But Also, The Most Brilliant Reveal In TV History
Ha ha, suckers.
Posted on May 28, 2018
New Television’s New Families
By Martin Shuster/Aeon
Our present, many have noted, is a new golden age of television, defined by the rise of a range of sophisticated, creative and powerful serial shows.
We know that, time and again in history, forms of art arise to meet the demands of even the most profound and unsettling changes in the world.
Several centuries ago, it was the novel and its alleged ability to engage with what the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács in 1914 termed our “transcendental homelessness.”
After that came film, and – as thinkers from Walter Benjamin to Robert Warshow noted – its ability to give some order, at least for a couple of hours, to our otherwise discordant experience.
“All care about movies, await them, respond to them, remember them, talk about them, hate some of them, are grateful for some of them,” is how the philosopher Stanley Cavell put it in The World Viewed.
Moving images, in other words, have an inherent egalitarian quality; you need little more than an ability to acknowledge motion and sound to appreciate them.
To what moment does the rise of television respond? And what is the significance of this medium?
Above all, new television responds to an omnipresent loss of normative authority, of a robust failure of humans to feel at home in their world; to trust their governments, their leaders, their role models, their traditions and, ultimately, even their senses.
New television confronts this state of affairs artistically and politically, presenting – like film – some order to such a world, but over weeks and months and years.
Posted on May 16, 2018
Sinclair-Fox Station Deal Enabled By FCC Is Dangerous For Democracy
By Tim Karr/Free Press
On Wednesday, 21st Century Fox announced a deal to acquire seven stations from Sinclair Broadcast Group for $910 million as part of Sinclair’s proposed takeover of Tribune Media.
Sinclair needs to divest a certain number of stations as part of its $3.9-billion proposal to buy Tribune. As originally proposed, the Tribune deal would have given Sinclair control of more than 233 local TV stations reaching 72 percent of the country’s population, far in excess of congressional and FCC limits on national and local media ownership.
Both the Sinclair-Tribune and Sinclair-Fox deals would not have been possible were it not for recent Trump FCC efforts, under Chairman Ajit Pai, to gut longstanding broadcast-ownership limits.
Posted on May 9, 2018
WGN’s Technical Difficulties
Scoring Family Guy
By Sound on Sound
“One of the defining features of Family Guy, apart from its resolutely irreverent sense of humor, is its use of lush musical arrangements.
“Almost every episode features a musical number, and these are performed by top swing players and recorded on the legendary Newman scoring stage at Fox Studios in Hollywood.
“While the show’s writers pen the lyrics, someone has to turn these into musical pieces that work. That person is Walter Murphy, a musician of note in his own right whose disco version of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony shot to fame as part of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.”
Posted on May 3, 2018