For our annual review of stories, our writers and editors have put together lists of the stories they were proud of this year, or just had fun writing or reading. Here are Senior Editor Michelle Drown and her contributer’s picks.
In the age-old contretemps between TV and cinema, the battle and party lines used to be sharply and comfortingly drawn. But what do you do when film-TV distinctions continue to blur and incestuously party? For example, one of 2018’s best “films” — the Coen Bros. gritty-witty The Ballad of Buster Scruggs anthology project — made only a grazing, Oscar-qualifying appearance on the big screen before swiftly landing on Netflix. The answer is, you enjoy both.
On the tube, Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men, came back swinging with the year’s best TV series, The Romanoffs, which was essentially made up of eight separate feature length films, riffing loosely on a theme of legacy, lineage, and bloody ghosts.