NUSSBAUM TO NEW YORKER: New York Magazine writer Emily Nussbaum will succeed Nancy Franklin as The New Yorker’s TV critic. She’s leaving New York in two weeks and will start her job at The New Yorker early next month. “I’m completely excited,” said Nussbaum.
She has been with New York for the last seven years. She joined the magazine as culture editor, created the magazine’s Approval Matrix and eventually became a full-time writer.
“This has been a life-changing experience of my life, being at New York Magazine,” said Nussbaum. “It’s a big deal for me to leave for somewhere else because I feel very identified with and very connected with the magazine.”
Franklin had been The New Yorker’s TV critic for 13 years before she said in September that she was leaving the job.
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“Nancy decided she was tired of writing for a while, and tired of writing about TV,” wrote New Yorker editor David Remnick to WWD last month. “I expect, after she catches her breath, she’ll begin writing for us again and I dearly hope so.”
“The entire time I’ve been at [New York], it’s been one of my major obsessions,” said Nussbaum about TV. “I’ve always been interested in the role of TV critics specifically. Historically, TV criticism — it varied among the different critics — but the art form itself was considered something that was really mass and a lot of people had a condescending feeling toward it. That was completely understandable because TV has changed so radically in the last 15 years. So, for me personally as a critic, I find this to be a fantastic time to be talking about television and putting it in the context of different art forms and actually taking it seriously and thinking about it as something that is not simply comparable to movies and great books, but at its best can be this transformative and very specific kind of accomplishment. Of course, there’s lots of terrible television out there too, it’s just an interesting and fun thing to write about it. I’m a big TV fan.”