Arrested Development: Season 5

It is a small shame that a show as widely loved and praised as Arrested Development ended up petering out with just the smallest amount of fanfare. The show's 2013 return was such an event, mixed reactions notwithstanding. Just five years later when it came back for half of a fifth season, even the biggest fans I knew seemed to be in no real rush to check in; and now, a year further on, that fifth season seems to have concluded with just a whimper.

All this makes sense; nothing gold can stay, and the same unique beats and charms and pacing style that made Arrested Development such a long-term slow-burn success in the mid-to-late 2000s almost seemed to be working against it this time around, especially exacerbated by that decision to release the fifth season in two parts nearly a year apart.

At any rate, this is most assuredly the show's final season. At least two of the actors have explicitly said they're done with the show, and Jif effrey Tambor's on-set controversy wasn't playing well last year, that super-weird interview with the entire cast seems to have opened up fissures everywhere. I mean, maybe a movie at this point? But why bother?

All that said, I enjoyed this fifth season very much; new Arrested Development is a pleasure and a delight even after all these years, and it's nice to see the show brought to some sort of conclusion - even if the third season finale worked perfectly already.

High Maintenance: Season 3

There's not a lot left to say about High Maintenance, the New York-as-hell show about all kinds of people doing all manner of things with their days and nights. It's an anthology series where every episode focuses on a different character or group of people - sometimes even switching focus halfway through an episode - and the only consistent character is a nameless weed dealer played by the show's creator.

I've got very mixed feelings about the show. I love that it exists, and I love that it's committed to this complete variety of perspective and point of view. One week will be about two unlikely roommates, one a nudist and the other a crazy old lady. Another week will be about an over-eager kid helping his mom out at her shift at a diner. But in a TV landscape where there's more and more and more to sample, it's almost like this show stretches itself too thin being as varied and inconsistent as it is. Like in a world where there are still "only," say, 200 shows out there, something this varied and meandering works a lot better than in a world where there are three times that many shows and where stories have been told about all manners of people doing all manners of things.

A consequence of all of this is that this show is almost completely forgettable on a week to week basis. I mentioned two plot points above, but there were nine episodes in Season 3 and I'm not sure I could get three more plot points. There was a scene where a paranoid doctor couldn't get a cat out of a tuba, so that's three. Lena Dunham showed up at one point, filming an episode of Girls, I think, and that already felt dated as hell! But even these memories I have - they're just scenes, they're not episodes; sketches, not stories.

All this is fine, and I think I'll keep watching High Maintenance - it's set on my DVR as a series recording, after all, and when I'm completely on the fence with respect to whether or not to keep going with this show, hey, it's a force of habit to watch stuff on my DVR rather than to delete it outright.

Crashing: Season 3

I think I've said here before, of Crashing, that it's a show I could so easily give up watching. It's funny enough, sure, but the entire half-hour comedy exists to tell the story of a nice guy, a good guy, cutting his teeth and earning his lumps as he tries to make it in the world of standup comedy. I mean, no one needs another comedy about comedy, right? Particularly about a middle-aged white guy doing comedy?

And yet! Even though it'd be so, so easy to stop watching... it's also the exact type of show it's so utterly easy to watch. I think I watched the eight episodes of Season 3 in three nights a few weeks apart each. It's perfect DVR fodder in that regard. "Ah, what's Pete up to this week? How's that new relationship going? What new comics is he going to run into tonight?"

It's just such an easy and pleasant watch. I think I'll keep going!

And, yeah, on that note, I just saw that the show's been canceled by HBO and that the season finale - which I didn't even know was the season finale when I saw it - will be the series finale. Gah! Now I miss this show. Funny how that works.

Victoria: Season 3

 

I'll come right out and say it - Victoria is hour-for-hour more purely enjoyable to watch than either the much more vaunted show about a British queen's lengthy tenure, The Crown, or its PBS Sunday night forefather, Downton Abbey. (Yeah I know there are like a thousand Masterpiece Theatre shows from the UK, I'm just comparing the only two I've ever seen, shut up.) It's got high production value but such low, simple, historical stakes - you watch the show mostly just to see Jenna Coleman looking impossibly pretty as a nineteenth century monarch and to hear Prince Albert getting all melodramatic and cutting with his dry German wit.

It's basically a show where the Queen and her Prince are just a bickering old married couple with too many kids. Now in Season 3 the show has added those kids and extended family to the forefront of it all, and you've got just the easiest and most mundane (in the best way) plotlines like "Albert is worried that his son is an idiot" and "Victoria has a rivalry with her sister" and "everyone dresses up like it's the 1700s and has a ball." But lest you think this is all fun and games, fear not, the season premiere is more or less "the Revolutions of 1848 are sweeping across Europe and the royal family might get exiled or killed."

As far as I can tell, there's really no reason for the show to go away anytime soon, either. Normally I love a nice, brisk, couple-seasons-and-get-the-hell-outta-here experience when it comes to dramas, but this thing's just such an easy walk in the park. The timeline begins in 1837, and through three seasons we're only up through 1851. At this rate it'll be another two or three seasons before Prince Albert dies, and then, I mean, we've gotta see Victoria grieve in that aftermath for at least another season more. That'll get us to what, the mid-1860s? Cool, the real Victoria goes on living for another forty years. Go nuts!

BioShock Infinite

Yeah, this blog's pretty much dead now, right?

It's been nine years since I played and absolutely loved the first two BioShock games. This one left me the slightest bit cold. The story's interesting but it almost directly rebuts a major theme of the first two games, in which decisions you made throughout the game affected the tone of the ending substantially. Here in Infinite, choice is completely irrelevant! Saying more would spoil some stuff, but, yeah.

Another thing the first two games had going for them was the atmosphere - abandoned underwater cities, which were just some of the creepiest and coolest and most serene environments I've seen in gaming. The "up in the air"-based society of Infinite was cool in its own right, but it was definitely a needless addition. The whole thing was a step back from what I remember loving about the first two games. There weren't even any memorable or iconic enemies in this one the way the Big Daddies of the first (and second) game stole the show.

There's a big twist early on that reveals - minor spoiler - that you're actually hanging out in White Supremacy Utopia, but it gets abandoned pretty early on in favor of an under-explained socialist uprising by black folks and Irish people. There's just a lot of philosophy and political science I thought this game left on the table that the first two made some minor hay with!

It's also possible that I'm a few years too late to this party, and that the ending played out a lot better in 2013 before multiverse theory went mainstream thanks to, like, Rick and Morty. (Oh shit, did I just spoil the thing I said I wasn't gonna spoil? Gah! Whatever.) The whole story was left feeling very Looper-esque, very Primer-esque - the ending wasn't satisfying, and if anything was nihilistic. The ending looks you square in the face and says, "that place you just spent ten or twelve hours exploring? Those characters you came to appreciate, and kind of understand? Yeah, none of any of that matters. Nothing matters. Embrace nihilism, eat at Arby's!"

If there's one highlight here, it was the relationship between main character Booker and deuteragonist Elizabeth. It felt an awful lot like the relationship at the center of The Last of Us, and probably 500 other video games about gruff dudes learning to care about young women. So it goes!

Maybe, just maybe, I'll eventually try out the Burial at Sea DLC associated with this game - it's allegedly very good, and brings the story of Rapture full circle in ways the baseline game did not. (More likely, I'll just read about it. Gonna go do so right now, actually.)

Lastly, I thought we were done here, and the game itself kind of lays out plainly that there need not be any new BioShock games (or games of any kind at all, really) but apparently there are fairly recent and very heavy rumors that a fourth title is in development. Cool! I'll play it. Someday.

Anyway, embrace nihilism. Eat at Arby's.