By Jacob Surpin
It’s been a big week for television coverage here at LARB. Along with Dear TV, two other excellent pieces on television appeared as well. While not technically Dear TV, they are featured in this recap. Including those pieces, we saw essays on Game of Thrones, Orange is the New Black, and Louie.
Dear Television, June 15–21
- The Game of Thrones season finale was this past Sunday night, and Sarah Mesle has thoughts about it. Her piece, “Arya’s American Fantasy,” is concerned with the choices Thrones characters are confronted with, how they deal with them, and how this relates to American narratives of freedom (“the desire to go someplace else, where our choices will, maybe, be somehow different.”)
- Maurice Chammah‘s extended piece on Orange is the New Black blends a real appreciation for the show’s aesthetic appeal with an examination of whether “we actually learn anything about criminal justice from staring at these women for 13 hours.”
- Micah Hauser carefully considers the politics of laughter in Louie. From the essay: “As a show, Louie relishes the repeated trope — there are YouTube videos devoted to excavating the conceptual continuities throughout the series — and one of the most persistent is Louie’s own rigorous pursuit of women against their will.”
