TV
Dear Television is Jane Hu, Evan Kindley, Lili Loofbourow, and Phillip Maciak. This season, they'll be posting weekly letters about AMC's "Mad Men." While this is not a full recap, there are still plenty of spoilers. Read the last installment here. READ MORE >>
Marc Maron is obsessed with intimacy. His own compulsive oversharing is the engine of his successful, four-year-old podcast, “WTF”—structured around candid, raw interviews with comedians that take place in Maron’s garage. It fuels every page of his new book, Attempting Normal, in which he offers disclosures like “This is who I am: I overthink and I ruminate. I’m obsessive. READ MORE >>
Dear TV: 'Mad Men' Season Six: Episode 5, Post 2
The awful over-sympathizers of 'Mad Men'
Dear Television is Jane Hu, Evan Kindley, Lili Loofbourow, and Phillip Maciak. This season, they'll be posting weekly letters about AMC's "Mad Men." While this is not a full recap, there are still plenty of spoilers. Read the last installment here. READ MORE >>
Why I'm (Almost) Glad 'Crossfire' Is Coming Back
The original CNN show was better than the cable slugfests it inspired. The revived version might not be.
“When you watch it now do you think, ‘My God, what have I done…allowing these sorts of shows to be on?,’” Jon Stewart asked guest—and former New Republic editor—Michael Kinsley in May of 2003. Stewart was referencing the plethora of gladiatorial evening talk shows then proliferating on cable news. Kinsley, he suggested, bore some responsibility because he had hosted CNN’s “Crossfire” between 1989 and 1995. READ MORE >>
Conan O'Brien’s WHCD Jokes Were A Missed Opportunity
The comedian couldn't help making himself, not the media, the butt of his jokes
When Conan O’Brien took the stage Saturday night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he looked a bit like a giant, flame-haired mannequin, smiling tensely and reciting his jokes with one eye trained on his notes. READ MORE >>
Dear Television is Jane Hu, Evan Kindley, Lili Loofbourow, and Phillip Maciak. READ MORE >>
The Sneaky Feminism of 'Veep'
Selina Meyer and the problem with female characters in political comedies
As a bureaucratic comedy, HBO’s “Veep” is resolutely conventional. Its Washington is a place where every apparent policy decision is little more than a bit of staging in the endless game of image management and damage control. But the show has always been perceptive about what it means to be a woman in a position of political power. It is peppered with canny details: Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis Dreyfus) is always taking off her heels and putting them on again when someone important walks into the room. READ MORE >>
In the Sundance Channel’s new drama “Rectify,” which premiered last night, a man is released from prison after spending nearly two decades on death row for rape and murder. “Rectify” is the network’s first original scripted series, produced by Melissa Bernstein and Mark Johnson from “Breaking Bad,” and it shares that show’s commitment to the slow burn of character development and plot. But as a drama about an accused killer, “Rectify” occupies a category all its own. READ MORE >>
Dear TV: 'Mad Men' Season Six: Episode 4, Post 2
Daytime Drama, or To Discipline and To Punish
Dear Television is Jane Hu, Evan Kindley, Lili Loofbourow, and Phillip Maciak. This season, they'll be posting weekly letters about AMC's "Mad Men." While this is not a full recap, there are still plenty of spoilers. Read the last installment here. READ MORE >>
Dear Television is Jane Hu, Evan Kindley, Lili Loofbourow, and Phillip Maciak. This season, they'll be posting weekly letters about AMC's "Mad Men." While this is not a full recap, there are still plenty of spoilers. Read the last installment here. READ MORE >>
