Dear Television ended a fun year by recapping all of our favorite things for the LARB blog. From favorite performances to favorite and least favorite episodes to our year-end GIFstravaganza, it’s all here. I wrote about Kristen Schaal’s performance as Louise on Bob’s Burgers, my favorite episode of Game of Thrones, and why Mad Men was such a compulsively GIFfable series this year. See you in 2014!
In what will hopefully become a holiday tradition, the wonderful Jane Hu and I wrote about NBC’s The Sing-Off and our shared love of a cappella music for The Hairpin:
Phil: Yes, Jane! “Keep A Cappella Weird.” Speaking of the future, though, if you and I were looking to put together an a cappella group for next year’s Sing-Off, what would we be called?
Jane: Oh, we couldn’t quite well use Cruel Poptimism, could we?
Phil: Aural Exams, BeatBakhtin, Three Part Harmony in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Vocal Historicism…
“No Future: The Sing-Off and the Art of A Cappella”
This week, Dear Television wrote about music videos, and I turned in a #longread post on all three of Arcade Fire’s music videos for their single, “Afterlife.”
“This video is good because Gerwig is dancing to the song. Part of what makes the [Black Orpheus] lyric video so uncanny and ultimately uncomfortable is that the dancers in the video cannot possibly be dancing to Arcade Fire. On a visceral level, the appropriation of their spontaneous, impassioned movements feels almost more invasive than the appropriation of their skin color or ‘exoticism.’ The lyric video commits a low-grade historical fraud by forcing its subjects to dance to ‘Afterlife,’ a song that is really only modestly, theoretically even, danceable.”
“Three Ways of Looking at Arcade Fire”
This week at Dear Television, we focused on why we ditch or stick with shows that have gone off the rails. I present to you my essay on why we should indulge Homeland:
“We had to sit through it because Carrie had to sit through it. We had to endure it because it needed to be endured for a greater purpose. We had to grow to hate Homeland so that Homeland could earn our love. Needless to say, I loved it. Like M. Night Shyamalan, Alex Gansa had put me, as a viewer, through an intolerably long stretch of stupid television in order to smack me over the head four episodes in.”
“Trust Fumes: Staying with Homeland“
This week at Dear Television, we’re covering my favorite series, The Good Wife. I wrote about sex, speed, and the show’s place in the hierarchy of cable and network television:
“In ‘Hitting the Fan,’ the courtroom disputes are so fast as to be almost surreal, decisions handed down, fates decided. The jokes fly quickly and by inference. Traumas and set-backs quickly compound like multi-car pile-ups. From Alicia and Peter’s ambitions to the broad arc of Lockhart Gardner, The Good Wife is a show about the tension between impulse and plan, spontaneous event and long history, chaos and order, the Dynamo and the Virgin.”
“The Fastest Show on TV: On The Good Wife“
Last week for Dear Television at The Los Angeles Review of Books, we wrote about Horror TV from Alfred Hitchcock to American Horror Story: Coven. My post focused on Fox’s excellent new series Sleepy Hollow:
“Sleepy Hollow for its part seems content, for now, to revel in lightly toying with its generic forebears, but it certainly has the potential to engage in some wackadoodle critique of its own. It’s by no means as ambitious as American Horror Story in its cultural politics, but it both embodies and speaks back to the kind of revisionist-nostalgic obsession with American history that defines the current political moment. Indeed, a few episodes in, we see a flashback revealing that Ichabod Crane organized the Boston Tea Party as a diversion so that he could steal a supernatural MacGuffin that unleashes the forces of the underworld…or whatever. But the other thing we realize is that this is only the second most ridiculous, delusional, and fantastical appropriation of the Boston Tea Party American culture has produced recently. Sometimes the Hellmouth opens, and we fall right in.”
This week at Dear Television, we focused on the current state of Fox’s Tuesday night sitcom block. I wrote about the way that a bunch of likable dudes are slowly de-centering the women who used to anchor these shows:
“Where the man-child is insecure in his masculinity, the good bro is secure; where the man-child is stunted in his development, the good bro is confidently developed; where the man-child is immature to the point of disability, the good bro is functional, even successful; and where the man-child is searching, the good bro operates based on a strict ethical code. What they both share, however, is the sincerity of which Lili speaks. The good bro, as opposed to the sleaze, holds nothing back. Masculine, friendly, sensitive to women, only rhetorically misogynist, possessed of a Str8 Bro-style obsession with homosexual desire, and, above all, committed to a kind of unfiltered truth-telling, the Good Bro is now the dominant feature of Fox’s Tuesday night.”
Dear Television held a symposium on Netflix, or the Way We Watch Now, at The Los Angeles Review of Books this week. I wrote about re-watching TV series as a practice with its own joys, limitations, and even aesthetics. And I close with a long-overdue ode to re-watching NBC’s The Office.
“Streaming may have artificially limited the canon, it may have provided an apparatus that fully realizes TV’s potential as background music, but it’s also made more astute, attentive viewers of a larger swath of the viewing audience…They are aware of texture, in other words, the results of aesthetic decisions if not necessarily the mechanics of those decisions, and they are aware of it because their shows exist in infinitely watchable, infinitely re-watchable, infinitely controllable time.”
This week, Dear Television returns to The Los Angeles Review of Books to anchor its new blog! We’ll be covering a different show or topic every week, and it all starts off with Showtime’s new series Masters of Sex, about Masters and Johnson.
“What we’re being set up to see is an open-ended series about the toll that telling can take on a person, on a relationship, on a society. From Cheever to Chase and Weiner and Gilligan, there’s been a lot of lying on television for the last 15 years. What does it feel like to stop?”
Here’s my post, entitled, “Exposing Yourself on Television.”
The folks at Mediabistro were kind enough to ask me to chat with them about the weird, morbid, tone-deaf Emmy awards. Here’s the video of me talking with GalleyCat’s Jason Boog and TVNewser’s Alex Weprin.
Phillip Maciak