E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

STEVEN TIMBERMAN ON TELEVISION IN 2014 How good was 2014 for TV? So good that there is no critical consensus. Years past saw a relatively small list of television shows dominate the critical conversation – The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Deadwood , maybe a sprinkling of Friday Night Lights or Lost if the critic wants to feel particularly transgressive. Shows written before 1999 are seen not as genuine predecessors but chicken scratch compared to the gorgeous calligraphy to come. It remains one of the things I love about American television – with ample time and a steady hand a relative newcomer can easily track down and absorb the medium’s accepted canon. A medium in relative infancy has no room for the gloriously messy and anarchic world of literary publishing. And then 2014 happened. With Walter White’s conclusion told with deadened clarity, critical consensus collapsed. Critics went from arbiters to advocates – for the single-minded True Detective , the of...

2014 seems like a very long year, and, like many moments of crisis, it is an event in two halves. My Swift Report is necessarily personal, even, it may appear, egoistic, or egotistical.  This is in the nature of such posts.  I can make no apology for this, the genre I am writing in here is memoir, specifically, a brief summary of "my" year. It is not, for example, a history of the year from the perspective of murdered young men in America; or victims of the mysterious plane crash; or the horrid Ukraine conflict; or a story of the victims of the Taliban; nor a jocular discussion of the adventures of Hollywood actors. It is not a story of Ebola victims or doctors, Winter Olympians, World Cup losers and victors, the struggles of Man United, or the return of Simple Minds . It is not a lament for the rise of the right, or the decline of the book.  In short, to reiterate, it is not a story of all of 2014 (if such were even possible), but of whatever the word "me" c...