We All Watch In Our Own Way: A Critic Tracks The 'TV Revolution'
When TV critic Emily Nussbaum was growing up in the '70s, she says television wasn't something to be analyzed, criticized and picked apart.
"Even people who loved to watch TV would put it down," she recalls. "It was considered, at best, a kind of delicious-but-bad-for-you treat, and, at worst, more like chain-smoking, like something you did by yourself that messed up your brain."
It wasn't until Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos that she felt a shift. Nussbaum, who had been working toward her doctorate in literature, began to see TV as its own art form.
Now, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic for The New Yorker, Nussbaum is known for reviews exploring the ways gender, race and sexuality figure into television shows — and our perceptions of them. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, she's been grappling with whether or not a viewer can separate the art from the actions of its creator.
"I don't have a solution to it," she says, "but ... I don't think that the
