Television

The best show on television sounds awful. It’s a truly terrible problem to have, and a frustrating one for a TV critic shut down by an artillery of cringes and glazed-over eyes and the apologetic “sounds like it’s not for me…” The first season of The Leftovers was a dismal chamber piece of grief that chronicled the aftermath of 2 percent of the population disappearing off the face of the Earth with no rhyme or reason. It was grueling to the point of off-putting, and thus utterly fascinating. It got a lot of hard passes. But then season two—oh, man, that season two—opened things up. How people move forward, or aggressively don’t, after such an event was only part of the point. It dealt with hope with as much fervor as it dealt with pain. Introducing the town of Jarden, Texas, home of Miracle National Park, where no one disappeared, the show was suddenly rich in dichotomies: faith and hope to counteract nihilism and despair; heroism and … [Read more...] about Why ‘The Leftovers’ Is the Best Show on Television Right Now

The first episode of the gripping Showtime docuseries Couples Therapy opens on Annie and Mau, an attractive middle-aged couple, sitting on opposite ends of a rust-colored sofa. “So he has a lot of birthday… stuff,” Annie begins, pausing and gesturing on the last syllable, as if to indicate annoyance. “Always has. I have been unsuccessful for 20 years.” In today’s therapy session, Annie and Mau are talking about Annie’s repeated failures to satisfy Mau on his birthday, just one example of his disappointment with her inability to anticipate his needs.  As Annie describes her painstaking attempt to plan a special weekend full of “sexual events,” including a dominatrix theme and a threesome, her husband of 23 years looks around impatiently, each fleeting facial expression seemingly conveying his disagreement with her statements. “The things she was doing,” Mau explains when it is his turn to speak, “[are] the … [Read more...] about Inside the Therapists’ Office Where New York Couples Televise Their Sex, Money, and Relationship Woes

Svetlana Alexievich, the Russian-language Belarusian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2015, for her work with oral history, has said that the book she found easiest to report was her book about Chernobyl. (Its English title, depending on the translation, is “Voices from Chernobyl” or “Chernobyl Prayer.”) The reason, she said, was that none of her interlocutors—people who lived in the area affected by the disaster—knew how they were supposed to talk about it. For her other books, Alexievich interviewed people about their experience of the Second World War, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For all of these other events and periods in Russian history, there were widely adopted narratives, habits of speaking that, Alexievich found, had a way of overshadowing actual personal experience and private memory. But when she asked survivors about Chernobyl they accessed their own stories more easily, … [Read more...] about What HBO’s “Chernobyl” Got Right, and What It Got Terribly Wrong

It is important to note that Abby McEnany’s therapist is not dead. Specifically, she did not die while in a session with her.  “Oh my God, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed ever again if that really happened,” she tells me. “How do you ever recover from that?” The clarification is needed given the confessional, semi-autobiographical nature of McEnany’s new television series, Work in Progress, which premieres Sunday night on Showtime. It opens with Abby speaking to her therapist through tears.  “I’m going to kill myself in 180 days if things don’t get better,” she says. “I mean I’m 45. I’m fat. I’m this queer dyke who has done shit in her life, and that is my identity?” NEWSLETTERS The Daily Beast’s Obsessed Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. By Clicking "Subscribe" you agree to have read the Terms of Use and … [Read more...] about Abby McEnany: The 45-Year-Old ‘Fat Queer Dyke’ Whose Life Was Ruined by ‘SNL’

Right before Empire star Taraji P. Henson announced that Regina King had won the Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or TV Movie for her work on American Crime, producers cut to a split screen of King and her five fellow nominees, a Who’s Who of the best and most interesting performers in television last year: Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett, Zoe Kazan, Mo’nique, and Sarah Paulson. When Henson gasped with excitement and revealed that King had won, her competitors erupted with such jubilant glee that a .GIF was created celebrating the adorable moment, a handful of seconds that represented decades of goodwill for one of Hollywood’s most underrated actresses finally getting her due. After Sunday night’s episode of The Leftovers, King might want to make sure she’s free on Emmy night next year, too. King, most famous for her roles in Boyz n the Hood, Jerry Maguire and Ray, before the gritty cop drama Southland kicked off a recent television boom … [Read more...] about Regina King Is So Happy She’s Crying