Louis Theroux has made a career as a documentarian by going out into the “bush”—basically, anywhere outside the urban and online bubbles where his kind dwell. There he meets weird and marginal people. He is nice to them in order to get them on film. Then he displays them—like so many Hottentot Venuses—for the amusement of condescending liberal urbanites like himself. (more…)
Tag: television reviews
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February 11, 2022 Alex Graham
Lovecraftova země
English original here
V posledních letech roste mezi některými příznivci tvorby H. P. Lovecrafta úzkost, jak skloubit svou lásku k mýtu Cthulhu s Lovecraftovými názory na rasu. Seriálové televizní zpracování románu Matta Ruffa Lovecraft Country (2016, česky Lovecraftova země, Baronet, 2018) přináší jedno z možných řešení tohoto dilematu: aplikovat Lovecraftovu mimozemskou hrůzu na bělochy. Seriál, na jehož vzniku se podíleli mimo jiné nechvalně známý J. J. Abrams a režisér Get Out (Uteč!) Jordan Peele, měl premiéru 16. srpna. (more…)
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I seldom have occasion to say nice things about television shows. I’ll make an exception for My 600-lb Life, which has a great deal of cautionary and educational value about a growing problem in society. As the name implies, it’s a reality TV program in which the guest stars usually begin around approximately 600 pounds (273 kilos). Some are less and some are more. (more…)
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Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
Burn the land, boil the sea
You cannot take the sky from meSo went the opening theme of Firefly, a boot camp/cowboy song with fiddles and guitars instead of electronic music. In 2002, Firefly was a sci-fi show that led a brief but exciting life, not even completing a full season. (more…)
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9,004 words
“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” ― H. L. Mencken [1]
“We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.” ― The Animals.[2]
Living in the post-lockdown world of streaming, I find myself more than ever revisiting the good old days, including the early, superior seasons of Mad Men, the world of which looks even more alien — in a good, Golden Age way — than before. (more…)
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Today, we will be looking at some anti-communist propaganda from deep in the heart of the McCarthy era when the second Red Scare was at its zenith. This is some hardcore time capsule stuff, folks. (more…)
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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a television series that ran from 1993 to 1999. In contrast with its predecessor The Next Generation, which was inspired by an optimistic vision of a largely peaceful future, Deep Space Nine depicts a less cooperative and more familiar universe. (more…)
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For a while now, I’ve found that I cannot bring myself to enjoy new films, new TV shows, and other new media, not only due to the active war on whiteness waged therein. I expected Netflix’s Barbarians to be no different, but people were talking it up and I was having trouble sleeping, so I thought, what the hell. I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw. This may be the first series that I have, as the kids would say, binge-watched. (more…)
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One of the great unexpected pleasures of the Covid lockdown last spring was discovering oddball television series you otherwise wouldn’t have approached with a barge pole. Producers and programming executives detected a nice angle here, so they moved up launch dates by a few months. This is what happened with Mrs. America, a nine-part FX series with Cate Blanchett that debuted on Hulu last April and May, instead of its originally scheduled launch in July and August. (more…)
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I feel like I grew up in Twin Peaks, the fictional Washington logging town that gave its name to David Lynch’s iconic TV series, which aired on ABC from the spring of 1990 to the spring of 1991. Twin Peaks has one of the best pilots in television history, which was followed by an abbreviated first season of seven episodes. (more…)
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1,959 words
1,959 words
HBO is planning a reboot of The Boondocks, an animated television series which ran from 2005 to 2014. Created by black cartoonist Aaron McGruder, the show was an interesting sociopolitical satire, lampooning blacks at least as much as whites. Although the series’ creator majored in the largely grievance-focused field of African American studies in college, it is not the unreflective blaming of whites for the problems of blacks that one might expect. (more…)
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2,140 words
2,140 words
The PJs was an animated television sitcom series that unfortunately ran for only three seasons, from 1999 to 2001. Shockingly by today’s standards, the series focused on lampooning inner-city blacks, depicting them as buffoons in a way that would only be acceptable today if the subjects were white. It was not so long ago that (more…)
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2,727 words
Children of Earth, or more accurately “Children of Britain,” was the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood’s third outing. Torchwood dropped the Doctor and asked what happens when he’s not around to save the day, a not-unreasonable question given the astonishing frequency the Earth is attacked by aliens. Being a BBC show, it’s always Britain that gets attacked first and hardest, and a “Time Rift” in Cardiff keeps vomiting out beasties for the Torchwood team to tackle. (more…)