Archive for October, 2010

Last night, the Banksy-directed opening credit sequence “couch gag” for The Simpsons took us into the sweatshop behind the franchise. As executive producer Al Jean noted, “This is what you get when you outsource.”
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Ten (or more) media industry stories you might have missed recently.
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Despite an appealing sense of inevitable narrative momentum, a long but more importantly uncertain wait makes it hard to feel excitement and anticipation for the mid-season return of this Battlestar spin-off.
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In a cultural climate in which many now pick up a newspaper or turn on the nightly news with a strong sense of foreboding, a distinctive new ad has appeared in cinemas, run before every feature film I’ve gone to see in recent weeks.
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“Grilled Cheesus” is one of the few Glee episodes to not only establish, but also to play with, the opposition between dream world and real world in the musical.
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Zucker never managed to balance a love for the potential of television with a love for the bottom line. Indeed, his job description only expected the latter, but the great ones have managed to do both.
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In "Chinese Wall," barriers between personal and professional lives continue to erode, and Mad Men's men begin to wrestle with these costs.
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Given that Erin so eloquently captured the buzz of the scholarly conversations this weekend, I’m going to focus on some of the roundtables that I found most intellectually stimulating.
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The ability to facilitate dialogue not only within roundtables, but among them, seems to me the greatest strength of the Flow conference model.
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Director Arthur Penn, who passed away last week, is best remembered for his Broadway plays and Hollywood films, but his impressive work in television's live anthology dramas has been neglected.
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