Borders: Season 2

Remember when I had some mildly positive and excited things to say about the first season of this "show?" Yeah, the second season was just the host hanging out in Hong Kong for a while, talking about the buildings there and the neon signs after running out of geopolitical topics in, no joke, two episodes. Short, though!

Big Mouth: Season 2

This is still a uniquely gross and off-putting show - really didn't need to see 13-year-old boobs and wieners, guys - but I also really respect that it's willing to tackle certain topics and subjects that no other show is. The introduction of the David Thewlis-voiced "Shame Wizard" - a creepy phantom who each kid gets judged by, but thinks only he or she can see and hear - really pulled everything together for me and let the awkward confusion of puberty and adolescence hit home.

Also, not for nothing, but the voice work is top notch here. Nick Kroll's doing the heaviest lifting by far, but John Mulaney and Jason Mantzoukas are just taking their characters to another level. There are too many talented people to list here, so I'll cut to the chase. My MVP is Jenny Slate as the braces-wearing horny nerd girl Missy Foreman-Greenwald. Every one of her line readings slays me! What a champion.

Forever: Season 1

Here's a weird one form Alan Yang (Master of None) and Matt Hubbard (30 Rock). It arrived a month ago with virtually no fanfare whatsoever, just showing up on Amazon after Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph had that very weird bit at the Emmys to, I guess "promote" this show? And reviewers and critics were embargoed from revealing just about anything about what the show even was, which isn't necessarily a winning marketing move in 2018. I, for one, only decided to give the show a shot after I'd read some spoiler-laden reviews. I'm glad I did, and I'm going to go right ahead and also talk about exactly what this show is.

So, first episode, opening montage, we meet this couple. We watch them come together and grow comfortable and old with one another, all totally wordlessly like the opening of Up. Years pass, Maya Rudolph's maybe a little bored and tired after 13 years in this relationship, just doing the same old things all the time, year after year. So in an attempt to mix things up, they decide to go skiing for once. Plenty of standard hijinks ensue, and for a little while the whole thing feels like a weird anti-comedy, like why did all of these talented people get together and decide to make this off-beat but otherwise uninspired show? Then suddenly, Fred Armisen skis directly into a tree and dies and the episode ends.

Oh! The second episode's about Maya Rudolph coming to terms with his death, mourning, moving on, what have you. And then she also dies, chocking on airplane peanuts. And then she wakes up in the afterlife, which is just a regular old mundane suburban existence, and Fred Armisen's there, and he's so happy to see her. Okay. Okay, so this is what the show is. Now I get it.

The remaining six episodes (yeah, there are only eight total, each a half-hour. Isn't that nice?) begin to explore what it is to be in the afterlife with someone you were already growing kind of bored with. There's nothing really profound going on here, but I found it all to be an enjoyable and pleasant watch, like some sort of mellowed down version of The Good Place without the jokes. I mean there are jokes here, but the vibe's much more relaxed.

Apparently there's going to be a second season, and that's fine by me. I enjoyed this! It was nothing special, but I would very readily have a second helping next year. I use "comfort food" a lot here as an analogy for shitty shows that I can't help but stick with - guilty pleasures, really, would be a better term - but "comfort" food feels very apt here, like the whole thing's a warm bowl of soup or something.

Anyway, give Forever a shot, maybe.

Better Call Saul: Season 4

This is one of the best shows on television and it's gotta be considered top ten for the decade, but get out of here if your take is that this thing has surpassed Breaking Bad. That show was frought with absolute tension thanks to masterful writing, acting, cinematography, and editing. Just an overall masterclass example of tense and ultimately heartbreaking storytelling. This show might be even better at building tension with shots and editing, it might be just as wonderfully acted, and it might be just as well-written, but the biggest shortcoming with it is that we ultimately know the fates of virtually every character in the series. (And virtually all of them, on every side of this burgeoning drug war, get done in by the same angry chemistry teacher. Come on!)

I'm not suggesting that Better Call Saul isn't, you know, excellent. But I think too many people are too quick to diminish or forget just how good Breaking Bad was when they suggest this show is better than that one ever was. No accounting for taste and all, sure, and it's a hell of a ride seeing Mike and Gus and Nacho operating at their peaks. But what's left to do in this "world before Walter White?" I love this show, don't get me wrong, and it seems to find its way into my top five or ten shows every year. But Breaking Bad was never not my number one overall show in any given year. It's one of the greatest shows of all time! Gah. I'll stop now.

Lodge 49: Season 1

Total weird one. This was described pretty commonly by critics as being like The Big Lebowski, but I almost think that's giving the plot and story here too much credit. I'm a fan of Wyatt Russell's and have to admit that he's the least compelling part of this show (aptly named "Dud"), well behind his character's sister, Liz, and new friend, Ernie (both pictured on the couch in the poster above). I'll also admit that I lost the thread of the plot pretty quickly and pretty often on this one, but thankfully Lodge 49 doesn't feel like much of a plot-nbased show at all. This thing lives and dies on its absurd scenes, like when Ernie gets into a shirtless pushup contest at the wrokplace, or when Liz shuts herself in a refrigerator, or when Dud nearly crashes his car into a seal in the middle of the street, or when Liz tries to pull her couch across her living room by her teeth. It's all character-driven nonsense vibes, and if that's your bag, great. I think I simultaneously liked this less than I wanted to and also have myself convinced I liked it more than I did. A second season's been confirmed, which is almost a shame based on how this first one ends, and I really have no idea if I'll be back for more. Honestly? It may depend on when this airs in 2019. If they can accelerate the production schedule enough to make it a true summer show (like, with a June debut instead of an August one) then I think there's a better chance of me coming back than there is if this is airing in the typically densely-packed fall. Pairing this with Better Call Saul was, uh, interesting at best - and I know air dates and scheduling barely matter in 2018, when even DVR viewing is quickly being replaced by streaming, but still!

Wrecked: Season 3

Probably the dumbest comedy I'm still watching. What started as a Lost spoof in 2016 (yeah, I still can't believe that either) became some sort of forgettable cruise ship farce in 2017 and then this year turned into a Hunger Games parody of sorts. It's all so inoffensively dumb and the characters are just barely funny enough to keep me going, but man, this is exactly the kind of show I should stop watching if I'm serious whatsoever on cutting back on my TV hours. Two saving graces here are that it's such a short and easy watch (ten half-hours a season, and those half-hours are really like, 22 minutes each) and that it reinvents itself constantly, never staying in one place long enough to get completely stale. But oof. Oof, guys. What am I doing here?

Follow This: Season 1

Here's Buzzfeed's version of Vox's Explained. It was weirder and worse. Nothing else to say, really.

Man, this blog stinks lately.

Explained: Season 1

And here, in the latest installment of "what even is TV anymore?" we have Explained, a twenty-ish-minute weekly Netflix series about any number of things. (Is it made by Vox? Oh baby, you know it's made by Vox!)

A lot of these episodes were informative and interesting deeper looks into subject areas I knew only superficially about. At worst, these were no worse than boring middle segments of Last Week Tonight and at best they were that perfect blend of easily digestible and helpfully informative. Like I really can't say I needed to know more about K-Pop, and I really can't say I learned anything new about he gender wage gap, but I don't feel like the episodes on those respective topics were wastes of my time as much as enjoyable little informational videos. What's not to like?

Stan's Book Dump: Summer 2018

Play it again! I read six more books over the last three months. As always, you can read my trying-hard-to-sound-smart takes over on goodreads.com and you can read my stringing-multiple-words-together-with-hyphens-quality writing here.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

Long-gone blog contributor Dee described this as one of her least favorite books by one of her favorite authors, and I can't put it more concisely than that. This is my third Murakami book after the very accessible and non-Murakami-esque Norwegian Wood and the very weird and surreal and Murakami-esque The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, both of which I absolutely loved. This I could appreciate, but it made no lasting impact on my brain beyond me trying to figure out how its two parallel narratives were linked. I was so underwhelmed by this - relative to the other two Murakami books I've read, I should stress - that I never even bothered to fill out a Murakami Bingo card, and trying to do so now I find myself unable to remember certain necessary details. Alas! For what it's worth, I still enjoyed and respected this book a great deal. Pretty sure I gave it four stars on goodreads. But for an author who'd earned nothing but unabashed fives from me, sure, this was a minor disappointment. That said, it definitely expanded my Murakami horizons and probably just sets my expectations better for future works of his - of which I have plenty.

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Speaking of minor disappointments from authors I respect a great deal, here's Fitzgerald's final novel if you don't count the one he never finished. This was his favorite of his own works, and it's easy to recognize several of Fitzgerald's recurring themes here and thus easy to see why this might have been his magnum opus. First part's about a pretty young girl just star-struck and infatuated by a cool and confident older man. Third part's about that same man, aging and drinking and losing his cool and unable to hold onto that same young girl who used to throw herself at him. But none of the characters or motifs are as memorable as Nick or Gatsby or Daisy or that dang green light, and as such, the book pales in comparison to that one. (But hey, what's more F. Scott Fitzgerald than being unable to recapture the talent and magic he had as a younger man? Life imitating art, and so forth.) This was fine, and maybe even good. But it wasn't great.

Journey by James A. Michener

Here's an obscure little historical adventure novel by an author I've read once before, long ago. I dug it. Thanks to The Terror, I got way the hell into the story of the Franklin expedition earlier this year, this poor doomed travesty-mystery of a hundred or so men who set out to find the Northwest Passage and ended up iced in above the Arctic Circle for two years instead, starving and freezing and diseased and then dead. This is a very similar story about British pride and hubris in the face of the brutal Canadian wilderness. It's set in the 1890s and depicts the vainglorious attempt by five men to reach a place called Dawson in the Yukon territory without ever setting foot on American soil. Here, let me show you where that is and what that entails:

Ha! Buncha dumbasses! You can't tell from this scale, but Dawson is located on the Yukon River, which is navigable all the way out through Alaska to the coast. So, the easy way to get to Dawson back in the 19th century is of course just to sail there from, say, anywhere at all in the Pacific Ocean. Instead, our proud British boys catch the train from the eastern coast of Canada all the way out to Edmonton and then spend a goddamn year and a half trekking through byzantine lake-and-river networks and around mountains until they stumble at last into Dawson, way the hell after they wanted to get there and long after the gold rush there has ended. Oh, and a lot of them died. You almost get the sense that Michener was looking at old maps one day or something, and realized what an absurd thing it would be to try to reach the Klondike region by Canada instead of Alaska, and then wrote a little novel about doing exactly that. Probably not for everyone, but this history-and-geography nerd was into it, at least.

Authority by Jeff VanDerMeer

It's the sequel to Annihilation, and oh my God is it a snoozer. Where that book was thin and quick and just atmospheric as hell, this one is 400 pages of corporate office drudgery and conspiracy theories. Here's hoping the final book in the Southern Reach trilogy sticks the landing, because holy shit, this was a slog!

The Chapo Guide to Revolution by Chapo Trap House

I've been a big fan of Chapo Trap House this past year and a half or so; their "dirtbag left" jokes and takes and sensibilities have kept me sane during what's been a, uh, shall we say a wild ride? For those who listen to their show - and really, I can't imagine anyone else is buying this thing - the book offered nothing drastically new or different or even particularly insightful. But I mean, shit, it's a book in the political humor section at the end of the day, and the contemporary alternatives in that category are more or less John Oliver calling Mike Pence's pet rabbit gay.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

I was just about blown away by Little Fires Everywhere, so I had high hopes for Ng's first novel, Amazon's 2014 Book of the Year. Eh. For whatever reason, this never really connected with me. I blame myself more than Ng or her book for that, as I just kept putting the book down for extended periods of time instead of sinking into it, investing in these characters, losing myself in their stories - but then again, doesn't it say something that I was able to keep putting the book down for weeks on end? This is the story of a family in crisis. Specifically, an Asian-American family in 1970s suburban Ohio hiding secrets from one another and harboring resentments and leaving just so many things unsaid, either out of embarassment or politeness or something else entirely. I can relate to that! I can even see a lot of my own family's dynamics in that. But for whatever reason, this didn't really register with me. Hey, so it goes!

So that's twenty books on the year. I'm on pace to finish 2018 with 26 or 27 reads, which would be my most since 2012. Not bad! Unfortunately, it's a far cry from the 30 I resolved to read in 2018. Ten more books in three more months? Fuck it, let's do this!