Unsurprisingly, she has a soft spot for shows made by and about women. Reviewing is personal for her, and she’s present in the writing, like the “I” in the title of the book, now and then introducing snippets of autobiography that ground her opinions. She writes of Kevin Spacey in “House of Cards”: “He’s miscast by being too well cast - there’s no tension in seeing a shark play a shark.” She describes “Rosemary’s Baby” as “a feminist masterpiece created by a sex criminal.” Her prose succeeds in creating an easy intimacy that feels like conversation. Nussbaum is fond of word play and startling paradoxes. Discussing “Sex and the City,” she observes that its reputation “has shrunk and faded, like some tragic dry-clean-only dress tossed into a decade-long hot cycle.” She writes like an angel infected with the sportive spirit of a mischievous imp. Nussbaum’s essays are at once brainy and so well written that I found myself stopping not only to ponder the ideas but to savor her prose. She takes her own temperature, checks her pulse, monitors her moods - “audits” herself, as she calls it - as she engages the creations in the context of bad news about the creators.

Nussbaum relentlessly interrogates her own responses to Woody Allen and his movies Roman Polanski and his - along with a fascinating anatomy of her relationship to Louis C.K., the person and the work. She looks at the issue from multiple viewpoints, changes her mind, alters the angle and alters it again. Plopped in the middle is a long, brilliantly executed essay called “Confessions of a Human Shield.” She wrestles with one of the most vexing controversies of the day: “What should we do with the art of terrible men?” The essay is about the dissonance between good art and bad men in the wake of the #MeToo revelations. They are provocations, springboards from which she plunges into deep waters, the big questions that roil the culture, like the relationships between politics, gender, art and audience. To call these essays “reviews” doesn’t do them justice. Although this is not a particularly flattering metaphor, Nussbaum is like a ruminant, chewing and digesting her subject, when others are satisfied with gumming and gulping. So much writing on TV confines itself to throat clearing and recapping. She has fashioned them into a sustained argument for both the uniqueness and importance of television as an art form distinct from movies and novels. “I Like to Watch,” a collection of her reviews, essays and blog posts, is no mere miscellany. Not to mince words, the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum is one of the best, if not the best, critic writing about TV today.

I like to watch by emily nussbaum