Tv Series
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Ensuring AI Obeys Americans September 04, 2023
“I’m Yul Brenner, and I’m dead now.” That was how comedian Bill Hicks only slightly misremembered the actor’s eerie, posthumous anti-smoking ad broadcast after his 1985 demise.In 1973, Brenner played a killer Android, not a human ghost, in sci-fi Mas...
We Should Still Love Kojak September 04, 2023
NYPD detective Lieutenant Theodopolis “Theo” Kojak’s eponymous CBS series represented something new in police dramas when it debuted fifty years ago this October. It had to—in 1973 there were more than a score of crime‐oriented shows on prime time. W...
The Singular Nicolas Winding Refn Experience Arrives January 06, 2023
At just six episodes, all of which run under an hour, Copenhagen Cowboy should be more accessible—and presumably far cheaper to produce—than Refn’s grand Amazon experiment. The show is also something of a homecoming for the director, who filmed in hi...
Life After Westworld December 15, 2022
Dystopia is a crowded field in today’s television. As early twenty-first century reality catches up to the cyberpunk of the 1980s, streaming and cable television takes to bridging between the Way We Live Now (Mr. Robot) and the world inevitably to fo...
Seize the Means of Production December 01, 2022
As television series grew ever more prestigious, their distinctions became ever more blurred, both from movies and among themselves. Right after Game of Thrones (2011–2019) showed its white walkers besiege Winterfell on the same April weekend when Av...
The Force Is AWOL in 'Andor' November 23, 2022
It wasn’t until the sixth episode of the shape-shifting and genre-curious new “Star Wars” series “Andor” that I figured out what had been nagging at me. The episode, titled “The Eye,” centers on rebel fighters as they plan to infiltrate an imperial b...
Whose Midlife Crisis Is It, Anyway? November 21, 2022
The television series Fleishman Is in Trouble begins upside down, with the camera soaring over an inverted Manhattan skyline—squat brick buildings in the top half of the frame, hazy blue sky below. It’s an appropriately destabilizing introduction for...
The Unwatchable 'The Watcher' October 28, 2022
The Watcher seemed like a solid idea on paper. It had the right materials: the ripped-from-The Cut true crime story set in an affluent commuter town with a preexisting sordid history. It had the right audience: worldly urbanites who have likely been ...
'Interview with the Vampire' Doesn’t Suck October 17, 2022
AMC’s adaptation of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, which is also available to stream on Amazon Prime through its AMC+ add-on, updates the story for the age of COVID and makes several other subtle but significant changes to the narrative as well. Instead ...
