Two aspects of TV criticism I’ve been thinking about a lot recently

1) Every single piece that any critic has ever written and you or I or anyone else has ever read over the past ten years or so about how TV drama is in trouble has been a complete waste of time to both write and read, since there’s basically never more than a month-long stretch between good-to-great shows being on the air. That concept has eaten up SO many column inches at different periods in time, and it’s NEVER been true.

2) Did any major (full-time / on-staff / national) TV critic support Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary? Can you name one?

Support for Sanders is an insufficient rubric for leftism, obviously; his mild socialism should be the beginning of the conversation. But I suspect that for most entrenched culture writers – I’m singling out TV because it’s the field with which I’m most familiar but I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true in other areas as well – Sanders and his ideology are as out of bounds as they are for, well, every single op-ed page at every major paper in America, at none of which are Sanders supporters or socialists generally represented.

Anyway, this is an honest question: Are any major TV critics Sanders supporters or self-identified socialists? I can’t think of any, but it’s possible I’m overlooking someone.

(FWIW I can think of two or three non-major ones, myself included. And I can think of a couple who are on the left but have ambivalent, primary campaign–related feelings about Sanders himself. That’s…not a lot.)

If I’m not leaving anyone out, I think we’ve discovered a limit to what you’re going to get out of the field.

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