Current Events

Glenn Beck's departure from Fox News does not mean he truly leaves the network. Cable television news has been fundamentally changed as a result of his presence. We look back at Beck's legacy and what that means for television news.
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Is the comics industry doomed or simply too insular?
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The Bruins won the Stanley Cup, in style. So why, as a Vancouver Canucks fan, do I feel more relief than sadness?
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Could the demise of so many daytime soaps be causing a return to form for a genre fans have long felt was losing its way? The rapidly changing world of U.S. daytime television has as many highs and lows as a juicy soap storyline these days.
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Superman is the myth attracting the audience and the property that Time Warner values. But this value diminishes if his story is not told enough, so the trick is to render him inexhaustible, allowing him to be consumed without dying.
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British comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play somewhat fictionalized versions of themselves in The Trip, a six episode comedy series which aired on BBC2 last fall. IFC Films is releasing an edited version of The Trip as a film June 10th, 2011.
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The challenge facing Tremé (and every other media representation of New Orleans) is finding a way to balance a celebration of the city’s unique cultural contributions with an acknowledgment of its more conventional, and often more damning, histories, memories, and contemporary realities. Week 6’s episode “Feels Like Rain” responds to this challenge, self-consciously,...
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When it comes to misbehaving male politicos, troubled marriages, and suffering wives, it seems a reasonable question to ask whether the writers/creators of The Good Wife are either clairvoyant, or just darned lucky.
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What happened at last week's network upfronts, and what does it say about American television?
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The obvious critical question is this: which Matthew Graham do we get here? The Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes scribe? Or the 'Fear Her' and Bonekickers doppelganger?
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There's an illusion of transformative work here – although this seems to alter the rules of the Whoniverse, in fact it leaves all the game pieces in play as they were.
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While season one seemed to chart the resiliency of New Orleans as a place, defined by its people and its culture, season two is digging into localized spaces and demonstrating their continued vulnerability in the wake of the storm.
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'The Curse of the Black Spot' serves up warmed-over intertextualities with gusto. But such manic repetition of generic fare seems to over-ride considerations of authorial distinction.
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Moffat challenges the TV industry establishment far more notably than did series one through four. He's the Tom Baker to Russell T. Davies's Jon Pertwee.
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As one of the first events of this magnitude that has taken place squarely within the Twitter era, Osama Bin Laden's death reveals the challenge facing traditional media outlets when Twitter runs rampant with speculation (and real reporting).
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