Joshua Gamson

It is not without significance that the title of the hit TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire contains no question mark. It’s not so much a challenge as a chipper invitation, as in, “Who wants candy.” Not only does the show correctly assume that everybody wants to be a millionaire–what’s not to want?–but, […]

By far the most sensational moment of the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Sensation” exhibit–more exciting than the shark in a tank, the mutant mannequin girls with penises coming out of their foreheads, or the stinky, bloody, maggot-infested cow’s head; more thrilling than Mayor Giuliani’s scripted obscenity attack or the museum’s scripted First Amendment defense–was provided […]

Aliens are still poking around on television, though by now you’d think they’d have found what they were looking for, and God has certainly been holding His own on TV lately, what with angels and miracles and the like. But now, finally, dead people are making something of a play–or, rather, the people that dead […]

I‘ve always thought of my portraits as my own version of the Museum of Natural History,” Errol Morris said a few years ago, “these very odd dioramas where you’re trying to create some foreign exotic environment and put it on display.” Those portraits–in nonfiction films such as Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, A […]

I n the midst of a bachelor party on FOX’s new show The Street (premiering November 1), a fast-talking securities salesman named Freddie pulls out a wad of cash in an attempt to persuade two strippers to provide extra services. Standing in bikinis and stilettos in the noisy club, they demand equities. “Blue chips, small […]

T he Big Moment in the early episodes of the Fox Network’s Boston Public comes at a school board meeting called by the superintendent–an enemy of Winslow High School’s tough-love overseer, Principal Harper–to address the principal’s handling of a teacher who brandished a gun in his classroom, a soccer team that tried to download test […]

The Oblongs, the WB network’s new animated series that premiered on April Fools’ Day, opens with the sound of a flushing toilet. Chipper voices, who could be singing about the Flintstones or Scooby Doo, sing the show’s setup: As cartoon waste flows from a fancy mansion down into a valley filled with decrepit houses and […]

The charge that politics has become indistinguishable from entertainment–and that partly for this reason we now have in office a spoiled frat boy with not much upstairs–is overstated and not especially new. Such notions are not entirely wrong, though, and to see them translated literally into television programming, as they are on Comedy Central’s new […]