The death of David Bowie in January hit me very slowly, in waves. I was sad about it at first, but mostly because so many people I knew were sad, too. See, I never knew Bowie in the way I knew other artists of his generation. When I was a
First rule of criticism (or any opinion writing): If you have the words "in my opinion" in there somewhere, cut them out. Heck, if you have the words "I think" in there, cut them out, 999 times out of 1,000. The exception, generally, is if
In case you haven't noticed, I'm a slight workaholic. I like to think I come by it honestly. My father loved to work, and if there's one thing he drilled into my brain, it's "If a job is worth doing, it&
(On Friday, we rank things, why not?) In the process of coming up with this list, I realized something: I have seen far more shows on Broadway than I actually thought I had (though I didn't have to rank the listless performance of Les Mis that I saw,
(How young we all were!) The sixth season of The Walking Dead is finally showing the slightest signs of viewer fatigue with the program. The ratings are down, just a little bit, and you can sort of see where the show will end somewhere around season 10 or 11, as
It was Fargo's 20th anniversary today! Happy 20th anniversary, Fargo! As with every time there's a major pop culture anniversary, there were a ton of pieces that were basically the same piece, over and over again. (Here was mine. At least I quoted from other people!
I don't know if you noticed this, but a couple of weeks ago, Outsiders charted the biggest rating ever for an original series on WGN America. The second I saw that, I knew my beloved Manhattan was done for, because the approach that series embodied (a sophisticated, more
I don't know if you heard, but Leonardo DiCaprio won his first Oscar at Sunday's awards. The Oscars this year were overshadowed by the controversy over an all-white slate of acting nominees, but the one thing seemingly everybody thought to mention, even if they were talking
Every Friday, we rank something why not. Let's not beat around the bush. Let's do this. 1.) Quarters: Is there anything better than a quarter? No. The quarter is a perfect coin. Just holding it feels like holding power, and if you get a roll of
Two major TV stories this week left me thinking about Leave It to Beaver (though, to be fair, it doesn't take much for me to start thinking about Leave It to Beaver). The first was the tremendous episode of Black-ish that aired Wednesday night, in which the show
ON THE ONE HAND: I really do think that eating meat probably contributes to a bunch of global ills, just in the sense that, like, livestock production contributes so much CO2 into the atmosphere, etc., etc., etc. I also think that I like animals a lot and have to sort
(This newsletter now has over 500 subscribers, which seems crazy to me. Welcome to all of you, and when we hit 1,000, I promise to do an Episodes on an episode of Showtime's Episodes.) One of the great joys in my life (as we've established)