In Homer’s famous poem The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus traveling home to his wife Penelope after many years away fighting the Trojan War, is frequently distracted and delayed by the people and creatures he encounters. During this journey, Odysseus was…
There aren’t many true masculine figures left in television. Jon Hamm is one of the last. You feel it immediately when he appears in Your Friends & Neighbors, his first major TV lead since Mad Men ended over a decade ago. Hamm doesn’t just…
The Dream Factory: that’s what they used to call Hollywood. As the long-forgotten silent-movie star Norma Desmond sings in the 1991 musical Sunset Boulevard: “We taught the world new ways to dream.” To people of my parents’ generation, born in…
Years ago, Bob Dylan spoke of the Bible as both the most underrated and overrated book in the world. His words seemed clear enough to me. Though I can’t speak for what it meant to him, I will share my…
Good quality entertainment is hard to come by in recent years, and season two of 1923 and the Wheel of Time are no exception. Join Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay in this episode of The Spectacle Podcast as they critique these shows for their lack…
The prescription painkiller OxyContin was released by Purdue Pharma in 1995; the six-part TV series Painkiller, created by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster and directed by Peter Berg, was released by Netflix in 2023. During the intervening 28 years, Purdue’s…
Better late than never? We are mesmerized watching a five-year-old Netflix morality series called Madam Secretary, which follows a secretary of state who is skillfully portrayed by Téa Leoni. Remember the rich lady searching for her son on dinosaur-infested Isla…
You Never Know — A Memoir By Tom Selleck with Ellis Henican (DEYST, 343 pages, $30) In which, happily, Tom Selleck does not tell all. Selleck rarely talks politics … and when he does he claims to be more libertarian…
It took three years for legendary journalist and social mores chronicler Tom Wolfe’s first work of fiction The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) to be adapted for the silver screen. Unfortunately, the 1990 Brian De Palma film starring Tom Hanks,…
