Advancing Our Way to the Bottom? My kids' “now” and “just what I wanted” style of viewership encourages them to be tiny, impatient content bullies.
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Author Archive
Why is My Kid Watching That Lady Fondle Eggs?
There Are Worse Things Fox Could Do: Grease Live and TV’s Sad Affair with the Live Musical
In the era of multiple platform viewing and increased time-shifting, television turns to the musical. But Fox's selection of Grease seems to ignore a string of warning signs.
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The Face (and Laugh) that Launched a Thousand Bits
A farewell to Phyllis Diller from a reverent scholar-fan.
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The MTV Tony Awards: Television’s De-Theatricalization of Broadway’s Biggest Night
True to form, this year’s Tony Awards laid bare its undying need to appear youthful, popular, and hip, all the while marginalizing the spirit of American theatre and those who participate in it. The broadcast looked less like a celebration of New York theatre and more like the Oscars, Emmys, and Grammys rolled into...
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Army Wives, Safe Soldiers, and Online Smokescreens
As everyone else was drooling over the final episodes of LOST, I fully admit that I was focusing on my weekly fix of Lifetime’s Army Wives. Despite its lack of cultural cachet, to me the show continues to illustrate an interesting tension between niche marketing, media convergence, and politically charged topicality.
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Friday Night Lights: The Musical! or Glee‘s After-School Sing-a-long
I feel like the “powers that Glee” (PTG) are trying to combat complaints of minimal plot development. After last week’s most excellent narrative-filled musical numbers, my hopes were high. It looked like they might pull it off, but then it became Glee meets Friday Night Lights. Say it ain't so!
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