Tag
Television
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The Shape of Ménage à Trois to Come
“However much desire there is for the threesome to maintain its stability, the cultural force of homogenous marriage is strong.”
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Is That All There Is?
“Is That All There Is?” became a hit for Peggy Lee in August 1969, the month that followed the July 29 moon landing featured so prominently at the end of the first half of Season 7. Though not much time has gone by, the televised Nixon speech that comes later in the episode dates it…
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On The Horizon
“On The Horizon” is a new quarterly feature from Public Books that looks forward to the coming season’s notable events—literary and artistic, intellectual and pop-cultural—in and around New York City. FILM & TELEVISION Film About Elly at Film Forum, April 8–21 From director Asghar Farhadi comes this mystery-thriller, set among a group of Iranian college…
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Weekend Reading: Memory Lane
One day we won’t be covered in snow. But not just yet, it seems. While we wait, here’s your weekend reading. NBC’s Brian Williams has found himself in hot water over his account of being shot at while flying in a helicopter in Iraq in 2003, which, apparently, never happened. That, in turn, has brought…
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Return to the Fold
At first glance, Rectify may seem like another variation on that favorite TV conceit of recent years: a damaged, asocial male struggles to reconcile with the modern world (see Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Sopranos, True Detective—the list goes on). And in broad outline, this Sundance Channel (now SundanceTV) original about a recently released death…
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Baggy Monsters
In 2012, the New Yorker hosted a roundtable discussion on the question “Is Television the New Cinema?” Two years later, the New York Times asked, “Are the New ‘Golden Age’ TV Shows the New Novels?” Apparently, television in its contemporary flourishing cannot be just television. One show often cited for its bigger-than-television ambitions is HBO’s…
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The M Word—In Multiplex
We don’t know where the coy linguistic practice of using-while-not-using so-called offensive words by appending the term “word” after its initial letter and preceded by “the”—as in “the N-word”; “the C-word”; “the F-word”; “the R-word”—came from. The practice functions in spoken and written speech the way the “bleep” does on television. Everyone presumably knows what…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Orange Is the New Black”
In advance of the second season of Netflix’s original series, Orange Is the New Black, which will be released on Friday, June 6, we asked Public Books contributors to share their views on the show’s representation of race, gender, sexuality, incarceration, and the women-in-prison genre. —Heather Love: Made For TV —Megan Comfort: The Two Pipers…
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Reading Social Democracy in Translation
It wasn’t so long ago that Scandinavia seemed very far away from London and New York. But steady doses of Dogme films and Ikea furniture over the last decades have prepared the way for a swell in the Anglo-American uptake of Danish television, Nordic noir, high-end Scandinavian design, and more. Such is the increased traffic…
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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…
