I Like to Watch (2019)

Emily Nussbaum won a Pulitzer in 2016 for her TV reviews in the New Yorker. This roundup of her stuff—including feature profiles and one or two previously unpublished essays—is at once an eccentric survey primer and an exploration of what has happened to TV so far in this century. She sets the tentpole starting markers at Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos, feeling called on to defend Buffy at every opportunity and noting that the accepted status of The Sopranos means no defense is necessary—in fact, some skepticism might be called for. She also takes nuanced feminist views into her analyses, which proved notably useful when Me Too rolled around in 2017. Most of these pieces appeared originally in New York magazine or the New Yorker but most of them were reworked at least a little for this excellent compendium. Three groups of reviews are organized by theme (“Girls Girls Girls,” “Breaking the Box,” and “In Praise of Sex and Violence”) and all the rest are essays and/or profile pieces, on subjects such as Tina Fey, Jenji Kohan, Ryan Murphy, and Joan Rivers. Issues of product placement are discussed alongside full-throated defenses of Buffy and Sex and the City. Perhaps the best piece here is a long meditation on Me Too and bad artists and good art and trying to split the difference. The fact that she is also a recovering Woody Allen fan made me like her even more. TV in the 21st century has become an overwhelmingly vast landscape, with which I am familiar only in relatively tiny parts. She talks about a lot of shows I’ve never heard of here (as do people all over social media, I’m kind of in the dark on a lot of this), many more I’ve maybe meant to get to and know a little, and some things I know well, like Lost and The Leftovers, the Damon Lindelof projects. If she prefers Law & Order SVU to the flagship series, which I don’t, her reasons are clear and not surprising. Ryan Murphy gets one of the biggest profiles at the very end, but he’s one I have tended to reflexively skip past—American Horror Story, Glee, Nip/Tuck, etc. I guess he got me with the OJ doc, which was brilliant. I’d say it makes me want to try more by him, except I already did with the first season of American Horror Story. I Like to Watch also promises to be useful because there’s a lot of TV here I hope I can track down.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.