How do you use nostalgia as a storytelling device and what does that even mean?
Introducing Why You Should Watch, the video series that delves into what makes something unique, but with minimal spoilers! Today, we focus on the comedy You're The Worst and how its realism impacts our watching experience.
How does Black Mirror craft a dystopia?
How Louie and Atlanta use surrealism to influence their observational comedy.
A spoiler-free look into some of the ways THE AMERICANS shapes identity.
A look into how Crazy Ex-Girlfriend tackles genre, mental health, and women.
How Big Little Lies uses artful editing to impact the story as much as anything else. Big Little Lies is owned by HBO.
How does Samurai Jack tell such a rich story with so little dialogue?
A deep dive into the philosophical reasons characters live and die in GAME OF THRONES.
Unanswerable questions are some of the biggest reasons you should watch The Leftovers.
Search Party was a surprise hit of 2016 but rose to a whole new level with its Season 1 finale. What was so great about it?
Why the plot isn't that important in Mr. Robot
How does Arrested Development keep so many running gags going at the same time?
UnREAL has a strong commentary on The Bachelor and reality TV that is just as relevant today as ever.
Westworld has all the ingredients of a great show, so why isn't it better?
The Good Place is hardly the first sitcom to teach moral lessons, so how does it go to the next level?
A peak into BBC 3 and Amazon's Fleabag and how it uses perspective as a storytelling device. This video is an audio remaster and reupload of a blocked video from 2016. New video on Phoebe Waller-Bridge's new series Killing Eve is in the works.
What makes Killing Eve's Villanelle so lovable despite being so evil?
Lost has one of the best pilot episodes there is, but what makes it so good?
Better Call Saul has some of the best montages on TV, even if some of them are unconventional.
A look at the beautifully fast-paced dialogue of Amy Sherman-Palladino's show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
So what were the top 10 shows of 2018?
Why does the laugh track get a bad rap and is it fair?
How does The Expanse build a world and what makes it so compelling?
It's been 20 years since SpongeBob SquarePants debuted, so why is it that we still can't stop referencing it?
Game of Thrones is over. Now what? How do we remember one of the biggest television shows of all time?
Fleabag put out a near-perfect season of television in 2019. How? By focusing on TV's greatest strength: perspective.
The BBC miniseries Years And Years isn't your standard dystopia. It builds on a long history of dystopian fiction and blends it with our current climate to create something new: a story about a dystopia that's already here and what we do next.
"Show don't tell" is common writing advice, but in a show with no action, how does that work?
How does HBO's Watchmen "remix" the original graphic novel, and how does it appeal to newbies and diehards alike?
Netflix’s You might seem like Bad TV™ until you look a little closer #You #Netflix #YouNetflix
Normal People is a show about the inner lives of two characters based on Sally Rooney's best selling novel, so how does the show use its camera to translate those inner feelings and emotions into visual language?
Cops are in the news and American society is rethinking its relationship to the police. But where does our image of what the police are come from? How did early TV create the template for "copaganda?"
Original Title: How One Cop Show Plays Police Politics | Copaganda: Episode 2 13 million people watch Blue Bloods every week. That's a bad thing.
Should we tear down the system? Nah, you've had enough to eat today.
The Wire has long been heralded as a smarter cop show, but is it even really about the police or is it about systems, power, and money?
Can you define what a gang is? What can we learn about gangs and the cops that police them through the TV show The Shield?
How can TV and media critique the police? Is it possible? Do antiheroes do anything more than just glorify monstrosity?
WandaVision is very META but does that mean it's good?
The MCU is the biggest franchise in TV/Movie history. What kind of ideas about America's role as global police does it send? And what can we learn about the American approach to policing by looking at this attitude?
Original Title: The Most Important Modern TV Episode In 1999, The Sopranos changed the course of TV history with it's fifth episode "College," an episode that would come to define the next two decades of TV storytelling
Original Title: The Legacy of Spooky Cops: From Buffy to The X-Files | Copaganda Episode 7 The Spooky Cop Show™ genre used to be all about outsider heroes like on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files, but nowadays, uniformed police officers patrol the supernatural like on Fringe, Grimm, and The Outsider. What happened?
At what point is a show too ridiculous to be copaganda?
Original Title; Did Brooklyn Nine-Nine Defund the Police in Season 8? | Copaganda Episode 3.2 Brooklyn Nine-Nine made a big deal about how the show would address the police protests of 2020 in its final season. How did the show do?
It's true! Succession is about a lot of things, from family to money to power to the best way to enjoy a glass of wine. But at its core, Succession is about the end of the American Century, about an impending collapse, and—well—climate change.
Euphoria has a lot of graphic drugs, sex, and nudity in it which has raised the question, "Why does this show take place in high school?" Why not college? Or the prison from Oz? Well buckle in buckos, because we're about to travel on an emotional time machine!
Jon Stewart is one of the most influential political commentators of the 21st Century, a champion for liberals, and one of the most dominant presences on TV ever (10 straight Emmys!). He's returned to TV with The Problem with Jon Stewart, and it got me wondering: What the hell happened to Jon Stewart?
The Problem with Jon Stewart talks about a lot of issues, but the one thing the show keeps bumping up against is its unwillingness to grapple with the bedrocks of American policy: capitalism and neoliberalism.
HBO's Barry has a funny premise: a hitman is bored from killing people and just wants to settle down. It's a riff on the Difficult Men era of TV, defined by central middle-aged men behaving badly in shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. But is this premise just for laughs or is the show trying to say something deeper about masculinity?
Original Title: The Weird Capitalist Spaces of SEVERANCE Severance (AppleTV+) is not so subtly about capitalism, but it leaves a lot of its most powerful critiques to an unlikely source — set design.
PAW Patrol is a TV show for kids. It's very popular, so we might as well ask: "What vision of policing does it suggest?" PAW Patrol is also a very bad TV show.
Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal on HBO is one of the greatest pieces of art I've seen on TV, because of the way it paints a portrait of social anxiety on multiple levels.
The Haunting of Hill House is a masterpiece of TV horror, and has turned its creator Mike Flanagan into a Netflix industry unto himself, churning out one beloved horror series after another: The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and The Midnight Club. But what makes these shows so special?
Top Gun: Maverick's nostalgia isn't just a sweet treat for fans of the franchise. The nostalgia is the whole point, one that has something powerful to say.
Law & Order's Biggest Lie
????????Much was made about Cops getting canceled in 2020, but it never died. Cops is currently airing its 36th season and the latest iteration of the genre—"On Patrol: Live"—is a ratings juggernaut. Do these shows provide a check on the police? Or are they just glorified PR reps? And are some cops performing for the camera?
The Bear was the rare TV scripted series that focused on and respected an underrepresented and underappreciated group of people — ordinary kitchen workers. This was a decidedly working class story that I think resonated with a lot of people because it embodied the anxiety and burnout that hit a breaking point during the pandemic. Now, that neighborhood sandwich shop is a fine dining restaurant chasing a Michelin star. It's a change portrayed as rags to riches, but it's something uglier. Carmy hasn't saved The Beef, he gentrified it.
To Catch a Predator gave us our public conception of what a "sex offender" is. How wrong was it? And how much damage has that misrepresentation caused?
NCIS is one of the most popular TV shows of all time. It's about a small federal agency that's supposed to investigate the non-combat deaths of Navy personnel. So why is Mossad—the Israeli CIA—such a major part of the show?