The New Republic

In 1991, George R.R. Martin was working on a science fiction novel when suddenly an unrelated scene flashed in his head: a group of children finding a litter of direwolf pups. “It just came to me so vividly,” he told me. The children, needless to say, would become the Starks, protagonists of Game of Thrones, the first book in his best-selling series A Song of Ice and Fire. He soon abandoned the other novel completely. READ MORE >>

Harmony Korine has built a career by alienating audiences. Kids (1995), a portrait of New York City’s drug-addled youth subculture—which Korine wrote when he was  just 18 years old—was aggressively uncomfortable to watch. His directorial debut, Gummo (1997), followed teenagers in Xenia, Ohio, killing cats, sniffing glue, and having sex with prostitutes. READ MORE >>

The men of A&E’s wildly popular reality show “Duck Dynasty” catch squirrels with their bare hands and skin frogs with a single flick of the wrist. They say things like “My idea of happiness is killin’ things” and “That is how you trap a lizard, boys.” They sit with their legs wide apart and their barrel chests puffed out. They project a primal, frontier masculinity—the rifles slung over shoulders, the endless supply of camouflage pants, the craggy faces swallowed by beard. And for some reason, people are watching. READ MORE >>

As soon as Michelle Obama agreed to appear on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” the writers began brainstorming madly. The president’s slow-jam of the news in April had been a huge success—one of the show’s very first YouTube videos to go viral—and the creative team knew they had another potential hit on their hands with Michelle. READ MORE >>

When Dan Harmon took the stage at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles on June 16, several weeks after he’d been fired as showrunner of NBC’s “Community,” the mood in the room was tense. Harmon had been performing his live show, “Harmontown”—part stand-up, part confessional, part drunken pop-cultural exegesis—for about a year. But that night in June was his first performance post-“Community,” and from the moment he began talking, it was clear that the purpose of “Harmontown” was new. READ MORE >>

In the very first scene of Netflix’s new political thriller “House of Cards,” Kevin Spacey kills a dog. It has been hit by a car and lies whimpering; Spacey kneels at its side. “There are two kinds of pain,” he tells us, “The sort of pain that makes you strong—or useless pain. The sort of pain that’s only suffering. I have no patience for useless things.” As he strangles the animal, the camera lingers on his placid face, the blank eyes fixed in their sockets, the corner of his mouth upturned in amusement. READ MORE >>

“The Americans,” which premieres tonight on FX, is the rare spy thriller in which we are fully encouraged to root against ourselves. The year is 1981 and Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are Russian secret agents masquerading as an unexceptional American family, complete with two children, in the suburbs of D.C. They run a travel agency as a front for their espionage. When the kids are asleep they bash in heads and stash KGB defectors, bound and gagged, in the trunk of their car. READ MORE >>

Katie Couric’s interview with Manti Te’o—which aired yesterday on her daytime talk show on ABC, “Katie”—made for a queasy spectacle. Te’o sat stiffly in a pale cardigan, looking bug-eyed and stricken. “I was just scared, and I didn’t know what to do,” Te’o said, when asked why he did not tell his parents and coaches the moment he discovered that the girlfriend he’d thought was dead might have been an elaborate hoax. His parents were trotted out as tearful character witnesses. “He’s not a liar,” his father told Couric. READ MORE >>

READ MORE >>

READ MORE >>