The last laugh: is the television sitcom really dead?

From Friends to The Thick Of It, the TV sitcom has evolved – but it’s no longer in rude health. Enter offbeat shows like Stath Lets Flats, bringing joy and potential redemptionThe sitcom has a long history of being dead. According to the former NBC president of entertainment, Warren Littlefield, in the early 1980s many people believed the sitcom was over. In 1999, Entertainment Weekly noted the genre’s demise. In 2005, so did Victoria Wood. The following year, the former ITV director of programmes, David Liddiment, made a programme called Who Killed the Sitcom? In the decade and a half since, similar questions have been posed repeatedly by publications on both sides of the Atlantic. Declaring the sitcom dead now seems more like an annual ritual than a convincing take on the state of comedy. But what if this time it’s actually true?There are a few reasons why the sitcom seems, if not comprehensively deceased, then at least less responsive than it has ever been. In terms of the comedy zeitgeist, the sadcom – a frequently bleak drama hybrid – continues to rule (see: I May Destroy You, Feel Good, This Way Up, Insecure). Streaming giants increasingly shape our viewing habits, and they don’t tend to make sitcoms (their discrete episodic plots mean they are not very bingeworthy, for a start). The newly established National Comedy Awards, meanwhile, doesn’t include a sitcom category, while Bafta dropped its sitcom award in 2015 and replaced it with one for scripted comedy: this... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2021-10-26 14:35:04 UTC ]

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WriteGirl Has My Heart: A Conversation with Keren Taylor

I KEEP FOLDING DOWN the corners of pages in this latest anthology from WriteGirl. It’s that kind of book, contains multitudes, it does — 180 young writers represented, and a range of genres, too: poetry, prose, drama, song — and in between selections, tips to keep a writer of any age on task:... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-01-16 18:00:49 UTC ]
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The Controversial Origin of Asian American Studies

Since its release in 1974, the provocative literary anthology ‘Aiiieeeee!’ has been discussed far more often than it’s actually been read. Continue reading at The Paris Review

[ The Paris Review | 2020-01-15 16:00:28 UTC ]
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FX Gives Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story a 3-Season Renewal

As FX expands to a streaming platform this year, with FX on Hulu, the network is making sure its most popular series will continue to be a mainstay on its linear channel for the next three years. FX has given a three-season renewal to American Horror Story, its anthology horror series from Ryan... Continue reading at AdWeek

[ AdWeek | 2020-01-09 17:00:29 UTC ]
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'Nobody in Tesco buys spy books by women': how female authors took on the genre

Publishing’s long established boys’ club in espionage fiction is having its cover blown by a new school led by Stella Rimington, Manda Scott and Charlotte PhilbyWhen Stella Rimington, the former director general of MI5 and spy author, wrote a new foreword last year to The Spy’s Bedside Book,... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2020-01-07 09:00:54 UTC ]
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Apple TV+ will drop every episode of ‘Little America’ on January 17th

Little America, the anthology series based on true stories about immigrants in the US, arrives on Apple TV+ on January 17th. Apple will release all of season one's episodes at once, rather than weekly as it's done with other shows, and more than a mo... Continue reading at Engadget

[ Engadget | 2019-12-12 23:19:00 UTC ]
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5 Goals for Making Your Anthology the Best That It Can Be

Marika Lindholm, co-editor of the new book We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Grit, Heart, and Humor offers 5 tips to creating a more appealing and successful anthology. The post 5 Goals for Making Your Anthology the Best That It Can Be by Marika Lindholm appeared first on Writer's Digest. Continue reading at Writer's Digest

[ Writer's Digest | 2019-12-11 10:00:21 UTC ]
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Bob Geldof anthology snapped up by Faber

Faber will publish a book from Bob Geldof, Tales of Boomtown Glory, which it describes as “the musical life and times of one of our most powerful singer songwriters” Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2019-12-10 12:26:27 UTC ]
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How Journalism Made a Poet Out of Me

In 1977––just three years after the publication of Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism, a landmark, incendiary anthology that declared journalists using fictional technique had erased the novel as literature’s dominant form—I was fresh out of college and had just landed my first job as a journalist.... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2019-12-06 09:48:12 UTC ]
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The Woman Who Brought Dostoevsky and Chekhov to English Readers

My first publication was a translation, not something I wrote myself. It was an essay in Greek about the poet C.P. Cavafy for a literary anthology of that kind of thing. Before taking up Modern Greek I had spent thousands of hours of my youth translating Homer for my studies—probably too many... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2019-11-12 09:50:58 UTC ]
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Netflix's 'Heartstrings' trailer reimagines Dolly Parton songs as dramas

Netflix is turning eight Dolly Parton songs into an anthology series, Dolly Parton's Heartstrings. The first trailer arrived today, and it gives us a glimpse of the dramas based on iconic songs like "Two Doors Down," "JJ Sneed" -- and of course, "Jol... Continue reading at Engadget

[ Engadget | 2019-11-06 03:18:00 UTC ]
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Unbound launches Irish working class writers anthology

Unbound is launching an anthology of working class writers from across Ireland, featuring original pieces by Roddy Doyle and Lisa McInerney alongside lesser known authors and edited by Paul McVeigh. Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2019-11-04 02:04:57 UTC ]
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Eve L. Ewing’s debut poetry collection is being adapted for TV.

I have no idea how one goes about adapting a poetry collection into a TV series, but it looks like I’ll find out soon—AMC Studios is creating an Afrofuturistic anthology series based on Eve L. Ewing’s debut collection Electric Arches. According to Shadow and Act, “The Electric Arches anthology... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2019-10-31 17:27:27 UTC ]
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What We're Reading – October 2019

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine EvaristoSince studying Lara as a student, I have been a fan of Bernardine Evaristo’s work, and am delighted to see her win the Booker Prize this year. Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives of twelve black characters with different backgrounds and experiences, most... Continue reading at British Council global

[ British Council global | 2019-10-30 09:49:28 UTC ]
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The Best of the Horror Story

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a new anthology of classic horror stories Shortly after receiving my review copies of Darryl Jones’s informative and engaging history of the horror genre, Sleeping with the Lights On, the publishers, Oxford University... Continue reading at Interesting Literature

[ Interesting Literature | 2019-10-25 14:00:45 UTC ]
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Sci-Fi Authors Charlie Jane Anders and Madeline Ashby on Imagining the Future

Two authors from the recent Future Tense Fiction anthology discuss how they approach their craft. Continue reading at Slate

[ Slate | 2019-10-25 11:30:07 UTC ]
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Your Spot on the Wall: An Introduction to “Graffiti”

LARB presents this exclusive excerpt from Graffiti, the inaugural anthology from artist collective POC United, published this week by Aunt Lute Books. ¤ WHERE ARE YOUR WORDS welcome? Where do you have permission to scribble, scrawl, romanticize, speculate, brag, retaliate, and narrate your own... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2019-10-16 17:00:52 UTC ]
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From TMZ to ESPN, content deals stream in for Quibi's 'Daily Essentials'

When DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and former Hewlett-Packard and eBay CEO Meg Whitman announced the idea for Quibi last year, there was debate over whether millennials and Gen Zers would cash in on a mobile-only platform streaming shows lasting for 10 minutes or less. One thing is for... Continue reading at Advertising Age

[ Advertising Age | 2019-10-11 22:09:18 UTC ]
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When Stephen King is Your Father, the World is Full of Monsters

We had a new monster every night. I had this book I loved, Bring on the Bad Guys. It was a big, chunky paperback collection of comic-book stories, and as you might guess from the title, it wasn’t much concerned with heroes. It was instead an anthology of tales about the worst of the worst, […] Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2019-10-10 08:49:26 UTC ]
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A Great Spirit Trapped in a Tiny Life: On Cherríe Moraga’s “Native Country of the Heart”

CHERRÍE MORAGA HAS been an iconic figure in queer and Latinx literature since the 1981 publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, an anthology she edited with the late Gloria Anzaldúa. Bridge was among the first explorations of how people and communities with... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2019-10-04 17:00:25 UTC ]
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Our New Sci-Fi Anthology Will Be Your Tour Guide to the Future

Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow is a thought-provoking excursion into the futures we would and would not want to live in. Continue reading at Slate

[ Slate | 2019-10-02 16:18:40 UTC ]
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