Badwatching: Scenes from a Misspent Life
J. D. Connor explains what Fox’s game show “Snake Oil,” Disney’s film “Haunted Mansion,” and NBC’s crime series “The Irrational” have in common.
J. D. Connor is an associate professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Hollywood Math and Aftermath: The Economic Image and the Digital Recession (2018) and The Studios After the Studios (2015).
Beginning in April 2023, J. D. Connor has written the City of Industry column for LARB: City of Industry offers monthly dispatches on the collisions between the art … the industry … and the experience of contemporary Hollywood. The art is often underestimated and demands closer analysis. The industry is undergoing profound and rapid changes that demand explanation. And our experiences of movies and TV and everything that has grown up around them demand more precise description. City of Industry tries to do all those things at once. Neither an insider’s guide nor a view from nowhere, this column is about what it means to think inside the Hollywood slipstream.
J. D. Connor explains what Fox’s game show “Snake Oil,” Disney’s film “Haunted Mansion,” and NBC’s crime series “The Irrational” have in common.
J. D. Connor ponders how AI is transforming the media landscape, the law, and our lives.
J. D. Connor writes about the writers’ demands in the WGA strike in Hollywood, and about how movies about contracts relate to a downturn in production...
J. D. Connor reflects on the seemingly endless mutability of the Super Mario Bros. franchise.
J. D. Connor discusses Netflix’s business model, specwork in comedy, and the extraction of surplus value from Black labor.
J. D. Connor asks why Netflix spent $450 million to acquire the “Glass Onion” franchise.
J. D. Connor analyzes how cultural shifts in the relationship between movies and money made James Cameron’s initial record-breaking blockbuster...
J. D. Connor explains what “Citizen Kane” would look like if it had only industry politics and no real ones: it’d be “Mank.”