James Poniewozik has a tough job: He gets paid to watch TV.
“There’s a lot to keep up with,” Mr. Poniewozik, 56, the chief television critic for The New York Times, said in an interview. “But much of the time it is really interesting.”
For nearly three decades, he has written about dramas, comedies, presidential debates, court hearings, interactive art installations and anything else that plays out on the small screen. Mr. Poniewozik began writing about television as a media columnist for Salon and later became the TV and media critic for Time magazine. He joined The Times in 2015, focusing his coverage on the intersection of TV, culture and society at large.
Ahead of TV’s biggest night — the Emmy Awards — on Sunday, Mr. Poniewozik shared the TV trends he’s watching and how he decides what shows to cover in the seemingly infinite modern TV landscape. These are edited excerpts.
Fourteen percent of American adults say they get their news from TikTok, up from 3 percent in 2020. Is TV still a force to be reckoned with?
TikTok has certainly become more influential. But I was struck while covering the presidential debate between Biden and Trump that it was possibly the most politically consequential TV broadcast ever: Because of one or two hours of TV, a candidate for president changed. All of the reasons Biden dropped out were present before the debate, but once you had tens of millions of people focused on one performance at one time, it became an unstoppable force.
How do you weigh how many people will watch a show against its quality when deciding what to review or cover?
There’s not necessarily much value in panning something really bad that’s not going to get a lot of attention anyway. But there can be value in writing a negative review of something that will get a lot of attention, or vice versa — finding something really great that might get overlooked in the onslaught. You have to abandon the idea of covering everything, or even everything with a fan base, because it’s impossible. There are hundreds of new shows on each year, and even if I stayed awake 24 hours a day and did nothing but watch TV, there aren’t enough hours in the day.
How many hours of TV do you watch per day, on average?
I’m watching much less TV than the average American if there’s a stretch when I’m writing a lot. But then there are other days — like at the beginning of a new television season — when I’ll spend all day doing nothing but plugging through screeners [episodes that are provided to critics in advance]. Many of them I won’t even watch all the way through. I can typically tell in the first 10 minutes of something whether it’s worth my time.
Really, 10 minutes?
Something I often fret about as a TV critic is, am I really giving a show enough of a chance? Then I realize, often as I’m watching TV with my wife, that people who don’t do this for a living are far more willing to give up on a show. My wife will say five minutes in: “This is no good. Why are we watching it?” I have to remember that as a critic, my job is to represent people who don’t have endless free time to wait for a show to get better.
The Emmy Awards are on Sunday, and you’ll be providing running commentary in The Times’s live blog. So you’re just the person to ask: Why is “The Bear” — a show that grapples with trauma and grief — competing as a comedy?
Back in the day, when a show was either a cop drama or “I Love Lucy,” you had this very simple division between serious drama and laugh-a-minute sitcoms. But nobody really expects that kind of rigid adherence to category from movies or books. There are books that are serious yet funny, and the bittersweet, dramatic comedy is pretty common in movies. TV has become more like that.
There’s an argument for not having drama or comedy categories anymore. But award shows like to give out lots of awards, and people like to receive them, so they’d never get away with cutting the number of Emmys in half — though I personally would not object.
What’s one TV trend that you’ll be tracking closely over the next few years?
TV has increasingly become reliant on intellectual property adaptations — things like Disney’s “Star Wars” and Marvel series, shows based on books or movie franchises. Rather than being original ideas, shows are based more on the idea of: “Here is a recognizable fictional universe you already know and have responded to. We’re going to give you more of that.” I wonder if TV will continue down that road and become something more like movies, where you have a lot of big franchises crowding out everything else.
What was a recent show you watched that you loved?
“My Brilliant Friend” really delighted me. And I’m excited by this weird little show on HBO by the comedic actor Julio Torres, “Fantasmas.” I reviewed it back in June. It’s a six-episode comedy series. It’s magical.
The post How a TV Critic Navigates an Age of Endless Content appeared first on New York Times.
