Ten signs you’re watching a “prestige” show.
Are you worried the program you’ve fallen in love with isn’t high-quality entertainment but actually just cheap trash? Are you a showrunner who needs to make sure everyone understands that you’re not just sending random episodic pabulum out into the universe—you’re making art? In 2017, there are several surefire ways a show can signal its importance. Here, we look at ten of them.
1. “It’s like a novel.”
This is possibly the oldest, most reliable way to tell us that your show is of far higher quality than regular, dumb, mass-market TV. It’s not TV—it’s literature! This trope dates back all the way to the mid-’90s, if you can believe it, when it was applied to shows like Homicide: Life on the Streets and ER, but The Wire and The Sopranos are probably the shows that really anchored this idea in our conversation.
2. “It’s like a movie.”
See No. 1, except this includes even more pointed implications of cinematographic sophistication, narrative complexity, and high production values. It also implies the ability to swear and depict (usually female) nudity. The most egregious current example is Game of Thrones, which its creators recently described as “like a 73-hour movie.” More broadly, the impulse to describe TV as “cinematic” covers everything from Mr. Robot to Transparent to Big Little Lies to Fargo and is regularly used without much precision about what, precisely, it means.
3. They’re not episodes, they’re “chapters.”
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 3-16, 2017 من New York magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 3-16, 2017 من New York magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Drowning in Slop - A thriving underground economy is clogging the internet with AI garbage-and it's only going to get worse.
SLOP started seeping into Neil Clarke's life in late 2022. Something strange was happening at Clarkesworld, the magazine. Clarke had founded in 2006 and built into a pillar of the world of speculative fiction. Submissions were increasing rapidly, but “there was something off about them,” he told me recently. He summarized a typical example: “Usually, it begins with the phrase ‘In the year 2250-something’ and then it goes on to say the Earth’s environment is in collapse and there are only three scientists who can save us. Then it describes them in great detail, each one with its own paragraph. And then—they’ve solved it! You know, it skips a major plot element, and the final scene is a celebration out of the ending of Star Wars.” Clarke said he had received “dozens of this story in various incarnations.”
The City Politic- The Other Eric Adams Scandal The NYPD shot a fare evader, a cop, and two bystanders. He defends it.
On Sunday, September 15, Derell Mickles hopped a turnstile, got asked to leave by cops, then entered the subway again ten minutes later through an emergency exit. This was at the Sutter Avenue L station, out by his mother's house, five stops from the end of the line. Police said they noticed he was holding a folded knife. They followed him up the stairs to the elevated train, asking him 38 times to drop the weapon.
Can the Media Survive?
BIG TECH, Feckless Owners, CORD-CUTTERS, RESTIVE STAFF, Smaller Audiences ... and the Return of PRINT?
Status Update
Hannah Gadsby's fascinatingly untidy tour through life after fame and death.
A Matter of Perspective
A Matter of Perspective Steve McQueen's worst film is still a solid WWII drama.
Creator, Destroyer
A retrospective reveals an architect's vision, optimism, and supreme arrogance.
In Praise of Bad Readers
In a time of war, there is a danger in surveying the world as if it were a novel.
Trust the Kieran Culkin Process
First, he nearly dropped out of Oscar hopeful A Real Pain. Then he convinced Jesse Eisenberg to change the way he directs.
The Funniest Vampires on TV
What We Do in the Shadows is coming to an end. Its idiosyncratic brand of comedy may be too.
The Water-Tower Penthouse
Gigi Loizzo and Angel Molina's apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx looks out on Yankee Stadium.
