Email freelance inquiries to samantha@shinygun.com

Innocence Lost:
The Third Wave of Teen Girl Drama
(Veronica Mars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, My So-Called Life)
05.07 | Neptune Noir anthology (Smart Pop Books)
My So-Called Life and Buffy indulged and awoke our inner teens by putting the feelings of adolescence front and center. They taught us the teen girl story, the recurring beats, milestones, and conflicts, and we bring that understanding and its related assumptions to our experience of Veronica.

Ted's Quest
(How I Met Your Mother)
12.19.06 | PopMatters
This is no static workplace comedy or rinse-repeat tale of funny family life. As the narration from the future reminds us, life as Ted (Josh Radnor) and his friends know it is destined to end.

Chamber of Echoes
(Gilmore Girls)
09.26.06 | PopMatters
The series resumes tonight under the CW's green banner, guided by new show runner David S. Rosenthal, but without its lightning-rod mama bear. Some of you no doubt welcome this change (Ding-Dong, Amy's gone!) as a chance for Lorelai and Luke to start behaving again like the characters you believe them to be. Others might feel CW's Tuesday flagship now carries an asterisk beside its title, a reminder that Gilmore Girls without Sherman-Palladino just isn't quite Gilmore Girls.

Things Fall Apart
(ER, The West Wing)
12.05.05 | PopMatters
But West Wing didn't quite crumble under new management. Rather, Wells made collapse -- specifically, that of Bartlet's merry band of West Wingers -- the long-term story. On his watch, the series' chief relationships have been tested and compromised, turning Sorkin's noble, fast-walking liberals into more than the sum of their quips and ideals. They're also myopic, cranky, and sad.

All Dressed Up...
(Martha, The Apprentice: Martha Stewart)
10.20.05 | PopMatters
Clearly Mark Burnett deserves a pink slip, too. The one-time producing wunderkind seems to have mistaken the hype surrounding Martha's trial and imprisonment for evidence of widespread devotion to the woman herself. It was the scandal -- whether perceived as just comeuppance or egregious railroading of a strong female -- that had cable news screen-crawls on incessant loop. Now that Martha's done her time, done the talk show circuit (playing the coquette with Letterman, she claimed not to remember precisely why she was convicted), and reclaimed her throne, there's little left to pique the public's interest. She's back to her sizeable base, and Burnett's done wonders pissing them off.

By Committee
(Related)
10.12.05 | PopMatters
If time slot is any indicator (and it always is), teen girls -- the culprits behind lead-in One Tree Hill's incomprehensible popularity -- are the WB's target. Only one of the four Sorelli sisters (coed Rose, played by Laura Breckenridge) is a teen herself, but the quartet's fashionable, funny, familiar problems are just the stuff young girls' ill-formed expectations for the future are made of.

Wouldn't It Be Nice?
(Gilmore Girls)
09.13.05 | PopMatters
Note to TV creators: to achieve series longevity, ground your story in family pain. Quarreling parents and children make should've-known-better repetition feel organic and oh-so-true. Thus, the hurts-so-good appeal of Gilmore Girls. Now in its sixth season, the WB's mother-daughter dramedy resumes tonight just where it left off: with Lorelai (Lauren Graham) heartbroken and daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel) way overdue for a swift kick in the ass.

Going Without
(The 40-Year-Old Virgin)
08.26.05 | PopMatters
Hairy-chested Andy Stitzer's (Steve Carell) teen years are far behind him, yet early adolescence lingers. The evidence is everywhere in his apartment, from the action figures lining his walls to a childlike daily schedule (his evenings consist of TV and videogames) affixed to the fridge.

Irreconcilable Differences
(Desperate Housewives)
06.06.05 | PopMatters
Stunned to learn that Mom wasn't always perfectly happy (talk about a duh-squared revelation), the apparently very myopic Cherry set out to tell -- or at least represent -- the "truth" behind the homemaker facade. Through farce and unrelenting, unsettling violence. Not that you hear, or read, much about that.

Living the Plan B
(Everwood)
06.02.05 | PopMatters
For three seasons, Everwood has successfully incorporated both sides of the WB coin -- impossibly charismatic young performers and heart-rending and -warming family matters -- without careening too far to either end. And I can't believe more people don't watch it. Don't get me wrong: it's a modest hit for the Frog, now regularly pulling in four to five million viewers. But those numbers feel puny in light of the series' dependably nuanced mix of the funny, the sad and the true.

Collateral Wackiness
(Jake in Progress)
03.21.05 | PopMatters
Introductions can be awkward, particularly on TV. There's something both endearing and excruciating about the way a series pilot, that first please-please-like-me episode, strains to set plots in motion, explain and spark relationships, and make its case for a return viewing. Exhibit A: The new single-camera half-hour starring John Stamos as Jake Phillips, a "smooth-as-silk publicist" (according to ABC's publicity), ostensibly looking for love in the Big Apple. Jake in Progress isn't ABC's first post-Full House attempt to score ratings off Stamos' dimples (he sparred with Melissa George in the stylish but short-lived Thieves), but it is the busiest.

Oddball Rhythm
(Gilmore Girls)
02.09.05 | PopMatters
Gilmore Girls turns 100 episodes old with "Wedding Bell Blues," an hour brimming with evidence that Girls is not the show it started out to be. It's a generation deeper, and much better... With three generations in the mix, Gilmore Girls captures the myriad ways strong-willed women hurt each other, and themselves, in the name of getting or finding out what they want.

Don't I Know You?
(Late Night Shopping)
01.26.05 | PopMatters
A union of stylish visuals and paint-by-numbers characterization, Late Night Shopping follows Sean (Luke de Woolfson), Vincent (James Lance), Lenny (Enzo Cilenti), and Jody (Kate Ashfield), four acquaintances turned maybe-friends who work nights in dead-end jobs and frequent the same nearby cafe. They meet for coffee between shifts, sharing the kind of banter and confessions that might keep a long night alive but never linger in the morning. The same is true of Late Night Shopping, a moderately pleasant but forgettable entry in the genre best described as "20somethings in flux."

Before Sunrise Revisited
12.16.04 | ShinyGun
For my money, Richard Linklater is the superhero of the year, swooping in with an achingly personal emotional thrill ride. Forget the adrenaline rush of arch-villains and guns to the head; this film captures the desperate suspense that comes with finding -- and recognizing -- a heart and mind connection with someone who could blow your life wide open, if only you'll let them.

Strictly Luhrmann
08.14.01 | ShinyGun
Rapid-fire glimpses of the action may be true to how we experience a setting such as the Moulin Rouge in actuality, of course, but we look to film and literature -- to storytellers -- to craft a narrative. It's what we humans are drawn to -- it's why we linger over past events, why we tune into series television, why we read chapter-long descriptions of events that last for mere moments. We're forever looking inward and outward for meaning, for relationships between events or ideas.

Affectations That Become Habit
(Kicking and Screaming)
03.20.01 | ShinyGun
Writing and directing his first feature, Baumbach expertly captures the extended childhood that so many well-educated, moreorless privileged young people are allowed -- and that some never really move on from. With no school to provide order to their days ("I find myself writing 'Go to bed' and 'Wake up' in my date book like they're two different events..."), his characters -- wounded Grover, surly Max, neurotic Otis and naive, good-hearted Skippy -- find themselves adrift in non-student status. With no excuses. Nothing to overshadow -- or delay -- the fear that they might never live up to their own secret great expectations.


Email freelance inquiries to samantha@shinygun.com