I received this book from Good Reads.OK, I admit it: I binged read this book about binge watching television shows, in boxed sets. Frankly, I didn't read all the critiques about shows I never watched: Mad Men in particular and Good Wife. However, I read with great interest his comments on Game of Thrones and NYPD Blue. I agree with the author totally on the character of Andy Sipowicz. The problem with such books as this is that they get old really fast. In five years, people won't even remember,...

The First Book of 2017, and what a corker!When he was in the process of dying, Christopher Hitchens wrote a condensation of his philosophy called MORTALITY. Hitchens's friend, and fellow wit, Clive James is now in the process of dying but he gives us a collection of astute yet hysterical essays on television shows. James and his family have been watching boxed sets of TV shows during his recent illness (leukemia, in fact). He covers, in his own way, The Sopranos, Band of Brothers, The Pacific ,

My interest in long-form drama is relatively recent . I went almost a decade in my 20s without a television. Without articulating it, I think I was drawn to the format by the potential for both pacing and proportion. Perhaps it was the adaptation of Little Dorrit, it was certainly The Wire. Historically I have slated these binges for the summer when futbol takes a brief hiatus and those frequent, fleeting spots of holiday.Clive James freely admits he's living on borrowed time and that he's steep...

Clive James remains a thing of joy, even while facing death these last years. His musings on the new "binge watching" method and the narrative changes it brings to entertainment are constantly pleasing. Especially since he mostly analyzing those series I have seen.

If only he could write with a little more condescension and sexism about women it would just be so awesome. Aside from which, he just has very little that's interesting or insightful to say about any of the shows that he's binged.

Debarred by fate from military prowess, Tyrion has never been able to influence events except with his brain, and his trial is the show's clearest proof that in an unreasonable society to have reasoning power guarantees nothing except the additional mental suffering that accrues when circumstances remind you that you are powerless. Your only privilege, even as a son of a noble house, is to understand the fix you are in, and to express yourself neatly when neatness can avail you nothing...Clive J...

I am now searching for more Clive books.He is funny,erudite,obviously troubled(2 daughters) and loves beautiful women.I would have finished the book much earlier,but I had to google pictures of almost all the actresses he mentioned.4.5 stars

Interesting book on the virtues of binge-watching. Provides decent synopses of many series, both here and abroad. Overly opinionated in spots, and not very good on recommendations. (Mad Men? The Good Wife? Please!). For anyone who has read Clive James before and would buy this book as a matter of course, I would redundantly recommend this book. Otherwise, you're as well off reading the crap on the Rotten Tomatoes website.

Wondering what Clive James would have thought of Game of Thrones feels a bit like wondering what Ruskin would have thought of Banksy, and yet here, delightedly, we are. As James likes to remind us in his columns, he isn't actually dead yet, despite a nasty leukaemia that's looked like finishing him off any day for the last five years. And what better way to pass this borrowed time than by sitting with his two daughters and binge-watching our new golden age of TV programmes. The Sopranos, The Goo...

I haven't seen any of the TV shows discussed except for the Sopranos, but I will read anything by Clive James. This is a wonderful book. I binge read it.

I really don't know what I expected from this book, since the subject, getting the most out of binge watching entire series hardly seemed to need an entire book. But it also promised information on how tv has allowed storylines to expand. However, when all is said and done, I felt this would have been a good article, not a 200 page book. James is a respected critic who, during a recuperation and enforced period of rest, binged on boxed sets of long running series. When he's discussing the merits...

I have a serious man-crush on Clive James. He's cultured. He's perceptive. He writes with a distinct style and he's damned funny. In short, he's the full writerly package.I've long admired him, and throughout the many of his books that I have read his writing somehow manages to be both treacle-smooth and razor sharp, a jumbo jar of fine-grade honey laced with surgical scalpels.James is a confessed bingewatcher of TV shows, regularly smashing the decency-threshold of four episodes in one sitting,...

Like the cover of the book says, the text on Game of Thrones is really worth reading. And we really should start The Good Wife again. Not so sure about NYPD Blue...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

I binge-read this book about binge-watching TV shows. I skimmed over chapters on shows I have no interest in, but enjoyed James's perspective on shows I have watched and enjoyed. I particularly appreciated his perspective on Mad Men, which was different than most other commentaries on the show (critiquing the show's lack of explicit critique of the advertising industry by the characters themselves). I also loved the frame story, of an ailing father binging TV with his daughters, and thought he w...

I found this deeply frustrating. To get a minor, but persistent, annoyance out of the way... this was published in 2016, and yet the title and repeated references are to box sets. I.e., physical media. Really? No mention of streaming or Netflix? Even to comment on what effect the relevant companies have on prestige TV? Fine. Whatever. One would think that a mind that could get from Total Recall to Leni Reifenstahl within two sentences would have some fun insights to dig through. But, much like h...

Forgotten how much I enjoyed Clive James' writing. Renews the love for TV, and banishes any thought that watching a box set is a waste of time. Has a great way of having the ideas and chapters flow together, unlike other books where each chapter is completely self-contained. It's great having someone put forward an opinion, able to justify it and compare with negative examples and also look at the thread of the history of TV leading to current age.

Few critics are as astute and funny about TV as Clive James. This work honors the long form TV that I now prefer to the old days of scheduled episodes and impatient waiting. Some of his dead-on observations -- On Madmen:"Don Draper is Don Giovanni in a Brooks Brothers shirt." The Sopranos : "On the more subtle level of mental torture, Artie the restaurateur, who by his gift for foolish investments has brought his enterprise to bankruptcy, is saved by a loan from Tony. Being saved by Tony ensures...

It is always a great pleasure to read scholarly AND entertaining writing on television - a form that still remains film's poorer cousin when it comes to serious analysis. James is a bingewatcher after my own heart, and it helped that his interests in TV series are very similar to mine. But, even if you haven't seen most of the stuff he talks about, it is difficult not to enjoy this book. Equal parts insightful and hilarious (I almost died laughing while reading his description of Claire Danes in...

A scholarly look at binge watching television boxed sets without resorting to big exotic words or going off the subject, and mentioning how he and his family reacts to various series without going off on tangents.He mentions how good- or bad-looking various performers are, not to be lecherous but to prove that how people look in a visual story does make a difference as much as how the costumes and sets look. He mentions facts that unlike the Godfather movies, real gangsters do not protect the li...