reviews
The year of living digitally: Top 30 global TV series of 2020
December 23, 2020The biggest story in television this year was the rise of the streaming services, with Disney+, HBO Max, Apple TV+, and NBCUniversal’s Peacock joining what was already the crowded field of Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. This...
Read more
A pandemic ‘Nurse T’ tells her COVID-19 story in new published diary
December 22, 2020Reading A Pandemic Nurse’s Diary, particularly against prevalent media representations of healthcare workers’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, brought to mind for me the opening words of the sketch by the U.S. radical writer Jesús Colón,...
Read more
TV’s forgotten: Indigenous and working-class series
December 21, 2020Few series on television focus either on the Earth’s first inhabitants, the Indigenous, now mostly quartered in slums across the world, or on workers, their lives, and daily concerns. We’ll be discussing the series Mystery Road,...
Read more
How capitalism underdeveloped Appalachia: The economic truth ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ ignores
December 1, 2020It’s a tough trip for J.D. Vance and the viewer, but as the ride bumps along, it stays safely above the larger issues that actually shape the afflictions of Appalachia.
Read more
PBS ‘Latinos Are Essential’: Who does the work and who pays
November 24, 2020The mainly young filmmakers and their mainly young subjects have gone beyond the confusion and drama of crisis. They do what so few films do: They capture portraits of working-class people at their jobs and illuminate...
Read more