cable

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 industry that has changed rapidly over the last 30 years — and continues to do so. There so much television, and so much [...]

Spoilers ahead. There’s a tradition for launching a new network with a original programming. The idea is to give audiences something they can’t get elsewhere. On cable creating new original shows often leads to casting, or making shows about, minorities. It’s a remarkable trend. Look at the early scripted dramas and comedies for cable networks, [...]

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 Richards decides it’s time to get something done on her face. She’s just not sure what yet. But her doctor says no to everything [...]

  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 that is wrong with contemporary life. And yet I cannot stop consuming it. I have a reality TV addiction. As [...]

Let me just get this out of my system. I guess I have to get over the fact that even the homos on Girls are deplorable. [...]

Previously on How Does Adam Feel About Girls? [...]

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish for linking. We’ve waited almost a decade for more Arrested Development, the groundbreaking sitcom of the aughts. Now with a release date set, critics and fans are eager for Mitch Hurwitz’s franchise to break new ground on the web, via Netflix. Think Progress‘ Alyssa Rosenberg, one of television’s sharpest critical [...]

Lest I be accused of Gloomy Gusism (or, worse yet, Doubting Thomastry), [...]

Oh, Homeland. Homeland, Homeland, Homeland. [...]

Posted at Tubefilter. When I first ran into Abbi Jacobson at the New York Television Festival last month, I didn’t know what to expect. Jacobson was unassuming and humble. You’d never know she and creative partner Ilana Glazer were mere weeks away from shooting a pilot for a sitcom on Comedy Central based on their cult web series Broad City and executive produced by comedy queen Amy Poehler. If [...]