Film & TV
It seems distant now, but once upon a time the Internet was going to save us from the menace of TV. Since the late fifties, TV has had a special role, both as the country’s dominant medium, in audience and influence, and as a bête noire for a certain strain of American intellectuals, who view it as the root of all evil. In “Amusing Ourselves to Dea... See more
Chris Hayes • On the Internet, We’re Always Famous
In the two-thousand-tens, there was a brief vogue for “slow TV,” reality television of unedited reality, such as a more than seven-hour real-time video of a train ride from Bergen to Oslo, shot in 2009, and a Norwegian production, in 2016, showing twelve hours of the extreme tidal current in the strait of Saltstraumen. The durational videos inspire... See more
The New Yorker • “Emily in Paris” and the Rise of Ambient TV
What is lost in this sea of feel-bad content isn’t just a sense of fun, but of taste . These “non-problematic” shows are not just irritating, they’re bland and forgettable—except in those rare moments when they pass through the looking glass into the world of self-parody, as in the 2018 NBC drama New Amsterdam when a doctor delivers this somber dia... See more
Kat Rosenfield • Kat Rosenfield: How Culture Got Stupid
Not surprisingly, people report some of the lowest levels of concentration, use of skills, clarity of thought, and feelings of potency when watching television.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Flow: The Psychology of Happiness
As with soaps and chores, the current flow of ambient television provides a numbing backdrop to the rest of our digital consumption: feeds of fragmented text, imagery, and video algorithmically sorted to be as provocative as possible. Ambience offers the increasingly rare possibility of disengagement while still staring at a screen.
The New Yorker • “Emily in Paris” and the Rise of Ambient TV
“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
Anne Helen Petersen • "Taste Hierarchies Like These Stink"
On one hand, we have a booming Creator Economy, with an ever-expanding democratization of tools for production to anyone with an idea. So much so, that according to 1,000 surveyed Americans by ZINE, 86% of people believe there is an overwhelming amount of entertainment available today.
Yet meanwhile on the other hand, we seem to have also found ours... See more
Yet meanwhile on the other hand, we seem to have also found ours... See more
Matt Klein • The Creator Paradox: Cultural Stasis Amidst Creative Surplus
To avoid this condition, people are naturally eager to fill their minds with whatever information is readily available, as long as it distracts attention from turning inward and dwelling on negative feelings. This explains why such a huge proportion of time is invested in watching television, despite the fact that it is very rarely enjoyed. Compare
... See moreMihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
The ambience of ambient TV is often predicated on homogeneity; any diversity or discordance would disrupt the smooth, lulling surface. (“Emily in Paris” almost entirely stars white actors, too.) The lurking subtext of “Dream Home Makeover,” a kind of soft-white capitalist nationalism cloaked in throw pillows, brought to mind for me the architect Re... See more