Category: media

“Long before FOX was hailed as the true fourth network, there was DuMont, an underfunded and largely forgotten broadcast pioneer whose lost recordings have become the stuff of minor legend. … Debuting in 1946, the network was actually started as a ploy to sell televisions.” (includes video clips)

The forums, which are still viewable using thanks to internet archives, were a hotbed of problem-solving, discussion, and joyful discovery. Imagine a digital summer camp for researchers. “It was so much fun. The contest was structured so well. We had to learn so much to be competitive and I met so many people along the way.” As stressful as it could get, especially as the improvements to the algorithm slowed down and the years rolled along, the teams were buoyed by a sense of community.

“When a network TV show performs badly, the networks deliberately introduce errors into the episodes’ metadata before submitting it to the Nielsen ratings, so that the episode is counted as a separate show and doesn’t bring the season’s average rating down.”

Excuse me, what the Wonder Woman? “The Marvel Cinematic Universe won’t have a woman in the director’s chair until 2019’s Captain Marvel. … For context, Captain Marvel is the MCU’s nineteenth film. However dire that ratio sounds, the MCU will actually be outperforming the rest of Big-Budget Hollywood.”

“Americans are preparing for different eventualities. The president is promising a border wall, even as the nation’s biggest networks pour cash into Telemundo and Univision. This year and last, Atlanta and Insecure and Moonlight and Moana moved the spotlight away from white characters and writers, and eyes and hearts and wallets moved, too. … The nation’s heartbeat holds the quick pulses of those brown girls and black boys, and executives tried to match fare to that pace. Others, famously, could not keep up.”

Never mind the jump cuts; it’s time for existential dread (what, the news isn’t bringing that on enough, movie-makers?!).

One of the creators of Netflix’s new wrestling series, GLOW, says: “You’re telling stories on a scale that we’re not used to, but that’s really exciting — that can cross cultures, can cross languages. From one side, if you’re being ungenerous, you can say it’s super reductive and then from the other side, you could say it’s storytelling at its most potently inclusive and epic.”

L.A. used to have dozens of porn movie theaters. “Now only two remain: the Studs and the Tiki. They sit at opposite ends of Santa Monica Boulevard — the former in West Hollywood, the latter in East Hollywood, framing the city in an unseen porno-magnetic field.”

Reporter Roslyn Sulcas talks to Andy Serkis, whose performances as (among others) Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Caesar in the current Planet of the Apes series are so widely admired that fans have been agitating for him to be nominated for an Oscar.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt have actually hated the news channel for its entire two-decade history – and now they think it’s finally in a vulnerable position. (includes audio report)