“A loving and breezy set of essays” on today’s most addictive TV shows from “an incisive and hilarious critic” (Slate).
Television is not what it once was. Award-winning author and critic Clive James spent decades covering the medium, and witnessed a radical change in content, format, and programming, and in the very manner in which TV is watched.
Here he examines this unique cultural revolution, providing a brilliant, eminently entertaining analysis of many of television’s most notable twenty-first-century accomplishments and their not always subtle impact on modern society—including such acclaimed serial dramas as Breaking Bad, The West Wing, Mad Men, and The Sopranos and the comedy 30 Rock. With intelligence and wit, James explores a television landscape expanded by cable and broadband and profoundly altered by the advent of Netflix, Amazon, and other cord-cutting platforms that have helped to usher in a golden age of unabashed binge-watching.
“James loves television, he loves the winding stories it tells and that we share them together. Play All is a late love letter to the medium of our lives.”—Sunday Times
“Large-brained and largehearted, and written with astonishing energy.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Witty and insightful musing on popular and critically acclaimed series of the past two decades.”—Publishers Weekly
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Play All: A Bingewatcher's Notebook
“A loving and breezy set of essays” on today’s most addictive TV shows from “an incisive and hilarious critic” (Slate).
Television is not what it once was. Award-winning author and critic Clive James spent decades covering the medium, and witnessed a radical change in content, format, and programming, and in the very manner in which TV is watched.
Here he examines this unique cultural revolution, providing a brilliant, eminently entertaining analysis of many of television’s most notable twenty-first-century accomplishments and their not always subtle impact on modern society—including such acclaimed serial dramas as Breaking Bad, The West Wing, Mad Men, and The Sopranos and the comedy 30 Rock. With intelligence and wit, James explores a television landscape expanded by cable and broadband and profoundly altered by the advent of Netflix, Amazon, and other cord-cutting platforms that have helped to usher in a golden age of unabashed binge-watching.
“James loves television, he loves the winding stories it tells and that we share them together. Play All is a late love letter to the medium of our lives.”—Sunday Times
“Large-brained and largehearted, and written with astonishing energy.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Witty and insightful musing on popular and critically acclaimed series of the past two decades.”—Publishers Weekly
“A loving and breezy set of essays” on today’s most addictive TV shows from “an incisive and hilarious critic” (Slate).
Television is not what it once was. Award-winning author and critic Clive James spent decades covering the medium, and witnessed a radical change in content, format, and programming, and in the very manner in which TV is watched.
Here he examines this unique cultural revolution, providing a brilliant, eminently entertaining analysis of many of television’s most notable twenty-first-century accomplishments and their not always subtle impact on modern society—including such acclaimed serial dramas as Breaking Bad, The West Wing, Mad Men, and The Sopranos and the comedy 30 Rock. With intelligence and wit, James explores a television landscape expanded by cable and broadband and profoundly altered by the advent of Netflix, Amazon, and other cord-cutting platforms that have helped to usher in a golden age of unabashed binge-watching.
“James loves television, he loves the winding stories it tells and that we share them together. Play All is a late love letter to the medium of our lives.”—Sunday Times
“Large-brained and largehearted, and written with astonishing energy.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Witty and insightful musing on popular and critically acclaimed series of the past two decades.”—Publishers Weekly
Clive James is an Australian memoirist, poet, translator, critic, and broadcaster, who has written more than thirty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including, for Yale University Press, Latest Readings. He lives in Cambridge, UK.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
A Note on the Text xi
Title Sequence 1
The Ducks Have Left the Pond 23
Actors Airborne 43
Sorkin on the Racing Line 57
Sweet Faces Speak Poetry 73
City of the Dead 85
Breaking Understandably Bad 95
The Way We Weren't 121
Displays of Secrecy 135
Game of Depths 151
Ariadne's Labyrinth 173
Interviews
In the early 1970s you more or less invented serious (if incredibly clever and funny) criticism of television. What accounts for our current golden age of TV drama? The golden age of long-form television has probably happened because somebody proved it was possible and everyone else piled in. Let's hope it's a great new city, but it could be the Klondike.
Is binge-watching especially enjoyable with others? Binge-watching is only possible with others. Try it on your own and you'll end up talking to yourself: "Josh, Josh, you schmuck! Donna is telling you she loves you!"
What actor in the history of the movies would you most like to see do a turn in a small-screen serial drama? Watch Carole Lombard and John Barrymore in Twentieth Century and you'll immediately realize that what these two need is about fifty more episodes. If Janice Rule could be here now to star in The Good Wife's Best Friend, she would be the most famous actor in the world.
Praise for Latest Readings:
"Pick up Latest Readings. It’s wonderful."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post
“For the literature-obsessed, this slim volume is a delectable gift, a reminder of why one reads at all, especially when the mortal countdown timer is ticking loudly. And it proves that James is the rare literary critic who can speak deeply to a general audience, with a sense of humor and levity that suggests that high art can indeed be for everyone.”—NPR Books
“This book possesses an undercurrent of brave, unsentimental reflection; the author is intermittently philosophical and, in the face of death, funny.”—Thomas Swick, Weekly Standard
