BoJack Horseman: Season 5

One of the simplest challenges in the current TV landscape is consistent greatness. Feels like every year a whole dozen new shows capture the zeitgeist for a hot second, make waves, earn that workplace cafeteria "hey have you guys seen -" buzz, and then fade away somewhere in the second season. It wasn't always this way! Only like five years ago, I could enter a given year knowing that Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones and Mad Men and Parks and Recreation would be four of the best shows on TV all year, and they always were, and that was that. But these days, whether its due to anthology formats, extended hiatuses between seasons, or the general glut of television in general, it just seems harder for shows to be consistently very good. The Americans just went out on a high note, but took a minor faceplant in Season 5. Fargo felt completely strained in Season 3 after being a consensus "best show on TV" candidate for two years. And plenty of reliable old comedies like Archer and Always Sunny have been inconsistent at best in recent memory.

Credit, then, to BoJack Horseman for a fourth straight season of very good television. The fastball is slipping a little, maybe - Season 4 was already a small step down from Seasons 2 and 3 - but this is still arguably the best show on earth when it comes to mixing absurdly stupid laugh lines with deep and cathartic emotional punches.

Nothing gold can stay, and creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg has been candid about how he could see this show lasting for ten or even twenty years, so it's going to be inevitable when - not if, but when - BoJack has a season that feels lazy or misguided or out of touch or uninspired. I mean, you can only burn so bright for a short amount of time - look at how quickly another wildly creative animated show like Rick and Morty hit a snag, and look at how deeply lazy and bad old stalwarts like The Simpsons and South Park have grown over the years.

Eventually, BoJack Horseman will get bad. But I'll take every season I can get until then.

American Vandal: Season 2

Here's my entire review of the first season of this true crime parody from Netflix:

It's a Netflix true crime parody about a case of high school vandalism. Someone has spray-painted a bunch of dicks on the cars in the faculty parking lot. But who? Starts out feeling like this dumb, trivial show, and frankly, that's what it ends up being. Still, I enjoyed it - and it ends with a big old gut punch that I shouldn't spoil. Eight episodes, half an hour each (or so). Give it a try, maybe.

Not very glowing, not very insightful, just a little ho-hum write-up about an enjoyable but forgettable season of television. I wrote that in October of last year, and then by December when all the "best of 2017" lists started coming out, imagine my surprise when I found just so much love out there for American Vandal. People were raving about how it Trojan-Horsed in all kinds of depth about high school sadsacks and how it was the first show about teenagers to explore what social media does to outcasts. Sure, fine - I can see that. but also, this was just an eight-episode show about spray-painting dicks onto cars! It's a thing that's making fun of - and in some ways, making light of - the real cases presented in Making a Murderer and Serial and the like.

Anyway, the creators of American Vandal clearly heard all your praise for their depiction of high school losers, because they're doubling down here in Season 2. Things were a little less funny and a little more nakedly moralistic the second time around, despite a bunch of poop-based pranks, and without spoiling anything major, I'll just say that catfishing and cybersecurity play a huge role in the story.

It was fine. Not sure if I liked it better or worse than the first season - probably just a little bit better? - but then, the idea that I haven't given it any real thought speaks pretty loudly about how I feel about American Vandal in general.

Here's a thought. How many high schools around the country have been subject to recurring, large-scale, shit-based pranks? And now, how many have been subject to school shootings? And, moreover, to sexual assault cases? I mean, I'm not suggesting that American Vandal should go ahead and do a school shooting or a rape season - both of those concepts would actually fly in the face of the low-stakes "whodunnit" nature of the show. But I guess I'm saying, hey, there's real shit that high schoolers are dealing with that could potentially be mined or referenced in some way, no? I mean, even just making one of the talking head interviewees to say something like, "I always figured he might shoot up the school someday, but making everyone shit their pants? Horrific."

Just some food for thought! There's probably some way to make a very poignant #MeToo season about a star athlete who keeps groping his lady classmates, or something. You know?

Making It: Season 1

One of the most appealing things about The Great British Baking Show - or as it's called everywhere else, The Great British Bake-Off - is its exceedingly gentle and calming nature. There's something so nakedly melodramatic about the way so many competitive reality shows are edited and structured - manufactured beef between contestants, a toxic "every man for himself" mentality. But then you watch The Great British Baking Show and it's just a bunch of self-deprecating British people laughing nervously about how badly their tortes and puddings came out, and then one of them has to go home, and no one is harboring any bad blood or resentment or being petty, and it is not treated like a tragedy or a triumph or anything obnoxious like that.

Making It was a six-episode reality competition that just aired on NBC, and it borrowed heavily and heartily from The Great British Baking Show, right down to the format of the competition and the physical set up of the competition space - a big old barn in the middle of the woods. It was the perfect length, at six episodes, just enough time to really get to know the eight contestants and the hosts and judges without ever feeling needlessly long or padded.

Anyway, this is basically "Etsy: The Competition." Etsy ads were all over this thing and the whole competition was based on crafting. Make a last-minute Halloween costume. Make a child's fort. Make a non-traditional quilt of some sort. And so on and so forth.

Marissa taped the first episode because the show was hosted by Nick Offerman and Amy Poehler. And while I didn't need to watch "Etsy: The Show," we found it easy enough to watch Nick Offerman and Amy Poehler being generically pleasant and cheerful and positive to eight people just making shit with their bare hands. Do I need a second season of this thing? Fuck no, I do not. But it's a much more berable summer show - especially at just six episodes in length - than, like, MasterChef ever was.

Electric Dreams: Season 1

Here's Amazon's answer to Black Mirror, a ten-part collection of stand-alone episodes of science fiction based on the stories of Philip K. Dick. Right away, the immediate question is of course, how did they compare to Black Mirror? And I mean, truly, I think the best episodes of this show would be lesser episodes of Black Mirror at best. But! That doesn't mean this show is necessarily worse than Black Mirror as much as it means that these episodes aren't necessarily meant to look and feel like episodes of Black Mirror. And that makes sense. Where Black Mirror is about - loosely - "what happens when all this new technology we all use and love goes too far," Electric Dreams is much more of a mixed bag of far-future space travel and dystopian weirdness. One episode's got a straight up pig lady - not the point of the episode at all, just, a completely inconsequential character is a woman with pig ears, a pig nose, and pig hooves, and it's sort of tangentially related to the episode at hand, so hey, cool, whatever, great worldbuilding - but yeah, Black Mirror isn't touching something half that campy.

The other obvious question is, how do these episodes rank against each other? And you know what? I tried to answer this question, but just couldn't come up with a definitive ranking - me, a serial ranker. None of them stood out as excellent, none of them stood out as terrible - hell, some of them didn't stand out as anything at all.

That said, here's my best stab at arranging these episodes into, I dunno, call them "tiers."

Solid, memorable, impactful:

"Safe and Sound"

"Impossible Planet"

"Kill All Others"

"Autofac"

Something there, execution maybe slightly lacking:

"Crazy Diamond"

"Real Life"

Meh:

"The Commuter"

"Human Is"

"The Father Thing"

No impact whatsoever:

"The Hood Maker"

Meanwhile, here's a consensus of all the Internet rankigns I could find. It's hardly even a consensus - every episode on here was listed all over the place on various lists - but I rank-averaged all of them across every list and sorted them for whatever that's worth.

1. "Kill All Others"

2. "The Commuter"

3. "Real Life"

4. "Autofac"

5. "Safe & Sound"

6. "Impossible Planet"

7. "The Hood Maker"

8. "The Father Thing"

9. "Human Is"

10. "Crazy Diamond"

"Crazy Diamond," if you're wondering, is the one with the pig lady.

Anyway, that's Electric Dreams for you!

Disenchantment: Season 1

I kind of saw this coming, what with The Simpsons not being very good for, oh, 15 years now, and with the later seasons of post-cancellation Futurama petering out with a whimper, but Matt Gorening's new show Disenchantment left me... disenchanted.

The core characters are really just a re-tinkering of the Futurama line-up, with Princess Bean as Leela (an ass-kicking tomboy with disdain for the establishment and a heart of gold), Elfo as Fry (just adorably dumbfounded and unfailingly good and completely naive to the new world around him), and the little cat-demon whose name I forget as Bender (endearingly ego-driven and constantly ragging on humans).

The pilot was especially rough. And, sure, a lot of pilots are - but this thing felt conceptually leaden and heavy from the outset, whereas something like Futurama was bold and fresh and new and exciting from the first minute. There's a second season coming - technically a "Part 2," which, oof, come on now Netflix, can you cut that shit out already? - and to date there's no confirmation of a third. I'm not suggesting or even hoping that means Disenchantment was always meant to be a two-season series, but at this point I'm not willing to give it a third. Let's see how that second one goes, see if there are any meaningful emotional beats or arcs we haven't seen four times already in Futurama, and judge it accordingly. Because so far, this is an easy watch, but not much else.

The 2000s: Season 1

This CNN documentary provided a cursory but solid look back at the decade before this one. It was much more interesting than I thought it would be, having lived through it all. This was the decade in which I came of age (entered at 11, exited at 21), and thus the first one in which I was really "aware" of politics, current affairs, and international events. So this seven-part look back didn't really give me any new information or insight.

What it did do, however, was really organize the moments and events I recall into a narrative of sorts, if that makes sense. (Of course it makes sense - look at me, describing what "history" is.) You've got the weird Bush-Gore election, you've got 9/11 and Afghanistan and Iraq, you've got Katrina and Bush's second term failures. Then you've got the Obama campaign, alongside the financial collapse, and then the very early Obama presidency and the rise of the tea party. Alongside all of this, you've got an explosion of communications technology - we enter the decade reading newspapers, dialing up to connect to the Internet, we spend the decade growing more comfortable with memes and viral videos and social networking, and we close the decade with always-online, hyper-connected sleek computer-phones in our pockets. TV? It gets incredible. Music? The entire industry struggles with the death of the CD and emergence of the MP3, hip hop dominates, rock more or less dies, country enjoys a jingoistic resurgence.

I dunno, a lot happened! And yet, so little seemed to happen. The 2000s represent this weird cultural nadir in my mind, especially in the early part of the decade. I mean go ahead and Google something like "2003 Teen Choice Awards" or "2004 Big Brother Cast Photo" to get a sense of the prevailing, uh, fashion. When I think of that era I think of H2s and velour tracksuits and frosted tips. Spray tans and tube tops and acid-washed jeans. Flip phones and shitty HTML websites. I think of how the entire culture of the time seemed to be a direct response to 9/11, a loud and proud and emphatically "free country, bitch!" thumb in the eye of, shit, I dunno, taste and decency? But also clearly I existed in my own dumb bubble back then, this suburban white high school American mindset getting style tips from Mean Girls and The OC. Because while my dumb ass was focused on these things - I swear there was one winter where every girl I knew wore headbands and long sweaters and tights and ballet flats, which still blows my mind to consider - there was a six-year span that included 9/11 and the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina and the collapse of the global economy, not to mention a golden age for digital information and communication technology.

Weird decade, man. But aren't they all?