"Taste Hierarchies Like These Stink"

The age of prestige TV has buried that influence deep. The blanket denial of the televisuality of these television shows has turned this ancestor into a shameful secret. So much so that, often, when a prestige TV series is perceived as too much, too excessive, (too female), (too queer), it’s criticized for being too soapy.

The show understands that people, especially teenagers, have their worldviews built, in large part, through stories other people tell them about themselves. Whether those are stories they encounter on TV or in movies or in rap lyrics, or whether those are stories they hear from their teachers or their family elders or the federal government — the s... See more

On a week like this, I find myself oscillating between two strategies: staring directly at the crisis, and seeking temporary and necessary reprieve from it.

Criticism, to me, is ultimately a practice of paying attention.

Ted Lasso is a show that’s a bit confused about whether it represents a return to the classic sitcom on a streaming platform or an opportunity to move past that form into something different and more shapeless.

taste hierarchies like these stink. And they stink because they stand in the way of actually seeing the work on its own terms. Often, what this looks like is an artist or a viewer insisting on describing TV series by way of other media, praising a good show by calling it “cinematic” or “novelistic.” It’s a cliché by this point, but the early-aughts... See more

“TV has never transcended the soap opera or the sitcom, and every ‘great’ TV show is just polishing up one or the other.” This isn’t a particularly controversial point, but it’s one that often gets covered over in prestige papier mache. The Sopranos isn’t a soap, it’s a ten-hour movie. The Wire isn’t a soap, it’s a Dickens novel. There’s got to be ... See more

Jeremy O. Harris, who’s a producer on HBO’s Euphoria, tweeted that the show was made for people “with an intellect for CINEMA not the impatience of TELEVISION.”

innovations in genre, not inventions of form. These hour-long, prime-time serials owe their existence to all sorts of forebears, but their greatest formal debt is often to the lowly soap. Its plotting, its melodrama, its feel for viewer engagement, its sense of time.