• Dear Television

    Dear Television is Jane Hu, Lili Loofbourow, Phillip Maciak, and Anne Helen Petersen. They write epistolary criticism about TV. Each week, the gang will select a different series, issue, or pet peeve, and their correspondence about it will appear here on the LARB blog, Monday through Wednesday.

    If you’re looking for blog posts prior to September 2013, you can visit Dear Television’s page on LARB.

    Follow us on Twitter (@Dear_Television) and Like us on Facebook for announcements and updates or to suggest possible topics. We like Television Series With Strong Female Leads.

    Dear Television is edited by Michael Goetzman.

    You Won’t Read This Review of “Masters of Sex”: The Problem of Episodic Criticism

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    I WANT TO TALK with you about Masters of Sex. I want to talk about Michael Sheen’s acting, Lizzy Caplan’s …

    Sex and the Slightly Unreliable Narrator

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    Dear TV, I’D HOPED Masters of Sex would resist following Mad Men down the sepia brick road to the land of overburdened …

    Ambivalent about Horror

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    Dear Television, TO LOVE HORROR is to love genre. As Annie’s piece on abjection and Phil’s on “Hellmouth” (new meme, …

    Greetings from Hellmouth, U.S.A.

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    Dear Television, THE THING ABOUT American Horror Story is not just its insanity or its abjection or its politics or its …

    The Exquisite Repulsion of “American Horror Story”: An Essay on Abjection

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    Dear Television, An African-American albino. A 200 year old woman who looks 45. A vagina that destroys all that enters …

    The Good Bros of Fox

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    Dear Television, HEY, REMEMBER WHEN Fox Tuesdays were the next best hope for a full-on televisual Ladies Night? An evening …

    Are Sitcoms Sincere Again?

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    Dear TV, I LOVE JANE’S take on the sitcom-as-Manchild and her point that the contemporary sitcom’s reliance on the manchild …

    Can the Sitcom Grow Up?

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    BROOKLYN NINE-NINE — one of Fox’s new sitcoms — begins with a classic expository trick: the viewer’s first introduction into …

    Streaming Pam Beesly

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    Dear Television, It is the strangest thing to have a long-term fictional love interest. It’s a type of relationship that …

    Why We Watch Netflix In The Middle of the Night

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    Dear TV, I WENT TO a puppet show last night. It was the story of the little mechanic who runs …