The 20th anniversary of Seinfeld’s divisive finale has inspired no shortage of essays and analyses, with authors examining the show’s impact through any number of subjective means. Enter writer Andrew Thompson and designer Tri Vo, who instead sought to see what we could learn from the hard data. The duo scooped up all…
You know Cyrano de Bergerac even if you don’t know Cyrano De Bergerac. The protagonist of Edmond Rostand’s century-old play—based loosely on the life of an actual French polymath—is a canonical figure, his romantic plight, panache, and prodigious proboscis immortalized in countless stagings, adaptations, and lit-class…
Melody Cheng, Helen Wu, and Janet Wang get together every week to discuss their careers, personal lives, and everything else modern Asian-American women experience. This week is all about first dates: dos and don’ts, dealbreakers, the best and worst places to meet, and more. The trio share real-life stories about…
The success of the Will & Grace and Roseanne revivals has stirred up talk of revisiting virtually every successful sitcom, including The Office (but in that case, only for a holiday special), as well as many dramas. But NBC is actually showing some restraint in that regard—at a recent Hollywood Reporter event, network…
Over the weekend, much of the world’s population dutifully set its clocks one hour ahead in adherence with daylight saving time, that mandatory act of “springing forward” in order to... something about farmers. Or coal. Or whatever. As a popular Last Week Tonight With John Oliver segment pointed out, most of us don’t…
Bowing to the pressure of Hollywood’s most relentless journalistic interrogator—Ellen host (and unconfirmed Deep State operative) Ellen DeGeneres—comedian Jerry Seinfeld has acknowledged that a potential revival of his landmark ’90s sitcom Seinfeld is “possible.” “Anything is possible,” Seinfeld admitted after…
Seinfeld is heralded as the “show about nothing,” but there are plenty of episodes that are about something, while avoiding sentimentality. For this 6 Things, we’re looking at six episodes of Seinfeld that were actually about something.
Welcome back to Pop Lexicon, The A.V. Club’s series with Kory Stamper, Merriam-Webster lexicographer and editor, where she reveals the origins of America’s favorite colloquialisms. Kory uncovers the roots of “yada yada yada,” a conversational shorthand popularized by Seinfeld—but it can be traced back even before…
It’s December, so it’s time to dust off those Christmas movies, those Christmas movies that aren’t really Christmas movies, or whatever side of that wall you think Die Hard falls on. But what if you’re in a holiday mood but not up for the whole two-hour jaunt to Bedford Falls? Or want something classic and familiar,…
TV now is a lot different than it was 25 years ago, but that doesn’t mean studio executives don’t still clutch their pearls when it comes to “controversial” content. These days, The Walking Dead can spill as many intestines as it wants, but many issues surrounding sexuality and gender identity are still considered…
Because real life has no soundtrack—nothing to set the mood as soon as the supporting characters of our days wander into view—we have to make it ourselves.
Jerry Seinfeld is a guy with a reputation for caring about jokes and comedy above all else (give or take a cup of coffee or a fancy car). Seinfeld doubled down on that humor-over-everything attitude last week, when he went on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and the two ended up on the subject of comedy legend and…
We’ve all done the thing where we use our phone’s predictive text to spool out long sentences of utter nonsense that still manage to cohere into grammatically recognizable sentences. It’s interesting technology, if a little insulting to think that our thoughts are so easy to grasp that a computer could anticipate them…
Back in 1999, Jerry Seinfeld and the late David Bowie did a bit during the Saturday Night Live 25th anniversary special sending up their images as above-it-all, coasting megastars. “You gonna do the ‘lost sock’ bit?,” asks Bowie, to which Seinfeld replies with a sheepish nod. In his first stand-up special in 19 years…
Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about.
The Handmaid’s Tale took home the top prize at tonight’s Television Critics Association Awards, the professional organization’s annual celebration of TV excellence. In addition to winning the trophy for Outstanding Achievement in Drama, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel was named Program of the…
Everyone has their favorite one-off Seinfeld character, whether it’s the Caped Lawyer or the Soup Nazi. It was series co-creator Larry David who donned the questionable accessory to play the former, though there doesn’t appear to have been a real-life equivalent. The exacting soup chef played by Larry Thomas, however,…
The Sopranos’ final scene has been pored over so much in the decade since it first aired that, at this point, it’s gone from massive pop-culture mystery to mere reference point. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” Meadow’s terrible parallel parking skills, the guy in the Members Only jacket, and finally the bell ringing…
Since Steve Bannon emerged, people have marveled at him as the mysterious Satan- and Sith-loving mound of decomposing organic material that somehow has the ear of the president. The teeter-totter of power has tipped back and forth in this White House between his racist, xenophobic hard-right ideology and the…
Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…
