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Phillip MaciakNew Republic |
Last fall, I made a classroom full of 20-year-olds read The Da Vinci Code. It was a seminar for junior American culture studies majors, and one of the...
The saying goes that if you run into an asshole in the morning, then you ran into an asshole. But if you run into assholes all day, you’re the...
“Our goal is nothing less than the reinvention of the science fiction television series.” This is the opening line of one of my favorite documents...
I have never watched a stand-up comedy set without crying. Sometimes, it’s organic. The rhythm, the pace, the precision of a good stand-up can make...
Midway through the new miniseries Masters of the Air, a young airman named Quinn bails out of his crashing bomber and lands somewhere in the...
The 2005 blockbuster Mr. and Mrs. Smith doesn’t just feel like it’s a document from another time; it feels almost imaginary. It’s a movie...
Time, you may have heard, is a flat circle. It’s hard, now, to go back to the moment of the first True Detective in 2014 and remember the hold it...
There are two kinds of nightmares in Showtime’s surreal HGTV satire The Curse. The first is the kind of nightmare that warps and distorts the...
Are you a “Fishes” person or a “Forks” person? To some extent, many of the best (and some of the worst) TV shows of this past year existed in...
Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap opened in London’s West End in November of 1952. The play is an archetypal Christie mystery: A group of...
Looking back, labor unions were strangely central to a lot of the earliest hits of HBO’s prestige era. Corrupt union politics and all those “no...
Girl Talk is the stage name of DJ and electronic musician Gregg Michael Gillis. In the aughts, Girl Talk became briefly famous, and a little bit...
In this depressing and precarious year for television, there have nonetheless been a few small, isolated miracles. Fresh off the disappointment of an...
Last fall, a TV series premiered about a man in New York City whose wife has disappeared without a trace. He searches for her in vain, both longing...