What do we lose when we revive a TV series?

The next year will see new seasons of Heroes, The X-Files, Coach, Twin Peaks, Prison Break, Full House, and possibly Arrested Development or 24. Television shows long since canceled have found a second life in the increasingly diversified, well-funded world of digital programming. Surely TV fans of a certain generation looks forward to catching up […]

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New Acquisitions – June 2015 – Part 1

As promised, we’re going to start updating you about our new acquisitions every two weeks. We just resumed purchasing for the summer, and the latest wave of titles has begun to pour in. For this most recent batch, our biggest acquisition is the complete run of the Helen Mirren-fronted British crime procedural Prime Supsect. You […]

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New Acquisitions – May 2015

Apologies for the radio silence on new acquisitions! It’s been a breathless few months, but now that we’ve hit the summer and campus has cooled down, we’ll start giving you more regular updates about what new titles are coming into the library. Since we last updated you in March, we’ve gotten our hands on a […]

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With Letterman’s departure, walk back through the old guard of late night

David Letterman ends his late night talk show career tonight. Although he has certainly settled into a curmudgeonly pattern in the last decade or so – and is probably indistinguishable from Jay Leno for many younger viewers – Letterman’s earlier years behind the desk remain some of the stranger and riskier network television ever produced.  […]

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Television’s reign of visual media continues, bleeds into film festivals

Even in a post-Breaking Bad and nearly-post-Mad Men landscape, television continues to assert its cultural dominance. More directors and actors turn to television for a chance to tell experimental or long-form stories, and the film world has unsurprisingly taken notice. In the latest sign of this explosive growth and relevance, the Toronto International Film Festival […]

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New Acquisitions – March 2015

Now that all the students are away, it’s time to roll out the new DVDs! We’ve been steadily adding new titles all semester, the usual mix of academic titles, popular films, television shows, and other interesting and noteworthy titles. We got the blockbusters Guardians of the Galaxy and Divergent, and we’re picked up Oscar nominees […]

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Revisit SNL for its fortieth anniversary

Saturday Night Live doesn’t really turn 40 until next October, but the folks at NBC decided that now was the right time to celebrate four decades on the air. SNL is indisputably one of the biggest and most important comedy programs of all time, having weathered constant changes in style and quality and producing some […]

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Behold the wonderful insanity of Japanese Spider-Man

Just for fun, we’re gonna share something really weird. Marvel Studios has slowly been expanding its line-up television programming, starting with Agents of SHIELD and quickly expanding with Agent Carter and Daredevil. There’s plenty to discuss about the business of high-budget television and the current wave of genre shows that we’re experiencing, but we’re not […]

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