As a Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic for The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum knows a thing or two about the joys of watching television. In “I like to watch,” her new collection of essays on sale now from Penguin Random House, Nussbaum writes about the shows that shape our cultural and political zeitgeist, from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “The Apprentice” to “The Sopranos.” The collection includes three monumental profiles of TV showrunners — Kenya Barris, Jenji Kohan and Ryan Murphy — and explores the question of what to do when an artist you love gets #MeToo’ed.
As TV creators have brought about a viewing renaissance in the past fifteen years, Nussbaum too has blazed trails in the art of criticism, resisting the false hierarchy of one kind of culture over another and searching for a more expansive vision of what it means to make art. According to “Fantasyland” author Kurt Andersen, “I Like to Watch” is “the most incisive, intimate, entertaining, authoritative guide to the shows of this golden television age.”
Emily Nussbaum has written for The New Yorker since 2011, where she invented a charticle called the “Approval Matrix” which, to this day, closes out each issue of the magazine. In 2016, Nussbaum won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. She lives in Brooklyn and will host a reading from “I Like to Watch” at Books are Magic in Cobble Hill on July 30.