Sarah Kessler edits the TV section of Public Books. A media scholar and television critic, her articles and essays have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, In These Times, Theory and Event, Triple Canopy, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her book-in-progress, “Anachronism Effects,” examines the politics of voice and ventriloquism in transatlantic popular culture. Kessler is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California, a Philadelphian, and a whale enthusiast.
Sarah Kessler
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Writing on Public Books
The Reboot Will Be Televised
“Star Trek: Picard,” “And Just Like That…,” “Bel-Air,” “Reboot”: even within our age of the reboot, old stories offer new insights.
Distant TV
If television is giving you something right now, what might it be telling you about what you need?
The Bingewatch: Lesbian Drama
Why do I, and so many others, still stan for “The L Word,” despite its failure to enact a perfectly calibrated representation of queer life?
11 TV Shows Professors Are Watching This Summer
The academic year has wound to a definitive close, the Handmaid’s Tale hype has died down, and those of the professorial persuasion now have less than two blissful months remaining …
The Bingewatch: #Resist
After November’s election, I only wanted to watch normporn. Craving fallible yet manicured characters whose gaffes—provoked by pain mired in class privilege—always culminated in tear-jerking …
The Bingewatch: We’re All Fired
Liberal grief in the wake of Trump’s election has occasioned binges galore: binge-drinking, binge-eating, binge-weed-smoking, and not least …
The Bingewatch: Mother Winona
Since its release last July, Stranger Things has been praised as an “original,” “meticulous” homage to the Great Men of 1980s popular culture (Carpenter, King, Lucas, Spielberg) …
The Bingewatch: It’s Never Just a Dress
My ongoing love affair with TLC’s Say Yes to the Dress began about two months ago, when a close friend prescribed the long-running reality show as a remedy for my encroaching PhD graduation anxiety. It was May, and thus also the cusp of wedding season, making SYTTD a particularly timely recommendation. I’d been beset by […]
The Bingewatch: “Love” Angeles
Despite today’s abundance of “quality television” programming, TV has yet to fully shed its reputation as a degraded medium. Why else would the binge have taken hold as a (if not the) prime metaphor for contemporary television viewing? Where the representative of televisual excess was previously the couch potato, a human-turned-tuber upon cathode-ray immersion, today’s TV-watching […]
Virtual Roundtable on Women Directors
It’s no secret that Hollywood has a diversity problem, especially when it comes to hiring directors …
Working Girls
“A friendship between college girls is grander and more dramatic than any romance,” writes Hannah Horvath (played by show creator Lena Dunham) in the final episode of the second season of the HBO series Girls. This literary gem is the first, and only, sentence of an ebook for which Hannah has already received and spent […]
