'I Like To Watch' Is A Passionate, Brilliant Defense Of TV
The collection of 32 mostly previously published essays by New Yorker TV Critic Emily Nussbaum includes a new consideration of the question "What should we do with the art of terrible men?"
In 1997, Emily Nussbaum was a doctoral student at NYU, studying literature and "foggily planning on becoming a professor," when an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer changed her life.
At the turn of this century, television was still considered unserious, "a disposable product, like a Dixie Cup," Nussbaum writes. It was also bad for you — in "the much-quoted (although possibly apocryphal) words of '90s comic Bill Hicks," it was "a spiritually harmful act, like 'taking black spray paint to your third eye.' "
But Buffy "spiked my way of thinking entirely," Nussbaum writes.
