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Reality Check: Welcome To My Head
I have an addiction to something that most of my friends consider filth and trash. In the last decade it’s become both ubiquitous and hotly disdained. It’s widely hailed as the epitome of everything...
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Reality Check: The Plastics
This week I want to talk about a favorite American pastime that is an unusually recurrent theme in reality television. Plastic surgery!!! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. On the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Kim...
View ArticleContemporary Television Syllabus
How do you teach television today? There are a lot of ways. Here’s my attempt. This week I’ll start teaching “Contemporary Television” to introduce students to the complexities and contradictions of an...
View ArticleZombies Beat Humans on Television
This post was originally published at Flow TV (click for footnotes). On a recent episode of the Melissa Harris Perry Show – a stellar example of what’s possible in the expanding field of TV news – I...
View ArticleOpen TV: Rescue Pilots from Development Hell
Originally published in Flow TV journal. Hold your mouse over footnotes (#) for more information. The Avengers, franchise of franchises, has invaded television. Last year in late July Deadline reported...
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For Antihero Wives, Revenge Means Regret
It’s not new to say Skyler White and Carmela Soprano have a lot in common. They’re both married to two of television’s most renowned antiheroes. Both of their husbands are liars. Both women try to...
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Is ‘Boardwalk Empire’ HBO’s ‘Dexter’?
Two weeks ago, Boardwalk Empire ended in the middle of a conversation. It was one of the last episodes of the fourth season of the HBO show set in Prohibition-era Atlantic City. The city’s mob boss...
View ArticleI Know, You Tried to Watch ‘Treme.’ Try Again.
I hated the first season of Treme. I didn’t know what I was watching and didn’t care to find out. I found the show plotless and plodding. I wrote about that. I found Steve Zahn’s Davis McAlary...
View Article‘The Interview’ & The Power of Entertainment in International Affairs
‘Dumb and Dumber,’ ‘Ace Ventura,’ ‘The Naked Gun’ … America certainly loves its slapstick comedies. And given the success of 2004’s ‘Team America: World Police,’ it seems audiences are also pretty...
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Emerging on the Side Stage: A New Era for Women on HBO
by Heidi Khaled and Brett Bumgarner Two shows, both held together by the common plotline of poop. Valerie Cherish sits down in her trailer with a producer for the HBO series in which she plays a...
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