How Writing Closed Captions Turned Me off TV For Good
Post-MFA, a writer spends time in the captioning trenches
Technobabble
UK podcast star Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist helps me figure out why one set of poorly understood pseudo-scientific terms can sink a scene, while another set can make a…
Keeping ‘Insecure’ lit: HBO cinematographer Ava Berkofsky on properly lighting black faces
Any brown person who’s taken a selfie in the club can tell you cameras aren’t made for us. Yet in Insecure’s club scenes, dark-skinned protagonists like Yvonne Orji’s Molly continue…
The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened
The Bizarre Modern Reality of The Simpsons
The Adorkable Misogyny of The Big Bang Theory
The Big Bang Theory provides a perfect lens through which to deconstruct a popular media trope I like to call the Adorkable Misogynist. Adorkable Misogynists are male characters whose geeky…
The Lost Cause Rides Again
HBO’s Confederate takes as its premise an ugly truth that black Americans are forced to live every day: What if the Confederacy wasn’t wholly defeated? By Ta-Nehisi Coates HBO’s prospective…
How Netflix’s GLOW Takes a Straightforward Approach to Abortion
GLOW is a show that doesn’t shy away from the flaws and mistakes of its female characters, but never demonizes them for it. This is evident most in Alison Brie’s Ruth,…
From beyond the grave
trying to hold onto someone after they are dead
The cosmic ballet goes on: 15 of our favorite pop-culture eclipses
The Simpsons has prominently featured a solar eclipse twice in its long run, but most memorably in the Season 20 episode “Gone Maggie Gone,” where Marge is stricken blind and…