That was the summer
a broken TV
served as the stand
for a smaller TV
that worked.
-“The Reservation Broadcasting System,” Sherman Alexie
My guest on the show today is the inimitable Sherman Alexie, poet, novelist, Substacker, and occasional screenwriter.
I would be surprised if you don’t already know who Alexi ise, given that he’s been an award winning and best-selling writer for decades now and is almsot certainly the best known Native American writer of our time.
I asked him on, naturally, to talk about genre television. I’d noticed over the past few years that whenever I posted something to Substack about whatever random genre TV I happened to watching at the moment, Alexie would often pop in to respond. It became clear that we shared an earnest love of TV as emotional comfort food, and I wanted to talk to him about that. It naturally spins off into all sorts of other issues about childhood, reservation culture, literature and other forms of media, and politics.
It is, in other words, an immensely fun conversation. Hope you enjoy.
Peace
