“The audience doesn’t want to hear you make points,” insists Tracy Morgan in “The Comedian,” the first episode of the rebooted Twilight Zone series helmed by Jordan Peele. He might as well deliver the line with a wink, as that’s what the show has always done: critique human failings, and often, current events, in ways…

Ours is a confessional age, a time in which telling all is not only customarily practiced but also routinely lauded. To do less than unbosom oneself in the most candid of ways is both to endanger one’s mental and emotional health (a distinction I’ve never been quite clear on) and to frustrate the kind of…

In recent months several of us have quipped that the drama surrounding the Trump campaign and presidency would make for a great plotline on the FX drama, The Americans. A show about Russian spies living in D.C. during the Cold War easily brings to mind our present-day episode of America-Russia relations. If you watched the…

This post is a web-exclusive feature accompanying Image issue 93. In the conversation around faith and film, Ron Austin is an elder statesman. He has worked a lifetime in the entertainment industry, and his essays and books, including In a New Light: Spirituality and Media Arts, have influenced generations of filmmakers (much of his writing is…

During its four seasons from 2013 to 2016, Rectify was no stranger to critical praise. Nearly a year after the series finale, I think it’s time to mention Ray McKinnon’s series alongside the usual exemplars of television’s “golden age”—shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Wire. As I watched the series in…

Five hundred years from now our present political confusions, conflicts, and outrages will become the stuff of high melodrama. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would look back on this period of American history as entertainment, but they’re bound to, I expect. Not Singin’ in the Rain entertainment, but certainly something like Wall Street or…

It’s been said that human beings warp everything that they touch as a consequence of original sin. Like Midas, whatever we come in contact with, we distort, however slightly, either through some degree of ignoble intention or some incapacity to effectuate what is pure. In other words, even our best achievements are tainted by motives…

For Kate Keplinger It is the blight man was born for It is Margaret that you mourn for… —“Spring and Fall,” Gerard Manley Hopkins “I’m sorry for your loss,” my friend Dionne posted in response to a note I posted on Facebook. I’d just come back on the redeye from the West Coast that morning, and…

If I were to graph my mental health over the past five years, the line might resemble a stegosaurus spine with several points and plunges, that, thanks be to God, climb overall to a place of greater acceptance and peace. But damn, do those jagged edges hurt. Over the past couple of months, hormones, summer…

Earlier this month, one of the best shows on television aired its final episode. A few friends and I huddled on a sofa to eat hamburgers and watch the series finale of Friday Night Lights—and I won’t lie, I grabbed a few extra napkins to use as tissue, just in case. Before the episode began…