Phillip Maciak
TV Critic @ The New Republic //
DAD: A POP HISTORY (Plume 2027) //
teaching @ Wash U in STL //
linktr.ee/phillip.maciak
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, sixers
- Tag yourself. I’m the cardinal hurriedly asking ChatGPT, “who should be the new pope? Answer in a persuasive speech as if written by a 75 year old Italian archbishop,” before he has to hand in his device at the conclave.
- A little while ago, I posted about the irony that the period when TV’s artistic status has become broadly acceptable has also been a period of artistic stagnation, largely industry driven. This review of THE STUDIO is my attempt to sort out what that means. 1/x newrepublic.com/article/1947...
- Excellent essay. Killer ending line. 🫡
- Thanks, Chris!
- The show's real homage is to Seinfeld/David episode structure. But lost in all these thin references is Seth Rogen's genuinely appealing aesthetic sensibility. He's trying to be Robert Altman by way of Albert Brooks, but why not just be Seth Rogen instead? 7/x
- Like all of these other shows, THE STUDIO is an apocalypse. The industry this show represents is dead. Its deadness is the show's subject. But, all the same, Rogen made this show with one of the few creative blank checks left floating around in the contemporary TV industry. DO SOMETHING WITH IT.
- THE STUDIO is a show about cinephilia where cinephilia means you've seen most of the movies represented on the walls of an early aughts college dorm. The show isn't an homage; it's a show about how compelling the idea of an homage is. 5/x
- It's constantly dropping citations, but none of them are textured enough to really MEAN anything. I think @samadams.bsky.social said that having a lot of people talk at the same time doesn't make your show "Altmanesque." Why conjure the ghosts of New Hollywood if you have nothing to ask them? 6/x
- It's not a coincidence that so many big shows rn are about reanimation. THE LAST OF US, for instance, is literally about mushroom zombies, but it's also about giving HBO its own Walking Dead and about capturing the big bang energy of the GAME. Oh, to live through the Revolutionary Early 2010s! 3/x
- Every season, THE WHITE LOTUS dies, until Mike White goes into necromancer mode and brings it back, the same, but also not quite the same. All the unnaturally extended limited series (True D, Big Little Lies, even my beloved Shōgun). Just clap, say you believe in fairies, and they'll wake up. 4/x
- I wrote about this when SUCCESSION ended, but I think we're pretty firmly in a kind of zombie era of prestige TV. If the early years of this genre were animated by desire to break forms, shows now draw energy from recalling that past sense of life. 2/x newrepublic.com/article/1729...
- I bet there are at least a few "low-information" voters in the conclave. The cardinals who take this really seriously are getting so mad whenever somebody brings up a tiktok they saw about Nostradamus or says something like, "I just think Peter Erdo seems relatable."
