Can Happy Endings Be TV’s Best Sitcom Despite Having No Point-of-view?

For the no longer nascent group of people who take sitcoms very seriously, declaring the moment’s best is an incessant burden. This is partly what makes Happy Endings so frustrating – it’s super hilarious but doesn’t feel like the best. As a wildly funny show without perspective, it doesn’t feel like anything. It’s the proprietor of television’s most enjoyable thirty minutes but is that enough? Can a show be television’s best sitcom without having a point-of-view?

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Svengoolie For The People

By Jason Diamond My Nana and Papa lived in a condominium complex called Winston Towers, located in the in the Rogers Park neighborhood, right near where you could say Chicago either begins or ends, as the city of Evanston and the North Shore is a few blocks away.   The series of buildings is well-known among many who grew up in the surrounding suburbs as “Cabrini Greenberg” for its large number of middle aged and senior Jewish occupants. Looking back, […]

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Bites: Stephen Elliott in Williamsburg, McSweeney’s Broadsheet, the Original Gossip Girl, Lethem Recommends Poe, Balloon boy FAQ, and more

Stephen Elliott hung out  in Williamsburg (went hard, if you will) and wrote about it on The Rumpus. Lit. Largehearted Boy reviews Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked. McSweeney’s to publish an old-fashioned, Sunday edition-sized broadsheet: San Francisco Panorama Jonathan Lethem  recommends on Daily Beast Edgar Allen Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and describes it as “the missing link between Mary Shelley and Herman Melville.” My kind of narrative. On Willa Cather’s development as a novelist. […]

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Bites: Chabon Interviewed, Granta Changes, Literary Doppelgangers, Grand Theft Auto & Inherent Similarities, Anderson to adapt Dahl, Real Chocolate, and more

Michael Chabon is interviewed at Jacket Copy on fatherhood and the writing process: “I think in a way, that’s sort of what you’re engaged in doing as a writer, too. You come into this inheritance of things that have been done and the ways in which they have been done, and people who influence you sort of pass along what they think is important, and what they think you need to know how to do. But over time you begin […]

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High-Brow v. Low-Brow: Thomas Pynchon, the Simpsons, and Why Academia Sucks

Thomas Pynchon loves The Simpsons.  Remember this the next time you feel superior at a dinner party for being one of those people who never watches television, and you choose to tell others about it even if they work in television.  Oh, and if you’ve recently written an obscure academic book on said recluse which will probably never be read, esp. by the writer himself, well, that helps with the shame. “True Tales of Conversational Vengeance,” Matt Selman (TIME)

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