Archive for the ‘Television’ Category

I continue to find it mind-boggling that people seem to think that a good use of AI tools like ChatGPT is to gather accurate information. Any cursory reading on the topic should explain that ChatGPT is designed to predict language in response to a prompt, not actually present information based on “knowledge” or “intelligence.” I […]


I’ve produced and posted the final video (save the introduction) for my videographic book, The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad. As discussed below, this chapter has one of the most extensive written commentaries, which I’ve reproduced to present and contextualize the video. (All the videos are now available in tentative sequence on my Vimeo […]


I just returned from a truly exceptional conference: The Theory and Practice of the Video Essay at University of Massachusetts – Amherst. Not only was there the simple joy of attending my first in-person conference in three years, but it was best type of conference: a single-stream of presentations that help to connect and build […]


Today I had the pleasure of presenting a keynote address at the Television Aesthetics conference at University of Kent in the UK, entitled “Television Aesthetics, Videographic Criticism, and the Case of Breaking Bad.” Well, not exactly “at” the conference – my Tuesday flight out of Vermont was so delayed that it prohibited me from getting […]


I am excited to launch a new project called Media Mirrors: Critical Analysis of Film & TV and Film & TV! This website collects undergraduate student writing that has emerged from my course Key Concepts in Film & Media Criticism. The site emerged from a decision many years ago to encourage my students to write […]


I’m excited to share the next video in my Breaking Bad project, “The Sounds of Silent Mike,” focused on fan-favorite character Mike Ehrmantraut. This was a nice palate cleanser for me, after spending around a month laboring on my last video, “Breaking Genre“—this video only took two days of editing to produce, as its scope, […]


Earlier today, I debuted my newest video essay at the Society for Cinema & Media Studies conference – alas held online rather than in Chicago as planned. It was part of a great panel on “Genre in the Age of Transmedia,” where the presentations included both typical papers and videographic pieces. I screened this new […]


Last week I shared the epic five-part miniseries “Skyler’s Story,” retelling Breaking Bad from Skyler White’s perspective via a hybrid of women’s melodrama and experimental dual projection film. It took me weeks of work to assemble the 160-minutes from hours of footage, and thus I certainly felt a sense of accomplishment in completing the series, […]


It’s been more than two years since I posted to this blog, but I’m back with some good news. Obviously, it’s been a not-great couple of years of silence, although comparatively I have little to complain about personally or professionally. Things have sucked, but far less for me than for many people. But for 2022, […]


I took advantage of one of the (many) perks of my job and took over our high-quality screening room this morning to watch El Camino, the Breaking Bad movie that dropped today – this was probably the closest that Vermont will get to a theatrical release! I have some non-spoilery thoughts, followed by a few […]


This weekend, a teaser dropped for what had been only rumored-about for the past year: the Breaking Bad movie! Named El Camino, presumably for the car that Jesse drives off to escape his Nazi prison in the series finale, the film presumably focuses on Jesse’s life after Breaking Bad. While  we’ll have to wait until […]


After a week of vacation, I’ve returned to my project creating video chapters for my audiovisual book, “The Character of Chemistry in Breaking Bad.” After letting these videos sit for a couple of weeks, I’ve made some final tweaks and am ready to share drafts of two more chapters: “Walter’s Whiteness” explores the role of […]


For the last two weeks of June, we welcomed another cohort of budding videographic scholars to Middlebury for our Scholarship in Sound & Image workshop, now under the auspices of the Digital Liberal Arts Summer Institute. Fourteen strangers came in together, and a robust community of practice emerged at the end, with amazing drafts of […]


I’m writing this from Pamplona, Spain, where I’m attending the 2019 Conference for the International Study of Narrative. Just now I had the pleasure of chairing a panel on Videographic Criticism & Serial Narrative, where Kathleen Loock, Sean O’Sullivan, and I all presented video essays – a first for this conference, which is more predominantly […]


As of today, I am officially on leave for the next academic year. I recognize what a privilege it is to get such a leave, as the tradition of the tenured academic position with regular leaves for focused research is becoming more rare and confined to elite institutions (and only some appointments within such institutions […]