This week, Sarah Michelle Gellar, star of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, announced that a planned Hulu reboot was not going ahead because of a Buffyphobic television executive. This is weird, because the original show was among the most groundbreaking on television and everything gets a reboot these days. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer … Read more
Watching Inside the Manosphere, Louis Theroux’s decent new Netflix documentary about influencers with horrible attitudes to women and totally normal names like HS Tikky Tokky and Sneako, has me thinking about the golden age of male role models. I am talking, of course, about the 1980s and 1990s. These are the olden-days manosphere influencers who … Read more
A frog, a pig, a bear, some chickens, a bespectacled human man made of felt, a piano-playing dog, Seth Rogen, an eagle, a non-specific drumming organism, a Swedish gastronomist and a brainy boffin walk into a theatre. The frog and the pig seem to be in some sort of sexual relationship. The Swede has a … Read more
Small Prophets BBC Two Main takeaway: it’s good to have a hobby I love the new Mackenzie Crook show, Small Prophets (BBC Two). I properly love it. I’d marry it if you could marry a television programme (Also, I have just remembered: I am already married). I don’t just love it because it’s about a … Read more
I believe that children are the future. As Marx said, we need to teach them well and let them lead the way, show them all the beauty they possess inside. Maybe it was Hayek who said that. One way or another, this sentiment is the basis of the BBC’s most recent social experiment, Lord of … Read more
Beef I watched the first series of this thinking it would be about the delicious foodstuff namechecked by the title. It was, in fact, an enjoyably dark and deranged comedy about two characters, played by Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, who, after a road-rage incident, spiral into an obsessive feud, aka what elderly millennials call … Read more
The most popular shows on television nowadays are property shows and dating shows. The airwaves are littered with both, and all should really have the words “Crisis Edition!” added to their titles in brackets. In the olden days, people combined the two phenomena. Recall the way in which Jane Austen’s love interests are all hung-up … Read more
From the large windows of NCAD Gallery in Dublin a series of pencil-drawn boys on life-size cards stare out on to Thomas Street. These are the “boys” created by small groups of boys and young men aged seven to 18, working with youth workers and artists for a project called Boys in the Making. The … Read more