The Art of Television 2026
“There was a time when cinema was our clearest reflection of the culture. Today, that conversation increasingly belongs to television.
Perhaps it’s the rhythm of the medium itself. Television unfolds over weeks and months rather than hours, allowing characters to evolve with a complexity that mirrors our own lives. It has become the place where we wrestle with questions of identity, ambition, power, intimacy and belonging — not as fixed ideas, but as ongoing negotiations. The most memorable series of the past year don’t offer easy answers. Instead, they invite us to sit with contradiction.
We hope this issue reflects that spirit: a celebration of the artists, craftspeople and storytellers redefining what television can be, and a reminder that the most compelling stories are often those that help us better understand ourselves.”
—Andrew Wren and Michaela Dosmantes, Co-Editorial Directors
Faces of 2025
A museum in Los Angeles, a gallery in New York and 12 of the year’s most compelling actors. At LACMA and Sprüth Magers, we photographed the performers who defined this season of television—and asked them what art has to do with it.
A Love Story
The stars of FX’s record-breaking show have brought Camelot’s most talked-about romance back to life, capturing its glamour, longing and inevitable heartbreak.
Being Louisa
As Marian Brook on HBO’s The Gilded Age, Louisa Jacobson has spent three seasons transforming from a penniless ingenue into a woman slowly finding her place among New York’s elite.
Franco Franco
James and Tom Franco were born a few days shy of two years apart, to parents who met as painters at Stanford and then both stopped. Their sons didn’t.
DIGITAL IMAGE COURTESY OF AMALIA ULMAN AND RHIZOME AT THE NEW MUSEUM
Performing the Self
When posting yourself online becomes a job, who’s really doing the watching?
Valerie’s Reflection
For 20 years, Lisa Kudrow has embodied Valerie Cherish in fleeting bursts—three seasons spread across as many decades. After The Comeback’s final run, Kudrow reflects on how age has softened Valerie’s desperation into something closer to grace, and why saying goodbye to a character this enduring might not really be goodbye at all.
Holding the Line
Antiheroes are out. TV has handed the lead to exhausted professionals patching institutions too broken to fix.
L.A. Confidential
I Love LA has spent its first season skewering and celebrating the ambition, chaos and codependency that comes with trying to make it in Los Angeles.
12 X 14 INCHES
Aurel Schmidt, Trash Dolls
Since 2019, Aurel Schmidt has drawn her Trash Dolls: figures assembled from the detritus of downtown New York—plastic baggies, candy wrappers, human hair, the odd Swarovski crystal.
Material World
Inside the invented universes of four of the year’s most transporting shows, built from real brick, salvaged fuselage, 3D-printed marble and hardware that could pass for NASA’s.
Little Screens Everywhere
As the world moves increasingly online, contemporary artists and institutions are seemingly becoming more and more enamored with television’s rapidly outmoding place in our homes and our hearts—as a rash of TV-centric exhibitions this year suggests.
A Curious Eye
Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer opens his Los Angeles home to talk Warhol, Richter and a Murakami he bought over Instagram.
© 2026 ERIC FISCHL / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY
Members Only
Sometimes, the sweet thing you’re after is actually poison.
In Memoriam: James Burrows
The television legend directed more than 1,000 episodes of TV and won 11 Emmys, but few viewers ever knew his name. The Cheers co-creator, who died in June at 85, spent five decades perfecting the multi-cam sitcom.
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