I Like to Watch Quotes

“Decent people sometimes create bad art. Amoral people can and have created transcendent works. A cruel and selfish person—a criminal, even—might make something that was generous, life-giving, and humane. Or alternatively, they might create something that was grotesque in a way that you couldn’t tear your eyes away from it, full of contradictions that were themselves magnetic.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, she dissects the darker history of positive thinking, the cult of optimism that has, in recent decades, she writes, metastasized into “an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“American consumers take pride in their media savvy; they are too hip to be fooled, too jaded to be appalled.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“I'm its creature, the way we are all creatures of the art we care about, even if decide to throw it in a garbage can.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“When you’re put on a pedestal, the whole world gets to upskirt you.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“From the 1960s on, Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh realpolitik, one based on her experience: Looks mattered. If you got cut off from access to men and money - and from men as the route to money - you were dead in the water. Women were one another's competition, always. For half a century, this dark comedy of scarce resources had been her forte: many hands grasping, but only one golden ring. Rivers herself had fought hard for the token slot allotted to a female comic, yet she seemed thrown by a world in which that might no longer be necessary. Like Moses and the Promised Land, she couldn't cross over.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“These days, we are all performing what a friend of mine once called “the audit,” struggling to reconcile the stories we used to tell ourselves with the ones we tell ourselves now.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“a moral lasagna of questionable aesthetic choices”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“As the medium changed and more “auteurist” shows got green-lighted, and as “showrunner” became a term of art, turning television writers into celebrities with their own fan bases, shows that could be traced to one clear creator often got more credit from critics—a bias that tended, among other things, to favor drama over comedy. To quote BoJack Horseman: “Diane, the whole point of television is it’s a collaborative medium where one person gets all the credit.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“Among other things, these are, in fact, movies about men who fall madly in love with middle-aged women—their peers—but get rejected by them. Those women (who are played by a cadre of amazing actresses including Diane Keaton, Farrow, and Judy Davis) are prickly, funny, demanding, messy, controlling, complicated, and intellectually accomplished figures. They’re generally portrayed as preferable to younger women, but harder to hold on to.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“I was hardly a major sex radical in my personal life, but I nonetheless thought of myself as a member of the “pro-sex” resistance, even if no one in that resistance knew I existed.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“Real fanhood, in other words, is, at its purest level, love. As in Corinthians, fanhood is patient, kind, not rude, etc. (It is also not easily angered and it keeps no record of wrongs.) The Fan of Faith is superior to the Fan of Science, and while it’s natural to have questions, the ideal viewer should behave less like a nagging critic and more like a soul mate, supportive and committed even when doubts creep in.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“Barris spoke longingly about the comedic collective that Judd Apatow had built, and said that he wanted to create something like it—“a contemporary, racially eclectic, gender-eclectic, experience-eclectic salon.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“The problem was far bigger than the Oscars: When African Americans were starved of opportunity, they were forced to celebrate art merely because it existed, to be cheerleaders instead of individuals with distinct, even iconoclastic, tastes.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“he also helps link it to other women’s “stories”: the soap, the rom-com, the romance novel, and, more recently, reality television. These are the genres that get dismissed as fluff, which is how our culture regards art that makes women’s lives look like fun. They’re “guilty pleasures,” not unlike sex itself.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“Viewers who craved other visions of creativity, other styles of filmmaking, or a different brand of funny or beautiful, felt that pressure, too; we felt it from without (in media messages that certain art was less important) but also from within. It was hard not to internalize these rules, even when you resisted them, even when they excluded your story.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“In his manifesto “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” the novelist warned that the boob tube was infecting literary novels with this empty self-loathing, passing on a strain of nihilistic irony like some aesthetic tapeworm.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution