Tag / The Americans

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 9/23/16

Joss Whedon got basically his whole stable of actors to film an irreverent PSA on exercising your civic rights to vote. (This should hardly need saying, but don’t read the comments.)

“Do we want to just be the white male anti-hero network? We need to try to broaden out.”
–an FX exec, on turning down Breaking Bad

At Hitfix, Alan Sepinwall writes about the ascendancy of FX, which is apparently due in large part to the creative direction of the network head, John Landgraf. (via Longform.org)

AV Club wrote a great review of This Is Us, but it paled in comparison to this delightful Gilmore Girls-related exchange in the comments:

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Elliott Holt writes on the return of omniscient narrators in contemporary fiction, comparing them not to God, but to a smartphone (via the NYTimes)

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 8/12/16

Margot Robbie deserves better than Suicide Squad’s sexism, or The Big Short’s, or Vanity Fair’s, or The Wolf of Wall Street’s. She has been objectified for her entire career but still manages to knock it out of the park every time (via AV Club).

Jeffrey Dean Morgan didn’t like The Good Wife finale either! But for VERY different reasons from us. For some reason he didn’t notice that he was playing a complete asshole. (via EW)

It’s happening, guys! According to TVLine, Rupert Friend is coming back to Homeland. We were not exactly thrilled about how his supposed exit played out, so let’s hope the show redeems itself and uses Rupert Friend’s talent a leetle bit more wisely, and less sentimentally, this season.

The Americans is ending after its sixth season (boo-hoo), and according to Indiewire, the showrunners have a 50-page document detailing everything that happens in the next two seasons, called the Final Plan. They also reveal that Margo Martindale and Frank Langella will wrap up their storylines next season. Do we think that means they’re going to die??

The Lost Boys of Hook reunited to pay tribute to Robin Williams and Vulture collected their reenactment tweets. It’s pretty amazing.

The Atlantic writes on the mess that is Unreal Season 2 and the potential for an amazing season 3.

Kindle delenda est.

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 8/5/16

An in-depth analysis of Watchmen and the conundrum of “adapting the unadaptable”:

The Establishment has a comprehensive survey of the history and evolution of queer YA literature (by an eighteen-year-old who can already write circles around most of the older writers on the internet). Want to know exactly when people stopped killing off their LGBTQ queer love interests (or at least stopped doing it as often)? Read to find out!

THR‘s rare interview with on and off-screen couple Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, which includes interesting analysis on the flipping of gender roles in The Americans and Rhys joking that real-life Keri Russell “doesn’t have the ice of Elizabeth — though sometimes she does.”

The hilariously terrible Suicide Squad has yielded some amusing zingers, from Forbes calling it “an all-out attack on the whole idea of entertainment” to SFGate describing it as “two hours of soul-sickening torment.” But the harshest indictment of our current blockbuster season comes from Indiewire, who says that between Suicide Squad, Jason Bourne, Independence Day: Resurgence, X-Men: Apocalypse, Warcraft, and more, “this is what plays in the multiplex in Hell.”

by Janes

The Americans: America as the “Evil Empire”

The third season finale of The Americans, aptly titled “March 8, 1983,” ends with a quietly seething Elizabeth watching Reagan’s famed “Evil Empire” speech, which took a hard line against the Soviet Union’s nuclear missile installation and almost single-handedly escalated the Cold War. The episode included only a few of the most recognizable lines, ending on the fear-mongering mic drop: “…they are the focus of evil in the modern world.” But when reading the speech in full, it becomes clear that the meaning of its inclusion is multi-layered, as it precisely reflects the ideological conflict–and implicit critique of American culture–that is central to the show.

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