Mittell: My tastes don’t align with genre as much as with narrative mode. I wouldn’t call it a genre, but long-form television with complex narratives are what I gravitate toward most of all. These span traditional genres, like crime shows (The Wire and Dexter), sitcoms (Arrested Development and The Office), and sci-fi (Lost and Battlestar Galactica), as well as harder-to-classify dramas like Breaking Bad and In Treatment.

Shetley: Film noir (if we can call it a genre). I’ve become increasingly impatient with the body of conventions that permeates the American cinema: the reluctant hero, regeneration through violence, the hothead who breaks the rules to get things done, the valuation of intuition over reason, the hooker with a heart of gold. These elements are not entirely absent from noir, but appear in it with an infrequency for which I am grateful. I find it refreshing to submerge myself in the cleansing sleaze of film noir, whether classic or neo-.