Netflix’s Death by Lightning dramatizes the brief but important presidency of James Garfield. Outlined in Candace Millard’s 2011 book, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, this fine, but flawed production charts Garfield’s unexpected rise to the White House and the tragedy of his assassination by the [...]
Was the immense popularity of the 1960s television series "Dark Shadows" some sort of cry for help during a decade of brutish violence and social sickness? After all, its central character Barnabas Collins was a vampire with moral compunction. I recently finished watching all 1,225 episodes of Dark Shadows, the campy gothic soap opera that [...]
Both Chandler and Steinbeck, in radically different idioms and voices, express a redemptive optimism. They believe in truth, and they are infused with an intuition of an untarnished human goodness that the shabbiness of the world cannot extinguish. The 1930s were a period of intellectual and cultural ferment that have much to tell us about [...]
The classic television show "Columbo," like the great novel "Crime and Punishment," is a classic, and rightfully so, because it too penetrates to the heart of a modern heresy and exposes it for the lie that it is. This is the Nietzschean idea of the "ubermensch": the superman who can transcend ordinary law. Selecting a [...]
Malcolm Muggeridge and Marshall McLuhan are two now-mostly-forgotten TV stars who converted to Catholicism. In the current issue of the St. Austin Review, Daniel J. Mahoney writes of Malcolm Muggeridge, describing him in the title of his essay as a “vendor of words, scourge of ideology, Catholic convert, and witness to the truth.” In introducing Muggeridge [...]
What did William F. Buckley’s "Firing Line" teach me about our modern democracy? Simply this: It is not too late to reclaim intelligent and competent, moral and visionary political conversation. Nor is it too late to right the direction of our flagging democracy. The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous [...]
The HBO series “Chernobyl” serves to warn us about the danger of persistent lies in a society that refuses to acknowledge truth. It would be a grave error not to take stock of our own tendencies toward deceit, as if our lies are radically different from those that underpinned the Soviet Union. Over several long [...]
"The Chosen" is one of the few examples of television that really serves a higher purpose. Far beyond “entertainment,” it can enhance our traversal of Jesus’ life through liturgy and prayer. “We expect from TV consequences of the greatest importance for an increasingly dazzling exposition of the Truth.” [1] —Pope Pius XII (first televised Easter [...]
Despite making fun of the nature of tech company perfidy and internet culture, “The Mitchells vs. The Machines,” like too many animated films, may simply add to the inability of its younger viewers to follow a story for more than a minute. I should have known. The ad that popped up for The Mitchells vs. [...]
Chesterton once said, “It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap.” Jerry Seinfeld did the hard work to make his show leap week after week and into history. And twenty-six years after "Seinfeld" ended, [...]
M*A*S*H's Dr. Winchester and the Chinese prisoners in the American camp find a common language in a single piece of music, written a century-and-a-half before: Mozart's Clarinet Quintet. The final episode of the hit TV series, M*A*S*H aired on February 28, 1983, garnering an astounding 125 million viewers, the most in television history at the [...]
Pick up a Jane Austen novel, and you will discover that behind the long gowns and country dances, people in her era struggled with the same weaknesses we struggle with today. Well-written stories like Austen’s bring to life the human drama that is played out in every age, in every heart. I’ve been reading Jane [...]
The strongest point of Netflix's series "The Crown" is that it shows the moral decline of Britain and the West through the moral decline of one British family. As such, it is a sad and searing witness to the same state of fractured families and mutilated marriages we face across the waning West. Having completed [...]
The TV series "Dwight in Shining Armor" needs to be seen to be believed. What is most delightful about the series is the freshness and innocence of the spirit which animates it. One imagines that the multifarious imaginary plots are akin to the sort of humorous adventure stories that would entertain real-life hobbits were we [...]