Bianculli will talk about his latest book, “The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific.” Tickets for the event are $10.
David Bianculli, guest host and TV critic on NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross,” will speak about his latest book, “The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific,” on Wednesday, March 15 at 7 p.m. at the Katz JCC. Bianculli’s latest book discusses how television shows have now eclipsed films as the premier form of visual narrative art of our time. The book explains historically, how the art of must-see, binge-watch television evolved.
Bianculli’s theory has to do with the concept of quality television: what it is and how it got that way. In tracing the evolutionary history of our progress toward a platinum age of television — our age, the era of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad and Mad Men and The Wire and Homeland and Girls — he focuses on the development of the classic TV genres, among them the sitcom, the crime show, the miniseries, the soap opera, the western, the animated series and the late night talk show. In each genre, he selects five key examples of the form, tracing its continuities and its dramatic departures and drawing on exclusive and in-depth interviews with many of the most famed auteurs in television history.
A contributor to the popular NPR show since its inception, Bianculli has been a TV critic since 1975. From 1993 to 2007, he was a TV critic for the New York Daily News. An associate professor of TV and film at Rowan University, Bianculli is an author of three previous books and the founder and editor of the online magazine, TVWorthWatching.com.
Bianculli has visited the Katz JCC before as a moderator for author Daniel Silva and for a panel discussion with Lorraine Newman and Saturday Night Live co-stars at the Bank of America Festival of Arts, Books and Culture. This program is a partnership of the Saltzman Foundation Life Long Learning Institute and the Bank of America Festival of Arts, Books, and Culture at the Katz JCC. Tickets are $10 and available at www.katzjcc.org/adult-education.
