Last weekend, the new Starz series "The Girlfriend Experience" premiered on cable and dropped in its entirety online. The always grumpy Richard Brody called it "an artistic as well as an epistemological disaster," but he blamed all of that directly on "the rigid format of serial television."
So that got us to thinking about serialized entertainment. Which got us to thinking about how a lot of these streaming services tend to get serialized stories wrong, with their all-at-once, binge-watching models. Which got us to thinking about Clive James's must-read essay on binge-watching "Game of Thrones" while dying. Which got us to thinking about serialized entertainment and our own mortalities.
Somewhere in there, Colin and Irene got to thinking about the binge-watchable guilty pleasure that is "Billions." Which got Colin to thinking about Paul Giamatti as, for Colin, at this point, an actor who's worth watching in almost anything. Which got the rest of us to thinking about who those actors are for each of us -- the mandatory, must-see, it-doesn't-matter-what-sort-of-dreck-material-they-might-be-surrounded-by-you-gotta-watch-them-anyway performers. One thing that's clear is that Tilda Swinton does not qualify.
Other stuff we got to thinking about but probably won't get to talking about:
- 'You Forget There's An Outside World': TV-Watching Record Broken With Four-Day Binge
- How Accurate Is "The Girlfriend Experience" Premiere?
- Out of Time: Remaking history on "Outlander" and "The Americans"
- Conan's Korea special
- The MoMA Is Shuttering Its Architecture and Design Galleries
- US cinema chain AMC set to allow customers to text during films
- Top Sheets Are a Scam
GUESTS:
- Rich Hollant - Principal and design director at co:lab
- Jacques Lamarre - Outgoing director of communications and special programs at The Mark Twain House
- Irene Papoulis - Lecturer, Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric, Trinity College
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Colin McEnroe, Greg Hill, and Chion Wolf contributed to this show.
