13. Two Thumbs Up

In today’s media landscape, one thing I bet you’ve never wanted more of is choices. A 2016 survey by Rovi suggested that the average viewer scrolls through streaming apps for at least 20 minutes before settling on something to watch—or in other words, the average length of a sitcom episode. I’ve certainly spent longer checking all of the different apps and then re-checking, desperate to find the exact right thing. This is what Barry Schwartz calls “the paradox of choice,” where the more choices presented to a consumer often lead to a less satisfactory outcome. So how do we parse through endless entertainment? Well, the solution may not need to be something new at all. This is what critics have been trying to do since the profession began.

What is worth your time? What is worth seeking out? How do we process what it means? A good critic answers all of these questions rather than simply working through a checklist of subjective qualifiers. And the best critics are as entertaining as a lot of the entertainment they assess. If you follow film criticism at all, it’s impossible not to have some awareness of two titans of the industry: Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. 

So in a time where culture reporting is seemingly more precarious than ever, we thought it would be worth doing a show looking into the role of criticism in our media ecosystem both in the past and present—and how the two most successful critics navigated these questions. All of this is the subject of Matt Singer’s new book, Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever, which is available now wherever you get books.

Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Today’s show featured music and clips from At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, On Cinema at the Cinema, The Critic, and The Tonight Show. 

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