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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From Quiz to Chernobyl, the one-off television series is the perfect antidote to the relentlessness of multi-season shows. But do they ultimately leave us wanting more?Broadcast across three nights as lockdown kept us glued to our sofas, ITV’s Quiz was the first new drama in a long time that... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-06-02 14:27:30 UTC ]
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Published with permission from BAM and the National Book Foundation What is it about courage that astounds our ability to imagine it? Perhaps it’s because, in dire times, we’re told to forget we can—not be courageous, but imagine what that looks like, what it feels like. To imagine others,... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-04-23 08:49:39 UTC ]
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Cussler's page-turning novels about underwater explorer Dirk Pitt sold millions of copies. Continue reading at The Huffington Post
[ The Huffington Post | 2020-02-27 05:10:29 UTC ]
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His literary fantasies and larger-than-life exploits swirled together for decades. He wrote some 70 books, selling no fewer than 100 million copies, and located scores of shipwrecks. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-02-26 17:57:43 UTC ]
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The emerging left media—currently spread across the digital media landscape—are uniting to deliver an alternative to corporate, centrist news and entertainment. Sitting in a small Bronx apartment back in early 2018, it would be difficult to picture the world today. As Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2020-02-26 07:00:23 UTC ]
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Hope Dellon, former longtime editor at St. Martin's Press, died on February 19 surrounded by family in New York. She was 67. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2020-02-21 05:00:00 UTC ]
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Val McDermid’s How the Dead Speak (Sphere) has knocked Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse (Ebury) from the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, with 16,856 copies sold for its first full week on sale. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-02-18 10:19:09 UTC ]
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In Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s historical novel, characters have many ideas about a woman’s place in 17th-century Europe. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-02-17 22:25:50 UTC ]
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Last week, Lyz Lenz, a journalist and writer who lives in Iowa, predicted that the state’s caucuses “are going to be a f*cking nightmare.” In a piece for Gen, Lenz (who also contributes regularly to CJR) wrote that the caucuses are inaccessible at the best of times, and that state Democrats’... Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2020-02-04 13:11:10 UTC ]
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A new comic book series imagines that Nancy has been killed, infuriating some fans of the unstoppable teen detective who made her debut 90 years ago. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-01-25 19:16:28 UTC ]
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Wurtzel, who had breast cancer, gave new breath to the memoir and was a new voice for those struggling with clinical depression and addiction. Continue reading at HuffPost
[ HuffPost | 2020-01-07 21:47:12 UTC ]
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Author of bestselling memoir about clinical depression, which made her ‘a hashtag before there was Twitter’, died from metastatic breast cancer Elizabeth Wurtzel, journalist and author of bestselling memoir Prozac Nation, has died at the age of 52.Writer David Samuels, Wurtzel’s friend since... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-01-07 16:51:54 UTC ]
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Mr. Mehta was a voracious reader and instinctive decision maker who could spot great books and, coming from a paperback world, had no qualms about pushing them. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2019-12-31 15:37:45 UTC ]
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Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief of Knopf and chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, died December 30 in New York City. He was 77. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2019-12-31 05:00:00 UTC ]
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Congrats to Susan Choi for ending the year on a high note: her novel Trust Exercise, which won this year’s National Book Award for Fiction, is in development to become a limited television series with FilmNation Entertainment. Choi will write the series for FilmNation Entertainment, which was... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2019-12-12 21:43:30 UTC ]
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In this episode, taped live at the Miami Book Fair, writer Jeff VanderMeer and editor Ann VanderMeer talk to Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell about editing The Big Book of Classic Fantasy anthology, historical understandings of fantasy, editing beyond... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2019-12-05 09:48:07 UTC ]
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In “The Story of a Goat,” animals articulate their own curious perspectives on their lives — and ours. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2019-11-26 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Writers of literary fiction are supposed to disdain celebrity memoirs. They’re sucking up all the big advances and lowering the bar of what’s supposed to be Literature, right? But I’ve got a dirty reading secret. I love celebrity memoirs, particularly by standup comedians (and not just because... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-20 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Tom Spurgeon, author, editor, comics critic, blogger, and executive director of the Cartoon Crossroads Columbus comics festival, died of unknown causes in Columbus, Ohio, on November 13. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2019-11-15 05:00:00 UTC ]
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On May 17, 1973, the first witness to testify in the Senate’s Watergate hearings took the stand. It wasn’t former White House Counsel John Dean, or former Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, or the burglar James McCord, but Robert C. Odle, Jr., a “baby-faced” 29-year-old who had been the office... Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2019-11-13 13:14:35 UTC ]
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