Category: Analysis

  • “I miss my wife!”

    Yeah. I get that non-sentient Betazed box. I get that. At least you have somewhere to store your flute.

  • The American Model is the Devil

    They did it. And I’m done with it. I’ve unlocked the “Cancel Season Pass to How I Met You Mother Badge.”

  • Cooking Channel or…Food Network Canada

        I cook. A lot. I started at six or seven, worked in restaurants in college, have a semi-annual breakdown where I contemplate chucking it all in and starting a food truck, and spend a lot of time reading, studying, and practicing technique. I was excited when Scripps announced it was launching a second…

  • TV for Dudes too Stupid to Read Maxim

    I’m tired tonight and didn’t want to be up for two or three hours writing about a real network (or even NBC) like I did last night, so I wanted to pick on someone easy and quick. And then I just kept hitting refresh on Twitter and Tumblr instead of picking anyone, and suddenly it was…

  • Suddenly There is Music in the Sound of Your Name…

    In the past three weeks, the following things have all happened on the National Broadcasting Company: Mr. Daniel Radcliffe hosted Saturday Night Live Smash, premiered to great fanfare (if NBC-level numbers) Mr. Matthew Broderick appeared in a heavily promoted ad during NBC’s highest rated program of 2012 (I don’t think it’s premature to make that…

  • Maybe Brent Musburger could get me to care that THIS IS CBS

    Since I started out my little project with a spotlight review of How I Met Your Mother, I might as well stick with CBS. I bet that a clever monkey (like a Nielsen statistician) with access to Nielsen’s numbers (like a Nielsen statistician) and some secondary studies about television viewing habits, traditional vs. alternative broadcast…

  • How I Wrote About Your Show

    So let’s talk about The View. What? You didn’t think I was going to write about How I Met Your Mother just because the title of this piece clearly implied that, did you? No, no. Titles are contrivances, mere fluffery. They don’t constitute a contract between author and audience. Just because the show seems to be…

  • A Man, a Plan, a Channel a Day…this isn’t a very good palindrome

    There are a lot of reasons this blog has been inactive—work has been emotionally taxing, life has been filled with complications, I’ve been generally blocked—but those tell only part of the story. I’ve not been writing about TV; I’ve not been watching very much of it either. Television breaks my heart. ((Hyperbole is the currency…

  • Mad Men and the problem with shallow readings

    It’s been a while since I’ve written here. I’ll be trying to rectify that. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s not a TV show but a piece of piss-poor criticism that’s inspired me to write. I finally got around to reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s piece on Mad Men in The New York Review of Books and…well…wow. What a piece…

  • Trust Me: Why I won’t quite miss you

    I really wanted to like TNT’s Trust Me, thinking that a lighter, modern take on the advertising business would be a nice counterpoint to Mad Men‘s meditation on mid-century America. With a cast mostly populated by actors I’ve liked before and the cushion of working for a cable network willing to give shows room to…