![]() ![]() Nussbaum relentlessly interrogates her own responses to Woody Allen and his movies Roman Polanski and his - along with a fascinating anatomy of her relationship to Louis C.K., the person and the work. She looks at the issue from multiple viewpoints, changes her mind, alters the angle and alters it again. Plopped in the middle is a long, brilliantly executed essay called “Confessions of a Human Shield.” She wrestles with one of the most vexing controversies of the day: “What should we do with the art of terrible men?” The essay is about the dissonance between good art and bad men in the wake of the #MeToo revelations. ![]() They are provocations, springboards from which she plunges into deep waters, the big questions that roil the culture, like the relationships between politics, gender, art and audience. ![]() To call these essays “reviews” doesn’t do them justice. Although this is not a particularly flattering metaphor, Nussbaum is like a ruminant, chewing and digesting her subject, when others are satisfied with gumming and gulping. So much writing on TV confines itself to throat clearing and recapping. She has fashioned them into a sustained argument for both the uniqueness and importance of television as an art form distinct from movies and novels. “I Like to Watch,” a collection of her reviews, essays and blog posts, is no mere miscellany. Not to mince words, the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum is one of the best, if not the best, critic writing about TV today. ![]()
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