Emily Nussbaum

With the golden age of television has come a golden age of great writing about television. As Emily Nussbaum points out in her new book I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way, through the TV Revolutions, television has always had a uniquely intimate role in our homes and lives, since the technology was first introduced. And the television of the last two decades has become steadily more artistically ambitious and technologically enabled to permeate our culture, it's seemed all the more necessary to talk about it: what did that last cut to black mean? Is the character we've been following since the beginning of this series turning into the villain instead of the hero? As Pulitzer-prize winning TV critic for the New Yorker, Nussbaum has entered into that conversation with a kind of joyful aplomb, making her regular columns — and her presence on Twitter — less a courtroom where judgment is rendered and more like an arena in which the competing and conflicting impressions and emotions raised by last night's episode (or the season just binged) can fight it out. She sat down with us in the studio just before this challenging, provocative and, yes, highly entertaining new collection was published to talk about the state of the screen, and why it matters to us.