This is a collection of essays and profiles written by a television critic, who came to her life as a critic via an abandoned English PhD and being a fan in the early days of internet fandom. She approaches television from the point of view of someone who had absorbed early on that television storytelling wasn't considered to be worthy of analysis and critique, and then pushed back against that. But she also rejects the idea that there is only some television worth analyzing and loving, television that is almost always male-focused and often bleak and cynical and mechanical in its violence: the antihero "not like the other guys" stories that didn't start with The Sopranos but certainly gained a cultural respectability via that show.
I enjoyed her pieces about shows that I watched and often loved (in particular her piece on Hannibal), but I also loved reading her thoughts on shows I haven't seen, because so much of her focus is on what television means to us, and how we can see what stories we're telling ourselves about reality through this particular medium. It wasn't always an easy read, both because there are essays that were written and published before and after the 2016 election, and also before and after Me Too in the fall of 2017, and obviously both of those events are still reverberating in our art and in our daily lives. She also takes a look at what it was to be a young girl who grew up being taught to focus on men, and men's lives, and valuing that perspective, and how it really did take something earth-shattering to fully examine the price that extracts. But at its heart, this is a book that deeply engages both with narrative and also why narratives matter to people, and there is nothing that matters as much to me as that. I really enjoyed this book, end to end.
Grade: A
I enjoyed her pieces about shows that I watched and often loved (in particular her piece on Hannibal), but I also loved reading her thoughts on shows I haven't seen, because so much of her focus is on what television means to us, and how we can see what stories we're telling ourselves about reality through this particular medium. It wasn't always an easy read, both because there are essays that were written and published before and after the 2016 election, and also before and after Me Too in the fall of 2017, and obviously both of those events are still reverberating in our art and in our daily lives. She also takes a look at what it was to be a young girl who grew up being taught to focus on men, and men's lives, and valuing that perspective, and how it really did take something earth-shattering to fully examine the price that extracts. But at its heart, this is a book that deeply engages both with narrative and also why narratives matter to people, and there is nothing that matters as much to me as that. I really enjoyed this book, end to end.
Grade: A
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