Who Is America?: Season 1

I'm co-signing on a take from Todd VanDerWerff I heard earlier today: that Sacha Baron Cohen's Who Is America? is the most disappointing show of 2018 so far. Not the worst one, but one that had so much initial potential and instead found so little to say.

Step back for a second. What, if anything, do we have to gain by watching Baron Cohen pose as an effeminate NPR-loving coastal liberal with a gray ponytail and a pink pussy hat while telling a town hall full of blue-collar Arizona fifty-somethings that their town was about to become the site of a gigantic mega-mosque? I mean, what's the joke here? I'm laughing, and I'm cringing, I'll admit - but what's the takeaway? Working class white boomers in Arizona are xenophobic? Go figure.

Or how about when Baron Cohen plays an Israeli military hothead who meets with Dick Cheney and tells him he's a big fan of all the torture Cheney did, and calls Cheney out for shooting a guy in the face. "2007 called..." I mean, the character's a riot - hell, most of the new characters are - but the show just doesn't seem to exist for any reason beyond having a laugh at how stupid politicians and celebrities and regular people are. I mean, fuck, look around! We all have Twitter and Facebook, we all know full well how stupid everyone else is!

The worst and most annoying character was an InfoWars-style idiot called Billy Wayne or something like that, who just used illogical arguments and false data to tell, for instance, Bernie Sanders that "everyone can be part of the one percent," or to pass climate change off to Jill Stein as seasonal temperature fluctuation. This isn't funny! It's exhausting. You can go anywhere on the Internet and find a thousand such idiots every day.

I think what separates a show like this from Baron Cohen's earlier work is, frankly, ten or fifteen years of cultural change. Time was, if you posed as a foreigner doing interviews for an Austrian or Kazakhstani TV show, you could get Americans to really let their guard down, say some things they might not be proud to reveal to their friends and families and neighbors. Now, everyone's just a blathering idiot, perfectly comfortable putting their full name next to opinions like "I fully support locking crime alien kids in jail at the border" for the entire world to see. Even ten years ago, Sarah Palin was already making an enormous ass out of herself on national news.

Like, it really might have been something if Sacha Baron Cohen somehow, in disguise, got some U.S. official to admit to rigging elections, or got O.J. Simpson to admit to murdering his wife, or whatever. But he didn't! Seriously, this whole show accomplished nothing, and none of its characters are going down as being remotely as memorable as Ali G, Borat, or Bruno. Oh well!

The Affair: Season 4

The Affair is a show I really liked for two seasons. Then it fell off the rails in its third season. Here's its fourth, which falls probably somewhere in between. My biggest concern for the show as it enters its fifth season is that it's just completely run out of story to tell.

I've already talked about one or two of the most interesting episodes with Sween, the only other guy I know who watches this thing. For those who don't or haven't - but are still reading this for whatever reason - the series begins with an extramarital affair. Noah and Alison are cheating with each other on respective spouses Helen and Cole during Noah and Helen's summer trip to Montauk. The first season is told in alternating Alison and Noah perspectives, and it's interesting to see the Rashomon effect right out of the gate, with each of them remembering or even just interpreting events differently. Where does the truth lie? Probably somewhere in between, right?

Season 2 expands to include Helen and Cole's perspectives. Now Noah and Alison are getting married - meaning they've gotten divorced from Helen and Cole - and all four of them still manage to get brought back together by a needless but interesting enough tragedy and trial.

Season 3 - and here's where things go south - Season 3 jumps ahead by three years. Noah and Alison are already divorced. So now the show's just about four divorced people, leading four largely separate lives - occasionally interacting, yes, but otherwise just doing their own things. So almost entirely gone now is the initial gimmick of the Rashomon effect. We're only seeing most events through one person's eyes at this point, and frankly there's little reason for any of these characters to be hanging out together at all. The original couples still have kids and all, but what are we doing here? And to top it off, there's a fifth character completely needlessly brought in to have a fifth perspective, a French professor who never shows up again after Season 3. Why?

Season 4, finally, does come up with some organic reasons for these four people to keep coming back to each other. But it accomplishes this by - SPOILERS! - killing off both Alison and also Helen's new husband. (And not because the two of them had an affair or anything - wouldn't that have been an interesting wrinkle!) The show's upcoming final season is confirmed to be its last, but really, what's left to do or say here? Will they write out Cole, entirely, and leave us with a final Noah-and-Helen season about co-parenting in LA? Will Noah and Cole work together, or perhaps against each other, to uncover the truth about Alison's death? (It was ruled a suicide, but was it?)

It just seems like a show whose initial premise was more or less, "The 'truth' is whatever you want it to be, depending on who you are," ought to be so fascinating, especially here in 2018, but instead the show just needs to wrap up the stories of these three remaining broken, damaged, wealthy, middle-aged white people. But we'll see!

Wild Wild Country: Season 1

Call me a broken record, I know, I know, but my biggest issue with this Netflix documentary miniseries was - say it with me - it didn't have to be nearly as long as it was.

Not much else to add here, really.

Sharp Objects: Season 1

Okay I'm posting out of order at this point but make it five straight female-driven dramas.

Read this book [consults blog archives] three years ago and liked it just fine. Always figured that with Gone Girl and Dark Places both being adapted into movies, it was only a matter of time for an adaptation of Sharp Objects. What I did not expect was that this 250-page murder mystery would get the HBO miniseries treatment and balloon into eight fucking hours of content. And this really just brings me to my main critique here - eight hours? Holy shit. Holy shit, no, this should have been four at most. There are all of three characters here - two half-sisters and their mother - and for all the depth to their various dark pasts and weird relationships, I'm sorry, there's just no way this deserved to take longer to watch (eight hours!) than it did to read. Plenty of adaptations expand on their source material - this miniseries barely even did so. It was just this slow, slow, painfully slow slog, I thought. The vibe was great, the set design was great, the soundtrack choices were very inspired, the way it dealt with the past influencing the present, flashbacks and present scenes just existing in the same scene at the same time - I loved it all. But what a shame this was eight hours long when four (or even five!) would have sufficed.

Seriously, I'm not averse to long and slow - look at how many multi-minute segments in Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul consist of like, criminals meticulously staging or cleaning up crime scenes - but you've got to make long takes and lethargic pacing matter.

A secondary, distant nitpick I have with this series was its casting. Look, Amy Adams is wonderful and talented, and no one disputes this. But are we really buying her as someone who's more or less thirty, with a teenage sister? She is 44 years old. And on the one hand, I know, I know, it's hard as hell for women in their forties to land compelling multidimensional roles, or so the thinking went as recently as 2015 or so. But I mean, she fucks an 18-year-old here. Mrs. Robinson fantasies aside, that just plays as weird. And it also plays as weird when she lets her mother bathe her and give her various medicines when she's sick. And I know the point is that it's a weird and fucked up family dynamic, but I just think it skews more realistic to have, say, a 30-year-old actress fucking that 18-year-old and being babied by her mother. This is no knock on Amy Adams or her age or appearance - she looks great here, and I'd even buy her as being in her mid-thirties. But it's very hard to lose yourself in a character being 30 or so when such a well-known actor is playing her. And I know not every actor is available for or interested in every gig, but I can't help but think this would have worked so much better with like, Emma Watson in the main role, caught between a dark past, a rough relationship with her mother, and a developing but generally untrusting relationship with her younger half-sister, whose affirmation she seeks. Speaking of which - Amma, perhaps even more so, is miscast here. Credit to Eliza Scanlen, the 19-year-old actress playing the role. She was great! But she was also 19, and very clearly not 13. So much of the shock of the book's twist ending comes from (SPOILERS!) the idea that a two-faced 13-year-old could be a stone-cold killer. That shock dosn't exist here! Eliza Scanlen is 19, so when you see her being a good little mama's girl at home it feels particularly like an act, a ploy, rather than just an actual childlike innocence. Again, not every actor, not every role, but I find myself wishing we had something more like a Mad Men-era Kiernan Shipka in the role. Someone actually young enough to not look out of place and shady as hell wearing nightgowns and playing with dollhouses.

Okay, I've ranted long enough. Lunchtime!

Claws: Season 2

Wow, make it four straight posts about female-ensemble dramas. Living my best life over here, folks!

Claws is a show that can only be described as a guilty pleasure. It's a pulpy and occasionally campy TNT melodrama that, in its second season, focused on a turf war between Russian druglords and the Dixie Mafia that centered on a nail salon in Palmetto, Florida. You're more or less guaranteed one totally wall-breaking, format-shifting sequence per episode - a music video, perhaps, or a family courtroom send-up, or a speed-ramped-as-hell action sequence in which a fat old man just beats the living hell out of like, four guys with guns.

It's not quite accurate to say that this thing leans directly into soap opera-absurd arcs and twists - this isn't Jane the Virgin - but Claws isn't afraid to dip a toe, a foot, hell even an entire leg into that proverbial pool. And this thing is Florida as fuck, too - bright colors, breezy beaches, this weird high-class version of the trashiest styles in women's fashion, white trash and alligators and drug fronts everywhere - it's like if Breaking Bad took place in Florida instead of New Mexico. (The vibe, I mean.) Or maybe it's more like if Justified took place there.

You know what I think this show is like? I think it's visually and stylistically like something Ryan Murphy would make, but if it were made with patience and competence and consistency. Does that make sense? Just a fun, dumb, bright show with deep (and deeply human) characters. I'm in for the long haul on this one.

The Bold Type: Season 2

A show about three millennial girls working for a magazine, The Bold Type was a show I didn't expect whatsoever in 2017. That I made it through another whole season in 2018 is just as surprising. Superficially, this just feels like a show it would be so, so easy not to watch for ten hours a year. And yet here I am, writing once again about this infectious little story of female friendship and New York twentysomething lifestyles.

It's... good? It's good enough. It's fine. Episodes in this second season took on distinctly "after-school special" vibes, with individual weekly storylines dedicated to issues like guns, drinking problems, unemployment, open relationships, and white privilege. Apparently some people didn't care for this, but if anything I kind of liked it. I mean let's treat this show like the ABC Family schlock that it is, right? Make this overt and preachy and easy-breezy viewing, please and thank you!

Yeah, I'll be back next year for Season 3.

Picnic at Hanging Rock: Season 1

This really didn't do an awful lot for me. It's a miniseries set in Australia in 1900 and it revolves around a trio of young women - high school seniors, I guess, at whatever the equivalent of a ladies' boarding school is - disappearing one day during a school picnic (field trip?) to nearby "Hanging Rock."

This is the summary I had going in, and I knew it was based on an old and beloved Australian book, so I was prepared for some sort of Top of the Lake-style murder mystery. But, no. No, this wasn't that, at all. This dove hard into David Lynch-style weirdness, loaded with dream logic and hallucinations and the like. I lost the plot somewhere around the second episode, and almost bailed - but then the second episode ended with a little twist I didn't see coming at all and, sure, I stuck around.

Oh! And Natalie Dormer is here. She's the main character, the school's headmistress, and she's all kinds of fucked up. I'd like to say Natalie Dormer delivered a great performance, but really, I'm just not sure what was going on half the time. Yael Stone is here too, but only barely. Certainly don't watch this thing for her, of all reasons.

Ultimately I appreciated this, and I'm glad it got made, and I don't really feel like I wasted six hours watching it. But that's the best praise I can give it - it was weird and surreal at times, and jumped all over the place chronologically (which makes sense - gotta keep those three missing girls in the picture). I barely followed the plot, but in reading summaries of the book and earlier adaptations of it, I've learned that the plot doesn't really matter or make sense at all. So then, what are we doing here? What's the point of this story, and why is it so beloved, and why's it been adapted three or four times already? Eh. Dunno!

Orange is the New Black: Season 6

Not feeling super wordy here, and I don't have it in me to break down the twenty-odd running pots in this prison drama at this point, but I have to give Orange Is the New Black credit for consistently being very good and very compelling television. This thing is tonally a mess and a nightmare, zipping between prison guard hijinks and wrongful murder convictions with enough whiplash to break your goddamn neck. Also, here in Season 6, a huge chunk of the cast from Seasons 1-5 is just flat out gone, and what surprised me most was how little I missed most of them. (Guess that's how it works when you have an ensemble cast of, like, forty people.)

But yeah, six years in, this show is still finding ways to stay fresh and interesting and socially relevant. This year's finale included a twist of fate for one character that was just the biggest goddamn gut punch I've received form any show since like, The Wire itself. The version of this show that dabbles with those punches is, bar none, the best TV show in the world today. But Orange Is the New Black is only that show like five percent of the time. Still very good! I like it very much, and while I'm sure it'll wear out its welcome someday, it's going remarkably strong as it heads into Season 7.

Blue Planet: Season 2

After I got all kinds of geeked up about Planet Earth II a year or two ago, Blue Planet II just felt a little bit lackluster. I really can't say why. It's another incredibly high quality nature documentary from the BBC Nature team, impressive from start to finish. Is it, perhaps, because the ocean - for all its vastness - just sort of feels like one big environment? How the animals there, despite their incredible biodiversity, feel more monotonous to watch than the hyper-specialized land animals found in deserts and jungles and mountains? Or maybe it's simply that I scratched a nature itch last year that I didn't need to revisit so soon. Again - I really can't say! But where Planet Earth flirted with - and possibly even cracked - my top ten in 2017, I don't think Blue Planet is anywhere in my top twenty or thirty in a much weaker 2018 television landscape. Oh well!

The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit

Here's a free downloadable title that serves as a prequel or tie-in of sorts to the upcoming Life Is Strange 2. As a standalone title, it's fine. Captures a great deal of the same vibe and tone as Life Is Strange did - nostalgic, whistful, bittersweetly tragic - but it's only like an hour or two long and it ends on a cliffhanger, which I probably should have seen coming but still sucks a butt in an otherwise character-driven game with an interesting story. Worth the dabble though, especially for the price.

BrainDead: Season 1

Here's a blast from the not-distant past that I finally got around to seeing, a show that defies all logic and feels simultaneously dated and ahead of its time.

Journey back with me to the summer of 2016, a simpler time when Donald Trump was still absolutely just a punchline and the prevailing national mood toward the presidential race was an exasperated sigh. "What is wrong with everyone in Washington?" you may have asked, bewildered, with two hands in the air, as if you were Jerry Seinfeld.

What this show posits is that alien bugs have come to earth and crawled inside our politicians' brains. In particular, the aliens are forcing the far left and the far right to go even farther, even harder, the idea being that by dividing our nation the aliens can take over more readily without a united front mounting a challenge against them.

So it's a show that was ahead of its time in that it was the first one, to the best of my knowledge, to really capture the spirit of how fractured and divided we had become by 2016. Democrats and Republicans had shut down the government over budget bill disagreements as long ago as 2013, and I can absolutely see what this show was trying to go for in calling "both sides" of the aisle insane and incompetent.

But where it's hopelessly dated and almost offensively whitewashing reality by 2018 standards is in its characterization of the "far left" and the "far right." The show ignores class divide and racial politics altogether, characterizing the "far left" as an extreme caricature of, like, what moderates in 2004 thought liberals cared most about, like saving endangered species. This is especially weird since Bernie Sanders is repeatedly referenced on screen! And the extreme republicans are depicted as being mildly xenophobic form a place of earnest idiocy, rather than vehemently and openly racist.

What's weirdest about what BrainDead seems to try to be saying is that the show makes hay out of the corruption and shady dealings on both sides of the aisle, going so far as to have a Democratic senator straight up switch parties at one point, only to be countered by a Republican senator doing so immediately, but then its ultimate moral seems to be that extremism is bad and that centrists can save us from partisan gridlock - you know, from space aliens trying to break our government via ideological standoff.

All that said, perhaps I'm giving BrainDead too much credit for having a thought out message to spread at all; it's not like most Americans, particularly in 2016, would notice the cognitive dissonance lying at the intersection of "a healthy Senate rides the center of every issues and compromises constantly" and "our Senators are horribly corrupt people with no actual moral principles."

Anyway, enough about the politics of it all - let me sell you on the show!

Thirteen episodes. Stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead right before her mini-breakout in 2017 from Cloverfield Lane and Fargo, and she's great. So's the rest of the mostly no-name cast. The tone s what's delightfully weird here. It's not Patriot weird, but it comes damn close, especially considering that this thing aired on- oh yeah, have I not said this yet? - CBS of all places, America's grandparents' favorite network. I mean this show is truly bizarre, but in the right ways, not in the Adult Swim ways. "You Might Think," the 1984 hit single by The Cars, recurs so often that it becomes a catchy leitmotif for the alien invasion. Also, in a few cases of bug-brain-takeover gone bad, people's heads explode. Graphically, and all gory-like, right there on CBS. "Previously on" recaps come in the form of little acoustic songs from a fourth-wall-breaking narrator, and by one late season episode he's so overwhelmed and bummed out by everything that he just recaps a Gunsmoke episode instead.

In summation it's exactly the kind of show I find myself gravitating toward - something different, something new, something substantially weird. It never had any chance of a second season, and it knew as much, and wrapped up the first season in perfectly adequate series-ending fashion. It's absolutely not must-see TV, but I recommend it all the same to anyone looking for something delightfully quirky and weirdly 2016-specific in tone. Amazon Prime. You can do far worse!

Borders: Season 1

I'm not even sure if this constitutes a season of television - blurred lines, baby - but Vox put out a series of six YouTube videos in 2017, called the videos "episodes" and the whole thing a "season," and, well, why not?

Borders is a show(?) about international borders and I absolutely loved it. Quick and easy and educational, to-the-point, not half as schlocky as most of Vox's video content - this whole series is extremely "for me," fam. Like, first episode they're focusing on Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and how two countries sharing one small island can be so vastly different when it comes to economy and stability and demographics. And I just listened to a dozen-hour podcast on the Haitian Revolution, so, that lined up quite nicely. Second episode they're talking about Arctic nations making claims on underwater continental shelves in the Arctic Circle, focusing significantly on an all-Russian outpost on a northern Norwegian archipelago called Svalbard - a place I desperately wanted to visit when I went to Norway a year ago, and where two friends are honeymooning as I type this! Final episode, they're in and around the Spanish city of Melilla, one of two cities owned and controlled by Spain but located on the northern coast of Africa. I was just in Spain, and became briefly fascinated by the history of why Spain owns tiny pieces of Africa, and why the UK owns a tiny piece of Spain in Gibraltar.

And the series isn't just "about" these places; narrator/host Johnny Harris actually travels to these places, generally to both sides of whatever border he's talking about, in what looks, at least from the outside, like the world's coolest job.

There's a second season - a spin-off, maybe? - going up in weekly installments right now about the non-international border between Hong Kong and China. I'm in!

Everything Sucks!: Season 1

Summer nights make for a great time to catch up on low-stakes TV - still love a good dual-logging effort where I can divide attention between an easy TV show and a slow-moving video game - so I finally got around to checking out Everything Sucks!, a 1990s-as-hell half-hour show about coming out and coming of age. It was good! Critics gave it a lukewarm response, and I totally understand why - there's really nothing going on here that you've never seen before, and the '90s references are borderline stifling especially in the pilot, to the point where one character calls something "phat" and then specifies that he means "phat with a P-H," which, come on now TV show, don't go around explaining the blatant references that hard!

But I liked this. It felt very Freaks and Geeks to me, and that's even before accounting for both shows being set twenty years in the past when they came out. The main characters are a film nerd kid without a dad and a closeted lesbian without a mom. They date, and they also butt heads with the drama club upperclassmen, then later befriend the drama club upperclassmen, and of course they all make a movie together, and, yeah. Nothing special here - just an enjoyable and easy-to-watch show, and one that'll absolutely scratch a '90s itch for a certain demographic not unlike myself.

Also, I know I literally just posted about GLOW and how I liked it a lot, but I have to say that at this point '80s nostalgia is tired and '90s nostalgia is wired. Give me more "kids listening to Oasis for the first time" and less cocaine and big-ass hair. Yes, the '90s were dull as hell, but that's got its own special kind of charm, no?

GLOW: Season 2

The first season of GLOW fell just a little bit short of my expectations, but that's not uncommon for a new show, especially when it's hyped or advertised as one thing and then it turns out to be another thing. I came for an '80s lady wrestling dramedy, and what I got was a smaller and more character-driven story - collection of stories, really - about a ragtag group of women just trying to get their wrestling show off the ground. In hindsight, the first season of GLOW was very good, but I underrated it when I first saw it because what I had hoped to see was more of the wrestling show-within-a-show itself, the behind-the-scenes management of the storylines and character arcs. Someone described the whole thing as "having that issue where the pilot is the entire first season," and I think that's the best way to put it.

All that said - man, I really loved the second season of GLOW! Thanks to the groundwork the first season put in (of, you know, showing the groundwork these ladies put in), everything hits the ground running in Season 2. The characters and their relationships are firmly in place - and their kayfabe characters are already established - and the show is able to just jump right in and tell a whole bunch of interesting stories about these women and their silly little wrestling league. It can be frustrating, but overall it is a great sign when a TV show keeps leaving you wanting more. And I want more GLOW! More seasons, and dare I say, longer seasons. The second season's finale arguably makes for a satisfying series finale - any final scene that just cuts around to different characters' uncertain faces while Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" plays will do that - but no, fuck that, give me more GLOW. Seriously, why hasn't this been renewed for a third season yet? What the hell is going on at Netflix?