Joshua Gamson

It is no secret that shopping and religion are close relatives in America — money is God, God is heavily marketed, and then there’s “Christian rock” — but it sure does help to be reminded sometimes. Not surprisingly, neither advertiser-driven media nor religious leaders like to make the connection. But every once in a while, […]

One depends upon a tabloid like The National Enquirer, whether surreptitiously in the supermarket checkout line, or luxuriantly and unapologetically over a nice bowl of soup, to be sleazy in its journalistic style, juicy in its revelations, skewering in its attitudes toward celebrities’ privileges, and worshipful toward their diets, addictions, recoveries, charitable activities, and alien […]

In August, Cindy Margolis kicked off The Cindy Margolis Show, a variety show taped in Miami’s South Beach for Eyemark Entertainment, CBS’s syndication wing. Margolis is a thirty-something former Cal State Northridge business student- turned-model who distinguished herself from other former business students-turned-models in the mid-1990s not so much through her appearances on greeting cards […]

“I t’s amazing how you always manage to work anal intercourse into the conversation,” Debbie, the colorful waitress-with-a-heart-of-gold and suffocatingly supportive mother of one of the central characters on Showtime’s Queer as Folk (premiering December 3), says to her son and his friends. Indeed, the first few of the 22 episodes of the show–an American […]

In 1996 the Central Intelligence Agency, having taken many well-deserved public-relations hits over the years, hired a full-time “entertainment liaison officer”–a veteran paramilitary operative with the movie-hero name of Chase Brandon. Until September 11, the strategy seemed to be paying off. The CIA was set to star in three new network series: ABC’s Alias would […]

In his films, underdog-with-a-camera Michael Moore has taken on former GM Chairman Roger Smith (Roger & Me) and Nike CEO Phil Knight (The Big One), but the premiere of Moore’s newest half-hour series on Bravo, The Awful Truth (Wednesday nights, continuing through August 9), went up, appropriately, against Jesus Christ. It didn’t make a dent […]

It is quite rare to find ad criticism anywhere near the medium of television, except in such criticism’s natural habitat, the suburban basement TV room, where stoned teenagers have deconstructed Coke campaigns for generations. Sure, Dick Clark includes zany outtakes from commercials on his TV Bloopers and Practical Jokes shows, ABC’s Best Commercials You’ve Never […]

Here’s what I saw on TV last week: Good-looking, doe-eyed white youngster to his good-looking, doe-eyed sister: “It’s not like I’m still in the closet. Dad already knows I’m gay.” Click. Black guy in suit to white guy in suit: “This is important. I want to show the gay community that I stand out here […]