Television

Nostalgia is often seen as a positive emotion, but the word actually derives from the Greek nostos, meaning “homecoming,” and algos, meaning “pain.” Nostalgia is really a type of homesickness, an ache for something lost. As audiences watch the new trailer for the HBO Harry Potter television series, the algos may hit pretty hard: those tantalizing two minutes are the reminder we need that you can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice.  The first thing you notice is simply how bad everything looks. Shows seem to have an obsession nowadays with making everything as dark as possible, so that you are constantly trying to adjust the light settings of your screen to see what’s actually happening. Even the colors of the recent Wicked films – an emerald-saturated dreamland that changed the possibilities of

Now that the Stranger Things disappointment has died down – slightly – George R.R. Martin and his merry band of Game of Thrones cohorts have recaptured attention in what we must call the Thrones universe. After the warily positive but underwhelming reception that the major spin-off House of the Dragon received, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’s six-episode offering is in a lower key than either of its forbears. No dragons, no enormous battles, no big stars, just a small-scale relationship drama focusing on the hapless “hedge knight” Ser Duncan the Tall, aka “Dunk” and his child squire, Egg, whose origins are rather less lowly. Still, small-scale doesn’t mean humorless

It’s become the sport of the GOP