The History of Telemarketing
Past Present Podcast, Episode 391
In this episode of Past Present, Natalia, Neil, and Niki discuss the history of telemarketing....
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RuPaul and the History of Drag
Past Present Podcast, Episode 277
Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show:
Reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race has just wrapped its thirteenth season. Niki and Natalia drew on Simon Doonan’s book Drag: The Complete Story. Natalia also referred to this Vulture article on the history of drag and this New Yorker profile ...
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Larry King
Past Present Podcast, Episode 265
Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show:
TV and radio legend, Larry King, died last week at the age of 87. We discussed some of the retrospective pieces King’s sixty-year career produced, like this 2010 feature in the New York Times, and this 1988 article in the ...
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The Queen’s Gambit
Past Present Podcast, Episode 258
Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show:
The Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit has become the pandemic’s latest must-see TV. Niki referred to the role of African-American character Jolene, discussed in this Bitch article, and to her own piece on female leads for CNN. Neil cited this ...
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Killing It
TV’s Killing Eve as fashion epiphany
Eve, whose sense of style borders on grunge, is the foil to Villanelle’s haute couture. The government agent’s closet is a study in neutrals, while her counterpart’s is as highly keyed as her sociopathic personality. Villanelle fears nothing, certainly not color. Her wardrobe is as eclectic as Eve’s is predictable. But ...
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What We Learned in Pine Valley
The conversations All My Children promoted put feminism on television’s map
This scene, broadcast fifty years ago this week, marked the debut episode of the American daytime television soap opera, All My Children. More than forty-three years later, on the program’s final broadcast, the same character, the glamorous Erica Kane, repeated her observation, “Pine Valley . . . is still not the corner of ...
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Fleabag, Let Things Get Lost
Wonder, confusion, and why film needs more of it.
I want to talk about wonder in film. Wonder isn’t some starry-eyed luxury. It’s tantamount to messy, confused, vulnerable searching where all the possibilities of one’s world are up in the air, and one’s bearing is anxious. Wonder peeks out in mainstream film, but filmmakers should follow it and see ...
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How to Do It
Sex Education and the “Sex Life”
In 1696, in Somerset county in southwest England, a schoolboy named John Cannon and his friends took their lunchtime break on the banks of a river near their schoolhouse. Unlike other uneventful riverside lunches, though, this day was memorable enough for Cannon to record in his memoirs. An older boy ...
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My So-Called Life
Angela Chase, Body Image, and Teen Angst
In August 1994, ABC aired the pilot episode of My So-Called Life, and for the first time I felt that a television show spoke directly to me. I was fifteen, self-conscious, and searching for identity in a rural suburb of Lansing, Michigan. Shows such as Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place obsessed over affluence, sexuality, ...
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Tiny Animals
Season one of ‘My Brilliant Friend’
I think they are cockroaches, streaming out of the sewer by the thousands, but they might be rats -- we see them from a distance, and because it is dark and there are no people in the shot, just the empty street and the dirty white cement of the housing ...
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Big Hair, Boots, and Business
Bidding Happy Trails to Nashville
It’s no big secret that I’m Nursing Clio’s resident country music fan, as evidenced by my previous post on women in modern country music as well as my penchant for cowboy boots. Like many fans, this summer I’m mourning the conclusion of country music soap opera delight, Nashville, in late July. For six seasons, Nashville has treated us ...
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Roseanne, NFL Cheerleaders, and Instant Pot
Past Present Episode 125
In this episode, Natalia, Niki, and Neil debate the return of the television series Roseanne, the unfair treatment of NFL cheerleaders, and the sudden popularity of the Instant Pot.
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