If anything has characterized pop culture in the year 2020, it’s streaming media. From Hamilton to Tiger King, during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the essential elimination of out-of-the-home entertainment, we as a people have been absorbing a great deal of content from our couches through the magic of streaming. This is a world made for…
Category: Television
e141. Ghosts, Spirits, Scrooge and a Merry Marxist Christmas
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is likely the most famous Christmas story ever written. First published 177 years ago, it has been produced as stage plays, adapted into dozens of films and spoofed and parodied countless times on television shows, in comics, and other media. Whether from Disney, The Muppets, Scrooged, the original or somewhere…
Call for Comments: “The Queen’s Gambit,” or Chess is a Virus now
From Katya: The world, it seems, has lost its collective mind over The Queen’s Gambit. Released in October, it quickly became the most-watched limited scripted series ever and hit number 1 in 63 countries, according to Netflix. I’m not going to lie, I fell into the binge too. Give me an aesthetically pleasing show with…
Call for Comments: Dying Laughing! Connections of Comedy & Horror
From Hannah: We all desperately need a laugh right now. Which is why you should fire up your spookiest Halloween-themed movies (and television shows and stories and novels). I’m deadly serious! There are horror movies that are laughably bad (M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening might be the best example of this). But camp classics like…
Call For Comments: Is This The Darkest Timeline?
From Mav: It’s 2020, and the world is on fire. We all know how bad things have been. Some of the things are obvious, longterm, and we’ve done shows on them before. Some of them are new: There’s a deadly pandemic that has killed over 213,000 people in the United States (and over a million…
e128. 9 Popular Culture Pet Peeves We Hate and Why
Pop Culture is a double edges sword. The more we love a certain type of media, the more of it we absorb. But the more we absorb, the more we notice some of the tropes that are frequently repeated. And the more we notice those tropes, the more likely we are to eventually get annoyed…
e122. twentysomethingteen
There are a lot of television shows and movies about teenagers, both comedies and dramas.There always have been. And yet, actual teenagers on television are extremely rare. Teens are typically played by twenty-something actors (or older). This is especially the case when it comes to teenagers in shows with a heavy sexual or romantic components…
Call For Comments: TV-Twentysomething-Teens
From Mav: A friend of mine posted a meme recently that made fun of the way teenagers are depicted on television. It shows a stock photo of a typical looking adolescent boy labeled “Teenagers in real life” next to a stock photo of a rugged looking model labeled “Teenagers on Netflix.” My first inclination was…