The year in global streaming: Welcome to the Omniverse

This year’s Top 40 Serial TV Series unfolds against a background of continually rising inequality as Thomas Piketty (Capital in the 21st Century) and company released their figures charting global disparities exacerbated by COVID, front page news in Le Monde and ignored in the U.S. Billionaires have captured much more of the global wealth since the onset

Fall streaming series review: From Black radicalism to British royals in space

At this point most serious serial TV has moved online where there is no traditional “Fall TV Season,” that being a thing of the past, a relic of, what did your parents used to call it?, oh yeah, network TV, that quirky period of television history, which is actually still the majority of television history,

Strikes and financial tomfoolery highlight an alternative global fall TV season

It’s Emmy Award season, but rather than dwell on television’s past it might be better to dwell on its future. What follows are the best (and worst) of fall series previewed at the recently concluded Series Mania, the Festival of Global Television in the French northwest former mining center of Lille where many of the

Series, series everywhere with no audience spared : what’s new in fall streaming ?

If not the largest, it’s certainly “the most important” television festival in the world, as Hagai Levi, the showrunner of HBO’s lead fall series Scenes From a Marriage and festival jury president, termed it. This year’s edition of Series Mania at Lille in Northern France previewed 70 series from 22 countries with 44 new entries as well

The art of the deal and dealing in the streets and in the suites

In Donald Trump’s capitalist self-help tome The Art of the Deal—a book he, of course, did not write, and which has since been disowned by its ghostwriter—the “great man” outlines his rules for getting ahead which include “Think big,” “Maximize options,” “Use leverage,” “Fight back” and “Contain costs.” In Trump’s hands, as we’ve seen, these translate

Red lamb, black falcon: The balkanization of the Balkans and the capitalization of Croatia

It is today one of the jewels of global tourism. The Dalmatian Coast of the still newly formed country of Croatia is back again with tourist figures this summer starting to attain pre-COVID levels in a paradise that boasts the gleaming turquoise waters of the Adriatic, the medieval walls of Dubrovnik and Zadar, the Roman

Battle for the soul of popular media

Part I: COVID, Cannes, and conglomerates What did the just concluded Cannes film festival tell us about the power of the streaming services and the future of watching in theaters or at home on TVs and computers? “Will Cannes Kick Off a Global Comeback?” The Hollywood Reporter asked and the answer as far as theater going is concerned

The crime novel post-confinement and post-BLM: The three-day plan

LYON, France—As the world begins to wake up and we enter the period of post-confinement, in France the first major festival return, just prior to the re-opening of the Cannes Film Festival, was the just concluded Quais du Polar. It’s the global festival of crime writing, the largest of its kind, if not in the

Cannes and COVID go together like a horse and carriage

CANNES, France — Another Cannes Film Festival is in the books, and this one, which Variety labeled “Red Carpet Done Right” and The Hollywood Reporter hoped would “kick off a global comeback” for the film industry in a return to a “New Normal,” instead was beset with all the contemporary contradictions as the global crisis outran the global comeback.

Cannes 2021 : The best lack all conviction, the worst are filled with a passionate intensity

CANNES, France — It may be a bit cruel starting with Yeats’s summary of his era in his epic poem The Second Coming, but unfortunately, it is a somewhat accurate distillation of both the organization and the films of this edition of the world’s leading film festival. This post-COVID confinement version of the festival featured maximum