Neighbors

For as long as we’ve had homes, we’ve had neighbors—which is to say, we’ve had neighbor problems. [...] 

This kind of conflict—heightened, in modern times, by the advent of the doorbell camera and the erosion of the social contract—is the stuff of “Neighbors,” a new documentary series on HBO created by Dylan Redford (grandson of Robert) and Harrison Fishman (ancestry unknown). The show focusses on disputes between homeowners that, in many cases, have evolved into debilitating, years-long feuds. Tyler Foggatt, The New Yorker

Why Dickens still endures on page, stage and screen

All Dickens’s fiction – and any good adaptation – makes you laugh in the midst of what is horrible or sad. In Oliver Twist, Dickens commended “good murderous melodrama”, loved by Victorians, for presenting “the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon”. His audacious alternations of tragedy and comedy – or, in Great Expectations, terror and absurdity – provide the entertaining shocks essential to popular entertainment. John Mullan, The Guardian

in effetti i romanzi di Dickens sono delle macchine narrative ingegnosissime, dei veri modelli per chiunque voglia scrivere. Nell'immagine Olivia Colman nella nuova versione della BBC di Great Expetations.

Gli sceneggiati tv sono i nuovi romanzi?

A questa domanda rispondono due scrittori. 

Adam Kirsch: "Spectacle and melodrama remain at the heart of TV, as they do with all arts that must reach a large audience in order to be economically viable. But it is voice, tone, the sense of the author’s mind at work, that are the essence of literature, and they exist in language, not in images. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be grateful for our good TV shows; but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that they give us what only literature can". 

Mohsin Hamid: "I now watch a lot of TV. And I’m not alone, even among my colleagues. Ask novelists today whether they spend more time watching TV or reading fiction and prepare yourself, at least occasionally, to hear them say the unsayable.

That this represents a crisis for the novel seems to me undeniable. But a crisis can be an opportunity. It incites change. And the novel needs to keep changing if it is to remain novel. It must, pilfering a phrase from TV, boldly go where no one has gone before. nytbr.

Enlightened

Laura Dern

Enlightened è una serie televisiva americana ideata da Laura Dern - che è anche l'interprete della protagonista - e Mike White. Francine Prose ne parla in questi termini: "Compared to flashier series such as Girls and Homeland, Enlightened, now finishing its second season, has been slow to find its audience. People complain—understandably—that the show makes them anxious, and few viewers may want to admit to having anything in common with a forty-year-old, divorced, basement-level coporate worker, living at home with Mom. But what’s most surprising about Enlightened is the intensity with which Amy and her friends get to us, how much of ourselves we may see in them, if we only have the temerity to allow it.
Amy is a tightly wound, rubber-band ball of contradictions: she’s determined but self-sabotaging, perceptive but solipsistic, generous but self-involved. She’s not stupid, but she is goofy and naive. It’s rare to see someone so deeply conflicted and ambiguous on TV, or even in contemporary film; a character plagued by so many warring impulses is more likely to be diagnosed (like Carrie Mathison, the heroine of Showtime’s Homeland) as bipolar. But Enlightened makes you conscious of how many people like Amy you know". nybooks.

The Revolution Was Televised

The Revolution Was Televised è il titolo del libro di Alan Sepinwall sulla storia della televisione (sottotitolo, The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever). Dapprima auto-pubblicato, è stato ora comprato da Simon & Schuster. "In the course of chronicling the modern-day history of television, the author Alan Sepinwall has made a bit of history himself, becoming the rare self-published author to be picked up by a major press. On Wednesday, it was announced that the Touchstone imprint of Simon & Schuster had acquired his well-regarded book “The Revolution Was Televised,” which Mr. Sepinwall put out late last year". nyt.

Le donne delle sitcom

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Elaine Blair offre un'interessante analisi delle donne delle sitcom, che tendono a essere single.
"The Mary Tyler Moore Show was the first to make a subject out of a single woman’s romantic life. Moore’s character, Mary Richards, was thirty and didn’t have a steady boyfriend. She was initially going to be a divorcee, but the head of CBS programming balked at the idea. ...  Instead, Mary Richards became someone who was just ending a long-term relationship with a live-in boyfriend. To Burns and his co-creators, there was an exciting realism and urgency in

the idea that people have these long affairs with the man or woman they think will be the love of their life, and it turns out not to be, and they end up alone again, which became the overriding issue, I think, on the show. This woman who finds that she’s not alone, that she’s got this family of people whom she works with.

The idea of being not-alone even when your relationships and dates end in shambles—this would become not only the overriding issue of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but of pretty much every subsequent sitcom about single characters". nybooks.