Category: TV & Movies

  • 2023: Why Comcast should worry

    For years I’ve thought that—while Comcast’s cable television business had a future that made polar bears wince in sympathy—its lock on the cable internet business made the company invulnerable. Sure, cord-cutting and cord-shaving are eroding cable TV. Younger people in particular, unless they are big sports fans, don’t bother to subscribe (cord-nevers). However, Comcast still…

  • Streaming superheroes and the DC Universe

    DC Entertainment — home to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Justice League and a part of the recent AT&T acquisition of Time Warner — has announced a new streaming video on demand service called DC Universe that will premiere in 2019. The service is a competitor to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and other Over…

  • What is a movie and why does it matter?

    Is the definition of a movie only a video presentation of a certain length, or is there more to it than that? The June 30th issue of The Economist featured an excellent cover story and short lead article about how Netflix is changing the entertainment industry with one disturbing sentence: “This year its entertainment output will far…

  • The half-life of brands: Amazon’s algorithmic strategy

    Although what comes next will offend generations of power-mad English teachers, red-pen-wielding copy editors, and Spelling Bee conquistadores, these days most people don’t need to learn how to spell. Spellcheck saves us from having to do work that we don’t care about and that we don’t have time to do anyway. Plus, more and more…

  • Will Oculus Go kill the TV set?

    Smart glasses, heads-up display, augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality: no matter what you call them, computer screens that you wear on your face are poised to change how we interact with information, the media we consume, and how much reality we share with people around us. It’s reasonable, for example, to expect that the…

  • Marvel’s new “Avengers: Infinity War” movie and the structure of special experiences

    Although at first this column will seem like a movie review, what I’m really after is a sense of what makes experiences special because we often mistake one part of an experience for the whole: we over-focus on the new thing, the concrete feature, and in doing so we miss the total shape of an…

  • Apple and original TV: a strategy teardown

    The world’s most valuable company is spending more than a billion dollars on new TV shows. The question is why? Last week, the New York Times published, “Apple Goes to Hollywood. Will Its Story Have a Happy Ending?,” a useful but incomplete article by John Koblin. The article is useful because it describes how Apple…

  • What the NY Times missed about “Rizzoli & Isles”

    Earlier this week, New York Times TV critic Mike Hale reviewed the opening of the seventh and final season of the TNT original cop show, “Rizzoli & Isles.” Here’s a relevant snippet: On television, as in life, comfort food comes in all sorts of flavors. There’s the tart apple pie of “NCIS,” the solid corned…

  • Where “Lucifer” on Fox goes off the rails

    “Lucifer,” the new midseason replacement show on Fox, doesn’t trust its audience. Episode #8 aired last night, and at this point the show is a basic police procedural with a celestial crisis (something bad will happen without Lucifer working as Hell’s CEO and main jailor) lurking vaguely in the background.  Tom Ellis is charming as…

  • A glimmer of hope for CBS’ “Supergirl”

    This TV season’s new “Supergirl” TV show confuses me. Over on the CW, producer Greg Berlanti has nailed both “Arrow” and “Flash,” but where those shows feel fresh and exciting “Supergirl” is forced and whiney. “Supergirl” oscillates between action and soap opera, rarely integrating the two. There’s too much talking among the characters but not…