Of all the questions people ask of American TV critics, there's one that's become harder and harder to grapple with over the years: Why do we treat so much foreign TV as a curiosity? When we're making lists of the best TV shows of
One of the delights of moving (if moving can be said to have delights) is the part where you find all of the stuff you had and sort of forgot about. By that I don't mean that you unearth buried treasure or anything like that, but that you
You wouldn't know it to look at me now, but I was a bit of a nerd in my middle school days, and the way that nerdery most consistently manifested itself was via the playing of graphic adventure games. Graphic adventure games, for those of you who don&
Today, I got exasperated with people on Twitter, and it all boiled down to the same thing it always does: structure vs .content. I made what I assumed was an incredibly innocuous tweet about how Breaking Bad's greatest influence was in its cold opens (something I plan to
Somehow, the last several Octobers have involved a lot of car travel for me, which has meant lots of listening to playoff baseball on the radio. Baseball has always been my favorite of the major professional sports, mostly because I have fond memories of it from my childhood and because
The night we moved into the apartment on Bonito, we were already running behind. I was to leave the next morning on a plane for Michigan, to visit family, and we didn't leave our old home in Riverside until long after we had meant to. I left my
Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak, which comes out on Friday, is a perfect Halloween movie. (You can look for my review at Vox probably Friday or Saturday.) And by that, I don't mean that it's particularly scary, because it's not. It has
Over the weekend, I took in the film Sleeping With Other People, mostly because I needed the air conditioning. (Los Angeles can't seem to escape the heat wave it's been in since April, seemingly, and the apartment I'm currently in lacks central air.) It
During the brief unemployment that preceded my current career, I realized that the job I was probably best cut out for was freelance journalism. Thinking long and hard about it, I narrowed my choices down to two: TV or travel. TV had the advantage of me knowing a lot about
These are, without dispute, the 11 best musical moments in the soundtrack to "Once More, With Feeling," the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 11) "They got the mustard out!" Specifically when the chorus sings it, then does the dance with the shirts. Perfect. 10)
I read a lot of writing from young, wannabe critics in my job. That's partially because of my annual Christmas readathon (which I still have to complete for 2014... don't tell anyone). It's partially because my job involves keeping up with younger, up-and-coming writers.
Every TV critic has one or two shows they backed from the pilot stage, only to have them blow up in their face. It's why we all tend to hedge our bets as much as possible if we only have one or two episodes to go off of.