Category: media

“When [the characters are] speaking to each other, they speak as early-20th-century farmers. It’s fairly realistic. But underneath, in the inner monologues, … they speak in ways that these characters would never articulate. … Maybe they could feel as deeply but they would never use this diction. So we came up with was the split-screen: that would give the feeling of multiple perspectives.”

“The trend of putting whole new series online at once hasn’t just changed viewers’ behaviour — it has opened up new possibilities for TV producers.”

The Atlantic‘s corrspondent talks with Rhonda Loverude about the series’s recurring archetypes (the Odd and Seemingly Unattractive Woman, the Young Naïve Girl, the Extremely Religious Woman, the Bitch, etc.), the counterintuitive ways the show can boost ordinary women’s confidence, and – because she is a humanities scholar – the subversion of heteronormative patriarchy.

“Forty and older are actually 47 percent of our population here in the U.S., yet only 26 percent of women on TV,” she observes. Of course, 40 and older in the real world tends to describe the ages of CEOs, high-level politicians and people who’ve poured decades into building distinguished careers.

“By marrying documentaries to new media, they are making public service sexy again.”

“How many of us haven’t lied about our catch-up addiction and had to sit through the same episode of Mad Men or Breaking Bad twice so our spouse doesn’t catch us out?”

“Amazon hasn’t matched that buzz with its slate of pilots, despite the presence of prominent actors such as Jeffrey Tambor, who stars in ‘Onion News Empire’ — and ‘Arrested Development’ — and John Goodman, who stars in the Garry Trudeau-created pilot ‘Alpha House.'”

“‘In the Flesh’ is about fear of others, intolerance, small-mindedness and the search for forgiveness. The great thing about the zombie genre is that it can be used for such multiple storytelling purposes.”

Its stars are aging, its profit margins are lower than the other studios – and now an activist investor wants to spin off the entertainment businesses. Tune in this week to see what happens next.

“The new smart TVs, like the smartphones and tablets that have shaped them, are meant to seem like devoted servants, concerned with our welfare, eager to anticipate our needs — happy to collect and digest information we are, or imagine we are, too busy to collect and digest ourselves. It is all a bit flattering.”