“Post-Sopranos,
television has brainwormed into something richer and deeper than an
entertainment spectrum, a babysitter for our brains, a night nurse for
insomniacs, a humming narcotic. Addiction has heightened into devotion, and
devotion carries the ache of religious hunger. God may not be dead, but He’s
been seriously demoted, and in His eclipse the flat screen summons forth.
People identify with some of their TV passions as if choosing a denomination, a
scripture to follow. Church on Sunday morning was how it was done in the
idealized America of Norman Rockwell paintings and white picket fences.
Television on Sunday evening is how we do it in the holed-up America of
Instagram selfies and padlocked foreclosures. The gnostic battle of damnation
and salvation is rigged out on TV in genre formats (the police procedural, the
gangster saga) where even the saints and dharma bums have serious blood on
their hands. Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle propped up in his hospital bed in
the season finale of True Detective
(HBO) couldn’t have looked more Christ-haggard.” —James Wolcott, “Hollywood And Divine,” Vanity Fair, June 2014
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