The Terminator was one of the formative movies of my youth. In addition to scaring the living daylights out of me, the movie has stuck with me on a primal level. Something about the Terminator’s totally implacable, unstoppable, but unemotional pursuit seems far more disturbing than the evil-sadist-of-the-week horror films that seem so common today. [Terminator […]
As I have not been keeping up with the updates on this fun little page during the Great Tenure Scramble of aught-8 (by the way, isn’t it interesting that we are now almost eight years into this decade and there still isn’t an accepted common name for it, ala “the nineties” or “the eighties?” I […]
My grad school education socialized me into viewing myself as a social scientist, with all that that entailed. While this isn’t a view that is universally shared within the Communication Studies discipline, I feel validated in holding it this week as my research was written up in the pages of Scientific American. I am now, evidence suggests, […]
It’s official: Princeton has approved Matt and my book (War Stories) for publication (subject to some relatively minor edits for readability and flow). When he and I started working together for the first time on that chapter for Cox Han and Heith’s volume almost six years ago, who would have thought it would have grown […]
Yet another cancelled show… so nice, they cancelled it twice. First on the UPN network (which has since been cancelled, itself) after only five episodes, and then on Comedy Central’s Adult Swim. Fortunately (for the time being), Comedy Central is streaming some complete episodes online, so you can see them for yourself. They tend to plug […]
I’m back. The Internet in Indiana was as bad as I feared (except for the oases at Mac’s restaurant [of the buy-one-get-one-free-pulled-pork-sandwich] and my brother-in-law’s), so I haven’t updated the site in a while. We actually got back a week ago, but then I immediately boarded a flight to Boston for the American Political Science […]
If you look at the other shows included in this list, you’ll notice that they’re all scripted. That is not an accident: Reality shows (particularly reality game shows) don’t do anything for me. The Discovery Channel, on the other hand, has really impressed me with their reality programming. Mythbusters is perhaps the most engaging science-lite programming […]
For some reason, I always seem to be drawn to shows that don’t get any respect from their home network. Fox, in particular, seems to undervalue some great shows, and King of the Hill is no exception (House, on the other hand, does seem to be an exception. Maybe they secretly hate comedy?). One need only compare the lavish […]
I confess I didn’t watch Heroes for much of its first season. I had previously watched a show called the 4400 on the USA Network, and Heroes appeared to be a pretty close clone of it (although the whole “superheroes are real” thing wasn’t that original when the 4400 did it, either). I do, however, pride myself […]
I just had a little shock when consulting the Wikipedia article on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3k) when I realized that the show originally starting airing in 1988… before many of my students had even been born. Like most of America, I didn’t actually get to watch MST3k until after they made the transition from […]