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: Why Do We Suddenly Love Musicals?

From Wayne: I used to think I didn’t like Musicals. There were a few, I guess. I saw Cabaret on TV when I was young (a heavily edited version of it, I’m sure), and had fond memories of some of the songs and imagery. There were others I saw in this context. I remember the…

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…

Call for Comments: Pop Culture Pet Peeves

From Hannah: A long time ago in a reality that now seems far far away, we did an episode on Media Addiction that discussed hate consuming media. We thought through why, exactly, fans continue to still engage with TV/book/comics/film franchises that disappoint them (Star Wars comes to mind). I’ve wondered, in the time since we’ve…

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…

e120. Quarantine Comfort TV

Let me tell you a story, children. Way back in the before time, in the long long ago, before the plague came, we used to have this stuff we called content… media… shows. Back then, if we wanted entertainment, we would turn on our magic picture boxes and marvel at the wonders that displayed before…

e119. Copaganda II: Going Rogue

A few weeks ago, we released an episode about “copaganda.” On that show we started out talking about the TV show Paw Patrol and internet calls to have it and other cop shows cancelled in the wake of the #DefundThePolice movement and heightened scrutiny on law enforcement in the United States (Note from Mav: And…