I Like to Watch is the first book by Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s TV critic. It combines nearly two dozen of her Pulitzer-Prize-winning reviews with essays on subjects ranging from product placement to Joan Rivers, profiles of showrunners like Kenya Barris and Jenji Kohan, and a new 17,000-word essay on the question of separating the art from the artist in the age of #MeToo.
Nussbaum traces her love affair with television back to 1997, when an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer changed the way she thought about the then-derided medium. She has spent the two decades since arguing for the once-unpopular notion that TV is an art form central to our culture and worthy of our attention and criticism. Since then, television has entered its current “golden age,” and Nussbaum’s side has won what she calls “the drunken cultural brawl” over the importance of TV. In the process, the best shows have slowly shed adjectives like “novelistic” and “cinematic” and earned respect on their own terms: as television. But along the way, she says, too many great series were ignored or met with condescension. And as innovations from TiVo to Netflix transformed the industry, the very definition of television itself became less and less clear.
Nussbaum and I sat down last month at a Park Slope café to talk about underrated shows, the downside of technological advances, and the benefits of Twitter. (And if you need a new show, she said she was looking forward to Season 2 of Succession; and she recommended Los Espookys, The Other Two, the most recent season of High Maintenance, and the final season of Orange is the New Black.)