Emily Nussbaum

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…

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.”…

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.

After making “The Good Wife,” Robert and Michelle King went rogue, creating wildly experimental series that capture the vertigo of post-Trump America.

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?

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…

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…

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…

“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…

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…

In the era of cable and streaming, there’s still life in old-school formats.

Before Volodymyr Zelensky was elected President, he played the part in “Servant of the People,” a genre-bending series that blends Ryan Murphy wackiness with Sorkinian uplift (minus the hubris).

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…

Off-Kilter Humor on “Los Espookys” and “Alternatino”

It’s an elegant, affecting sequence—at once grand and simple, movingly performed—which captures the central ethos of the show. “When They See Us,” on Netflix, is a harrowing story about a hideous injustice: the railroading of a group of five black and Latino boys for the beating and rape of Trisha Meili, who was attacked while jogging in Central Park, in 1989. The show portrays a racist justice system and an equally hellish penal system, as well as media that amplified the lies that put the boys…

It’s also the latest in a deluge of TV series that feel like a direct response to the #MeToo movement, touching on third-rail themes that are meant not merely to comfort or inspire but to unsettle. In one of “Tuca and Bertie” ’s central story lines (which I’ll spoil here, so bail if you care about that kind of thing), Bertie, who is working as a corporate cog at a magazine company called Condé Nest, gets her dream gig, as an after-hours apprentice to the celebrity baker Pastry Pete, a brilliant…

The real Iron Throne may be the sort of appointment TV that the show represented.

In fact, CBS had censored that week’s “Good Fight Short,” one of a series of “Schoolhouse Rock!”-like cartoons—written and performed by the singer Jonathan Coulton and animated by Steve Angel, the co-founder of the Canadian shop Head Gear Animation—that punctuate the legal drama, educating viewers on topics like impeachment and Russian trolls. The segment had been fully written and animated, then vetted by legal and run through all the regular corporate oversight. Then, less than two weeks befor…

It’s no wonder that Sally Wainwright, the British showrunner behind the bleak, indelible drama “Happy Valley” and the charming “Last Tango in Halifax”—a specialist in female iconoclasts—has long wanted to tell Lister’s story. Lister was a gender-disrupting trailblazer, who recorded experiences that society refused to admit existed. (Male homosexuality was outlawed; the female version was unimaginable.) The resulting series, “Gentleman Jack,” on HBO, co-produced by the BBC, is an imperfect but en…

When “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” first débuted, a lot of people complained about that title: so harsh, so mocking, maybe kind of sexist? Who exactly was being made fun of? (In the original opening-credits sequence, Rebecca herself called the term sexist—and, when the chorus cheerily sang “She’s so broken inside,” she insisted, defensively, that the situation was “a lot more nuanced than that.”) But “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” wasn’t kidding about the crazy bit. When, in the last season, Rebecca got a defini…