Silicon Valley: Season 4

Three phenomena at play here with my viewing experience of the fourth season of Silicon Valley.

One is the one I've seen other people bemoaning - this season was still funny, still plenty enjoyable, but the characters are getting flatter and dumber and the plotting is getting more and more ludicrous. Pied Piper has been through, what, a hundred major hurdles that would have ended a real company by now? And it's been valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, what, half a dozen separate times? Obviously you've gotta let a TV show be a TV show - a certain amount of stakes-resetting and status-quo-keeping is to be expected here. But I share the concerns and complaint many people have been voicing about the show this year - there are only so many pivots and bankruptcies and CEO ousts and mergers and so on that a show can withstand and still be about, you know, the same five or six people working on their start up out of the same house. Bottom line, was this the "worst" season of Silicon Valley to date, at least as far as being the broadest, the silliest, the least-honed? Arguably, probably, yes, it was.

Another phenomenon, however, is that this is the first season of the show I watched with Marissa. She caught part or all of the first season at some point, then decided to just jump in at Season 4 with me in April, which is easy enough to do given all the rebooting and resetting and circular plotting referenced in the last paragraph. And here's the thing about comedy, as all of you know - laughter is contagious. It's why laugh tracks exist. I watched the first three seasons of Silicon Valley alone, like I do with so much other television. I found them very good and very funny, sure, but I wasn't laughing at them as much as I was at this season, what with Marissa there on the couch or in the bed or next to me on the plane or whatever. So, acknowledging the difference in viewing atmosphere, I would also have to say that this was the most I've ever laughed at Silicon Valley so far.

Lastly, a third, distantly relevant phenomenon here was the very public departure of T.J. Miller. There's this weird thing with hang-out comedies, workplace comedies, where you just like to believe and imagine that everyone involved - all these funny people, together all day for so many days - are friends in real life, or at the very least hold down mutual respect and admiration. And that's rarely actually the case, but still - when it starts to leak out that, say, T.J. miller is terrible to work with, or that Thomas Middleditch whines about not getting enough laugh lines, I can't say that my view of the show is completely unaffected by those silly behind-the-scenes spats.

Anyway, it's just interesting to me when I think about how different seasons of television compare to one another - sometimes it's not just the TV show itself we react to, but the conditions in which we consume it. Okay, done navel gazing. Enjoy the Fourth of July, assholes!

Veep: Season 6

Bit of an aimless soft reboot in Season 6 for Veep (wow, Season 6 already?) but what else can you do after the way Season 5 ended aside from break up the team and send them all away to their respective next chapters? And then, of course, what else can you do but ultimately bring them all back together by season's end?

I'll say this - Veep was funny but fairly forgettable for me in its first two seasons, then started getting really good in the third, then hit some fantastic highs in the fourth and fifth, and then got, maybe, if anything, kind of too broad and cruel and mean in its sixth. Like, this used to be a razor sharp satire about the political process and how Washington is full of miserable people stuck in go-nowhere careers as aides and staffers and low-level congressmen, and how they're all just sprinting in place to stay ahead of the latest scandal, break the newest spin, biff on the newest memes, and so on. And it's no longer that show, really. Not at all.

But, to be fair, what could possibly be a bigger satire of the American political machine than the American political machine itself in 2016 and 2017. I mean, you've seen this, right? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqPbVwtw7qQ)

Based on the set ups in the Season 6 finale, I think when Veep comes back for Season 7 it'll only be even broader and dumber, with Selena vs. Jonah as a thinly veiled Hillary vs. Trump send-up. But then... what else can you do, if you're Veep, these days, with all this going on? When Veep debuted, our political system was ripe for a smart, sharp parody, but it's all just so hopelessly stupid and broken now. Like, how would Jonathan Swift have followed up A Modest Proposal if England went ahead and made eating Irish babies legal? Where does he go from there? What can Veep do now, but be as broad and mean and funny as possible?

I still liked this season a lot - but where it used to throw some beautiful, nasty breaking balls, it's just getting by on high heat down the middle now - which is the opposite of how actual baseball pitchers age, but, you know.

Fargo: Season 3

Oh damn - another post I fell too far behind on. Uh, let's see. I loved the first and second seasons of Fargo like everyone else. The first was just this completely unexpected surprise that had no business working, and still worked beautifully. The second was just a masterpiece ten-episode run that started out pretty good and ended up so much better.

This third season? Meh. It just wasn't anything special! Still good, of course. But not essential. Not important. Not memorable. Two brothers, beefin' over parking lots and stamps? Color me unimpressed. Can we all agree that Carrie Coon was miscast here? You need the plucky, spunky likes of Marge Gunderson or Molly Solverson for that Minnesota-nice lady cop role to really sing, up against the sad, dark, pathetic lives of all the small time crooks and big time crime lords, you know? Coon's Gloria Burgle, I mean, Carrie Coon is just magnificent at what she does, but what she does is make you feel terrible and sad and sorry for her in these put upon, emotional toughness-laden roles.

I dunno - just kind of feels like Fargo lost its way this season. The show's seasons (and the movie) have had such a dark-comic tone to date - very Coen brothers, after all - but Season 3 just felt so much less fun, so much less philosophical, so much less mysterious - just all sort of regressed into a good-not-great hour-long drama this year, if you ask me.

Anyway, sounds like there'll probably be a fourth season, but that it's also likely at least a year and a half away, and possibly more. Good! Fine. We can barely keep up with all the TV out there as is, and I'd so much rather have Noah Hawley recharge his batteries and come up with something great than just kind of ho-hum another lackluster season in there.

Ho-hum! Lackluster! Look at me, spoiled shitless, saying this about Fargo of all shows! I know so many people worked hard as hell on this last season. What an asshole I'm being! And yet, hey, them's the breaks as long as Peak TV's going strong. Boo?

Wonder Woman

I really enjoyed this movie despite its many, many bad attributes. Here's my Letterboxd review - one of my better ones, I think. Or at least hope.

Man. Suffers from the same old case of superhero movie bloat, lasting for half hour too long with a plot held together by duct tape and shrugs, capped off by a third act that is entirely like, no shit, a new age Final Fantasy boss fight in sensibility, logistics, and general inapplicability to everything that came before it. But damn - all the important parts work beautifully. The fight scenes are distilled elegance, all bicycle kicks and misty flips and choreographed computer-generated ropework like nothing you've ever seen. And no matter how dead the horse is, let's never forget that representation matters, and that a demographic that comprises half the goddamn population just got its first slice of hero-cake after, like, forty of these friggin' comic book blockbusters. It's wonderful. You should be very proud.

Now, for the rest of my post, a word on rankings, ratings, grades, and the problem with scoring and comparing movies. I gave the movie four stars despite my better judgment - that what I was really watching was another very long and very stupid PG-13 movie with very many fundamental problems. I mean, on so many levels, guys, this felt like a three, three and a half out of five, that might have even been a straight up two. It felt very confused by its own message at times, unclear on how it felt about humanity, about men, about war. Upon even a moment's reflection, it's devastatingly, overwhelmingly hawkish. Gal Gadot might be stunning and athletic and perfectly cast here, but she can't actually act, it turns out, which is something I never noticed about her when she played, say, "Crewmember #4, the sexy one" in The Fast and the Furious all those times. Also, for a movie about empowering women, there's an awful lot of Chris Pine heroism here, a whole lot of naivety on Diana's part necessitating a whole lot of mansplaining. There's a scene early on where Diana explicitly rejects the idea that women need men for any sort of sexual pleasure, and then later on there's a scene where she gives (gets? gets.) a big old nighttime smooch from Chris Pine. I swear, so little of it makes sense or holds up with any sort of thematic consistency.

But like I said in my review - none of that really seems to matter, not to me and certainly not to anyone else based on the soaring universal acclaim this thing has, because it's about a beautiful demi-goddess kicking all kinds of ass with grace and power and what on earth isn't there to love about that? Like seriously, how did it take this long to make a woman-superhero movie? It's fun and it feels relevant and meaningful in the bigger, broader context even though the movie itself is extremely apolitical and tepid with its "feminism" and should be inoffensive to even the MAGA-est guys you know.

I already think of this movie like I think of The Fast and the Furious movies - ridiculous, stupid, all kinds of fun, almost immune to any level of serious criticism. Or maybe it really is just that Gal Gadot is distractingly beautiful to the point where my simple manbrain stops functioning the right way. But no, really, to bring it all back home where I started from here - this has so many hallmarks of a #BadMovie. But it's also so goddamn fun, at least in the moments its trying to be fun. I mean, I simultaneously think that this is dumb and messy DC trash but also just a big old blast. Like, it's not a bore whatsoever, and as Trevor so often says, boring is the worst thing a movie can be. (He's not wrong!) And today, for whatever reason, the feel-good vibes I got from this one are outweighing the cynicism (which is good! it is good to like things! #hottake) and I'm happy to call it a four. Even though there are so, so many threes and three-and-a-halves out there I'd probably call "on the whole" better movies. And I can see the case for giving it the full-blown five. And I can also see the case for the two.

Bottom line, sometimes you have to ignore the numbers, ignore the ratings, acknowledge that sometimes a bad movie can be better than a good one, know that sometimes the best movies have all kinds of flaws and shortcomings. And so on.

The Dirties

Here's a conversation I had with Trevor just now about The Dirties, and more specifically about Matt Johnson, who made The Dirties and also Nirvanna the Band the Show.

Trevor
ah, you saw the Dirties
seems like you're torn on it

Steve
i did!
i am
i love matt johnson in nirvanna the band the show
which, have you seen that? have we talked about that?

Trevor
i have not
we have not

Steve
its one of my favorites of the year so far

Trevor
i havent even seen this movie

Steve
ah okay

Trevor
i just know kevin smith helped distribute it

Steve
yes
he loved it

Trevor
and he interviewed the kid and all
he did
i think he was also impressed by the indie nature of it

Steve
matt johnson has a very distinct and inventive approach to filmmaking
which is essentially, "do not use actors. use real people who don't know they're acting."

Trevor
not a bad approach
get some authentic performances

Steve
"the most human reactions to things come from people making those earnest reactions in real time"
right
and there's a found footage nature to everything, then
with cameras recording in secret, or discretely
and even for the people who are in on the act, the people who know theyre making a movie
matt johnson will just record scenes over and over, all kinds of ad-libbing, to get the actors involved to a point of exhaustion or frustration
and he'll cobble 4 hours of shooting into a conversation that flows naturally for 30 seconds
its all very interesting and when i watch his stuff im always thinking in the back of my mind, "but how much of this is real? how much was scripted?"
and i think part of the beauty of all that is, you can't really tell, you can't really know
and he takes advantage of that

Trevor
interesting

Steve
and i thought nirvanna the band the show was one of the funniest things ive ever seen because of that
like clearly all these men on the street giving him blank stares are unaware theyre in a movie or a show
but some people have clearly been told theyre in a movie, or been paid to be an extra in one, but they don't know what's coming
anyway, the dirties is matt johnson taking this approach... and using it in a high school
to end up at a school shooting

Trevor
yeah, that was the first thing he did, right?
just watched the trailer for NTBTS
looks good

Steve
theres a webseries from like 2009 on youtube
and thats okaya
nd then theres a viceland show from earlier this year and it's fantastic
and i can't push it hard enough on people like you and sweeney
did you watch nathan for you?

Trevor
i did
it was too cringe-worthy for me
but i respect that it is brilliant

Steve
this is almost as cringey
well no, it isnt, i take that back
now that i remember some of nathan for you
but it uses similar elements, like getting an unplanned and unprompted reaction and just letting that moment breathe, and keep going
anyway, why im torn on the dirties is, in NTBTS, this is all hilarious
but in the dirties its used in this dark and depressing way
where matt plays an eventual school shooter
and he hires a few extras to play bullies and occasionally make fun of him or slap him around in the hallways
and you can see the kids just sort of ignoring it
and it's very uncomfortable
and i just felt so bad for any of the kids not in on the joke, the act, etc
so im not sure how well the approach works when it's not played for laughs
i mean its effective, maybe even too effective, but it feels... dirty
hey-o!

So yeah, that's more or less how I feel about The Dirties - respect the hell out of Matt Johnson's innovative and provocative techniques, but not sure I love the way this whole project made me, uh, feel. (Unlike Nirvanna the Band the Show, which is a goddamn riot, and yes I will keep pushing this show until someone else out there gives it a shot!)

The Handmaid's Tale: Season 1

Here's another show I've got slotted very, very highly on my ever-changing 2017 rankings but that also faded a bit for me in the homestretch. This is what I said three years ago about the book this show adapts: (http://back-blogged.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-handmaids-tale.html)

I loved the book, and I loved this show. Mostly. Usually. The show is even darker than the book, depicting graphically at least a few terrible things that the book doens't even suggest. This is rare, really, for book-adapted TV and movies! As bloody and boob-filled as Game of Thrones is, it doesn't come close to the scope of the R-rated nature of the books! The visual is so much more visceral, and you can often trigger the same reactions with one tenth as much violence and horror depicted on screen as you can by describing things on the page in explicit detail. Hey, that's the power of the medium!

There are other differences, too. The show also spends plenty of time focusing on the unraveling of the old society into this frightening new world order, adding histories and details that just aren't present in the book. I'm very okay with this trend, this idea of "the book was better than the movie" not necessarily holding up when the movie is instead a prestige television show. Flesh it out, dig further in, extend and expand the story, it's a whole new ballgame! (See: The Leftovers.)

My biggest problem with the book was actually my biggest problem with the show, too - a lack of a memorable ending. An ellipses, not an exclamation point. In fact, the show feels all sorts of primed for a second season. I haven't heard anything, but I'd be astonished if the intention all along wasn't for a multi-season run. These ten episodes took us more or less right up to the end of the book (again, like The Leftovers did with its first season) but where the book sort of just ended on some dark and depressing notes, the season ended on a little bit of a "no, we're fighting back" mentality. So I absolutely expect it to continue on for at least a second season. Which is good! It's such a good show, and more than that, it feels like such a disappointingly important show, a relevant show. Sad!

I want an expanded worldview in the second season. Seeing any of the handmaids fight back is great, but let's see more of Yvonne Strahowski's character. Let's learn more about Ann Dowd's character. These people are both monsters, anti-feminists, abusers - but they're also victims in this new world order, right? They're also women. Let's explore that a little. There's potential here for something truly great!

Better Call Saul: Season 3

Y'all know I like ranking things, and in particular TV shows. So here it is - halfway through the year, Better Call Saul has been the best show on television. It's not without its flaws, of course, and I'd even venture to say it stumbled a bit in its second half, mostly just by slowing back down and returning to that good-not-great pace from Seasons 1 and 2, but everything up to and including that courtroom episode was just aces. (Okay, maybe The Leftovers is my number one on the year. But maybe not! Six months to decide, folks.)

Let me backtrack. "Slowed down." I'm not criticizing the slow-burn of individual scenes here; Mike deconstructing an entire car, piece by piece, in meticulous detail, in silence, for seven or eight minutes is goddamn fantastic television. I mean in the broader sense. The arc of the series. We know what Jimmy McGill becomes. We know what becomes of Mike, of Gus, of Hector Salamanca. We know these things because we watched Breaking Bad, the best show of the last, say, uh, decade? Yes, decade.

When this show debuted two years ago, no one expected it to be bad. No one thought Vince Gilligan was going to fail to make a compelling or interesting show. But Saul Goodman had always been this sleazy, schlocky character, and Bob Odenkirk far more of a comedian than a dramatic actor. So few people really expected something great, something tense, something so full of tragic hubris and damaged morality, something so goddamn excellent. But that's exactly what we have here! And like Breaking Bad before it, it only seems to get better every year.

Ringworld

So way back when, some previous version of me - let's call him 22-year-old me - thought it would be a great idea to get into some classic sci-fi. And that was by and large a fairly bad idea. It's very easy, and fairly interesting, to read about 20th century science fiction. It's much less easy and interesting to actually read 20th century sci-fi.

Ringworld is a book about a ring-shaped world (go figure). That's the most interesting aspect of it - its setting. You ever play Halo? Like, more than just the multiplayer? If so, you're familiar with the idea of the ring-shaped world, an impossibly large man-made structure that provides a ring of terraformed surface area spanning an entire orbit - three million times the surface area of the earth. How's that for a solution to your sustainability crisis? Larry Niven goes into specific details, sometimes to a fault, about the physical properties of the ringworld - the "what" and the "why" - but never really dives deep into the "how." Which is just as well - it lends a bit of an air of mystery to the whole place, which is kind of cool. And again, the setting is really the only memorable part of the book.

The rest is generic, shitty, 1970s sci-fi fodder. (Here's an alien species with two heads and three legs and a snake tail! Here's one that's basically just giant ferocious housecats! Mushrooms! Acid! Whoa...) And the characters, and the story they're involved in, and the prose they speak in.... yikes. The less said about any of that, the better. You can just see the line between sci-fi and fantasy being blurry as hell here. A field full of monster sunflowers! A human being who's literally been bred to have good luck! (D&D much, bro?)

You don't need to read this. I barely feel more well-read for doing so. But still, props for a cool concept, Larry.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Season 10

Might have been the dumbest and most disposable season of Aqua Teen Hunger Force yet. Oh well, no big deal - one more to go! (And yes, the title of this season was "Aqua TV Show Show.")

Moral Orel: Season 2

In my recent Aqua Teen post I commented on how utterly pointless that show is, and how it represents Adult Swim at large so well. Turns out, Moral Orel has to be one of the most specifically focused, brutal satires on the network. Holy hell, this show - and this season in particular - was relentless in its outright animosity toward religious Middle America. Admittedly, we've come a long way since 2006-2007... or at least we had, before 2016 came and... suffice it to say, the "problem with America" is really no longer the ultra-conservative Christians. (For now, I guess.)

Feels like I'm stepping in something. My point, I think, is that the staunchly religious feel like a very "dated" target. And holy hell, this is vicious in a way it seems like you can't even be toward Christian fundamentalists anymore. This whole dumb town is just loaded with assholes excusing their terrible behavior by being pious. Orel's father is easily the worst of them all - drunk, abusive, and unable to take any guff or backtalk from his kids or his wife.

The first season of this show felt very formulaic and a bit lighter, with Orel learning a lesson (almost always the wrong one) from church or school or his father or something, making a mess out of things, and then taking away the wrong lesson a second time about why what he did in the first place was bad. Here in the second season, there's just a lot more anger and bullshit and apparent emptiness. It ends on a dark, sad two-parter in which Orel finally, finally begins to realize that his father is a piece of shit.

Anyway, I'm far too late to this one to be enjoying it to the fullest, but it's still an enjoyable watch. Consider it, if you never have!

Her Story

Last night I played through Her Story, a game - interactive narrative, really - from Sam Barlow, who was the lead writer and designer on two of the Silent Hill games.

It was excellent, and very unique. I'm still processing it and will be for days. I recommend it to anyone and everyone, and I think it's on Steam for a handful of dollars. But it helps to go into it as blind as you can. (I went in under the impression that it was a game about a rape victim giving her testimony to the police - no idea where I got that impression, but that's one thing I'll say this absolutely isn't!) I'll say this much - the entire game consists of interacting with a mid-'90s computer in a police station trying to unravel a murder mystery based on different pieces of seven different police interviews. The clips are only accessible by searching for various keywords, so you can't just start watching them all, and there's no easy way to view them in chronological order (although each one is timestamped, so there's a specific order and chronology to them, for sure), so the process and method you use to piece together the story and unravel the mystery is entirely your own. I think there are something like 270 separate clips to view (most of them only ten seconds long) and I was able to "beat" the game in a little over an hour, but I kept hunting around for more clips for another hour, landing somewhere north of 75% of them. I might even go back and try for the 100% tonight.

It's an experience that sounds kind of lame, and at first it is. The only gameplay element is basically Googling things. But the interaction between your searches and the resultant clips starts to feel like you're running the interview personally. "I have no idea what she's talking about here, given the complete lack of context, but she mentioned 'Glasgow' off hand in this clip - let's press her on that... [search 'Glasgow,' 8 results] - wow, Jackpot!"

And, okay, I'll also say this - the "what happened" aspect of the murder mystery isn't all that interesting. The "why it happened" aspect is far more interesting, and it's something people are still debating in forums and threads to this day. Love it!

I found the whole process to be extremely immersive and rewarding and I'd definitely play more games like this one. Sounds like there's a spiritual successor from Sam Barlow in the works. I'm in!

The Leftovers: Season 3

There's a certain type of person (let's call the type a "TV critic") that thinks The Leftovers is just the pinnacle of what you can do on television, easily an all time great TV show, one for the ages. And I can see that line of thinking! I really can. I'm, like, 75% of the way there myself. This is the rare show (or movie) that's better than the book it's based on, no question, and the whole thing is largely just this exploration of grief and coping with it and moving on, and how fucked up we can be to ourselves and to each other when we don't have closure.

Famously, Damon Lindelof flubbed the ending of Lost - maybe even the whole second half of Lost - because he (and Carlton Cuse) just wanted to keep making weird shit happen without any regard for how it would all fit together or make sense. And of course this problem was compounded by a combination of fans, ABC, and the writers and actors themselves all wanting the show to eventually make sense, all assuming the show would eventually make sense. What were we left with? The saddest Hail Mary in the world, when in the antepenultimate episode we were told the answer to the island's mysteries was "there's a wheel, and when you turn it, the water, and also wood, good and evil, but time travel, have to let the light through." The whole thing was widely and deservedly derided, but plenty of fans and critics still clung to the "no, the Lost finale was actually good" take. Their argument was that the finale did justice to all of the characters, and to all of their moments with each other, and their line of thinking was that if you were watching Lost for the time travel and the polar bears, you were watching it for the wrong reasons. (Sanctimonious fucks, those Lost finale defenders.)

Anyway, it turns out that's just Lindelof in a nutshell - excellent at portraying those human interactions, those shortcomings, that sense of why a person might have a faith or belief in something totally insane, a relationship between two broken people told in tears and smiles and anguish - but maybe not so great at, say, science fiction. Or even plotting and storytelling.

I guess what I'm saying in a roundabout way is that Lindelof learned his lesson from Lost, and so did the rest of us, regarding what to expect, and The Leftovers wound up being so much like Lost without any compelling need for a satisfying answer, an explanation, what have you. And it was awesome! If anything, I could have used some more ambiguity from The Leftovers' finale - I didn't necessarily need to know the fates of Matt, of Kevin's father, of Laurie in particular, after her powerful, excellent episode. (Also the antepenultimate - wow!) - but I can't complain at all about the way The Leftovers ended and I'm looking forward to Lindelof's next project, whatever it may be.

Worms: Clan Wars

I absolutely loved playing Worms 2 and Worms: Armageddon in middle school, and then even though the series maintained a steady output of games every other year or so, I just sort of went quiet on it for ten years. Then I played (and liked, a lot) two Xbox Live Arcade ports, remakes, what have you - I wasn't sure Worms would translate from mouse-and-keyboard to game controller very well, but it did! Anyway, then I went ahead and bought Worms: Clan Wars as part of a Humble Bundle and... didn't really love it. It wasn't very good, frankly. Couple of gamebreaking bugs, and a difficulty curve that was way, way too easy early on before spiking absurdly in the final two levels. There were also a few levels early on where the objectives weren't clearly stated beforehand, which led to me, say, killing all the enemy worms for twenty minutes only to learn that I'd failed to grab a package somewhere along the way. Boo! At any rate, this feels for better or worse like a series that somehow doesn't hold up against its former self. Like it isn't even just that the gameplay was better relative to what else was out there in the 1990s than today - I really do think the games have gotten slighter, weaker, less intricate and detailed over the last twenty years or so. based on my limited exposure, anyway. Oh well! Still glad to have played this, and I won't be shy when it comes to free or severely discounted Worms games in the future.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Season 9

I know Adult Swim was around before Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and I know there have always been better shows on Adult Swim than Aqua Teen Hunger Force, but I think it's perfectly fair and reasonable to say that Aqua Teen Hunger Force was always the flagship show of the Adult Swim brand. Some were cleverer, some were even dumber, but as far as "what the fuck is even happening - no, wait, nobody cares" irreverent humor goes, how can you beat this? The show ended a few years ago - mercifully, finally - and with that ending came plenty of thinkpieces and looks back and legacy posturing, and you know what? After reading some of those, I'm sold on the idea of this show being some sort of proto-Internet-era "weird Twitter" sensation. This thing began in 2001 and was, at the time, the shortest show on television, what with these 11-minute episodes. There were no webseries back then. (Remember? I 'memba!) Anyway, you look at it through today's lens and the episodes almost drag on and on. Eleven minutes? Who has time for that? That's a long-ass YouTube video. That's 110 six-second Vines!

Anyway, my lengthy preamble there is meant mostly to butter the series up with rose-colored hindsight because, yeah, come on, there's nothing redeeming or intriguing about any of the ten episodes that constituted the ninth season of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, known for that particular season as Aqua Something You Know Whatever. It's an easy background watch while I'm playing a low stakes computer game or something, but the show's the same in its ninth season as it was in, like, its third.

Wrecked: Season 1

Here's a mostly stupid TBS show that markets itself as a parody of the first season of Lost - which is exactly what it is. In 2016. No one in the cast is anyone I'm even drawn to, save perhaps for Rhys Darby, so it's not like I'm watching this thing for the names or the talent; rather, I watched it because I haven't been disappointed or let down yet by any of the rebranded TBS's comedy lineup.

This one's... pretty dumb. But I knew it would be. I expected nothing more. Again, this is a Lost parody that debuted twelve years after Lost. And when I say "Lost parody" I don't even mean that it riffs on the deep mythology of the island - it's healing properties, cures for cancer and paralysis, a giant smoke monster, "the others." I just mean it's about a variety of dipshits who survive a plane crash on an island as they go about trying to reestablish or at least pretend to create some semblance of society and civilization.

The jokes aren't often good, and the good ones are repeated to death. One entire episode's B-plot revolves around a DVD player with two hours of battery left. The survivors have found two DVDs. One is Dumb and Dumber To and the other is Selma. One by one, when approached and presented with the decision, everyone lights up at the idea of watching Jim Carey be a doofus for a few hours, but then gets all solemn about Selma with generic platitudes like, "I mean, such an important movie... always meant to see it, just never found the time..." The joke here, in case you need it explained, is that even after a tragedy, everyone still feels the need to pretend to want to watch Selma lest they be accused of being shallow or racist or just un-woke or whatever. This is funny! It is. But is it funny enough to sustain a third to half of a 22-minute episode of television? Eh. Another similar later joke happens when no one can remember the name of the guy who played Kate Winslet's original love interest in Titanic and of course they can't just look it up on Google. Literally dozens of obscure actors of a certain age are named and treated with varying amounts of "that's close!" and "oh come on, you can't be serious!" The payoff comes an episode or two later when, trapped in a much more dire circumstance, someone finally says, out of nowhere "it was Billy Zane!"

So yeah - I'm sitting here describing jokes to bemoan them. Must have been a shitty show, right?

Actually, surprisingly... well, yes. I mean, yes, this is utterly inconsequential TV. But I didn't hate it! It made for a great late night binge, and at ten episodes long, it felt just right. I think I'll actually keep up with it when Season 2 debuts in a few weeks, but it could be just awful in a non-binged capacity.

The Americans: Season 5

In a certain sense, there are few shows on television more frustrating than The Americans. Right off the bat, let me say - the show is great. It's always been great, and if anything it's gotten better. But I find myself, every year, wanting it to be the prestige drama of the decade, this brilliantly plotted tragedy mixed with sociopolitical commentary and occasional kickass spygamery. If executed perfectly I really do think The Americans could and would be the greatest show on television. But it's just too damn slow, too low-stakes, too content to spin some wheels and increase the tension rather than pushing its characters to new breaking points. These all time great shows like The Wire and Breaking Bad were excellent because they knew when to rev the engine and when to hit the brakes. And they knew how to hit the brakes. The Americans just seems to always have its foot on the brakes! When Season 3 ended with a certain revelation - the Jennings' true identities being revealed to a key character - that should have been the Shakespearian arc shape's climax, the event that finally takes a big old swing at the status quo with a sledge hammer and cracks it, in a way where the characters can only ignore those cracks for so long before it all comes down so messily that they're just trying to escape with their lives or their honor or some combination of the two; it should have all been denouement from Season 3, a long and ugly fall from grace for the Jennings, full of betrayal and tragedy and impossible decisions and human breaking points. Instead, Season 5 has ended and we head into the final season, the sixth, in more or less the exact same place we were at the end of Season 3! And that's a little disappointing. There's been one shocking character death, but even that was midway through Season 4. Everything else has just been the Jennings - mostly Phillip, still - growing wearier and more and more exhausted both mentally and emotionally by the requirements of his job. And still, we don't even have much in the way of Phillip wanting to defect. We have no rift between him and Elizabeth. The seeds are there, sure, but the seeds were there after two seasons! Why are we still watering these seeds? Let the seeds germinate, already. Reap the rewards! Frankly, the stakes just haven't been elevating or changing at all, and it really feels like The Americans would have been better off wrapping things up in five seasons instead of saving the good stuff for a sixth at the expense of having a slow and mostly meaningless fourth and fifth. It's disappointing, is all! This show feels like a seven-speed car stuck in, like, fifth gear. Hey, great, fifth gear, most shows will never get there - but come on, let loose! Let's see what we've got here!

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Season 3

I don't have a lot to say about Kimmy Schmidt. The entire third season felt so... slight? I dunno. Not bad, or anything - don't get me wrong - but never have I seen a Netflix show that feels more like a disposable, average network sitcom. This still smells like Tina Fey and 30 Rock, and not in a bad way, but it's starting to feel like an entirely forgettable TV show to me - funny enough, a very easy watch, no reason to stop watching it, but no real reason to keep going either, you know?

80 Days

Humble Bundle had (and still has) an intriguing little trio of games available for whatever minimal price you want to pay. This one's a fun little text-based adventure game that takes all of an hour and change to beat. It's based on the Jules Verne novel and the goal is, of course, to circumnavigate the globe in eighty days or fewer. I ended up doing it in 62 days on my first playthrough, and easily could have done it in 50 or fewer but decided to waste a lot of time dicking around once I was within reach of London. It's really not that hard, and I liked doing it just enough to justify spending pocket change and ninety minutes on the experience. There's plenty of replay value here - so many cities to visit, and so much text to read - but I'm not sure how quickly I'll return to this well. Apparently the world record for this three-year-old game is 26 days, and fans are still finding new ways to tie it and hoping to beat it. Easter eggs abound, as do steampunk elements, and allegedly there's a way to go straight through the center of the earth at some point. Fans have also made their own records and contests - who can return to London having visited the most cities? Who can return to London having amassed the most money? I don't have a ton else to say about it, really - plenty fun, extremely simple and straightforward. What else do you want?

Exit West

A sneaky-good love story, a sneaky-bad refugee story. Most of the appeal comes from its focus on the ongoing migrant crisis, but the heart of it all is the relationship between the two protagonists growing and changing as they continuously "exit West." Credit where it's due - for the idea, the story, the ending in particular - but somewhere between the descriptions of an intentionally vague conflict and the magical realism of doorway portals that connect the first world, I lost track of Hamid's intention. Wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, too - it's likely I'm missing a few aspects of what he's done here, not appreciating a few others - but the whole thing's written in that God-awful melodramatically wan tone Mitch Albom made popular twenty years ago. No contractions, no exclamations, no soul or spark or pizzazz - just understatements and bare descriptions and lowest-common-denominator, "let-the-reader-do-the-work" nothing phrases like "in a way that felt both strange and familiar" and "for what seemed like a moment but also an eternity." Just the laziest form of writing, all generic, nothing specific. The country it's taking place in doesn't even get named or identified. If that's your bag, fine, go nuts! But this crap leaves me cold and distant - the exact opposite of how you'd want to feel reading any story "about" the "human experience." And the real shame is that this had potential - can't help but imagine Vonnegut or Murakami (just to name some personal favorites) having an absolute field day with this material. Oh well!

Master of None: Season 2

Loved this. Biggest knock on Season 1 seemed to be "the dialogue feels very stilted and no one actually talks like this; this is just Aziz exploring different aspects of being a thirty-ish Indian actor in New York." And I get that! It didn't bother me so much, but yes, the dialogue often felt very forced, like Aziz wanted to explore different things like "I get typecast as an Indian actor too often" and "long term relationships are scary when you fall into one during the time in your life when the people around you begin to get married" but didn't know how to approach those subjects organically.

Season 2 is a lot more focused, a lot more precise, a lot more clean. It's still got a handful of specific thematic episodes (such as "it's hard coming out as a lesbian to your proud black mother and grandma") but there's an arc here, not only picking up where things left off for Dev after the first season (in Italy, making pasta) but also following his career and love life. The climax is the penultimate episode, a budding love story stretched into an hour long (and all of it excellent) that's just brutally heartbreaking even though you know exactly how it's going to unfold - the type of story you've seen and even been through several dozen times, and it should feel totally played out, but it doesn't, because it's just this flawless execution every step of the way.

Aziz has said that there won't be a third season of Master of None for a long, long time if ever, because he set out to make a show about several of the very specific things he's already looked at, and he'd need to collect all kinds of new life experiences - get married, have kids, and so on - in order to have something new to say.

I respect that! But it also makes me sad. At the very least, here's hoping we see more from Aziz in the future - he's come a long way from the guy I knew as "laughably lazy intern on Scrubs" and later Tom Haverford, who was for all intents and purposes just a slight tweak on "laughably lazy intern on Scrubs."

Archer: Season 8

I don't blame Adam Reed or any of the rest of the folks making Archer for wanting to change things up. Eight years is a long damn time, and it's probably better for anyone "stuck" working on one show for that long to mix things up and keep things fresh. So, kudos to all, and thanks to Adam Reed for so many great years of not just Archer, but of Sealab 2021 as well.

But!

This was not nearly, at all, a good season of Archer. Season 7 ended with our main man getting shot, falling into a pool, and going into a coma. Season 8 picks up with him in that coma ("Dreamland"), envisioning all the characters as 1940s crime noir versions of themselves. It's an interesting concept and as a one-episode thing or even a two- or three-episode arc, it might have been one of my favorite things Archer has ever tried. But, I dunno. It just didn't work for me. (And I wasn't alone! I even got a text from an old friend out of the blue one day asking, "is it just me or is this season of Archer no good?")

I think part of the problem is that when you've spent seven years fleshing out characters and defining their relationships to one another, it's weird and off-putting to recast them all in different roles that don't really play with their established types.You sort of either have to recast everyone into the same role relative to one another or play with some serious "bizzarro world" counterparts. For instance, Cyril is and always has been, in Archer, a sort of beta male weenie - a nerdy, worried accountant in a sweater vest who consistently gets one-upped by Archer. You know what could have been fun? Turning 1940s Cyril into the epitome of 1940s cool - a trenchcoat-wearing, sitting back in the shadows, cigarette-smoking mystery man who nails it repeatedly with the 1940s slang. Like what if Archer suddenly had to deal with dream-Cyril being so much cooler and suaver and all-around better than him? Likewise, Mallory's always been a no-nonsense bosslady with a vicious mean streak. Maybe 1940s Mallory could have been a frail old woman - or at least someone who put on that persona in the public eye, only to become ruthless and cutthroat behind closed doors. (Yes, typing that out, I realize I'm just pitching Mom from Futurama.)

Anyway, Cyril was just sort of 1940s Cyril and Mallory was just sort of 1940s Mallory. It all felt like someone had taken a generic Sam Spade story and injected Archer characters into it, quirks and all, hoping the result would be funny, like bad fan fiction or something. I'm sorry! That's harsh. But I just didn't care at all about this season of Archer. And with just two eight-episode seasons remaining and Aisha Taylor contemplating a departure, I'm not optimistic that this show will return to its old standards again. Womp womp!