newyorker.com
The characters struggling to respond to these frightening developments are the Lyonses, a Manchester-based family that seems designed to represent every demographic in a pollster’s pie chart: cross-class, cross-ethnicity, cross-sexuality. Anne Reid plays the comfortable white boomer Muriel, whose large suburban home becomes a refuge for her family when the financial systems buckle. Her grandchildren are Stephen, a rich white banker in London who’s married to Celeste, a black accountant, with who…
about 5 years ago
newyorker.com
That’s basically what I was hoping for with “The Morning Show,” the star-crossed series set at a fictionalized “Today” show, in the midst of the #MeToo crisis: something flawed but electric, full of odd, oversized media-élite gestures; something along the lines of, say, “Smash” or “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” borderline camp dramas that I couldn’t stop watching, however hard I tried. For all its bad buzz, “The Morning Show” has a terrific cast, with Aniston, Steve Carell, as the deposed anch…
almost 5 years ago
newyorker.com
“Pizzazz” was satisfying media shorthand: it was fun to say, spangled in “Z”s, faintly vaudevillian—an anxious catchphrase that framed a serious subject. But the word also captured a genuine tension about just what sort of show was being produced here, and for whom. It sounds bad to demand that a legal proceeding entertain a mass audience—that it should do more than attempt to establish the truth. It’s depressing to suggest, as Donald Trump so often has (and as Devin Nunes did, clumsily, halfway…
almost 5 years ago
newyorker.com
That opening sequence pulls to the surface themes of racial violence that never appear directly in Moore’s graphic novel, although they seethe at the margins, coded in Reagan-era fear of urban chaos. It’s not necessary to read the source material in order to “get” the show, but it wouldn’t hurt. A quick primer: the original “Watchmen” is set in an alternate time line, beginning in the nineteen-forties, among a group of bickering masked vigilantes, the Minutemen. The team includes one guy dressed…
almost 5 years ago
newyorker.com
It was time to stop whining and learn to love the list—or to fake it, at least. True, this year looked particularly brutal, invoking the horrifying possibility of both a 2019 Top Ten list and a Top Ten of the decade—not to mention the necessity of a chilly, late-December deep dive into the vast, ever-expanding ocean of television, much of which I haven’t seen, including some of the rumored-to-be-great stuff. (That means you, “Lodge 49.”) A person has only two eyes, one brain, five screens, and a…
almost 5 years ago
newyorker.com
It’s a Borscht Belt gag, but, then, Abby’s whole life feels like a punch line. Still, buried in that Eeyore-ish lament, there’s something else: Abby’s girlish fantasy of herself as a “fucking damsel” longing for rescue—by a prince or a princess, the details don’t matter. Magically, that’s just what she gets when she meets Chris, a twenty-two-year-old waiter who Abby (Abby McEnany) initially assumes is hitting on her straight sister. Played by the supremely chill Theo Germaine, Chris looks like A…
almost 5 years ago
newyorker.com
For years, the elusive singer-songwriter has been working, at home, on an album
with a strikingly raw and percussive sound. But is she prepared to release it
into the world?
over 4 years ago
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After making “The Good Wife,” Robert and Michelle King went rogue, creating wildly experimental series that capture the vertigo of post-Trump America.
over 2 years ago
newyorker.com
Tennessee’s government has turned hard red, but a new set of outlaw songwriters is challenging Music City’s conservative ways—and ruling bro-country sound.
about 1 year ago
newyorker.com
The format of “Love Is Blind” sounded outlandish: fifteen men and fifteen women were gathered in Los Angeles, where they were ensconced in individual “pods” and flirted with strangers through a wall. After just a few days of speed courtship, contestants fell in love and, amazingly, some got engaged, sight unseen. The show’s producers, who worked for a company called Kinetic Content, emphasized that “Love Is Blind,” despite its premise, wasn’t some sleazy guilty pleasure like “Temptation Island.”…
5 months ago
newyorker.com
One floor downstairs, in the control room for the first season of MTV’s “The Real World,” the show’s co-creators, Jon Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim, gazed at a bank of live-feed monitors in excitement. They had planted the book—the fashion photographer Bruce Weber’s collection “Bear Pond,” which had been Eric’s big break as a model—inside the loft, hoping that the racy image would provoke a reaction from the housemates. Bunim, an experienced soap-opera producer, had a playful nickname for these ki…
4 months ago
