Television
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February 15, 2016
It is nearly impossible to watch Making a Murderer and believe in God at the same time. The viewing experience of this Netflix series perhaps was best summed up by Robert Browning nearly 200 years ago when he wrote, “And yet, God has not said a word.” If temporary atheism is too precise a descriptor of the affective wake the viewer is left to tread after viewing the series, then temporary agnosticism might do just as well. Agnosticism is the order of the day...
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February 8, 2016
The New York Police Department, the largest police force in the United States, is also one of the most mythologized. It is a favorite of writers and audiences alike when it comes to television, books and film. Of the many shows featuring the N.Y.P.D., few have been so pertinent and striking as the hit series Blue Bloods . Now in its sixth season, the show revolves around Frank Reagan (portrayed by Tom Selleck), a Vietnam veteran, 9/11 first responder and the...
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February 1, 2016
It is safe to say that if your last, best hope for avoiding nuclear war is the continued survival of Adolf Hitler, then you live in a dystopia. Such is the setting for the original series The Man in the High Castle, released on Amazon in November. Based on a Philip K. Dick novel, the series takes place in 1962 in a United States that lost World War II and is now occupied by Germany and Japan.
A political crisis is brewing,...
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December 21-28, 2015
When the television producer Robert Eric Wise looks at ancient Judea, he sees a familiar world. “ That was the hood,” he told Vice Media in August of last year. “In fact, Judea was so much of a hood that Rome sent Pontius Pilate, the biggest thug governor in the empire, to govern it.” (Ancient Jewish writers Philo and Josephus both describe Pilate’s frequent provocations toward Jews, including hiding soldiers in crowds to randomly attack and kill Jewish...
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October 26, 2015
A few weeks ago The Walking Dead tore into its sixth season of human/zombie apocalypse. It has been a big couple of years for the show. A spinoff series debuted this summer to the biggest numbers ever for a cable program, and the mothership continues to beat all comers, including Monday Night Football. (Chew on that, Chris Berman.)
The series has also spawned any number of knockoffs, from the unlikely rom-com “Warm Bodies” to...
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October 5, 2015
I must admit I approached the “The Jim Gaffigan Show,” now airing on TV Land, with much fear and trembling. I wanted the show to be funny, but I was afraid it would be, well, funny . There is the funny that is of the immediate, visceral kind, the kind that makes us laugh instantly and does not tiptoe around our personal relationships, ethical standards and religious convictions. And then there is funny.
Funny is the sort of...
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September 14, 2015
Few things can humble me more quickly than a brief trip to the Home Depot. I recently found myself lost among the store’s countless plumbing supplies, and when I sought the help of an employee, he looked at me with what appeared to be the disgust of an English professor being asked to spell cat. He grunted toward a shelf before shuffling off in the opposite direction.
A few moments later a younger employee approached me and asked how he could help. He...
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April 13, 2015
Thomas Cromwell may have been a conniving, loathsome character in Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons,” but the advisor to King Henry VIII was granted redemption by Hilary Mantel in her novels Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies. (A third novel, The Mirror and the Light, is in the works.) Cromwell is the unlikely hero of these stories, his famous Hans Holbein portrait fully brought to life. Now Cromwell has received perhaps the greatest honor a British...
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March 30, 2015
Surfing through today’s popular television series—“Game of Thrones,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “The Walking Dead,” “Sons of Anarchy”—one is met with a litany of ridiculously masculine men. It is as if the goal of every critically acclaimed series is to make Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer look like wimps. Call the Midwife is a welcome deviation from this trend. Now in its fourth season on PBS, “Call the Midwife” is first and foremost a series about women. The...
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If you are wondering how many seconds pass before The Italian Americans , PBS's two-part series premiering Feb. 17, mentions The Godfather , here's a spoiler: precisely zero. Surprisingly, the documentary opens cold with Marlon Brando rasping the familiar line, “I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.”
It’s surprising because most discussions—both private and public—of the Italian-American experience self-consciously avoid the dark shadow organized crime (both real and mythologized)...