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?