We Need Better TV Critics

If it's true that television is becoming the "future of the filmed narrative"—and just listen to all that chirping in academia about The Wire—then it's time for smarter TV critics, writes Vadim Rizov. The job goes beyond just snarking at the latest episode of American Idol. TV critics need to be "amateur sociologists" with historical perspective, and we currently "have very few writers capable of taking the long gaze."

Today's "TV writers are still largely untested," Rizov writes at IFC. "What we're going to need are a crop of writers who at least have seen the major shows of decades past and understand how they run into each other. If TV is indeed the new cinema, we need the writers to go with it." (More television stories.)