Swiss Army Man

No need for me to keep posting my silly old Letterboxd reviews - you guys get the point - but instead, damn, can we talk about A24 for a second?

I don't know much about the company beyond that it's an independent film distributor, but they're absolutely crushing it of late, and they seem to be responsible for ten or twenty movies I've loved in the past four years or so.

Spring Breakers

The Bling Ring

The Spectacular Now

Enemy

Under the Skin

Obvious Child

Ex Machina

Room

The Witch

Green Room

The Lobster

And now Swiss Army Man. Incredible! I've liked or loved all of those movies, with each of them pulling in a 7 out of 10 from me or better over on Letterboxd. (Also from A24? Tusk and Dark Places. They can't all be winners.)

Oh and perhaps you've heard of Moonlight? That's an A24 production as well. As are American Honey, 20th Century Women, Krisha, and like half a dozen upcoming releases I'm already excited for.

So, yeah. Good on you, A24!

Hidden Figures

Okay, this one's a little better. No, not the movie - that too - but my Letterboxd review!

Safe and soft even for an Oscar-friendly biopic, but that's okay - a feel-good story about black women in the 1960s doesn't need to be out there taking risks and pushing envelopes. At worst it tries to cover too many bases; this is about the Civil Rights Movement, but also about women in the workplace, about teamwork making the dream work, but also about individual success stories. It's a workplace drama, a family drama, and a space race thriller all at once. It features math and explosions. Essentially it's three separate movies crammed into one movie's running time, but then, that's exactly the type of creative engineering solution these women would have come up with to make it happen at all.

See? Maybe? No?

Anyway, I always find myself in a tight spot between "when the Oscar nominees are announced" and "when the Oscars are awarded" because all of a sudden I'm no longer watching and rating and reviewing movies; I'm watching and rating and reviewing them with the tacit knowledge that these have been declared the best movies of the year. Like for instance, I liked La La Land just fine - call it an eight out of ten - but now that it's got fourteen nominations and is the favorite to win Best Picture of 2016 in a month, I'm all angry and spiteful and annoyed about its very existence. "This!?" I'm asking. "This!?"

But then something like Hidden Figures gets nominated, this family-friendly by-the-numbers PG-rated thing, and it's clear it has absolutely no shot at winning Best Picture, and it's flawed in several ways and safe in several others, and I'm just sitting here like, "Oh hey, awesome! Cool! Good for Hidden Figures!" Even though I very much thought La La Land was a better movie, I'll be cheering for Hidden Figures to beat it an an upset, against absolutely all the odds.

But then I look down the nomination list a bit and see Octavia Spencer nominated for best supporting actress, and I'm just flummoxed. Her? For this? For that very very ordinary performance I just saw? I know the award shows have their own intricate politics and all, but I just can't fathom any other actress not giving the exact performance Octavia Spencer gave here. Gah!

So maybe I'm starting to understand why so many people scoff at the idea of art as competition.

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl

This barely merits a write-up, but:

Legit thought this was a low budget kids' TV show when it started playing after Sesame Street on HBO. Nothing insightful to say here; dogshit is just kinda dogshit, you know? That said, astonished to find out Robert Rodriguez did this.

Oof. Kept it nice and short and still I don't feel like there's any punch to that. Meh. Flat movie makes for flat three-sentence review. But yeah, this was very bad. Looked cheap as hell - which, hey, 2005, but still. The acting was awful all around, too, and not because this was a cast of no-names. You see Sharkboy up there? Sharkboy is Taylor Lautner, just three years before breaking out in the Twilight movies. David Arquette also, uh, "stars." Nothing to see here. Let's all just move on.

The Witness

No, sorry, not the video game. This documentary! It's available from PBS - catch it now before the whole network gets defunded!

Here's what I said on Letterboxd:

A documentary focusing less on the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese and more on her brother Bill's quest, five decades later, to get to the bottom of what really happened on that infamous night. Did 38 witnesses really ignore her cries for help like you were told in Sociology 100? I came here looking for a Rashomon-tinted caper of busted false narratives and a satisfying conclusion - and so did Bill - but, no such luck. Instead the doc makes a late turn toward being a poignant meditation on forgiveness and acceptance amid grief and uncertainty. It's touching, but slight.

To expand just a little bit and give oh-so-minor spoilers, my biggest reaction of any type came very late in the film as Bill prepares to confront his sister's killer, Winston Moseley - a man who confessed to the murder fifty years ago (along with a second one) and who had previously broken out of prison once already while serving his life sentence. Bill just wants to hear Moseley himself describe the events of the evening - whether his sister screamed before she was stabbed, whether a man yelled out a window "leave her alone!" or not, whether Moseley retreated back to his car before turning back around or not, and so on. Bill starts by inviting the Moseley's son - a reverend - over for a filmed conversation, and Bill just displays the patience of a saint with this man. Rather than contrition and humility, all Moseley's son - again, a reverend! - has for Bill is self-pity about what it's been like to lose his father at such a young age, and the only reason his father is still locked up is the notoriety of this particular murder, and oh by the way the only reason he even stabbed your sister to death on the street was because she was calling him the N-word. You can see Bill's heart just drop completely as his eyebrows raise ever so slightly. (Bill's a goddamn double-amputee, by the way, and has been since the Vietnam War. His tenacity and patience are downright inspirational.) But Bill doesn't argue or protest or defend his sister; he just lets the reverend keep showing his ass to anyone watching.

It gets worse! Moseley's son begins to tell Bill that a lot of his friends told him not to even come here today. "Genovese," after all - there's a Genovese crime family, you know? - but hey, he's not afraid to die, if it's his time, it's his time. And Bill just sits there, completely unfazed, and nearly deadpans, "So you're not only cordial for coming here - you're courageous for coming here." Beatify this man.

You know what? After describing all of that, I found this exact clip on the Internet. Watch it: https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/514019/the-witness-kitty-genovese/

At the end of the day, this isn't a movie about the Rashomon effect; it's a movie about how little we collectively care for the truth. We retcon our narratives, deny our own apathy, exaggerate news stories for dramatic effect, and simply genuinely forget details as time goes by. I mean, it's clear that facts don't matter - look no further than the current White House for proof of that much - but maybe they never really have!

The Things They Carried

Here's the long-form cut of my Goodreads review of The Things They Carried, which I very much enjoyed:

A consensus favorite high school reading assignment of friends who hated high school reading assignments. It's a collection of interconnected Vietnam War short stories - or possibly memoirs, but really, what's the difference? - from Tim O'Brien, who was there. It's full of all your standard war tropes and stock characters, except that it's light on gruesome battle action. Focuses instead on the misery and solace between the battles, and on how death and violence can weigh on a man, freeze a man in the heat of the moment, drive a man to suicide years later. Gradually changes from a story about conflicts to an internal conflict over stories. Author O'Brien yields to narrator Tim, who freely admits in later stories that earlier stories were only that: stories, gussied up with artistic liberty. There's a compelling case made for "story" truth being more important than "real" truth; Tim will exaggerate what it's like to kill a man in order for a reader to more closely comprehend that feeling, even if the details themselves are exaggerations or complete fabrications. The whole thing ends with Tim suggesting along the same lines that writing about the dead is as close as one can get to bringing them back to life, if only for a fleeting moment. Solid stuff, and it doesn't waste any time, as the best story (the eponymous one) hits a home run right out of the leadoff spot.

Goddammit. This was supposed to make me word things more concisely!

Steven Universe: Season 3

So here's what's up. I've full-on bought in on this show - not "second best show of 2016" bought in, but I mean, top twenty, easily. It's just so damn fun and enjoyable. But! But I'm going to echo something Kevin said when he called Steven Universe the fifth or sixth-best show of 2016. Season 3 had no sense of urgency! There were twenty-four episodes here, depending on where the seasons start and end - which is another issue entirely, but whatever - and although Season 3 began and ended on high notes, the whole middle stretch there was just... slow. There were maybe ten or twelve or fifteen straight episodes that just did absolutely nothing to advance the show's mythology, its plots, in conflicts. I don't need to see Steven and Connie drag racing against a douchebag. I don't need to see Steven spend an episode trying to rehabilitate a primitive centipede monster. I don't really care about baby Sour Cream. I had no desire to see Steven and Lars swap bodies. And I definitely didn't want to go five or six straight episodes without hearing from Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl!

I mean, don't get me wrong - still plenty of awesome here. Seeing the Gems play baseball was a lot of fun, as was the "Shorty Squad" spending a day in an amusement park; Peridot's emergence as a breakout character picked up right where it left off at the end of the second season. Amethyst got a great arc late in the season where she lost and then regained her confidence and swagger. And, sure, Uzo Aduba's Bismuth was an unexpected surprise. And I've always loved Lapis for reasons I can't fully understand - I just want her to find happiness, dammit! Oh, and that full-blown musical episode was pretty neat, even if "Greg becomes a millionaire" is a weird and very forced arc that this show totally didn't need at all.

But look at me, babbling on like an angry nerd about what worked and what didn't, when what's really important here is how quickly and fully this show has captured my attention and interest. I'm all in! I'll be caught up completely in a matter of days, I'm sure, and the DVR is set to record the rest of Season 4. And then we can all gab about our favorite characters and moments and theories! Hooray! Sween, jump on in here! The water's wonderful!

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Season 1

Alright. I know this will be an uphill sell - it's literally the lowest-rated show on broadcast network television and it's on the CW and there's not a single big name or recognizable face among its cast. It's a musical about a successful thirty-year-old lawyer who throws her career away and moves across the country in order to be closer to her middle school crush, which, hey, super uncomfortable, right? And I know my "Jane the Virgin is good" claims have fallen mostly on indifferent ears, so what good would pitching its Monday night lead-in do?

So, hey, I get it. And I won't push this on any of you. I promise. But please - at the very least - check out some - or all - of the musical clips below. That's all I ask. Maybe you'll see something you like!

Here's Rebecca going all single white female on her crush's beautiful girlfriend:

And here's Rebecca's very stereotypical Jewish mother arriving for a visit:

And here's the whole crew offering up a depressing but upbeat look at what Christmas in Southern California is like:

And here's Rebecca showing off her parent-impressing skills:

And here's another guy trying to convince Rebecca to forget about her ex and settle for him instead:

And here's the thing - these are five out of something like forty little song-and-dance numbers from the first season. And they're almost all fantastic. And there's no genre or subject that this show won't tackle. There's a Les Mis parody. There's a Disney villain-style song. There's a rap battle between Rebecca and her high school rival - a lawyer representing another firm. There are songs about sex with strangers, huge boobs, and coming out as a bisexual. Nearly all of them are total earworms. Most are hilarious. Some cut deeply. The five I've linked to aren't even necessarily my five favorites - they just seem to show off the breadth and depth of where this show goes and what it does.

Anyway, Season 2 is still airing, but almost over, and I'm pretty sure Netflix has this deal with the CW where once a season ends it hits Netflix in its entirety like a week or two later. So what I'm saying is, yeah, I'll be back soon with another season of this one, I'm sure. Loving it so far! So is Marissa.

The Good Place: Season 1

I don't think any of you watched the first season of The Good Place. Here are some reasons you might consider watching The Good Place.

1. It was made by Michael Schur, who also made Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
2. This season was only thirteen episodes long and the plan seems to be to make every remaining season just thirteen episodes long - a refreshing concession from NBC to try to be more like a cable network.
3. It's a high concept comedy, which is a rarity even today when there are literally hundreds of scripted shows on the air. In case you're unfamiliar, Kristen Bell has died and gone to heaven. Except it's not quite "heaven," but rather "the good place." (Bad people go to "the bad place.") Except Kristen Bell was a bad person. There's been a mistake! And her mere presence in the good place is causing it to unravel at the seams.
4. It raises interesting ethical and philosophical questions. Not in a deep or profound way - this is a 22-minute NBC comedy - but at least in a way that, again, differentiates it from anything else on TV.
5. Ted Danson!
6. After a bit of a rough start - not uncommon for a broadcast network comedy pilot, mind you - the show hits its groove and finds its characters and while rarely laugh-out-loud funny or shit-eating-grin goofy, it pulls you in with its own mythology and rules and history, sort of, like Lost used to do. Remember Lost? You loved Lost, once. (This isn't Lost.)
7. The first season finale pulled the rug out with a genuinely unexpected twist that enhances everything that came before it rather than cheapening it, and actually makes me more excited for a second season than I otherwise would have been. Kind of like Westworld. Ugh, you guys liked Westworld, at least more than I did. (This also isn't Westworld.)

That's what I've got. Give it a try. Or not! Look, I'm just saying, it's interesting and unique and feels a lot more rewarding at this point than - not to point fingers here but - other recent high-concept comedies on broadcast networks. (Yeah, what I'm saying is, this show is The Last Man on Earth.)

Midnight Special

In another shift that signifies the death knell of the blog, I've turned my attention not just to Goodreads for my books, but to Letterboxd for my movies. I'm trying to be more concise in my wording, I guess - it's the Age of Twitter, baby! Like to the point where later today a Twitter account is being sworn in as President. #TLDR is a whole damn modern lifestyle. I guess I'd rather push three-sentence reviews on my Facebook followers than dump an assload of word soup on this blog for two or three people - particularly, the same two or three people I'll chat with at length about books, movies, what have you.

So with that in mind, here's my review!

(See? The preamble to that link, explaining why it's here, was longer than my linked review itself. Yeesh.)

Sick poster, though, right?

Sherlock: Season 4

What a mess! Messes can be fun, granted. Entertaining, even. But instead of gripping and compelling television, the newest season of Sherlock (and for my money, the entire series) is just a barely cogent series of fun sequences that scream "look at how well Benedict Cumberbatch is thinking on his feet without even trying!" mixed with absurd melodrama and farcical twists and action sequences that feel like they needed higher budgets than they were granted. Sherlock just isn't good! It's not that I'm missing what makes it great; it's that the show simply isn't great. And that's fine! Anyone out there reading this who's a big fan - hey, cool! I enjoy a lot of crappy television myself. No judgment here. But this particular mess just ain't my thing.

Kayla was telling me recently that a big reason the show seems to get messier and less consistent every time it comes back (her own hypothesis) is that, since there are two years between every season, its writers go off and do different things between seasons, and every time they come back they've all acquired different flourishes and styles and they're eager to cram them all into three ninety-minute episodes and call it a season of Sherlock. That makes a lot of sense to me! It certainly seems to explain the show's ongoing and ever-wrosening ADHD. And it also helps to suggest why this show is, and long has been, literally unbelievable, which is not something an ostensible mystery series should strive to be. I don't think I'll be back for Season 5.

Oryx and Crake

Here's what I wrote about Oryx and Crake over on Goodreads:

Michael Crichton's semi-plausible science fiction meets Kurt Vonnegut's penchant for absurd human-triggered apocalypse meets George Orwell's dystopian apathy. This was thought out and imaginative, with genetically engineered monsters run amok and a miserable human being clinging to life all alone in a changed climate - kind of like a more restrained Hunger Games where Katniss is the only character. Two different timeframes here: before the end of the world and after. Before is all character backstory and worldbuilding; after is all existential depression and reflection. Only issue is, where's the beef? The story's in the flashbacks and the cataclysm comes and goes in a few pages near the end. Couldn't blame a reader for wanting something more from this.

I stand by all of this, but here on the blog, where I can ramble a little more with the comfort of knowing that no one but two or three dear friends will ever see what I'm saying, I'll add some bullets.

• This is my second Atwood book, the first being The Handmaid's Tale, which I liked a little more than this one, and which they're making into a TV series over at Hulu, coming out in April, which should be great.
• This book came out in 2003, and it shows just a little bit; Atwood was maybe ahead of her time in recognizing just how important the Internet would be in shaping our minds and communication in the near future where her novel is set, but the vocabulary and stylistic conventions are very much "of their era:" The Net, rather than the Internet; e-message, rather than simply message; and a whole host of camelcase-titled corporations like OrganInc, AnooYoo, and RejoovenEsence. It's tough to blame her, but it stands out just a little bit in an otherwise undated story.
• Atwood followed this up with two sequels, both of which are now in my backlog. I've grown weary (more like exhausted) of dystopian trilogies lately, but this is distinctly not YA stuff, so I've got high hopes.
• The backstory - the worldbuilding I was talking about above - if you don't know and want to, revolves around genetic engineering at "Big Pharma" in the near future. Remember that recent news story about how they grew a human ear on a rat? (I think that happened after this was even published, so, kudos, Atwood.) Well in this book they've made giant fast-growing pigs with eight human kidneys. They've made military-grade vicious wolf-dogs for security companies. They've made raccoon-skunk hybrids and snake-rat hybrids just for testing purposes, but different specimens have escaped, and the wilderness is now overrun by these "rakunks" and "snats" and other terrifying things.
• The book ends on a cliffhanger of sorts when - SPOILERS! - Snowman, the last man on earth, comes across a group of three other people. He's debating whether or not to greet them in peace or try to murder all three and take their food and supplies, in what he knows is probably a suicide mission. And the book ends right here. Now, there is a sequel - and another one, as mentioned above - but it really feels like this was meant to be a stand-alone story for the longest time, just the last man on earth clinging to life in a world overrun by genetic monsters before ultimately killing himself, before Atwood decided, "but wait, I've got another story to tell here." The abrupt left turn really cheapens and deadens the helpless vibe of the rest of the book, and I hope the next two novels are worth it - for now, Oryx and Crake seems like it would have been better off as a stand-alone title. But we'll see!

Steven Universe: Season 2

Thanks to a Hulu account assist from Sween, I'm another season into Steven Universe - now just one year behind being fully caught up - and I'm right there with Trev, absolutely loving it. His recent post sums the premise and the appeal up pretty adequately, but one thing neither of us have really hit on yet is the show's emotional core. Yes, it alternates seamlessly between being a cute kid-friendly animated comedy and an action-filled epic space opera of sorts, but where the series really began to shine in Season 2 - to look like something wholly unique and special - was in its exploration of the relationships between its characters. Friendships, romances, platonic bonds, slowly defrosting rivalries, intensely felt personal betrayals, lovers, jealous spurned lovers, loyal guardians, father-son bonds, mother-son love - all this takes center stage in the second season. The very concept of "fusion" - a special, literal fusing of any two Gems into something bigger and stronger - beautifully serves as a metaphor for same-sex marriage and genderfluidity while still making perfect sense as an element of a kid-friendly cartoon. It's actually really impressive, when I step back and think about it, and so is the show's slow-burn reveal of its characters' backstories and origins. Trev has also repeatedly pointed out that the art and music deserve recognition, and they do. (Although I'll never not cringe at Steven's father's perma-sunburn.) Sween, you really owe it to yourself to give this one a whirl. It's fun! And it somehow nails the intersection on the "easy to watch" and "rewarding to watch" Venn Diagram.

The Crown: Season 1

File this one under "pretty good period dramas full of fancy British people." In other words it's your go-to Downton Abbey replacement if you need one. Netflix already has big things planned for this one; if things work out it will run for six seasons spanning from the 1950s to the present day, following the reign of Queen Elizabeth II from her marriage to her - I'm just gonna come out and say it - probably impending death. Think of this series as the sequel to The King's Speech and the prequel to The Queen. (Just kidding - nobody saw either of those movies!) This was a Marissa pick, and I started out just watching it in the background, but The Crown won me over quickly. Of note are John Lithgow as Winston Churchill and Jared Harris (Lane Pryce from Mad Men) as the late King George VI - both of whom will likely be gone in Season 2. (Thanks for the spoilers, world history.) Still, I'm invested in the long haul here - it's the history nerd in me more than any nascent British royal family buff - and I'm looking forward to seeing the latter half of the twentieth century unfold over the next several years. (Who do you guys think should play Princess Di? Obviously Rupert Grint is Prince Harry.)

Looking Back and Looking Forward

The turning of the calendar is always a great time to pause and reflect, to review what's gone on lately and to course correct when necessary for the year ahead. This is why we spend so much of December reflecting on the highlights and lowlights of the previous 11 months, and it's why we have New Year's Resolutions for the year ahead.

This blog is no different! At its core, it's a place where I want to share my thoughts on pop culture consumables - books, movies, shows, and games - with my friends, and where I want to read any thoughts they have to offer as well. Let's briefly review the history of the blog and its changing nature.

It began in 2009 (wow, eight years ago) primarily as a motivation for me to go through my shelves and finally get around to reading, watching, and playing everything I owned but had not yet read, watched, or played. The goal then was to eliminate or empty out my backlog. Early on, I even had quotas and thresholds like "beat two games for every new one I buy." I was joined by Sweeney, and back in those early days, we posted here constantly.

Backlog-elimination quickly became a secondary goal to simple pop culture discussion. With more and more people joining the blog over the years that followed, our "golden age" was probably 2011-2012 or so, with lots of people posting frequently, commenting frequently, and just discussing books, movies, and games in general.

And then, as things do, the blog began to fade. A lot of us got married, bought houses, had kids, began to treat our jobs as "career opportunities" rather than mere "means to paychecks." These things happen! We read less, played less, and watched less. Some of us stopped writing altogether, and the rest appeared infrequently enough for this to essentially become a solo effort once again for a while there. Meanwhile, Keith was motivated enough to launch a website and a series of podcasts where we all began writing about and discussing games, TV shows, and even movies. It was a stylish new way - and a more legitimate way - to do so much of what we'd been doing here for so long, books aside. And it was easy to include more people - people like J and Stevie and Mikey, who never had much interest in writing, and people like Kevin, who were far more games-oriented than any of us, and people like Trashcan and Kiki and Andrew and Lucia and, well, the list goes on and on and on.

At this point, I was posting things back here at the blog mostly out of habit, unsure if anyone would ever even read them aside form some future version of myself. Some of my posts here were just links to more formal reviews I'd made over at gametimebro.com, or to podcasts where they were discussed casually, but in detail. For a while I debated shutting this down entirely, or at least migrating it over to gametimebro.com in full, like our own sad little "merger" to have fun with. And who knows? I still might! Combining our efforts seems very reasonable, particularly as we all seem to have diminishing efforts in general. Oof. Aging! Am I right?

But lo! The blog lives. It doesn't necessarily thrive, but there's been an uptick in activity recently, thanks largely to Trevor, and even keith has expressed some interest in posting quick rapid-fire reviews on games here instead of more formally and professionally over on gametimebro. Marissa, one of the fastest readers I know, has started reading books again after not doing so for, essentially, the last two years. To all of this I say, yes! Mor econtent! Let's do this! Let's make the blog great again! (Goddammit.)

So in the spirit of reinvigorating the heart and soul of the blog - quick thoughts, actual discussions in the comments - I'm going to abandon my two-year practice of "TV Dumps" and "Movie Dumps." I barely ever, if at all, watch things on DVD or Blu-ray anymore anyway; those backlogs are tiny and also irrelevant. We're in full stream mode, baby! (Yes, I'm just recognizing something that was inevitable and alreayd a realit back in, oh, 2012. But still.)

Anyway, TL;DR, my goal this year (and going forward in general) is going to be to post more frequently, more rapidly, more casually. And part of that means "dumping" out my thoughts on shows and movies as I watch them, rather than working on drafts that just sit there for a month or two. I hope this invited more conversation and more casual discussion.

One day the blog will fade away for good, as all things do. But not yet. Not yet!

Steven Universe: Seasons 2 & 3

Steve Universe is a show that has slowly and unexpectedly crept into my heart. What I first perceived to be a light-hearted and instantly forgettable kid's cartoon has quickly become a heart-warming epic that sits as one of my favorite shows on TV right now. And I never expected that to happen.

When season 3 of Steven Universe made it to the #2 slot in the Subject To Change podcast, Keith's overwhelming cynicism that we were just fucking with him was kind of understandable. I mean, what's next? My Little Pony? (No offense to any Bronies out there, but I'm not sure what the appeal of that show is.) Point is, Steven Universe doesn't seem like the show that deserve the acclaim that it receives. I mean, on its surface it looks like a show who's pitch would be:

A goofy kid in a sunny, beachside town strives each and every day to make his friends and community feel happy and loved with his wacky antics. 

But what the show's pitch really is:

After the conclusion of a long, galactic civil war, a superhuman warrior sacrifices her life to give birth to a human boy. Now under the protection of his mother's warrior companions, the boy must learn how to harness his inherited powers so that he can help protect Earth from the dangers that his mother once fought against... dangers that still lurk in the distant cosmos.  

The show is in fact an amalgamation of both of these log lines. It's utterly adorable while at the same time massively epic. And it's art and sound styles continuously draw you in (I touched upon the art direction in my season 1 post, but it's worth quickly mentioning again). 

I wrapped my seasons 2 and 3 posts together because 1) I'm lazy and didn't get around to posting them in time, and 2) the show runners first intended to have these two seasons together. While season 1 was 50-something episodes, each season since has been half as long. And the trend now looks to be the tradition. 

These seasons delve deeper into Steven harnessing his powers, the long history the Gems have with Earth, and tension that continues to build between our heroes and their Gem home-world. Sometimes the show is lively and fun focusing on a story about baseball or a jovial rivalry between a pizza place and burger joint. The next, it's metaphorical story about domestically-abusive relationships or forcing to kill someone you desperately wish to save. The show freely explores both story elements that are light and are dark, and I think that's a big reason why I keep coming back for more.

At the end of the day, these are stories that puts this wacky kid -- a kid who wants nothing more than to play video games and goof around with his friends -- at odd's ends with dangerous villains threatening well-being of Earth and all of its inhabitants. 

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

Many critics gave this game high praise. Currently holding a Metacritic score of 93 out of 100, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End definitely looks to be in the running as not only the best games in the Uncharted franchise, but one of the best games of 2016. After playing through I can confidently say the critics are right. This game is a masterpiece.

Where do I start? Let's try the graphics. This guy is absolutely beautiful and clearly seeks to push the boundaries of what the PS4 can handle. Not only that but the game takes you through an array of diverse environments. One scene you might be scaling the coastal cliffs of Mexico, the next walking through graveyards in the Scottish Highlands, then over to the oceans of Madagascar, and finally you'll end up back home in your cozy American-suburban house. The variety of environments are so satisfying, it really makes you feel like your on the global mission you always wanted to be apart of in the Uncharted games.

Next is the gameplay. There's a lot that's similar in the gameplay to the other titles because, well... the gameplay was never that challenging. I mean, you climb up a wall, pick up the gun in front of you, and shoot the bad guys. What's not to get? But in this title you actually get a rope that actually elevates the platforming element to these games. It also allows for some breathtaking views as you can dangle helplessly over giant chasms just taking this whole digital world in. Oh! You also have a Jeep for part of the this game. It's not a game-changer, but it is a pleasant little addition for the brief few moments you can drive around in it.

But what I love the most in this game are the characters. Drake really has come a baffling long way from the snarky, baggy jeans-wearing, Indiana Jones-wanna be treasure hunter he was in the first game. Now he's someone who's struggling to leave his life of adventuring behind him in hopes of creating a sustainable life with Elena (his now wife -- SPOILERS!). Sure enough, Drake's past catches up with him. And when his long-lost brother emerges from the dead pleading for help in finding the only treasure that's ever eluded their family, Drake must chose to help his brother in secret in order to keep everyone he loves in his life safe. Finally, Drake makes selfless decisions that look to better the lives of those around him... but just because he's making "good" decisions, doesn't mean they'll be easy to follow through one -- both physically and emotionally. 

I had a blast with this title and would encourage anyone with a PS4 that this is a must-play. Also, there's an easter egg that allows you to play the first level of Crash Bandicoot as well. What's not to love?!

Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection

I got my PS4 waaaay back in September when the revamped, slimmer version came out. Bundled with that console came Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. Despite me wanting to so desperately jump and start play that game -- a game many critics were saying was among the best of 2016 -- I committed to working through the backlog of Uncharted titles, luckily all of them were nicely bound in Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection. Let's take a gander, shall we?

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

This is a very simple action-adventure game about treasure hunter who's chasing down the secrets of his ancestor, which presumably will lead to great wealth or some shit. This game was incredibly bland. It never got all the challenging. All the characters were one-dimensional. All-in-all, I could have taken a pass on this. I mean, despite this game coming out in 2007, Drake looks like what I thought "cool" was back in 1999 -- the only thing he was missing were the frosted tips and a puka necklace.

I try to keep in mind that maybe the game was good for its time. Perhaps my expectations are too high 10 years later. Then I remember that in the same year we also had BioShock, Assassin's Creed, and Mario Galaxy. So, no excuses. This game sucked. 

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

When I was first looking up the Uncharted games, the second installment unanimously came up as the best in the series (not including the 4th title). And, yeah, it's definitely light years better than the first title. 

The game starts with a bang. You wake up in a train nursing a nasty wound to the gut only to discover the train you're in is dangling off a cliff about to plummet into the crevasse below. Exciting! And while the game did do a much better job and keeping me engaged both with the action and the characters, it still felt a little repetitive in the gameplay section. Pick up a gun, shoot people, climb a wall, shoot people. Over and over again. Then what few puzzles I came across were so easy they could be solved by a blind dog gnawing on the controller. But, hey, at least I was having some fun. Right?

Yes. But I will say that in this title I actually tried to collect all of the secrets hidden in each level. And guess what? I found them all. I 100% this fucker. And what do you think I got for being a devote completionist. Maybe a hidden movie? A secret level? New character? SOMETHING?! Well, I got two things: more Playstation trophies and jacks shit. Seriously, you get nothing for all that hard work. What a gip! With that realization, I no longer gave two shits about picking up any secrets in the upcoming games. 

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

You would think that with the dramatic improvement from the first game to the second, the third would be amazing-balls! Sadly, no. In terms of ranking, it sits just slightly lower than Uncharted 2. Yes the graphics and gaming environments are slightly more impressive, but -- if I remember right -- the game felt very glitchy. Camera bouncing around to frustrating angles. Drake fucking up jumps outside of my control. Minor inconveniences, but they add up.

However, the biggest letdown can be found in a few of the gameplay moments. What I mean is that the game has these moments that look to allow for something amazing challenges, but what actually occurs is basically a cutscene I move my joystick through. For example, you're in a plane crash in the middle of the desert. You wake in the wreckage with no idea where you are or where you have to go. Now, this could be a great moment where I have to scavenge the wreckage and build something that will save me, or use the stars at nigh for navigating, I don't know... SOMETHING that allows me to rise to a challenge and overcome the odds. All that ends up happening is you hold the joystick forward for 10 minutes as Drake stumbles through the sand before miraculous ending up at a campsite. How fortunate! Just a major missed opportunity to really pull the player into some fun, innovative challenges.

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With that the Drake Collection comes to a conclusion. It was... barely OK. The second installment is by far the best of these three games, but I wouldn't say right now, in the far off year of 2017, that these games are a must play. But, perhaps when it first came out I could see it blowing peoples' minds. 

I do appreciate the fact that I have grounding with the characters now. Drake has definitely evolved a bit from the stale, one-dimensional character he was back in the first game to at least a treasure hunter with some depth and heart. Let's see where the developers want to go with this in the 4th installment. 

Trev's Movie Dump: November - December 2016

Central Intelligence

Comedies are a fickle thing. Sometimes I think they're really only funny in the right environment. Central Intelligence should likely be watched with friends in a relaxed environment with a few drinks in hand... not on a plane by myself enduring turbulence 30,000 feet above the Rocky Mountains.

That said, the film was alright. Johnson and Heart's good-enough chemistry helped to keep my attention and distract me (slightly) from the thought of the plane plummeting out of the sky. I will say, there is a shocking amount of celebrity cameos in this film. Wasn't expecting that in a non-franchise film. But, hey, they were there. 

This would be a good afternoon movie. Maybe on a day where you're home sick and just want something to help pass the time, but I wouldn't clear your schedule to see this film. 

Sausage Party

Speaking of comedies... I really enjoyed this guy. An absurd film about all the food at the grocery store believing in the faith that when their purchased by humans, they will enter the great beyond and find nirvana or whatever. Sure enough, our main hero soon learns this to all be a false and that the great beyond is really just food being eaten. 

The absurdity of this movie just did it for me. It kind of had that South Park delinquent wit that I'm really attracted to. Whether that's shown from the fact that the only human who can talk to the food is a guy on acid, or the grand finale where we just have a giant food orgy (sort of reminds me of the puppet sex in Team America where you could show everything without ever showing the real thing... if that makes any sense). 

As I said before, comedies are a fickle thing. And this one worked for me. The only time things departed was at the very, very end when the food finds out that they're actually characters in a movie. It got all meta for no reason at all. 

The B.F.G.

I've got a lot of love for the Roald Dahl books -- despite it being years since I last read one -- but this film... what a waste of time.

Now, I'm sure most movie lovers poke their heads up when they hear of another Spielberg movie coming out. (I know I do.) And while I might not see each and every one, I do see most. This film, though, I could have missed. 

First off, it was aesthetically unnerving with its weird CGI-lacquer sheen on everything merging images from the real world with images from a magic/fake world. I don't know why, but that style immediately turns me off. The other part of the film that pushed me away was the story. It was very clearly a kid's story. However, I love watching kid's programming. Sometimes I think it's better than half of the other shit that's out there. But I usually attribute that to the fact that the kid's story I respond to have heart and really play upon my emotions. This film did none of that. 

Mostly it seemed to rely upon special effects and fart jokes. And while fast jokes may have a been a part of the original novel, it left a rotten-egg smelling impression on me in this adapted version. 

Now You See Me 2

I oddly enjoyed this soulless sequel to a movie I barely remember. I think I'm just attracted to the idea of magician-Rodin Hoods -- those that steal from the corrupt 1%... only with MAGIC! Don't get me wrong, this is not a movie I'm recommending. It's just a film I found oddly satisfying and an easy watch. 

But this in category with Central Intelligence. A film to watch when you just need to pass the time and there's nothing better on TV. 

Doctor Strange

Marvel really knows how to make the movie-going experience into an eye-bursting spectacle.  Doctor Strange is easy to love at first glance. I mean, it's essentially Inception with magic and superheroes. To be blunt, I am a sucker for superhero films. I just am. That doesn't mean I give a free pass to everything (looking at you Batman vs. Superman and Suicide Squad), but I just get wrapped up in the spectacle of someone becoming more than they ever thought they could be. 

This film doesn't stand at the front of Marvel's line of films, but it doesn't stand at the back either. It's firmly in the middle. An excellent addition to the MCU (a great collections of films as it were), but doesn't do anything to raise the bar on what they've been offering.

007: From Russia With Love

Zoë and I tried to get back into all the Bond movies. I've seen about 90% of them. And while I do believe I've seen From Russia With Love, I didn't remember it for the life of me. So, he's seeing it for the second time, for the first time.

As one of the Bond films that gets among the highest praise, I was expecting great things. Clearly I put my expectations too high. Even when trying to keep in mind how dated the movie was, it still felt slow and lazy. The story is basically, the villains devising a plan where "we'll bring down Bond by making him fall in love with our secret Russian double-agent." Not a terrible premise, but the story just meanders about for so long it was hard to really be pulled into it. 

I bet if another Bond fan were to read this, they would freak out that I'm missing some main points on what really makes this film stand out from the rest. But maybe if I had more nostalgia to the franchise it could help build a better connection to it all these years later. Sadly, this film threw be off my pace to devour the rest of the films in the franchise. 

Side note: take a look at the first appearance of Q. The gadgets were far less appealing back in the day. Seriously... bullets and gold hidden in the briefcase. I would have loved to see Bond try to cash in those gold coins at the airport if he was a jam to flee the country or something. 

The Jungle Book

Disney has killed it this year. Four out of the top five grossing films for the year of 2016, Disney owns the top four slots... with #4 being The Jungle Book. This is the second movie in Disney's mission to re-make their animated classics into live-action films (the first being Cinderella -- which I did not see.) This film not only cleaned up at the box office, but received tons of critical praise. 

I, however, was not a fan. The film just felt bland to me. First off, we have that problem I mentioned the BFG suffered from -- that uncomfortable CGI sheen that I am not a fan of. Also, the story and acting seemed all over the place. I kind of feel like Disney just went after big celebrity names to do all the voice work of the animals instead of truly getting the best person for the job. The only two roles that I really like was Idris Elba's work as the Sheer Khan and, of course, Bill Murray as the delightful Baloo. However, they also had Christopher Walken singing and King Louie. You would have though after Walken's work on Peter Pan Live! people would have understood the dude can't sing. But, they gave him that famous song, "I wanna be like you!" And he totally fucks it up for me. Sigh...

Anywho, not a fan of this film and I'm already hearing the possibility for a sequel. Not surprising. The money's there. And that's all the proof studio's need to greenlight another souless remake.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

The first book of the year for me, hopefully a not-at-all tone-setting choice, was this fairly well-known offering from that brief but essential "New York after 9/11" subgenre of fiction. It's about a boy whose father died on 9/11. A year after his death the boy finds a strange key among his father's belongings, and so he sets out all across New York City looking to find someone who might know more about his father or the key he left behind - in the process, wouldn't you know it, discovering the vibrant and varied people all over the city, each harboring their own lives and regrets and sorrows.

It's a good book. Not great, as it's a little "Oprah's Book Club"-y, but it's already twelve years old (wow!) and we can probably forgive it for taking on a slightly cheesier tone than a lot of contemporary prestige fiction. I have two main thoughts about this one.

One is "sentimentalism." The book is full of sadness and tears and private tragedies and exploring in general the open wound that New York was in the aftermath of the attacks, and none of that is inherently a bad thing. There's a big old healing process that needed to occur, and in some ways still does, and never fully will for people of a certain age, and it's perfectly fine for a New Yorker like Jonathan Safran Foer to explore that grieving process by writing a story about it. But where things got a little too Mitch Albom for my liking was in a separate, parallel story about the boy's grandparents and their weird and estranged relationship. They're both survivors of the firebombing of Dresden, and I mean, that's fine and all, and I get the parallels between Dresden and September 11th, but I'm not sure how well their story ever really fit into the boy's journeys through New York to learn about his father. And even on the boy's journeys. he meets all kinds of classically sad people, from a woman going through a divorce to an old man who hasn't left his apartment in 24 years. And I'm not clear what Foer's trying to do with all these characters and their various sadnesses, other than to say, "look at how sad these people are, and imagine if we could all just be open and honest with each other and ourselves about our pain, and isn't this wonderful?" I get that not everything needs to be dark and depressing and cynical, but there's also a way to explore sadness through optimism and humor - this is what Vonnegut did so well, for instance, speaking of the firebombing of Dresden - or through immense "this will never be okay" sorrow and grieving (Manchester by the Sea, for instance). But Foer never really seems to take it past "so much sadness, and isn't it kind of beautiful?" And again, maybe that's fine. Maybe a bestseller is allowed to be a little sentimental and cheesy, especially one about a boy who lost his dad on 9/11, especially for a nation (and a city) still healing. I'm just saying it stuck out, often to the book's detriment, all of that shallow "smiling through tears" sentiment.

The other major takeaway, and one I'm still wrapping my head around, is a little more disconcerting. So, the book begins, and the majority of it is told form the point of view of this nine-year-old boy, in the first person, and within about two paragraphs it's clear to me that the kid is mildly autistic, or at least that he has Aspergers. He counts stairs, he counts minutes, he has very specific phobias and superstitions and routines, he's inquisitive as hell and a little socially awkward - it's just all of these classic symptoms, right off the bat. And for the rest of the book, in my mind, the kid was somewhere on the spectrum, and that added a little subtext to his relationship with his mother, his grieving process, the alienation he felt at school - on multiple instances, another kid calls him a "retard," and he responds matter-of-factually with "I'm not mentally retarded." Like, the way he opened up to total strangers during his quest for information was, in my mind, an added triumph. And Foer never had his other characters bring up, even implicitly, that the kid was autistic at all, which made the whole thing a stronger fictionalized account of an autism disorder than, say, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the night-Time, where the entire purpose of the story seemed to be, "hey, this kid has autism, look at how every day life is a novel adventure for him because of how his mind works." Rather, here in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the purpose of the story was very much "here's New York after 9/11, look at how wounded everyone is," and as an added quirk the main character happens to be mildly autistic, which adds flavor to his story without taking it over. Not so fast! After finishing the book I started to read a little bit about it, and the reaction to it - as one does - and was astonished to find that whether or not the boy was on the spectrum was up for debate. Wait, what? Apparently in the film adaptation, it's explicitly stated that the boy has Aspergers. But Foer himself, when asked, said that he never thought of the boy as having any sort of autism. Now, granted, creators often play coy when discussing their intentions - what better way to prevent people from talking about your stories than to explain them? - but if we can take Foer at face value, I just think that's astonishing. Like, hey man, you were a young boy once, and it doesn't seem like you have Aspergers. Is this really how you remember thinking and acting and behaving? And look, whether or not the kid has Aspergers shouldn't be a big deal - hell, I appreciated how subtle it was throughout the book, so it's a little hypocritcal for me to make it into a huge deal after the fact - but Foer's denial or ambivalence regarding the issue just adds fuel to the "eye-rolling sentimentalism" fire. Because if the kid doesn't have Aspergers or autism, then he's just... precocious. Which, hey, is fine. And doesn't really change the story or anything. (But like, come on - of course he's got Aspergers!)

All in all, a decent read. There's just enough depth to the sadness for this one to resonate more than tear-jerking schlock, and the kid's particular mindset and point of view make things, intentionally or otherwise, interesting.

Stan's TV Dump: December 2016

Last one of the year! Not a lot of seasons ended in December this year, which is weird, since there are usually so many that do so - but I still saw plenty this month, particularly as I tried to finish a number of shows within the calendar year. Gotta make sure those "Best of 2016" lists are as accurate as they can be, you know?

High Maintenance: Season 1

It took me a little while to get into this six-episode HBO comedy, but by the third episode - which takes place entirely from the point of view of a dog - I was hooked. I'll back up. Like Broad City before it, High Maintenance was a long-running web series before it was picked up by TV executives and given a new life. And like Broad City and Girls and countless other shows, it takes place in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn itself is a "central character." But what sets High Maintenance apart is that it's a bit of an anthology comedy. Each episode features a "story of the week" - usually two, actually - with different characters in different circumstances. The main character is a weed dealer known simply as "the guy," and episodes focus on his various clients and customers. Give it a shot, maybe. I never watched any of the web episodes and I was fine jumping right in. Just understand that the format might be a bit off-putting at first; you're not meeting any recurring characters, so just enjoy the vignettes for what they are.

Search Party: Season 1

This one snuck up on me; continuing their trend of experimenting with contemporary TV-viewing habits, TBS decided to drop these ten episodes across the five nights that comprised Thanksgiving week. Their logic was something like, "millennials might not have cable anymore, but their parents do, and they'll be staying with their parents for the week, bored out of their minds and full of turkey, so why not watch this fun little show?" I have no idea if this was a sound strategy, and haven't checked on the ratings for this, because in today's TV landscape nothing ever gets canceled due to low ratings anymore if it has any level of critical acclaim or fanbase, and Search Party was good! It starts out a bit slow, and feels like a basic cable version of Girls - millennials being vapid and shitty people in the city, their relationships superficial, their goals questionable or nonexistent. But by the end of the ten-episode run, I actually came to like all of the characters. That's growth, folks! Development! The story here involves a girl who goes missing and a group of friends who remember her from college and decide to investigate what happened to her. It's pretty funny, but at turns it's also dark and devastating. And it all works its way toward an enjoyable and kind of horrifying finale. Will there be a second season? Organically, I'm not sure how there could be - the mystery is solved - but I hope so all the same!

Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV: Season 1

Even considering the decade-plus of less-than-fantastic offerings, I am still a dedicated and slavish fanboy for Square's long-running JRPG franchise multiverse, and any new (numbered, non-MMO) Final Fantasy title is an automatic must-play. I'll offer my thoughts on the new game, in depth, later on - for now, I've only played it for three hours - but so far the game's biggest strength seems to be the bond between the four protagonists: a prince and his entourage, basically. This five-episode anime serves as a prequel to the game and it outlines the group's history - how did they come to be these four bros-fo-life, exactly? The series is 50 minutes long in total and you can find it on YouTube if you're so inclined. I'm no anime expert, and obviously this was already catering to a niche interest of mine, but you know what? This wasn't bad.

Westworld: Season 1

I have plenty of thoughts - not so much on Westworld itself, but on its very unique strengths and weaknesses as a prestige drama in 2016. Instead of writing a paragraphs-long thoughtpiece - the umpteenth one on the series this month - here are a few thoughts with no cohesive flow. One, thanks to A) Twitter and online discussion boards and B) the rise of streaming and bingeing, you can no longer release anything in weekly installments and expect to surprise anyone. A few people on Reddit and Twitter figured out every twist on Westworld about three episodes before it was revealed, and since everyone loves collaborative speculation, everyone knew what was coming - and still got to feel "smart" when those twists were revealed. (See also: Mr. Robot.) Compare this to a streaming show like Stranger Things where everything comes out at once and people avoid discussions like the plague for fear of being spoiled. Imagine bingeing Westworld. That's a totally different experience, right? And probably a better one? Two, when you set your story in an indeterminable time and place and allow most of your characters to have an immortality of sorts - either an outright immunity to bullets or an eternal resurrection capability - you surrender a very basic and natural source of tension. You need to make me care about your stakes if "death" isn't one of them. Why does finding the center of the maze matter so much? Who stands to lose or gain anything if the robot hosts become sentient? For so much of this show, I just felt "along for the ride" with plenty of questions in my mind that I didn't actually care about the answers to.

Bloodline: Season 2

Marissa and I watched the first season of Bloodline a few months ago and thought it was decent, but slow - like so much other prestige TV from the decade. The second season was less decent and, although shorter, perhaps even slower. The third season of Bloodline will be the last, but is that a compelling enough reason to keep watching? Time will tell.

The Get Down: Season 1

Another Marissa pick. She's all about that Baz, and as such, she desperately wanted to like this. And she might even claim that she did like it. But folks - I know better. This was only six episodes long and it took us three months to get through. We stopped watching it in order to watch Bloodline - and I just finished saying exactly how thrilling we found Bloodline to be.

Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner: Season 1

This is perfect trash television, and whoever came up with the idea to pair Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg for half an hour every Monday deserves a raise. I'm not sure what the ratings were - and for something like this, who cares? Its existence almost seems to transcend its need for an audience. We'll be back for Season 2 in 2017. Or maybe it'll be the second half of Season 1. Hard to say.

Peep Show: Season 2

Years and years ago, like way back in the early parts of high school, everyone's favorite anglophobe Paul ("Peej") would occasionally invite a group of us over to his place in order to binge a season of one British comedy or another, likely on imported DVDs. It was there that I first saw The Office - yeah, before it was cool [feigns brushing dirt from shoulders] - and there that I saw the first season of Peep Show, an oddity whose primary gimmick was setting every shot from someone's point of view. It was unique and weird, but hilarious - at least in 2004 - and for years afterward I sought out ensuing seasons on DVD. Alas, nothing after the first season came to the U.S., and I never got to see them. But we live in the future now! Last year, when talking to Sweeney about TV as I often tend to do, I learned that he'd been watching the entire series on Netflix. And that there were nine seasons! Imagine that! At any rate, here's the second. Not quite as great as I recall the first one being - but then, what's as funny to anyone at 28 as it was to them at 16? I'll likely stick around for a while and poke in and out of future seasons of Peep Show; with six-episode seasons, it's such an easy and low commitment "binge."

South Park: Season 20

For years - and maybe since its very inception - South Park has been hit-or-miss. Due to its unique production schedule - "six days to air" - its writers can truly rip stories from the headlines as quickly as something like Last Week Tonight and can spoof celebrity mishaps and political gaffes with the speed of Saturday Night Live. For a few years now, though, South Park has taken a serialized approach to its seasons, allowing its characters to spend multiple episodes progressing through the same stories. I think this worked pretty well at first, but there's no denying that it blew up horribly this year, bogging characters down in various go-nowhere stories about the election, Internet trolling, a battle of the sexes based mostly on whether or not women can be funny, a nationwide obsession with nostalgia, and Elon Musk's goal to fly something to Mars. It was, frankly, a disaster - one likely made worse by the shocking results of the election; Matt and Trey seemed to be building the whole battle of the sexes arc toward a Clinton presidency only to scramble in the final three episodes to an "everybody wants to move to Mars now" gimmick. There were plenty of sporadic highlights this year, as there always are, even in the worst years of South Park. But after this latest ten episode stretch of the longest-running show I watch... man, I really hope they bail on this format next year.

Fuller House: Season 2

I hate this show, and I think it is a bad show, and for no compelling reason at all I just watched thirteen more episodes of it. But I don't quite hate-watch it. At least I don't think I do. No, I put it on while doing something else - anything else - because it's so, so easy to watch. (And hate! It's easy to hate, believe me!) But even after two full seasons, there's still something alluring about this piece of shit - "Memba Full House? I memba Full House!" - and I can't even promise that I'm done with it.  It's a throwback not just to Full House, which I never even watched outside of syndication as a kid, but also to all the hallmarks of '80s and '90s family sitcoms. It revels in trope-heavy plots, terrible catchphrases, and a studio audience that overreacts to literally every line of dialogue. Ugh, Netflix knew exactly what I wanted from this, even if I didn't. I hate myself.

The 100: Season 3
I actually liked this season a little better than the second one, but I'm shocked I made it this far, let alone past the first few episodes. This YA dystopian shit is just not for me - decidedly so - and in fact it seems like its not even for half of its own fans anymore after killing off a beloved LGBT character.

Steven Universe: Season 1
Trev already professed his love for this show earlier this season, and now I too have drank the Kool-Aid. There's something so uniquely appealing about a PG-rated cartoon that gets by not on catch phrases or crudeness but on quality and heart. The first season is fifty episodes long, but fear not! This is a very easy show to slide into; those episodes are just ten minutes long each, and the first twenty or thirty build the world of Steven Universe so gradually and easily that all you'll want is more information and stake-escalation. I'm a fan! I mean I wouldn't call this the second-best show on television or anything, by a longshot, but I like it nonetheless. Season 2 is in progress.

Horace and Pete: Season 1
I'm glad Louis C.K.'s new show found its way to Hulu before the year ended, because I wasn't going to shell out $31 for a single season of streaming television no matter how much buzz it was getting. Horace and Pete was, even among a diverse TV landscape, wholly unique. Episodes varied in length from thirty-something minutes to over an hour, and although it was made by a comedian it was almost as tragic in tone as it was funny. The whole show took place across two sets - Horace and Pete's bar downstairs, and their apartment upstairs. The show felt very much like a stage play or a multi-camera family-workplace drama. I think the median actor's age in it was over fifty. In a year full of great new shows from women, people of color, and younger voices, Louis C.K. showed that even an over the hill straight white guy could make something totally unique and original. It was intermittently okay and fantastic - so pretty good, all things considered - and I'd welcome a second season, or at least more of this kind of content (a show full of musings in a dive bar) from Louis C.K. and company.

The Night Manager: Season 1
If what you want from prestige TV is Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie glaring at each other for six hours while passive-aggressively trading barbs in decadent British accents, well, have I got the show for you! This was fine, but it was yet another instance of an AMC show where the production value far exceeds the writing, the story, the acting, the very content it serves to enhance. And there's nothing wrong with that! But in an ever-more-crowded TV landscape, hey, maybe don't worry so much if you missed out on this one in 2016. (But it's streaming on Amazon Prime if you're so inclined.)

Insecure: Season 1
As far as "semi-autobiographical half-hour shows created by female comedians that debuted in 2016" are concerned, this was well below One Mississippi and Lady Dynamite and more on par with Take My Wife and Better Things and Fleabag. Look, it was a tough year to stand out, is all.

The X-Files: Season 3
Earlier this year, Fox rebooted The X-Files and by all accounts five of the six episodes completely sucked. But can I be honest for a minute here? I think The X-Files has always sucked. I think that back in 1990-whatever when there was nothing else on TV but laugh track sitcoms and police, courtroom, and medical procedurals, a long-running show about paranormal activity and aliens and FBI conspiracies was bound to get a devoted following, regardless of quality. Here's every episode of The X-Files:

[Weird violence happens.]
Mulder: This was aliens.
Scully: Mulder - I'm just not sure!
[It was aliens.]

No, seriously. Tell me I'm wrong! Point me to a decent run of, oh, three consecutive episodes of The X-Files - a show that has produced over two hundred hours of content, mind you. Go ahead and do it! I'll wait. And until then, I won't watch any more of The X-Files. Good riddance!

3%: Season 1
Hey, it's another dystopian YA show about a bunch of - yes - young adults in a Brazilian future that is - yes - dystopian in nature! In this hypothetical world, three percent of the population gets to go live offshore in an enlightened utopian paradise of sorts, while the remaining 97% have to stay on the overcrowded and slummy mainland. Look, you better believe I lost the narrative thread on this one after three or four episodes, but fuck it - this gives me eighty shows watched in 2016, which is sort of impressive and pathetic and impressively pathetic all at once. Grad school, am I right?

Brain Games: Season 2
You know, I dug the first season of this thing enough to check out the second, but a twelve-episode second was a bit much. Things got repetitive in a hurry. The optical illusions were cool, but with entire episodes devoted to questions like "which sex has better spatial awareness and which one is better at seeing colors," it's clear that this show is aiming a little lower and broader than something I'd be interested in keeping up with. Oh well!

Adam Ruins Everything: Season 1

Somehow every episode to date of Adam Ruins Everything - a show that debuted in 2015, went away for most of 2016, and came back this fall for thirteen more episodes - is considered part of the first season. Fine! It was a long and informative and sometimes tiring season. I learned a lot from Adam Conover, but not as much as I learned from John Oliver's weekly segments, on average; Conover's show seems more focused on mixing up the episode sketch structures and lesson delivery styles - which is important, sure - than on cramming as much information as possible into the twenty-odd minutes available. But hey, it's good enough for me, and I'll be back for Season 2 in 2017.

And that was 2016. Onto the next one!