Sorry to have made it seem that I once again abandoned this blog. After I left Montana, I was on the road for 37-38 days (depending on how you add it up), with a lot of stops along the way. I’m back in D.C. now.

While criss-crossing America, I also went back to my job as TV critic at The Washington Post, filing a heap of TV reviews from hither and yon, mostly yon.

I’m getting ready to authorize a redesign of HankStuever.com, which will include (I hope) a place for visitors to catch up on my latest reviews. There is, of course, already an easy way to do that, on my bio/archive page at the Post. Click here. You can read recent reviews of “The Americans,” the end of “30 Rock,” “House of Cards,” the inauguration, the Golden Globes, “The Following,” “Enlightened” and more …

Coming soon: Random thoughts from the road trip and a BIG book giveaway. Don’t feel neglected.

My broader analysis of the cultural zombie fixation, vis-a-vis my Walking Dead review on Sunday.

And another nice use of art on the section front (see below), courtesy of illustrator Zohar Lazar. The print edition of the newspaper is still a bargain and a visual treat that the web site just frankly still isn’t. However, with the web version, you get a brief slide show of zombies. In a perfect world, you’d get both the lovely freelance illo AND the web extras. Maybe iPad will somehow deliver on the promise of principled design and neat, new geegaws…

Orson Welles said that. I say AMEN.

I haven’t been blogging as much because it’s like a department store in December around here. I’m the TV critic for The Washington Post. That’s my bread, that’s my butter. There is ENTIRELY TOO MUCH to do this time of year. (The rest of the year, there’s only always a little too much to do, which is how I like it.)

This is a very different situation from my previous 20 or so years in the newspaper business. Before, I was always adrift on the sea of possible story ideas, the rogue features writer: What should I write about next? What’s news? What stories can I do that no one else is doing? How long can I dither on one story before my editor loses his mind? How perfect can I make each story? What happens now that the story I was working on has fallen through? What should I write next? Where should I go? (Etc., ad nauseum.)

Welp, I don’t have those problems anymore. The TV critic job is sort of like stepping in front of an open fire hydrant every day. And there is a LOT of bad TV out there.

Here’s what I’ve been up to lately.

The Fall TV Preview section of Arts & Style comes out this Sunday. (The illustration above is (c) Stanley Chow, for the Washington Post.) If you’re in Washington, kindly do drop $2 on a Sunday paper. If not, click here. There’s the capsulized brief reviews, which this year I organized according to viewer type, thanks to viewers like you.

There are other pieces in the section, by me:

>> The shit that S#*! My Dad Says is nothing compared to the shit Gloria Bunker Stivic’s dad said — forty fuckin’ TV seasons ago! What happened to Bunker-like versions of old people? We have such anger in America right now — can it not be coalesced into a sitcom about moving back in with your dad? We need the catharsis.

>> Hawaii Five-O: A much-needed vacation for the brain.

>> Outsourced: Oh, those FBPs! (Funny brown people.)

And yes, I’ve opined on the TV event of the season: HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. It ran in Style in Friday’s paper, and our original, commissioned illustration, by artist Kako, was quite lovely. See? Newspapers: WORTH IT.

This is not a jet-set post, I swear, but once in a weird while, I find myself standing on a beach, dreamily contemplating one ocean …

And then a day or so later, I get to contemplate another:

Summer is rushing by, and I offer the usual apology of negligent bloggers who feel some odd compulsion to explain their absences to their almost-nonexistent readerships. Michael and I got a nice week off in Cape Cod (seen above, as the first tourists arrive in Provincetown, 1620, and immediately open an art gallery to sell paintings of lighthouses). We had bicycle rides, good food, lots of sleep, minimal drag queens. Everything seemed to calm down. I finished reading four (!) books, and wound up skimming another for quite a chunk. All of which the One-Man Book Club will discuss as soon as a quorum can be reached.

Was home for a day, and am now in Los Angeles — here’s Saint Monica herself (also above) keeping watch over her town, humming “Mad About You,” which she hasn’t been able to get out of her stony head since 1986.

The weather is perfect. But this is not neener-neener-I’m-in-Cali time. I’m here for some very serious business about the fall TV season. As I type this, Tom Selleck is doing his best to sell the TV critics of America on his new cop drama on CBS. (How old do you think he is, off the top of your head? Guess. Readers, he is 65, according to IMDb. He was born the same year we nuked Japan — yet he has no stoop, no creak, no spread. Those are some strong bones. Strong mustache too.) Tomorrow, I’m sitting down with some (or all?) of the Real Housewives of D.C. (“Buckle up” a publicist advises.) Oh, and I’m still filing current TV reviews, from one time zone to the next. Here’s a re-consideration, just posted, of Jersey Shore.

After several days of this, I’ll be spending a few more days in New Mexico, working on something exciting and new.

Here’s something I wrote for the paper about the end of (perhaps meaning of) Lost. More important, here’s the Owen Freeman illo that went with it. Only, when it came time to run the essay, the powers that be decided to run it on A1 on Friday, where we would just never ever run an illustration. (Then again, who would have ever thought deepish essays about TV would ever be on the front page of the Washington Post, either?) So, Owen’s art went with a “Lost”-releated story by Jen Chaney on Saturday’s Style front instead. The best laid plans, etc. — I’m glad it saw print.

But now I’m bringing my piece and the art back together the way that we intended.

"Lost" illustration (c) Owen Freeman for The Washington Post

‘Lost’ or not, we’re still at loose ends

By Hank Stuever
The Washington Post / Friday, May 21, 2010

“Lost” exhausts. It was a vacation in hell, our own wonderful hell, a “Gilligan’s Island” getaway for our nervous, crisscross-wired culture. A bunch of fictional characters clad in grimy gray Gap T-shirts tromped all over the hills and jungles of an illusory, magical isle — a place that represented about a thousand different metaphors. America, it’s so obvious: Millions of you loved “Lost” because you feel lost.

It’s been a long six years of goose chases and mash-up mythologies. It was filled with ultimately irrelevant numerology and hieroglyphics that mostly turned out to be set decor. It was tall pirate ships and utopian VW buses; literary references to everything from 19th-century philosophy to “The Empire Strikes Back” to Holy Communion wine.

As it lugubriously ends Sunday night on ABC, “Lost” leaves us more or less where it all began, but also with a spooky idea of the 21st century thus far. It was the perfect show for our frustrated ’00s era, in which no one had to answer for anything much — not for the real estate and Wall Street busts, the levee floods, the bad war intelligence.

While we fought elusive enemies in distant lands; while we vanished down our personal, broadband rabbit holes; while we doubted our elected officials; while we spent ourselves into impossible debts, “Lost” was along for the ride, with its unsolvable puzzles and its exhilarating but dorky extremes of fandom culture.

Though ratings steadily declined since “Lost’s” debut in 2004, the show held a firm grasp on some 10 million viewers (roughly half of the average viewership of the two most popular shows on TV, “American Idol” and “Dancing With the Stars”). Like anything these days, it survived on the passion of its niche audience, which skewed young and tech-savvy.

” ‘Lost’ is in a class by itself,” ABC’s programming chief, Jeff Bader, said this week. “It is the most successful cult show ever.”

But enough now. Enough with the instanalyses blogged and updated and tweeted late at night — or, more fittingly, during the next afternoon in cubicles all across the so-called American workplace. This is not one of those “Lost” farewells that goes over it and over it one more time. No charts, no diagrams, no last-minute theories.

Instead it’s a farewell to a feeling.

Read the rest here!