cable television
Matthew Weiner: 'Mad Men' has to end, because people try too hard to 'perceive the machinery'
Moderator Caryn James asked the question early on in the night, directing it at Weiner, “Tell us about Betty’s transformation, physical and internal. Why did you put on that weight for her?” Weiner responded matter-of-factly, “Well, it was a creative solution to a real-life problem, that January was pregnant—and everything worked out great, she has a baby [laughs]—and we had to start shooting, so I had the choice between doing the laundry basket thing or really trying to deal with it, not trying to hide it.” So, an accident of the filming process? Not quite. More
'Wire' and 'Treme' creator David Simon on being the 'angriest man in television'
"The copy desk nightmare is when you wake up and you realize I made a mistake. You know, it's a fact, it's a figure, you did something wrong, you wrote a backward sentence. And you call the copy desk in your nightmare, and you realize the slot man has left. And usually, you see the presses rolling. I started having these in my twenties, and I still have them." More
Breaking Bad, the final season: Men without pants
He’s become “king of all wild things” but now he’s feeling lonely and homesick for his own bedroom and a hot homemade supper made with love instead of nuked into existence in the same amount of time it takes for him to commit mass murder. More
(1)Pat Kiernan, sad about losing the 'Live!' gig, lights up the Empire State Building for NY1
"There's no grand plan to find the Plan B national show or anything like that," he told Capital this morning on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. "I'm happy to be back at work tomorrow." More
(2)Breaking Bad, the final season: Twos and threes
The show has to keep making Walter worse and worse, until every last one of us wants him dead while continuing to (presumably) keep him alive for another nine episodes in a way that feels solid and true to the plot and not in any way artificial. Because the minute we sense that they’re sparing his life for just the sake of the timeline, this delicate puzzle we’ve been assembling will collapse. More
(3)Breaking Bad, the final season: Look who's coming to dinner
In season 1, Walt meets up with his ex for a nice lunch that ends not all that differently from the dinner with Skyler in this episode. He’s full of spite even though she reminds him that he was the one who left her. I’ve always held that scene up as one of the most disturbing in the whole show, since it showed us that Walt was a monster, or at least had monstrous tendencies, way before the cancer struck. More
(5)'Breaking Bad,' the final season: The long game
Part of the game of "Breaking Bad" is remembering that we are playing too. Last week, I watched Lydia fumble with the fuse box, as though she were being confronted with it for the first time; and yet I still found myself halfheartedly filling in my own explanation instead of accepting that the show was telling me something. We the viewers were shown a moment in time that the other characters weren’t, and that never happens by accident. More
(1)'Breaking Bad,' the final season: A watching brief
Once again, into the pool drops wreckage caused by Walt’s deeds. This time it’s Skyler who is falling. Now she is the one doing the scheming. But even though it’s all part of her plan to get the children out of the house, didn’t her face look serene when she was floating under the water? More
(5)Breaking Bad, the final season: What Walter White wants
To figure out how much of the puzzle is left to complete, we need to first understand the goal. Just what is it that will make everyone whole? More
'Breaking Bad,' the final season: The wizard of ABQ
Each Monday, Starlee Kine writes about the previous night's episode of "Breaking Bad." This is the first installment. More
The show Aaron Sorkin should have made (it's not 'The Newsroom'); plus, more girl trouble
In the real world, Feb. 11 is not a random date in the timeline of the media in Egypt. It is the date on which CBS journalist Lara Logan was brutally attacked in Tahrir Square, suffering "sustained sexual assault and beating." This gets no mirror image on "The Newsroom," however, despite the fact that Logan's experience was by far the worst trauma suffered by an American journalist in Egypt at the time (though by no means worse than what was suffered by many Egyptian journalists on the ground there). More
(6)Breaking Bad, the final season: The Mirror Man
Each Monday, Starlee Kine will write about the previous night's episode of "Breaking Bad." This is the first installment. More
(3)The television of cruelty: Aaron Sorkin thinks we're stupid, and he's punishing us for it
What's wrong with "The Newsroom" is not actually its faulty news sense; it's that Aaron Sorkin has developed a great, inexplicable contempt for his audience. He believes us dumber than we were when he wrote "The West Wing," when in fact we're smarter. More
(4)In 'The Newsroom,' something to be sorry for
Apologies have become a minor art form in cable news these last few years; in lieu of an unscripted explosion they are the surest way to the online water cooler in the form of the viral video. Just this week Fox's Bill O'Reilly apologized for "being an idiot" (he predicted the Supreme Court health-care reform decision wrongly). More
(4)'Newsroom' 2.0 falters with Miss U.S.A. misstep
Sorkin is happy to stick to historical accuracy only when it allows him to point out how the story was covered wrong. More
(1)
