The Monthly Digest: October 2016
Television
Fact check: The Los Angeles Review of Books is not, strictly speaking, only a review of books. Since the days when we were but a wee Tumblr, tumbling through the ether, LARB has published criticism about all manner of cultural objects and obsessions. Most beloved of these, to me, is television. Whether you believe that TV is a garbage medium grasping for unearned legitimacy or whether you believe that TV has transfigured into an art-form of pure glowing eternal light that has rendered all other media as obsolete as the flip-phone, it’s hard to deny that the critical conversation about TV in the last decade has been an urgent, and occasionally brilliant, one. We, at LARB, are proud of the small voice we’ve been able to have in that conversation, and this month’s digital edition collects some of our best small screen coverage.
As we surf (or slouch) toward what FX president John Landgraf has called “peak television”—the prophesied moment at which there will simply be too much TV for viewers to reasonably consume—television criticism has had its hands full. But beyond simply trying to cover all of these series, critics, especially online, have turned to TV and begun to ask questions about aesthetics, about what we mean when we say “quality,” about the representation of race, gender, and sexuality. Television criticism, in other words, has evolved as a vibrant form that seeks not just to critique its object but to hold it accountable, to take it seriously as a medium that has the ability to both reflect and shape the culture from which it emerges.
The essays in this edition—all standalone pieces from LARB’s beginning to its present—model this kind of ethics of television criticism. The authors at this review of books aren’t descending from the realm of the literary to take stock of an upstart medium. They are invested scholars, critics, and viewers themselves. They expect things of their television series, and they have written with eloquence, passion, and hilarity about the way these series intersect with their own lives.
LARB doesn’t have the ability to cover every TV show that airs, but we do have the luxury of time and space. So these essays dive deep. Albert Wu and Michelle Kuo dig up the literary resonances of Breaking Bad; E. Alex Jung tracks the evolution of Asian Americans on TV since Margaret Cho’s failed 1994 experiment All-American Girl; Soraya Roberts examines television’s emergence as the medium of middle age; Kyla Wazana Tompkins and Rebecca Wanzo debate the racial politics of Broad City; Michelle Chihara assesses HBO’s attempt at a gritty second life; and Caitlin Woolsey watches Amazon’s Transparent with Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts open in front of her. Finally, our collection ends with a trio of entries from “Dear Television,” LARB’s TV criticism collective. Dear TV, like the Los Angeles Review of Books itself, emerged fully within TV’s internet age. In this moment, television, in a way that wasn’t possible decades ago, is in our hands, on our first, second, even third screens. And LARB, which was never just a review of books, has been binging.
- Phillip Maciak, TV Editor, Dear Televisioneer