Blast | Le Magazine. The New York Observer. The New Yorker. Harper's Magazine. The Nation. The Young and Entrepreneurial Move to Downtown Detroit, Pushing Its Economic Recovery. La Comédie Humaine. La Comédie Humaine A golden age of television Borrowing a line from his Frankfurt School colleague Leo Löwenthal, Theodor Adorno once derided the mindlessness of the idiot box as ‘psychoanalysis in reverse’, a backwards medium enforcing conformity, distraction and the programmed life.
Yet with today’s crop of complex, multilayered shows, driven by cable channels in the US such as AMC and HBO, television has become one of the rare places wherea properly psychoanalytic or critical mode of thinking is able to develop, and on a popular scale. As if to announce this ‘reversal of the reversal’, the first of these great series, The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007), began in an audaciously Freudian manner: a gangster-on-the-couch dreaming of a bird stealing his penis.
Many of these landmark series are reaching their dramatic apexes; among them, three stand apart as especially worthy of one’s viewing hours. Curb Your Enthusiasm, 2011 Aaron Schuster. Channel4 - The Antics Roadshow [compiled by Banksy] La Vie des idées.