One man's take on entertainment, unfiltered.
Ron Knights pulls back the curtain on the ridiculous research rabbit holes behind his columns — cereal prices, game show meltdowns, and one very incriminating question about Jell-O. A defense of the weird detours that make writing worth reading.
Ron spent a night on a Manhattan sidewalk so a handful of producers could point at him and say "look alive." What he found at 4 a.m. was a small temporary nation, held together by pastry, caffeine, and the terrifying enthusiasm of a woman named Deb.
Ron mourns the corner video store and the lost art of judging a movie by its box art. Somewhere between the New Releases wall and the late fees, we lost something algorithms can't replace.
After my father passed, I found his viewing history still sitting on the family room TV. So I did the only thing that made sense: I watched everything he loved, one episode at a time. Turns out the remote control is also a time machine.
I sat down for a perfectly good thriller last Tuesday, made the rookie mistake of checking Letterboxd first, and spent the next 100 minutes watching the movie through a stranger's angry eyes. Somewhere along the way, we all became nervous film students instead of fans. I want my naive moviegoing brain back.
I spent an afternoon at a taping of a classic game show revival, and I came home with a sore back, a hoarse voice, and a weird respect for the machinery. Turns out the most honest thing in the building is the sign telling you when to clap.
My daughter looked at my wall of DVDs, VHS tapes, and one sad laserdisc and said it belonged in a museum. She meant it as an insult. I've never been prouder of my collection.
Somewhere along the way, watching a movie you've already seen became a guilty secret. Ron Knights makes the case that revisiting old favorites isn't laziness — it's the whole point of loving movies in the first place.
Ron Knights pours one out for the canceled-too-soon shows that still haunt his DVR memories, from Freaks and Geeks to My So-Called Life. A support group of one, ranking the heartbreaks and asking the question nobody at the networks wants to answer.
Everyone's got a shortlist of shows they can watch with their eyes half-closed. Here are mine, defended with personal stories and absolutely no apologies. Come at me in the comments — I can take it.
Ron confesses to a bookshelf full of unread celebrity autobiographies and tries to figure out why he keeps buying them. Along the way, he takes apart the ghostwritten memoir machine and offers a field guide to which star books are actually worth your money.
Ron spent two weeks mainlining episodes of Press Your Luck from 1984 and came out the other side a calmer, weirder man. Here's his case for retro game shows as the last honest thing on television — and why today's versions feel like they're being hosted by a spreadsheet.
The algorithm keeps begging me to try something new, and I keep putting on the same movie for the fortieth time. This is my defense of the boring movie night — and why the content treadmill can pry my comfort films from my cold, dead remote.
I spent a month re-watching every sitcom finale that mattered to me, and my old report cards needed some serious grading corrections. Turns out I owed a few shows an apology — and a couple of others owe me forty years of therapy bills.
Some songs make a movie. Some songs haunt it forever. Here are ten needle drops that embedded themselves so deep in my brain, I can't hear them at the grocery store without seeing a movie scene play out.
Trailers used to be an art form. Now they're a hostage situation with a runtime. Ron rants about preview bloat, spoiler culture, and the rare promos that still remember what restraint looks like.
I gave myself a silly challenge: watch every single Best Picture winner since 1929. Somewhere around the fourth Kramer vs. Kramer-style divorce drama, I started questioning my life choices. Here's what ninety-six years of Academy taste taught me about Hollywood—and myself.
Subscription fatigue finally won. After another price hike and the quiet disappearance of shows I was halfway through, I pulled the plug on one of my streaming services. Turns out the local library and a decent Blu-ray collection make a pretty great consolation prize.
Ron explains why he hung up his popcorn bucket and walked away from the tentpole machine, and how three-hour superhero epics sucked the joy out of moviegoing. Plus, the smaller films and forgotten gems that made him fall back in love with watching things.
Ron gets cranky about the state of the modern TV finale — the shortened seasons, the surprise cancellations, the hype machine that promises everything and delivers a reshoot. He rates the infamous endings and makes the case for what we should all be demanding instead.