Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Season 4

And so concludes Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a spiritual successor to 30 Rock in terms of its creators, rhythms, on-screen talent, sense of humor, you name it. 30 Rock won eleven Primetime Emmy awards and was nominated for, holy shit, 73. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was nominated for just eleven and didn't win any. (I suppose this final half-season is eligible for the Fall 2019 Emmys, but, come on.)

Where am I going with this? I have no idea! I don't know what else to say about this show, here at the end of it, beyond acknowledging its pedigree, of all things. I guess I'm saying that I'm going to miss it in the weirdest and smallest way. I wasn't on board with 30 Rock right out of the gate, but for more or less ten years I've been a regular viewer of that show or this one. Peak TV churns on and on and on, and waits for nobody, and -

Wait, no, now I remember why I started this off by waxing nostalgic about the Emmys! The first six episodes of this fourth and final season of Kimmy Schmidt came out like two days before the Emmy eligibility window closed last May, and somehow - somehow! - they earned a nomination for Best Comedy Series. Fuck that, man!

Go to hell, Kimmy Schmidt.

Halt and Catch Fire: Season 3

It's been a real delight to spend January digging through the sizable but not daunting 40-episode series of Halt and Catch Fire, a blindspot of mine when it aired not all that long ago at all. It's not that the show is profound or amazing or even exceedingly memorable. Rather, the longer it goes - the more time passes on the show, the more time you get to spend with these four characters - the more immersive and real it all feels. One of the coolest parts about Mad Men was seeing these characters in 1960, products of the 1950s and the very conservative America they'd been successful in, and then seeing who they had become by 1971 after enduring not just ten years of age and experience, but specifically enduring the 1960s.

Where am I going with all of this? Halt and Catch Fire did something extremely cool in Season 3, which is a mid-season four-year time jump. Not enough shows do time jumps at all, and when they do it's almost always between seasons. I get it - seasons have narrative arcs that the time between seasons can easily ignore. It was just so bold and refreshing to see this AMC show decide that it didn't need all ten episodes of its third season to conclude its third season arc, and to go ahead and let the final two stand as a weird preview of sorts for the fourth and final season.

Specifically, the show jumps from 1986 to 1990, and in doing so leaves all of its computer hardware and software development storylines in the dust to prepare to tackle the early years of the Internet. Four years isn't a massive jump - they had to recast Gordon and Donna's daughters, but little else - but it's a massive jump from one "era" of the information revolution to another. In just two and a half seasons, the show had brought us from the proto-PC days of 1983 to the arrival of the NES in 1986. Why bother keeping up that same pace just to mull around in the late '80s instead of jumping all the way ahead for some more big innovations? (One can almost envision the show's hypothetical fifth and sixth seasons involving an MP3 player in 2001 and a smart phone in 2007. Why not?)

I'm also a sucker for era-appropriate details, and just as I loved the way Mad Men picked character-appropriate wardrobe evolutions, I mean, let me take a minute just to compare what the four main characters looked like in Season 1's 1983 -

- and what they looked like by Season 3's 1990 -

I mean, this is perfect. Joe the salesman goes from being a run-of-the-mill '80s "suit" to having the distinguished "tech guy" glasses-and-beard look in 1990, almost ahead of his time. This is the exact opposite of what's happened to the nerdier engineer Gordon, who had the very 1970s-appropriate glasses and beard in the early '80s but by 1990 has caught up with the late '80s "sitcom dad" look - glasses-free, clean shave, and plain haircut. Meanwhile, Donna - a housewife in 1983 who'd left a promising career behind in order to, uh, home-make, is just the absolute image of old-school maternal, looking older than her years with the pastel colors and big bow on her blouse - a sharp contrast to young punk-anarchist Cameron with the short hair and military-cut sweaters. But by 1990, Cameron is a slightly mellowed out married woman, and her wardrobe is very much that of a typical thirty-ish woman in 1990, while Donna is all the way back in the game, earth tones and short hair and an overall "power woman" look, very much no longer a housewife, or even a wife at all.

So in short, Joe and Gordon have switched looks, but Joe remains about ten years ahead of Gordon the whole way through the reversal, and Donna has sharpened up on her way out of a marriage while Cameron is softening out on her way into one.

You know, reading that back - that doesn't even begin to summarize the depths of Donna, Cameron, or their complicated and increasingly show-centric relationship. It's not enough to define these women in 1983 and 1990 by their marital status. Instead here are four stills of the pair of them that, I mean, a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

Season 1, first meeting (early 1983):


Season 2 premiere (late 1984 or early 1985):


Season 3 premiere (1986?):


Season 3 finale (1990):

Does this make more sense? Do you get a sense now of how Donna used to feel threatened by, or jealous of, the younger and edgier Cameron? How she used to see in her, perhaps, a vision of who she once was, and could still be? And how Cameron saw Donna, perhaps, as a future road she didn't want to go down? But how after years of working together, they've almost switched places in terms of who's wielding power over who, and which one feels more threatened by the other, and how much of that growth and change is conveyed in wardrobe decisions, but how the fashion still feels authentic to the time period on each character at all times? Yeah, I love that shit.

Anyway, this show isn't Mad Men, but I completely understand now what people meant when they said "it became the new Mad Men once it stopped trying to be Mad Men."

The Good Place: Season 3

A thing that rules about The Good Place is that it reboots itself roughly three times a season. I mean, the characters themselves have very literally been "rebooted" three or four times each now, and that's excluding the best episode of the series to date, where they were rebooted like a thousand times each.

But all that rebooting is also a handicap of sorts, and the first half of Season 3 felt like the worst version of this show so far, a dragging go-nowhere run where our characters were stuck on earth (so, no fun powers for Michael or Janet) and reintroducing themselves to one another for what's already the third time in the show's run. Season 3 picked up steam somewhere around its midpoint - not coincidentally, when the humans left earth again and the show got back to poking around in the odd corners of the weird realms of the afterlife (like the accounting department, Janet's void, the good place's mailroom, and the interdimensional hole of pancakes). But it all ended on a lackluster note all over again as - spoilers, I guess - Chidi voluntarily had his memory erased again and the humans are back in a "neighborhood"-style faux-good place again. Sigh.

Look, I like this show an awful lot, and it's doing things with the 22-minute broadcast sitcom format I'd never imagined were possible. What it's attempting is hard as hell, what with all the constant reboots and the breakneck pace of new territory it explores. But when you aim for something hard as hell and falter, I mean, you still falter. That's all I'm pointing out, I guess, is that The Good Place capably hits high notes that are just unsustainably good, like all of Season 2 and the middle of Season 3. I'm very much looking forward to Season 4, and that alone is such a rare and delightful thing to be able to say about any TV show in 2019!

Also, how much you wanna bet Blake Bortles makes a guest appearance next year? You know they've put some feelers out at least.

The Haunting of Hill House: Season 1

Ah, shit. Shit. Did I really forget to make a write-up for this last month? Shoot. Whatever, I can't imagine anyone's getting around to it at this point. Sorry. Sorry everyone. Ah, hamburgers.

Halt and Catch Fire: Season 2

Critics everywhere felt that Halt and Catch Fire rounded a corner in its second season, and it's easy to see why. A lot of the issues Season 1 had - namely, that it looked and felt like a very inferior Mad Men clone - were solved by refocusing and rebooting.

Gone already in the premiere is Cardiff Electric, the company that all four of the main characters worked at throughout a solid but tropey first season. Now each of the four is off doing their own thing - and importantly, the two women are doing the same thing, which is running a computer game company in the mid-'80s and kinda sorta building or at least discovering the foundation of the modern Internet in the process. ("These people, when they're done playing their games with each other, they'll stay connected for half an hour and just... chat!")

Punted off to the margins of their story is Donna's husband, Gordon, who made all kinds of money from Cardiff but finds himself without a new passion project. He's a hardware guy in an increasingly software-oriented world. The writers solved this issue by having him futz around with a brief obsession with solving lag issues in multiplayer gaming for a while before getting diagnosed with - hang on, looking it up - yeah, toxic encephalopathy. He's been huffing so much solder over the years that his neurons and brain are failing - how convenient, now our hardware guy doesn't need to come up with an interesting new project! Hey, writers' room - I can see you back there.

And then off on his own separate adventure entirely for almost the entire season is Joe, the central character from the first season, the Don Draper guy with a mystery to hide and no love lost for his business partners. However much time has jumped between seasons, Joe suddenly has a fiance we've never seen before and he's given a shitty job by his future father-in-law doing data entry. And then he turns the data entry job into a data processing job, then has an epiphany about renting out the company's computers after hours (and in doing so he ends up solving a processing power problem for Cameron and Donna back at their gaming company, Mutiny). And then by the season's end, in just a supreme dick move, he's infecting people's computers with viruses and selling them anti-virus software. He's a phenomenally shitty guy, but at the same time he's just a businessman in the '80s. 

Anyway, I found the season - when binged, years later - really not actually any better than Season 1, and possibly less interesting. Even while I can see exactly why viewers in real time were much more into it. I think it has to do with hype and trust affecting a hindsight viewer like me. I can trust that the show is good, since people whose opinions I trust have said so, which helps me get through a perfectly ordinary first season and just enjoy the characters as I come to know them instead of worrying about where the plot is heading. And hype, on the other hand, might mean I'm looking for a drastic improvement in Season 2 and I'm disappointed I'm not really seeing one. Does that make sense? I hope it does!

Halt and Catch Fire: Season 1

Finally getting around to this one during the January doldrums. Halt and Catch Fire ran for four seasons on AMC, each of them just ten episodes long, and by the end of its run several critics were giving it the "under-hyped and underrated" treatment with some going as far as to say it's quietly one of the decade's best shows.

That's funny, because the same critics had all kinds of issues with the first season in 2014, calling it a Mad Men knockoff and a tonally inconsistent mess. The first season tells the story of four computer engineers and programmers in the 80s - three, really, plus an industry salesman who, okay yeah, really really feels like a poor man's Don Draper - and the work they're doing on reverse-engineering an IBM PC to try to build their own for a fictional struggling middle-tier company called Cardiff Electric.

I liked this just fine, consuming it in a few big binges over the course of a week. It's amazing just how much shorter made-for-broadcast dramas really are than the hour-long norm on premium and streaming. I've been dragging my feet to jump into Halt and Catch Fire for a while because four full seasons of an AMC drama felt like a lot to tackle. Au contraire, the entire series is only thirty hours long, which means if you're a skilled veteran dual-logger like I am, you can fire up Civiliazation VI on your Switch and bang the whole show out in like two weeks. (And what else is going on in January?)

My Brilliant Friend: Season 1

Here's an interesting case of a show I really loved, or at least tell myself I loved, that I also could never seem to watch for more than like 30 or 40 minutes at a time. (And the episodes are an hour long each.) It's based on the super-popular book of the same name by anonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante; the book and its three sequels were just all the rage five years ago, and as usual, I'm late enough to the party to catch the screen adaptation before hitting the books.

The show is actually a joint production between HBO and two Italian networks. It takes place in Naples in the 1950s and is shot entirely on location and in Italian - or apparently, in some vulgar Neapolitan dialect of Italian that my pretty-fluent-in-Italian mother-in-law couldn't even understand. Regardless, it's subtitled, and I can't think of another show in HBO's long and storied history that wasn't shot in English - this is quite a risk!

But it's worth it. HBO is treating this adaptation with the utmost care and honoring its pedigree. My understanding is that the eight-episode first season is as "dutiful" an adaptation as you can make from a 350-page book. Allegedly the casting alone took eight months, and it's kind of easy to see why:

In the front are the two actresses who play the child versions of main characters Elena and Lila, respectively. In the back are the two actresses who play the teenage versions of the characters, obviously in reverse order. These aren't pairs of sisters, or even cousins, or anything - just two nearly perfectly matched sets of young actors fluent in the protected UNESCO language of Neapolitan. I've never read the books, but it's easy to see how perfect this casting is if you watch, like, two or three episodes. Elena, the fairer-skinned one, is the passive one, the observer, the wallflower of sorts who's consistently impressed and intimidated by Lila; Lila's the fiery one, the rebellious one, the beautiful one, the one who threatens to kill someone multiple times.

The main story of both the books and the show is about their friendship and all the subtle complexities of how their relationship changes and strengthens and weakens over time. Elena is consistently impressed by Lila's intelligence (Lila's the titular "brilliant friend") and rebellious streak as a child, and years later she's intimidated by Lila's beauty, her ease with relationships, and her sexual maturity. Lila's a more complicated and mysterious character, given that the story is told from Elena's perspective, but it's easy to surmise that Lila is jealous of Elena's life and opportunities. Both girls come from poor families in post-war Naples, but Elena's father is supportive enough to pay for her to go to high school, whereas Lila's more abusive father just wants her to help out in his shoe shop once she's all of twelve or so.

So far, then, this seems to be a classic case of each girl being at least a little envious of what the other has; Elena covets Lila's brains, personality, and beauty, whereas in Lila's eyes, Elena is increasingly the only connection to a world outside of the shitty mob-ruled neighborhood she might never escape. This only scratches at the surface of their relationship of course, and of the overall quality of the show and how thoroughly it transports you to Italy in the 1950s.

In short, it's a fascinating watch and as much as I respect and admire the show, what it makes me want to do most is read the books.

Stan's Book Dump: Fall 2018

I finished the year strong with ten books in the final three months of 2018 to reach my goal of thirty on the year. Never again!

The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower by Stephen King

No need to beat a dead horse - folks, if you've been reading this blog for the past several years, you know I'm the only guy I know who just couldn't muster up two fucks to give when it came to Stephen King's decades-spanning fantasy series. I'd be lying if I said I didn't skim enormous portions of this thousand-plus-page finale, but I have no regrets. Life's too short to get bogged down for hours on tertiary characters' D-plots in the seventh book of a series you've just never been able to love.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Read this in one night in front of a Sox-Yankees playoff game, and let me tell you - baseball is the perfect sport to watch while you read. so yeah, here's the now-decades-old story about a carefree guy who just wanted to soak up as much, I dunno, nature as he could, and how he disappeared and turned up dead in an abandoned bus in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. Beyond the specific details of this tragically preventable tragedy, the book's really about the urge to just disappear into the woods, that primitive and anti-social desire to just leave civilization behind. The author's an extreme outdoorsman himself, and remarks on his own near-death experience on a climbing trip a few years back. (Note that this book was written just before the author survived the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, which he wrote a book about a year later.)

Artemis by Andy Weir

Everyone liked The Martian, yeah? The very modern-feeling science fiction book (and then movie) about the astronaut who gets stranded on Mars and then has to "science the shit out of" his situation in order to find a way to survive? Here's Andy Weir's follow up, set on a lunar city. It's not great, and the biggest shame is that it comes close to being very good. The science is once again very good, with fully imagined and reasonably explained technology that would enable, you know, a moon city. But the story itself is kind of a silly caper in which the protagonist needs to sabotage a bunch of mineral harvesting machines and then evade the authorities looking for her. And, yeah, that's the bigger issue - "her." Look, it's great that a male author is giving his second book a female protagonist and narrator, and the effort is earnest, but man, the character is just so clearly a fantasy woman as imagined by a man. I can't get into how or why that is, really, but it really feels less like a young woman than like a young man's ideal young woman, if that makes any sense. Like a sexy bro, I guess. I don't bring this up for woke points or anything, I just bring it up because it's a huge distraction from the rest of the story. It's like Ready Player One-level bad.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

A thing I've done throughout the history of this blog, to mixed success, is attempt some of the European classics from ~1850-1950 that helped to shape and define modern Western literature. This is a thing I found when I googled something like "most famous book norway" back when I thought I could read this on my flight to Norway a year ago, and here's how Wikipedia describes it: "The novel has been hailed as the literary opening of the 20th century and an outstanding example of modern, psychology-driven literature." Glowing praise, right? But just like with The Trial and Nausea earlier this year alone, man, I just couldn't find a way to enjoy reading it. All three of these books are about regular guys slowly losing their grip on reality, and I can recognize and acknowledge why that might have been groundbreaking a hundred years ago, but they all kind of blur together for me into a boring paste that severely violates that very basic "show, don't tell" rule. Sorry, but this was the least impressive of the three books of this type that I read this year. (Oh, did I say three? Because a fourth one is coming up soon!)

It by Stephen King

What a marathon this was! Started it all the way back in February in audiobook form and got maybe two thirds done by spring before I pivoted hard into a podcast-based commute pattern. Dabbled very occasionally with it throughout the summer, and finally returned in full force to finish up the homestretch in October. You know, for Halloween. Look, I loved this book. (I saw the movie last year, so it helped that I already knew which of the hundred or so characters King included here would end up mattering long term and who was there more or less just to get killed instantly.) I've ragged on King here a thousand times - scroll up for an easy example - but when he nails an ending, his stuff tends to be pretty great. What impressed me about It though, more so than the story and its resolution, was the ridiculously detailed world-building that went into this one standalone novel. King goes through great lengths to describe the geography and history of this fictional little town in Maine and you know who I was reminded of? No lie, fucking Victor Hugo, taking dozen-plus-page breaks form the action of Les Misérables to describe, like, the Parisian sewer system, or the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo. Or George R.R. Martin going nuts about the religious customs of some out-of-the-way city that barely registers as a dot on his invented planet's map. World-building. It matters, guys! And that's really what set It apart from the rest of King's oeuvre of thousand-page monster books. I could ever tell what the fuck was going on in The Dark Tower or what realm or dimension they were supposed to be in at any point in time, but in It there are transitions from the past to the present that work just flawlessly.

The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Remember two books ago when I said Hunger was the least impressive and readable and memorable of the three-no-make-that-four books I read this year in which a now-dead European guy tells the story of a person having a psychotic breakdown? Yeah, The Double was maybe the most impressive and readable and memorable of those, but the bar's not very high and the range isn't very wide. Russian literature's been a huge blind spot for me to this point in my life, but rather than five headfirst into like, War and Peace, I thought I'd dabble with something short and easy. There's more wit and humor here - and it's Russian, so it's dark and dry as hell, but it's still there - than I've generally found in 19th century stuff, so that's a good sign, right? But yeah - overall, just not loving these old-as-balls stories about dudes going crazy. (Side note - this cover, I can't tell if it's the worst-designed public domain book cover hackjob I've seen in my life or one of the best. It looks like something your mom could make if you gave her a picture of an 1800s guy and some freeware Photoshop and five minutes to play around, and it gives me the worst headache to try to focus on it - but then, that's kind of the theme of the book, this jagged inability to make any sense of oneself in relation to an identical copy of oneself, no? Like I kind of imagine this shitty book cover art being exactly how the main character must feel by the end of the story, but again, also, this looks like an abandoned rough draft of a concept for something you'd be feeling out with stock art. Who knows?)

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

I've been too hard on Dickens in the past, ad he really was a generational talent with the pen. I think my issue with him and his work has always had more to do with the style of his day and time - both in sentence structure and overall story conventions - and less to do with him personally. Oliver Twist was a perfect example of this, a story teeming with a gaggle of cartoonishly one-dimensional cockney poorfolk (what a talented writer!) that went on for way, way, way too long and never really coalesced into a consistent or pleasant narrative (what a shitty storyteller!). The easiest way for me to think of it is to remind myself that they didn't have TV or podcasts back in the 1830s, and this was how people entertained themselves, was by reading a "chapter" or episode of a familiar story every week, or a few every month, or however the hell this was initially published. When you read something like Oliver Twist you are not so much reading one story as much as you are bingeing a whole series of stories, many of which stand alone entirely, and none of which really build the character up any amount at all. Like you'd think, with your 2019 mindset, that a story about a young orphan that has a happy ending would include a coming-of-age element where the orphan grows up, works hard, fights back, and so on. But, no - he's just a completely passive little poor kid who stuff is constantly happening to and around. He's like a video game character, an avatar for the reader to enjoy these hijinks. By the way, the iconic part of this book, where Oliver Twist goes "please sir, may I have some more?" and dares to request a second bowl of soup-gruel? Yeah, that's Chapter 2 of this thing. There are 53 chapters. Anyone who tells you they've read and loved this whole thing is lying.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

It's the Black Lives Matter book. That's not meant to be dismissive, but it's an apt description. This thing has just an insanely high rating on Goodreads. It's a ripped-from-the-headlines story about a black girl who's riding shotgun when her black friend is pulled over and summarily executed by a shitty cop. What happens next? Nothing. Nothing good. Protests, the victim getting his character just absolutely assassinated by the mainstream media, the cop being acquitted, and a full scale riot. And then the book just kind of ends with a half-hearted "we're going to rebuild our community with help from the good cops." It rubbed me wrong, I guess. It didn't seem to do or say anything profound about the depths of racism in America that could surprise or enrage or sadden a reasonably aware adult - and maybe I'm out of line, maybe the mere existence of a popular book with a young black woman's point of view is of tantamount importance, maybe books like this are absolutely vital for making other white people empathetic toward, like, Colin Kaepernick. But now it sounds like I'm saying that I, a white man, am "too woke" to have any need for this "very obvious" book written by a black woman. I'm not saying that! I'm just saying I'm astonished by its appeal and praise, especially since it seems to end not with a powerful statement, but with a "hey, that's the way it goes" shrug. Or maybe the shrug is all you can do as a black woman who saw her friend get shot by policemen, and that's the point I'm horrifically missing? In which case, holy shit, wow, amazing, but also, I think so many other people are missing the point then, when they call it eye-opening? Bu tthen again, does authorial intent even matter? God, this feels sticky. Let me start over. I am glad that this book exists, and I am thrilled that it is opening some of its readers' eyes to the breadth and depth of systemic racism in America, and I am mortified that those readers need young adult novels to do that for them when the real world is, like, right fucking there, just unfolding before our eyes day after day and police shooting after police shooting. Four stars out of five, get me the fuck out of here.

Island by Aldous Huxley

I was probably too young to fully appreciate the horrifying accuracy of Aldous Huxley's dystopian predictions for the future when I read Brave New World in high school. Island is a weird kinda-companion to that book, even though it came out a full thirty years later, in that it's Huxley's final novel and it contains his vision of what a utopian society might look like. Turns out, a utopian society is actually pretty boring! Or at least reading 300 pages about it was. Huxley does that very tropey thing where, actually, the best way to live is on a tiny island in the South Pacific, with all of the science and reason of Western nations but Polynesian family structures like "everyone raises everyone" and a healthy dose of Buddhism and meditation and recreational drugs.

The Wondering Years by Knox McCoy

A problem with any rating system, and in particular with Goodreads, is that it;s tough to make honest comparisons without grading on a curve. What is a 5-star book? A 5-star book is impressive, enjoyable, insightful, a page-turner, it stays with you, and so forth and so on. What's a 4-star book? A decent book. What's a 3-star book, a 2-star book, a 1-star book? Look, here's where I run into trouble, because I take some of these stuffy, hard-to-read older books like Hunger or Nausea and I say, come on, I can't give these less than three stars, they're a product of their time, they're classics in their own right, whatever. But then I come across a book like this - a simple little collection of memoirs and anecdotes and some wry pop culture observations, courtesy of a likable enough dude whose podcast I've heard a few episodes of and enjoy just fine, and just because I don't absolutely love it, I'm like, "oh okay, here's a book I can give two stars to." And that's probably not really very fair, and it probably makes it sound like I'm saying. "this book sucks," when really what I'm saying is, "this book is trivial and unimportant in the big picture even if I found it to be occasionally entertaining to read," and those are two different things, you know? So I'll end my year in books with a sheepish apology to Knox McCoy - it's not that I'm giving the story of your life two stars, man - it's just that I'm letting it represent the bottom of a scale where the top consists of some of my all time favorite books. I don't read books I know I'll hate, is the thing. Maybe I should just adopt a 3-star minimum? God, the things I worry about.

Happy 2019, all.

The Romanoffs: Season 1

Ah shit, how haven't I posted about this yet? I can't recall a more-hyped television series (Matthew Weiner does feature-lenth episodes in an anthology format!) that was met with less acclaim and regard. To illustrate it - I'm compiling year-end critical top ten (or twenty, or thirty, or whatever) lists and I've tracked down 67 of them. The average list is just under 20 shows long, and yes, I'm including honorable mentions. There are, weirdly, exactly 200 unique shows listed across those 67 lists. I think you can see where I'm heading here, but yeah, not a single one of the 67 lists includes The Romanoffs. I mean, God - Young Sheldon made someone's list. Suits made someone's list. But Matthew Weiner goes ahead and makes an anthology series of feature-length episodes for Amazon, and the entire world goes, "nah, no thank you."

Here's what you need to know about The Romanoffs. The first episode more or less sets the tone for what you're going to get. I liked it just fine, but it's easily the third-best episode. Then the third episode is an interesting little is-it-or-isn't-it-psychological-horror thing carried by Christina Hendricks, and it's easily the second-best episode. Then the seventh episode is an absolute doozy, a real delight, a total "strangers in a strange land" scenario with Kathryn Hahn and Jay R. Ferguson trying to adopt a baby from Russia as they're escorted around - "handled," really - by none other than Nina from The Americans.

The other five episodes range from forgettable to bad. Get ready for Season 2!

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Without getting all mopey-nostalgic, every new iteration of Super Smash Bros. that comes out reminds me more and more of how isolated we are in adulthood, in the "real world." Walk thorugh it with me.

Super Smash Bros. came out when I was in elementary school. I never owned it, so every single time I played it I was doing so with friends. "Friends" is even a stretch here - it's fucking fifth grade, you end up at people's houses surrounded by other people all the time - in a sense, you're playing with strangers.

Super Smash Bros. Melee came out when i was in middle school and remained a staple of my gaming diet all the way into college. This is, of course, the one I played to death, the one I played the living hell out of. I played it with friends, with siblings, with cousins, with siblings' friends, with neighbors, with neighbors' friends, and friends of friends. A quick glance at the name archive on my memory card would be a miles-long stroll down memory lane - I think my old babysitter is on there somewhere. So is an ex-girlfriend (or two). So is a then-ten-year-old kid who my mom would tutor at our house, who refused to leave our house without playing against me a couple times. Oh yeah - and also there are a bunch of college freshman floor-mates on there. It's just... my God, so many people, so many different people I would interact with, in that span that lasted from middle school to college, those crucially formative years where people enter and exit your life constantly and you're just used to it. The golden age, really, of Smash and of life!

Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out in my sophomore year of college. It wasn't as good as Melee - no one denies this! - but it also wasn't a bad game. It was a great way to blow off some steam and fuck around avoiding homework and studying at school, and it was still a social glue for my friends back at home. I didn't end up playing Brawl with the number or variety of people I played Melee with, but it still pulled in its fair share of names for the record book on my Wii.

Super Smash Bros. 4 - the one for the 3DS and the Wii U - came out when I was in my mid-twenties. My friends and I were hyped as hell, but I can't honestly say that we played it very often. There was online play, which was nice, but gone were the days where we'd hang out in person for no reason at all. I was married, I was a full time employee, I was a homeowner, I was taking part time classes - there just wasn't time! I won't pretend to know ho many names ended up in my record book on the Wii U, but it likely wasn't more than like, ten. Just ten core friends who'd been smashing with me for fifteen years or so.

And now Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is out, and it's probably the best game in the franchise yet on a technical level. And it doesn't matter. Because I feel like I've already played more of it than I will going forward. This thing's been out for a month now, and half of that month I was on vacation (staycation) from work, just chilling around during the holidays. And despite all that free time, and despite having this brand new game, I have played it in person with friends exactly twice. When my cousins and sisters visited after Christmas, we did not play Smash. When my good friend Steve tried to set up a "Smash Day" event, almost nobody came. And my good friend Keith, so often responsible for setting up our big dumb convoluted video game tournaments, has two kids and no interest in the game whatsoever. And my good friends both named Matt each live an hour away from me now, and surely aren't coming over just to play video games. And none of this is weird or unexpected; it's just life.

And now we have come full circle, because once again, instead of playing with friends, I'm mostly playing online with - yep - total strangers. It's funny how that works!

I'm looking forward to the DLC, though - that'll keep me coming back month after month for two-hour dabble sessions, I guess.

Anyway, like I said - best game yet in the series, probably.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Season 2

Call this perceived sophomore slump a classic case of calibration error. Last year this show came out of nowhere to delight just about everyone, a nice little December surprise from Amy Sherman-Palladino about a pretty and witty idle rich housewife in 1950s New York who accidentally stumbles into a career as a standup comic. It was good! And the thing is, it's still good! But I think everyone (as in, everyone who influences which aspects of pop culture get elevated into a temporary zeitgeist) kind of wildly overreacted to Mrs. Maisel last year and then wildly overreacted in the other direction this year. I mean, this second season isn't tanking by any means, but the first season was this endlessly charming delight that swept both the Golden Globes and the Emmys last year, and then the second season wasn't even worse than the first one in my mind - bigger, maybe, what with Paris and the Catskills and two more episodes - and apparently the same pop culture overlords are crying, no, too much! Back off, Mrs. Maisel, you're not the charming little delight we thought you were!

Is this just, uh, hmm, is this just how it is with female-driven comedy? I can't remember a backlash to a beloved first season of a comedy series this strong since Girls all the way back in 2013. (That one was much worse - and honestly, earned, but still!)

Call me crazy, or wrong, but it's weird to me that the first season of this thing was met with universal praise and adoration, and then came all the success at the Globes and the Emmys, and then the second season came back with the exact same beats and rhythms that the first one had, and now the Internet says, "enough with this shtick already!"

I dunno!

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was my #17 show in 2017 and my #18 show in 2018. (Huh, look at that.)

Watership Down: Season 1

Binged this in one night and it made just no impact on me whatsoever. I never saw the original Watership Down, and my understanding is that it's a dark and tragic cartoon. But this CGI-animated remake looked kind of cheap by today's standards and really didn't resonate at all. Maybe I'll check out the original one day. Maybe!

The Little Drummer Girl: Season 1

I think Park Chan-wook is just fantastic. Loved his Vengeance trilogy, particularly Oldboy, and then the other year The Handmaiden came out of nowhere to just blow me away. So when I heard he was directing a six-episode '70s spy miniseries starring Alexander Skarsgård and my man Michael Shannon, the question wasn't whether or not it would be any good, but rather just how far up my year-end rankings I could end up putting a six-episode miniseries. (The answer is twelfth.)

The show was great. I felt like it lost just the teeniest bit of steam in its endgame - the pilot was just so masterfully shot and directed, and you could really see that you were in for something special with this expert South Korean filmmaker, and the rest of the show felt more like, well, television, to put it pejoratively. I still loved it.

What I didn't love, AMC, was that this aired exactly once and then was only available On Demand in those obnoxious commercial-laden un-fastforwardable episodes. Worse, the whole thing was presented as three two-hour episodes. You pause that thing and your shitty DVR interface craps out, and it's game over. Look, I don't like supporting sites that pirate shows and movies, but when you make it virtually impossible for me to see something easily and conveniently, a thing that I'm already subscred to and "paying for" so to speak, that I just forgot to tape because come on it was Thanksgiving weekend who can remember to do that, I mean, what other choice do I have?