Archive for the ‘Taste’ Category
Best Stuff of 2014
This is not an organized or ranked list. This is a collection of the cultural things (mostly TV, but not exclusively) that I most loved in 2014, presented in alphabetical order. There are many things not on this list – they are absent because either I did not love them or I did not consume […]
Filed under: Animation, Books, Film, Taste, Television, TV Shows, Videogames | Leave a Comment
Tags: bob's burgers, Brooklyn 99, Colbert Report, Fargo, Girls, Hannibal, Her, Jane the Virgin, Last Week Tonight, LEGO Movie, Olive Kitteredge, Review, serial, Sharon Van Etten, Solforge, The Americans, the good wife, The Leftovers, The Wire, This American Life, Transparent, Veep, You're the Worst
Taste Privilege and GamerGate
[I know this has been a dormant site for months, and I have a draft post called “Too Busy to Blog” explaining why & what I’ve been up to, but I’ve not had time to finish it! But I just had some thoughts that are TLFT (too long for Twitter) that I wanted to throw […]
Filed under: Representations, Taste, Videogames | 28 Comments
Tags: gamergate, misogyny, privilege
Complex TV: Evaluation
It’s time for another chapter of Complex TV – this one focuses on questions of evaluation in television scholarship. Here’s the abstract: Television studies, as forged by the influence of cultural studies, has been loath to include critical evaluation in its toolbox, as television’s own spot on the receiving end of numerous aesthetic condemnations has […]
Filed under: Academia, Complex TV, Media Studies, Narrative, Taste, Television, TV Shows | Leave a Comment
Tags: breaking bad, Mad Men, The Wire
Best TV of 2011
Being in Germany since August, I feel quite detached from American television, even though that’s what I’m here to write and talk about. I’ve found ways to access the shows that I’m missing, but without the ease of my TiVo and the television schedule matching my timezone, I’m definitely watching less, and therefore more selectively. […]
Filed under: Taste, Television, TV Shows | 5 Comments
Tags: archer, Best of, bob's burgers, breaking bad, community, cougar town, doctor who, enlightened, friday night lights, Game of Thrones, happy endings, justified, louie, men of a certain age, parks & recreation, revenge, south park, the good wife, treme
This is a busy week for the Popular Seriality group I’m working with here in Göttingen. First, we took over In Media Res for a series of posts about seriality – my own contribution was on Wednesday, focused on Breaking Bad and how it constructs character interiority through serial memory. Head over and join the conversation! […]
Filed under: Academia, Media Studies, Narrative, Taste, Television, TV Shows | 5 Comments
Tags: aesthetics, breaking bad, evaluation, quality television, The Wire
One of the great gifts of sabbatical is having the time to read books that are not immediately required for teaching or manuscript reviews. I’ve taken advantage of that by reading some fiction (and would highly recommend D.B. Weiss’s Lucky Wander Boy if you’re into classic videogames and/or metafiction), as well as some scholarship. In the […]
Filed under: Academia, Books, Media Studies, Taste, Television, TV History | 10 Comments
An old college friend posted the following on Facebook yesterday: “So I keep watching the show Louie, which I find to be the most depressingly realistic TV I’ve ever seen. I think it’s a really good show, but it’s about as far from comedy as one can get. Why is it called a comedy? The […]
Filed under: Genre, Taste, Television, TV Shows | 9 Comments
Tags: jazz, louie
Best TV of 2010: The Second Tier
In my last post, I offered my Top Tier TV for 2010, roughly serving as a top 5 (with one of those taken by a videogame). So the following shows could be seen as residing in the bottom half of my Best Of list, but I refuse the arbitrary limit of 10 or the time […]
Filed under: Taste, Television, TV Shows | 3 Comments
Tags: community, cougar town, daily show, dr. who, friday night lights, good wife, justified, Lost, men of a certain age, modern family, todd margaret, treme, world cup
Best TV of 2010: The Top Tier
Last year, I skipped my annual Best Of list for a collection of decade-bests. Since we’re arbitrarily back to thinking annually this year, here’s a look back on the TV highs of 2010. I’m not interested in forcing everything into clear rankings, so like my decade lists, I’ll divide it into tiers – the Top […]
Filed under: Taste, Television, TV Shows, Videogames | 1 Comment
Tags: breaking bad, louie, parks & recreation, red dead redemption, terriers
On Disliking Mad Men
As a scholar and fan of contemporary narratively complex television serials, one of my blindspots has been Mad Men, a show about which I’ve mentioned on this blog has little appeal to me. Thus it was a bit surprising months ago when I was invited to contribute to a forthcoming book of collected essays on […]
Filed under: Fandom, Media Studies, Narrative, Taste, Television, TV Shows, Viewers | 118 Comments
Tags: Mad Men
Just TV 