My father is a novelist and screenwriter who’s made several films and also worked on a couple of TV shows, plus some projects that never got off the ground. And while I’m not a film critic or a pop culture writer, the behind-the-scenes glimpses I’ve gotten over the years have always left me a little unsatisfied with the way these things are conventionally covered.
A lot of cultural commentary basically seems to me like what you’d get if you did political journalism without covering the ugly “how the sausage gets made” side of the legislative process, just naively taking what everyone says and does at face value.
The people who write about this stuff know better, obviously, but it’s sort of convention to pretend that they don’t.
One thing writers don’t like about writing novels is that it’s hard to get paid a lot of money, because selling novels to the public is not very lucrative. On the other hand, one thing writers do like about writing novels is that your imagination and creative desires aren’t limited by budgetary concerns.
After I saw the movie “American Fiction,” I picked up Percival Everett’s “Erasure” (the novel it’s based on) and was surprised to learn that unlike the movie, the book is largely set in Washington, D.C., where I live. The book includes some very realistic descriptions of the city, which is something you almost never see in film or television. D.C. is an expensive location to film. It’s common for projects like the first season of “The Night Agent” to shoot in Canada and just say it’s D.C. Ninety percent of the audience probably doesn’t care, but I live here, and I care!
The Jack Reacher books themselves are sloppy with settings and geography, so I sort of don’t mind that the adaptations are like this, too. “Night Agent” author Matt Quirk is meticulous about his verisimilitude, though, and I think it’s kind of annoying that doesn’t carry through into the adaptation.
But filming location is hardly the end of it. Every creative choice in film or television is also a business decision — and that’s especially true in television. With movies, the big business question is which projects get made at all. But television is kind of a grind-it-out medium, where tons of projects are produced and cost control matters a lot.
I was thinking about this when I was reading the New York Times “100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century” list because while lists like these are quite literally made to be argued about, I just kind of dispute the premise that there are 100 good TV shows.
The medium does not always live down to Newton Minow’s infamous characterization of it as a “vast wasteland.” But what’s clear from the vantage point of 2026 is that while “The Sopranos” (ineligible for inclusion on the New York Times list because it launched in 1999) showed the world that television could be a forum for really great, really ambitious storytelling, it mostly hasn’t been. The success of that show created a brief flowering of efforts to push the medium, but so-called “prestige” television retreated relatively quickly into the same tropes and economic constraints that have always made television a land of mediocrity. And the exercise of list-building really drives that home.
What are lists for?
Again, viewed literally, the only real point of a list like this is to drive arguments and engagement, and on that level, mission accomplished by the New York Times.
But conceptually, I think the point of these exercises is to build a canon.