From The New Yorker's fiercely original, Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic, a collection of "confident, dauntless criticism -- smart and spiky, brilliantly sure of itself and the medium it depicts" (The New York Times)From her creation of the "Approval Matrix" in New York magazine in 2004 to her Pulitzer Prizewinning columns for The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum has argued that we've been looking at TV all wrong. In this collection, including two never-before-published essays, Nussbaum writes about her passion for television, beginning with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show that set her on a fresh intellectual path. She explores the rise of the female screw-up, how fans warp the shows they love, the messy power of sexual violence on TV, and the year that jokes helped elect a reality-television president. There are three big profiles of TV showrunners as well as examinations of the legacies of Norman Lear and Joan Rivers. The book also includes a major new essay written during the
