Intermission: Wedding season, baby!

One of the interesting things about covering television in recent years has been the way programming has moved to nights that used to be dead spots because of the perception that people were out doing other things on Friday and Saturday evenings. “Orphan Black” has taken over Saturdays, and Bruce Jenner’s interview with Diane Sawyer was a genuine phenomenon this Friday. What does it take to get you to stay on the couch on Friday or Saturday? Or do you just DVR everything that might air on those evenings and wait for later?
• “Bring back the serialized novel,” by Hillary Kelly: I’m not sure that this argument holds up at a moment when binge-watching has made television shows more like novels, or that it’s strictly necessary when writers can still write terrific chapter-ending cliffhangers, but I appreciate any conversation about how to get more people reading literature.
(Ballantine)“More than 150 years later, the publishing industry is in the doldrums, yet the novel shows few signs of digging into its past and resurrecting the techniques that drove fans wild and juiced sales figures,” Kelly writes. “The novel is now decidedly a single object, a mass entity packaged and moved as a whole. That’s not, of course, a bad thing, but it does create a barrier to entry that the publishing world can’t seem to overcome. Meanwhile, consumers gladly gobble up other media in segments — whether it’s a ‘Walking Dead’ episode, a series of Karl Ove Knausgaard ’s travelogues or a public-radio show (it’s called ‘Serial’ for a reason, people) — so there’s reason to believe they would do the same with fiction. What the novel needs again is tension. And the best source for that tension is serialization.”
• ” ‘The Real Thing': a wedding reporter reflects on love and life,” by Sara Eckel: This is a lovely review of Washington Post wedding reporter Ellen McCarthy’s new book about how to have a great marriage, just in time for wedding season.
“The love-advice market is a crowded field, dominated by sassy know-it-alls — power-suited Dr. Joes and Janes smiling sternly on their book covers with their arms crossed; shrewd reality-television stars prolonging their 15 minutes by dispensing wisdom gleaned from their divorces,” Eckel notes. ” ‘The Real Thing’ is a refreshing change, since McCarthy’s pumps-on-the-ground reporting focuses on happy couples, rather than the ones who bicker in therapists’ offices or in front of camera crews. She thus accesses a largely untapped resource: ordinary people who make mistakes but basically know what they’re doing. We meet a young couple who fled India to marry out of caste, who always hold hands during arguments to keep tensions from escalating. There is the 57-year-old bride, widowed from her first marriage in her early 30s, who steadfastly refuses to remarry until she finds an equally good match. And an octogenarian couple, married 65 years, offer their secret to relationship longevity: ‘Be nice.’ That might sound like common sense, but common sense is in short supply in a category dominated by fear, blame and gamesmanship.”
• “Why Push Is Still One Of My Favorite Superhero Movies,” by James Whitbrook: You might have guessed that I appreciate smart explanations of why people love their favorite pop culture, so I was primed to appreciate this nice piece from Whitbrook about different ways to tell superhero stories.
“2009 was Hollywood on the cusp of superhero boom — ‘Iron Man’ kicking off the MCU and ‘The Dark Knight’ redefining the ‘serious’ comic book film the year before, we were about to dive into the global comic book phenom we’re in the midst of today. These movies are huge, sweeping superheroic epics, big stakes, big explosions, a sense of grandeur on grand scales. ‘Push’? Pretty much the opposite,” Whitbrook writes. “Shot on location in Hong Kong by Paul McGuigan, it was a small-scale action thriller that happened to feature characters with psychic super powers. It didn’t deal with the end of the world or with villains who wanted to rule the galaxy; it was about a small group of powered people on the run from the government. The action wasn’t meaningless splendor, existing to merely so we could admire all the explosions and energy beams. It was staccato gunfire and invisible psychic pushes — action that served the story, rather than interrupted it. It was proudly small and intimate, already unique enough for a superhero movie in 2009. But today, alongside the likes of ‘Age of Ultron’ or ‘Batman v. Superman’? That kind of movie just doesn’t happen any more.”
• ” ‘Montage of Heck’ and the Impossible Kurt Cobain,” by Lindsay Zoladz: There have been so many reviews of this movie, which is still sitting on my desk, and which I swear I’ll get to before next Monday when it airs on HBO, but I’m posting a lot of them, because “Montage of Heck” has inspired so much good writing.

“About a half hour into Brett Morgen’s new documentary ‘Montage of Heck,’ the camera lingers on a note written in the slanted, scratchy handwriting of a teenage Kurt Cobain,” Zoladz writes. “It’s intended for his first girlfriend, Tracy Marander, with whom he lived for a little while in Olympia, Washington, while he was first putting together a band he briefly thought of calling Man Bug or Fecal Matter before finally settling on Nirvana. ‘Don’t read my diary when I’m gone,’ the note says. Then, just below it, in the same script: ‘When you wake up, please read my diary. Look through my things, and figure me out.’ What are we to make of this contradiction? What is its tone? Sarcastic? Playful? Needy? Marander hints that it might be all of the above, but the only person who can really tell us for sure has been gone now for 21 years.”