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Phillip Maciak

Phillip Maciak

New Republic

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Shōgun Is Reinventing the TV Epic

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...

08.04.2024 10

New Republic

Phillip Maciak

How Curb Your Enthusiasm Went Beyond Cringe

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...

03.04.2024 8

New Republic

Phillip Maciak

3 Body Problem’s Failure of Imagination

“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...

21.03.2024 8

New Republic

Phillip Maciak

Jacqueline Novak and Jenny Slate Are Not Okay

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...

26.02.2024 3

New Republic

Phillip Maciak

High Fashion Meets High Crimes in The New Look

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...

16.02.2024 3

New Republic

Phillip Maciak

In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Spies Are Just Like Us

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...

31.01.2024 2

New Republic

Phillip Maciak

True Detective: Night Country and the Demise of Crime-Riddle TV

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...

24.01.2024 8

New Republic

Phillip Maciak

The Curse Pushes Cringe Beyond the Limits

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...

22.12.2023 6

New Republic

Phillip Maciak

2023 Was the Year TV Really Put Us Through It

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...

15.12.2023 4

New Republic

Phillip Maciak

A Murder at the End of the World Is Isolation TV at Its Best

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...

14.11.2023 3

New Republic

Phillip Maciak

The Gilded Age Makes a Mess of the Picket Line

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...

01.11.2023 7

New Republic

Phillip Maciak

The Fall of the House of Usher Is All Over the Place

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...

11.10.2023 1

New Republic

Phillip Maciak

Reservation Dogs Was a Miracle

In this depressing and precarious year for television, there have nonetheless been a few small, isolated miracles. Fresh off the disappointment of an...

27.09.2023 1

New Republic

Phillip Maciak

The Changeling’s Problem With a Disappearing Woman

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...

07.09.2023 3

New Republic

Phillip Maciak

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