Television

“One must never let the public behind the scenes for they are easily disillusioned, and then they’re angry with you for it is the illusion they love.”

Sure, this quote is spoken by a very minor character and awkwardly shoehorned into the story, but it still makes its point. I realize it’s almost impossible to imagine now, but there was a time we didn’t have to capitalize the words “Real Housewives” and people were actually ashamed if they came off badly in front of a camera. HBO’s Cinema Verite tells the behind-the-scenes story of the creation of An American Family, the PBS documentary widely considered to be the first reality television show.
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“Won’t bow, don’t know how.”

More than any other show, Treme captures the very soul of the city it is set in. Where The Wire may have presented the city of Baltimore as one of the supporting players in the series, Treme is New Orleans. The haunting percussion and brass of the musicians, the lyrical shorthand of its citizens, the quiet desperation of pride after destruction, rampant political corruption and unchecked crime mix together to form an eclectic jazz tempo that makes up the heartbeat of the Crescent City.
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“As a boy, I came to understand that two things marked my family: distinctive names and extreme stubbornness.”

In fact, it was Thurgood Marshall’s “extreme stubbornness” in the face of racial inequality that led to his name becoming synonymous with the civil rights movement and to his 1967 appointment as the United States Supreme Court’s first African-American justice. Marshall’s remarkable life story is told in Thurgood, a sensational one-man show starring Laurence Fishburne that previously aired on HBO and was filmed before a live audience at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater in Washington, D.C.
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