Even at the peak of Peak TV, the medium’s gatekeepers were resistant to making full-fledged commitments to surrealism and absurdity. But that hasn’t stopped some weird curios from sneaking through. There have been long-running favorites […]
Daniel Fienberg
10 posts
If you’re developing a personality based around sports fandom, it’s easiest and most satisfying to root for either a perennial loser or a perennial winner. Cheer for the scrappy underdog and you can maintain a […]
In John Cheever’s expert short story “The Swimmer,” the protagonist announces his intention to swim from a small afternoon gathering to his home, exclusively using an interconnected series of suburban Westchester County swimming pools. What […]
You’d have to go all the way back to 2000’s Snatch for the last Guy Ritchie project that I awaited with unabashed anticipation. At the time, Ritchie was coming off of the sleeper success of […]
When Jennifer Euston was casting Orange Is the New Black, it stands to reason that she was selecting interesting performers first and, given the show’s evocative opening credits, interesting faces second. But somewhere on the […]
Taking eight episodes for what would, in more efficient hands, be a pilot — and setting up a second season that’s somehow even less necessary — Paramount+’s Happy Face vacillates between sanctimonious and hypocritical, lashing […]
For a while, Apple TV+‘s adaptation of Dennis Tafoya’s Dope Thief fits into one of my favorite subgenres of crime fiction: Longtime friends, bonded by shared trauma, engage in petty crime to survive, only to […]
Everything is not sunny in Philadelphia on the small screen this week. Both Apple TV+’s Dope Thief — review coming Thursday — and Peacock‘s Long Bright River set stories of blue-collar murder and misery against […]
The official description for Netflix’s new documentary CHAOS: The Manson Murders invites viewers to “Explore a conspiracy of mind control, CIA experiments and murder.” The trailer for the Errol Morris-directed film, which is based on […]
The ultimate sign of television’s arrival as a cinematic art form may be the medium’s growing obsession with the oner — the uninterrupted single-shot technique that was long part of the visual language of big-screen […]