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

THE SHIT GOT REAL The Cavalry   As the early results curdle, I text my father three words - This Is Bad. Like thousands of others, I’ve spent the last year volunteering and working to elect Hillary Clinton. The long fight. The good fight. The first fight I’ve truly thrown myself into, again and again. Election Night finds me in southern Virginia, a ramshackle campaign office held together by duct tape, off-white cracked paint, and five other community organizers. Growing up, the evening news was my family’s sacred time. Six years old, I watch a Palestinian child dive behind wreckage as gunfire crackles. Peter Jennings’ lullaby voice informs us that the child is unaccounted for. My father responds to my text with two words - I know.             Hour ago a packed office, trusty volunteers using an auto-dialer to rapid fire call as many inconsistent voters as we can. After polls close in Virginia, volunteers shu...

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...

STEVEN TIMBERMAN ON THE RETURN OF VERONICA MARS Veronica Mars should never have worked. A hard to describe show on a little known network, with a mishmash of tones and genres somehow expected to sing together. The recipe for the show reads like a parody of a parody – Buffy without the demons, Nancy Drew with an edge, X meets Y with a dash of Z. High school hijinks standing side-by-side sun-soaked noir with dames in short skirts. And yet, here we are – Veronica Mars endures. The Veronica Mars movie has been heralded as the newest wave of direct-to-audience content, and demonized as yet another way for movie studios to wring consumers dry. I don’t care about that. We’ve seen Arrested Development return, NBC announced plans to reboot their derivative Heroes , and Jack Bauer returns to kick unholy amounts of ass in a few scant weeks. But shows are more than buzzwords – the best products are able to capture lightning in a bottle at a specific time and place. 24 fed into our...

As another great season of ten perfectly-crafted episodes of The Bridge (yet another great Scandinoir) ends, leaving Saga in the rain with great responsibility on her shoulders, and some life lessons still to be learned, Eyewear welcomes this reflection by brilliant American writer Steven Timberman on Sherlock ’s strange, surreal, and off-putting third series. BBC’s Sherlock reimagining has always been an odd duckling. In it’s first two series Moffat and his team created a Sherlock Holmes that slotted nicely between complete fealty to the source material and entirely abandoning the spirit of the original stories. Moffat’s Sherlock stood out – both from the original stories and the endless imitators currently clogging up the television. And then Sherlock took two years off. Cumberbatch became Assange and Khan, Freeman went to Middle Earth, and Moffat hopped in the TARDIS for a while. After watching Sherlock ’s first three episodes in two years, I felt discombobulated. Th...