Phillip Maciak

3 days ago | newrepublic.com | Phillip Maciak

Paige Bueckers, the superstar guard who, in early April, led the storied UConn Huskies women’s basketball team to their twelfth national championship, had a made-for-TV spring. Bueckers is a smooth player. In the fluidity of her shots, the calm precision of the way she picks apart opposing defenses, there’s an ease to her game. It can be frustrating to see her pass up scoring opportunities, to defer when we might want her to attack. But once she gets going, she’s almost impossible to stop.

1 month ago | newrepublic.com | Phillip Maciak

My best friend’s little brother is a commercial airline pilot, and I am obsessed with this fact. I am a very nervous flyer, I have no desire ever to fly an airplane myself, and, overall, I have fairly little interest in the romance of human flight, whether it’s between regional hubs in the Southeast United States or between the Earth and the Moon. But the airline industry is fascinating to me.

1 month ago | newrepublic.com | Phillip Maciak

The “TV is Art” team won. When I first started writing about television in the early 2010s, there was still something of a taboo about lavishing critical attention on this down-market medium. For many decades, TV was the “boob tube,” the “idiot box,” a medium that wasted your time and attention rather than rewarding them. But in the late 1990s, things started to change. There was a push in popular journalism to consider television not just as an influential medium, but as an art form.

2 months ago | newrepublic.com | Phillip Maciak

There sure are a lot of TVs in the second episode of Netflix’s terrifying and terrified miniseries Adolescence. A teen girl, Katie, has been stabbed to death in a parking lot next to a playground. It’s not a mystery. The police know who did it. The murderer is Jamie, a diminutive, sweet-faced 13-year-old boy from a good family, and the cops have him in custody. What the police don’t know is why.

2 months ago | newrepublic.com | Phillip Maciak

It’s an uncanny experience, the moment you realize they’re making TV shows about you. It happens to everyone at some point: All of a sudden, the balance shifts, and the default “adult” character in a plurality of series is just about your age. As a millennial right on the cusp of Gen X—what sociologists rudely call a “geriatric” millennial—I remember having this realization for the first time with the 2011 Fox sitcom New Girl.