Viewpoints Radio
Award-winning reporting on current issues featuring America's leading experts.
A weekly update on what’s new in American entertainment. Short and to the point, each Culture Crash episode focuses on a singular topic within TV, movies, music or books and breaks it down for listeners.
In recent years, you’ve probably noticed a boom in TV revivals- old series brought back for new episodes. Fans of Gilmore Girls, Prison Break, Will and Grace, and more have all been gifted with new seasons and with reboots of Murphy Brown, Veronica Mars, and others in the works, this isn’t a trend that seems to be going anywhere.
There’s another brand of TV that’s easy to overlook, what I call junk food TV. In this comparison, those prestige shows are your nice dinners out: they’re prepared with care by professionals. This junk food TV is what you reach for when you just need something easy and fast and delicious.
In a wild moment, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences announced its intention to honor popular films at the Oscars. We explore why that’s a really bad idea.
One of this year’s gems at the cinema is in theaters now. It’s called Blindspotting, and it explores racial dynamics and gentrification in American cities.
Streaming networks have opened up the length an episode of television can run. Gone are the days when writers needed to accommodate advertisements. But episodes that run long often present a new slate of problems – namely, staying interesting.
A new documentary from HBO, Come Inside My Mind, explores the life of actor Robin Williams as told by his friends and family. The documentary is cleverly narrated by the actor himself using audio from earlier interviews.
Bo Burnham has followed in the footsteps of Jordan Peele and Greta Gerwig, transforming from a performer to the director of a terrific debut film. His movie, Eighth Grade is out now.
Christopher Nolan’s landmark superhero epic, The Dark Knight was released a decade ago this week, but its effects on our culture are still being felt.
It’s a dilemma many of us face from time to time: Should you keep reading a book even if you don’t like it very much, or should you set it down?
As apps like Spotify and Pandora have taken over, musicians have been forced to make their new albums into an “event.” We look at how they do that, and how streaming music impacts us as listeners.
Spider-Man movies have been done and redone several times now, but a new animated movie about the web-slinger is coming out in December, and it will finally tell the story from a fresh perspective.
The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize is given annually to what a panel of judges deem to be the funniest book of the year. But this year, the judges hit a snag: they didn’t think any of them were funny.
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