‘One Battle After Another’ Ticket Sales Are Solid (With an Asterisk)

NYT piloting troll headlines www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/b...

See below for a post-Emmys reading list, courtesy of the @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social! Featuring brilliant essays on THE PITT (by @charlotteerosen.bsky.social), WHITE LOTUS (by @cinementalist.bsky.social) & SEVERANCE (by @jordanrbrower.bsky.social) (plus something partly sorta on THE STUDIO by me)

Severance is a show designed to be taught, and to frustrate interpretation

lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

David Ellison:
Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak. I’ll go no further.

Ghost of Zukor:
Mark me.

A24 gets to seem like the Little Guy while it's the Medium Guy (boutique prod/dist with a $3.5b valuation); Apple is Apple.

In this fantasy, the Little Guy is the Medium Guy—King is Stackin' Hats—and the big guys—bank, creditors—get what they want. The allegorical payoff of this fantasy of equivalence goes: Spike/40Acres gets to feel like a Little Guy despite clout;

King, though, was never an artist, or if he was an artist, his medium was always money—he just was Stackin' Hits. We might say, then, in the fantasy of the movie, that even if King leaves Stackin' Hits Records, it comes with him. So he keeps his money, his house, his family, his métier: always whole

who literally loses the house on the hill and is brought low in properly tragic fashion, and who recommits to his vocational passion of cobbling. Gondo is a craftsman and an artist; he might have lost his way through the thickets of finance, but he's been given the chance to set things right.

is that there are no actual stakes for David King. Unlike Kurosawa's Gondo Kingo, Spike's King gets the money back, seemingly in time to avoid defaulting his debt—we know that King has "two weeks," and though the timeline is fuzzy, it does seem that he gets to keep his penthouse. Not so for Gondo,

Emphasis on LOOKS (I assume you chose the word with care, as always). What makes Highest 2 Lowest more of a musical fantasy—I thought Singin' in the Rain b/c backstudio, but Oklahoma! might be more appropriate; I just haven't seen it—than a serious reckoning with obligation—the High and Low model—

Sorry, I sent too early. Congratulations on your engagement!—AD

Dear Dr. Swift,

I'm sorry to inform you that, due to historic financial pressures, your position has been eliminated. This is by no means a reflection on your talent in the classroom; I know that you have been very popular with students.

Best wishes,

Associate Dean

The Put-On | Los Angeles Review of Books Jordan Brower considers the abjuring of depth undertaken by the Apple TV+ series “Severance.”

Andrew DeWaard’s chapter “Derivative Television and Securitized Sitcoms” in DERIVATIVE MEDIA might be up your alley. The book is open-access through Cal Press. You might also find what Ive written about “Severance” useful: lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

Hot diggity now I gotta go to the movies

@aarontpratt.bsky.social your bag

Did Heller write something better than Catch-22? If so it’ll jump to the top of my queue

The theory of allegory is as good as the reading

Severance earned an industry-leading 27 Emmy nominations. Why has it worked so well? In part because it sustained its put-on from the first episode to “Cold Harbor,” the justly-celebrated Season 2 finale

Funny, my mind went straight to de Chirico

Aw, shucks

"Severance’s most compelling excess is an excess of genre: the neo-noir conspiracy sits alongside a remarriage comedy that is itself internally divided and doomed to failure."

My alternate title was "The Offness," in homage to Teddy Blanks, who designed the show's typography: “The production design in Severance is highly indebted to that clean, modernist ’60s corporate look, but there’s something ‘off’ about it.... The type needed to be the same way.”

Thanks to Emily Shortslef, Ellen Song, and Michael Trask for talking through ideas, and to @elizabethalsop.bsky.social and @sayanniething.bsky.social for getting them into readable shape.

The Put-On | Los Angeles Review of Books Jordan Brower considers the abjuring of depth undertaken by the Apple TV+ series “Severance.”

In time for the end of the fiscal year, I took account of Severance for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

The Fielder Corollary to the Warhol Doctrine

Looks like I was on to something in “A24’s Academic Style; or, Coming of Age in an Era of Student Debt” tinyurl.com/yrxxza6t

Michael Szalay, Second Lives: Black-Market Melodramas and the Reinvention of Television Jordan Brower; Michael Szalay, Second Lives: Black-Market Melodramas and the Reinvention of Television, American Literary History, Volume 37, Issue 2, 1 Ma

My take on Michael Szalay’s impressive “Second Lives: Black-Market Melodramas and the Reinvention of Television,” is out today in the ALH Review academic.oup.com/alh/article/...

Thought goes through Shortslef

to @jefflawcdm.bsky.social, Emily Shortslef, Ellen Song, Michael Trask, and JCMS’s anonymous reviewers, for comments on multiple drafts; to Jeff Menne, for stewarding the essay through JCMS’s system; and to Lauren Stachew and her team at University of Michigan, for expert copyediting.

I’m grateful to all the undergraduate and graduate students who developed these ideas with me between 2020 and 2024; to audiences at SCMS, CalTech, and Rutgers University;