About the Book
A leading film critic on the evolving world of streaming media and its impact on society
The city at night under lockdown, a time of plague and anxiety. It is an exciting new age of television, the light that flutters in every cell in the city. But no one seems to be asking: What is the endless stream doing to us?
In Remotely, the most innovative writer on film and screens asks what happened to us as we sought consolation under lockdown by becoming a society of bingeing creatures. From Candid Camera and I Love Lucy to Ozark, Succession, and Chernobyl, David Thomson and his wife, Lucy Gray, wander through shows old and new, trying to pin down the nature and justification for what we call “entertainment.” Funny, mysterious, and warm, at last here is a book that grasps the extent to which television is not just a collection of particular shows—hits and misses—but a weather system in which we are lost pilgrims searching for answers.
About the Author :
David Thomson is a film critic, a historian, and the author of more than thirty books, including Disaster Mon Amour, Why Acting Matters, and The Biographical Dictionary of Film. He lives in San Francisco, CA.
Review :
“Thomson is the greatest writer on movies there’s ever been.”—Christopher Bray, TheSpectator
“Our greatest film historian, critic, and writer about movies turns his peerless eye to TV, from I Love Lucy to Succession, Seinfeld to Ozark, The West Wing to Babylon Berlin; offering a sometimes exhilarating, sometimes bleak—and always brilliant—personal essay on the medium that has seemingly swallowed our world, fractured the way we view content, and forever altered whatever sense of reality we once shared.”—Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho
“This book is like no other. David Thomson is television’s great demystifier, but one who nevertheless retains the power to fall in love, then fall out of love, become enchanted, then disillusioned almost in same breath. Both detached and partisan, enthusiast and skeptic, Thomson is at his paradoxical best in this book.”—Molly Haskell, author of Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films
“That David Thomson writes brilliantly about the big screen is not news. What is news: that he’s every bit as insightful, every bit as penetrating, every bit as enthralling on the small screen. Pure rapture.”—Lili Anolik, author of Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.
“In these pages, we join David and Lucy, sometimes almost imagining themselves Ricky and Lucy, watching alongside them, and then we’re arguing with them, doubting, quarreling as they do, making connections from the show on the screen to the world at large and then backing off, as trapped in the show as they are. ‘The night is young,’ Thomson says. ‘Or younger than we are.’”—Greil Marcus, author of Folk Music
“In our time David Thomson is the supreme authority on filmic experience, period. Now he trains his vast powers of observation, analysis, erudition, and wit on the ‘golden age of television.’ Every golden age needs an honest man, and this golden age finds its honest man in these pages.”—Leon Wieseltier, editor of Liberties
“Thomson’s brilliant writing about the experience of viewing film and television is informed by his deep knowledge of both media, his scholarship, and his unmatchable wit.”—Diane Johnson, author of Lorna Mott Comes Home
“David Thomson is our greatest living writer on film, and in Remotely he takes on the wonders of the smaller screen to dazzling effect. His piercing eye shows us television for what it really is: the mirror of our deepest intimacies.”—Matthew Specktor, author of Always Crashing in the Same Car
