Emily Nussbaum

The New Yorker’s fiercely original, Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic Emily Nussbaum brings home to Hollywood a celebration of today’s golden age of television as her provocative new collection of essays topples television’s long haunted “idiot box” status. Nussbaum’s book I Like to Watch traces her own struggle as a viewer, fan, and critic to punch through stifling notions of “prestige television,” searching for a more expansive, more embracing vision of artistic ambition—one that acknowledges many types of beauty and complexity and opens to more varied voices. As Nussbaum argues that we are what we watch, she celebrates television as television, even as each year warps the definition of just what that might mean. Join us for a conversation with Nussbaum and Maria Semple, writer of “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” on how our past and present television culture has transformed our culture at large.