4 pieces
The specific practice of choosing the pre-existing songs that go into films and prestige TV has quietly become as identity-defining as cinematography. An essay on who the contemporary music supervisors are and what they do.
The specific tools that made prestige TV great have, across two decades of refinement, become the tools that are now limiting it. An essay on formal exhaustion.
Films and TV shows are casting more speaking roles than they can properly serve. An essay on why the ensemble has gotten bloated, what it costs the specific characters inside it, and what tighter casts still do.
Eighteen months after The Bear's third season landed to the worst reviews of its run, the season has quietly become the one I most want to rewatch. An argument for the slow, prickly middle chapter.