HarmonQuest: Season 3

Christ, I'm way behind on my posting! I finished this like a month ago! Or whenever it ended. I don't know!

I honestly barely paid attention to this season of this show. The real reason to get on board witht his show in the first place was its impressive array of guests. Aubrey Plaza, Paul F. Tompkins, Ron Funches, Kumail Nanjiani, John Hodgman, Patton Oswalt, Jason Mantzoukas - you know, plenty of funny people! It was funny to watch them improvise their way through a big old Dungeons & Dragons game!

In Season 3, the show just leaned all the way into its own niche, pulling out nerdy guest star after nerdy guest star I'd never heard of or barely recognized. Like the biggest name this time around was... Reggie Watts? Kate Micucci? D'Arcy Carden, a.k.a. Janet from The Good Place?

To hell with this! I'm done!

Succession: Season 2

I liked Season 2 more than I liked Season 1, but, man, I'm just not ready to crown Succession the heavyweight champion of prestige television. There's too much plot going on "between episodes" if you will, and as such we're very much stuck in the third person, unaware of any individual character's true motivations. Also too much of the show still feels like a celebration of abhorrent behavior and excessive lifestyle porn. I understand the appeal here and in many ways I share it, but I'll enter Season 3 as far more of a casual fan than most people, it seems.

Ramy: Season 1

Here's a Hulu half-hour show from Ramy Youssef, a Muslim millennial, about being a Muslim millennial. It was pretty good! The standout episode is the fourth one, an extended 9/11 flashback; the attacks themselves notwithstanding, it's an utter tragedy to see a middle school Egyptian kid immediately lose all of his friends and kinda-but-not-fully understand why they and their parents suddenly seem to hate him and his. Oof. The show's been renewed for a second season and if you've got Hulu I think it's well worth your time! I mean, where else are you going to get a perspective like this one?

Untold History of the United States: Season 1

I thoroughly enjoyed this 2012 docu-series. It's a twelve-episode unapologetic People's History of the United States-like take on America's emergence as a global superpower during and after World War II from Oliver Stone, who, yes, okay, sure, go ahead and fact-check absolutely everything you're told here if you need to, he probably deserves it.

The purpose of the series is to provide alternative facts - no, not lies, literally and actually the information you don't get from high school or the news media or Hollywood war movies - to really help flesh out contemporary American history. And fam, it's some ugly shit! Which is the point. But still!

Also, holy hell, I'd love to see Stone make an epilogue chapter about the events covering, oh, 2012 to the present day.

Strongly recommend.

Transparent: Season 5

Yeah, I'm calling this one-episode feature-length finale a season of television, rather than a movie. Why? Because that's how it's been billed. Fuck, man, I dunno.

Let's talk a little bit about the history and legacy of the show Transparent, which won all kinds of Emmy awards and critical acclaim in part for depicting a transgender character's late-in-life transition and arguably lending visibility and cultural legitimacy to the trans community before kind of ironically, kind of predictably, kind of spectacularly blowing up five years later, in large part due to criticism and complaints from the same trans community it had helped legitimize.

(Look, I'm not complaining - that's literally what progress is! In 2014, our collective culture at large was introduced to so many aspects of life in the trans community that had previously gone unexplored by the mainstream by this show, explicitly; by 2017 or 2018, that community's cultural impact and visibility had already grown large enough for the same collective mainstream to take its cues on trans issues directly from said community, including criticisms and critiques of the same show that had arguably done more to boost awareness of the community than anything else in the first place. Oh God, this is a mouthful - can you tell I'm out of my element here?)

Let me maybe try phrasing it another way - no, don't take the shovel from me, I'm still digging! Like in 2014, it was, "give Jeffrey Tambor the Emmy for his heartfelt and dignified portrayal of a trans woman," and three years later it was, "it's nothing short of cis-washing that a trans character like Maura is played by a straight man like Jeffrey Tambor." I think the first take was a fine take in 2014 and I think the second take was a fine take to have in 2017 and I think it's very difficult for the zeitgeist at large to have the 2017 take without having first had the 2014 take. Does that make sense? Look, it's complicated!

All of that having been said, this show kind of stopped being about one trans woman's transition process and her family's reaction to that transition process somewhere along the way, and started being more about each of the family members' sexual and gender-based proclivities and hang-ups, and even some of their general flaws as people. Oh, and it's also somehow the most Jewish show of the decade.

But yeah, it's clearly run out of steam, and I can't think of a compelling reason it needed this finale once it was clear Jeffrey Tambor wouldn't be returning, beyond not letting Jeffrey Tambor's firing force the show to end prematurely; even though I said the show stared being about Maura's family as much as if not more than Maura somewhere along the way, what purpose does Transparent really have without the titular trans parent? Or, more directly, if you're going to make the finale of Transparent consist of the death of the trans parent, and you're going to loo at the family's reactions to that death... what are you doing making this thing a musical? None of these actors can even really sing, save for Judith Light, kinda. But what on earth - I mean, do these actors look like they want to be doing this? Does any of this seem like it was fun for them?

The most notable and controversial element of this whole thing is that it ends with a number called the "Joyocaust," whose premise as far as Twitter and I can tell is that Jews spend so much time, understandably, focusing on the dark and negative energy of the Holocaust - six million dead Jews! - that they ought to come up with some sort of positive energy counterbalance, some sort of joy, rather than horror, that can match twelve years of suffering and six million deaths. It's twice as insane as anything Marrianne Williamson is running on and way more tone deaf, but most of all it's a head-scratcher - less "oh wow, this is offensive!" and way more "this is such a weird note to end on."

Oh well. So long, Transparent. You were once very necessary, and then you got a little weird, and then in the end long after you were necessary you were just very weird. Thank you for your service!

Undone: Season 1

I wanted to absolutely love this, and for a little while, I did.

There's something inherently dreamlike about rotoscoping. Yeah, maybe it's just that Richard Linklater used the method in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, forever linking the animation style to dream logic in so many minds, but also, it's a perfect fit for dream logic in the first place. Straight animation makes abrupt swirls and background shifts commonplace and loopy, far too absurd-looking and harsh to pass for something plausible. Rotoscoping, on the other hand, looks just real enough to pull you in, so when time stands still or a person starts flying, it's not like, "ah, geez, okay, those are just visual effects" the way it would be in live action, and it's not "well this is a world unbound by physical laws and constraints anyway" the way it is in most other forms of animation. Instead it's this weird hybrid of the two - right on the line between unreal and surreal, sort of in its own uncanny valley.

Anyway, all this is to say, this show looked amazing. And for at least a few episodes as it slowly introduced its characters and built its world, I was all in - not only on the story this show was telling, but the way it was being told. The first episode introduces our protagonist, shows us the rut she's stuck in, gives us the overall baseline reality we'll be using as a context going forward, and ends with a car accident. The second episode has our same heroine stuck in a hospital bed, communicating with her dead father, stuck in some sort of time loop. We see that classic thing where, in a panic, she runs into a future version of herself, also in a panic, and they speak gibberish at one another, and only later in the episode do we see the context behind the second version's gibberish. And then for a few more episodes as her life returns to normal, we get a better idea of hwo she's getting by after the accident (not well!) and there are a few touching moments with her sister and with her ex-ex-boyfriend. But honestly, the show started losing steam here in its midsection, slowly ceasing to be about this woman's quest to discover, through time travel, what happened to her father twenty years ago, and starting to become more of a mystery regarding her overall mental status. I mean, I get that, and I get why and how it's poignant to compare a woman's conviction that she has superpowers to, you know, an insane person's delusions of grandeur. I just never felt like the show went anywhere with that. I felt like the show slowly petered out and got less interesting, rather than snapping puzzle pieces into place as it went on. And, sure, we can have the same old discussion about whether open-ended non-conclusions are cop outs or not, but it just really seemed at first like Undone was going to be a dryly comedic and enjoyably-cast time thriller, complete with butterfly effects and parallel outcomes. I don't even like time thrillers much anymore, and still I was looking forward to that. Instead, it ends up hinging on whether or not this woman was sane and correct or delusional and crazy all along. And it doesn't even really explore what either outcome would mean.

Look, it's an easy watch and at eight half-hour episodes it's still well worth your time. I had just been hoping for something more, is all.

The Mind, Explained: Season 1

Here's another tough-to-categorize "thing I saw;" it's definitely TV, as it's broken into five distinct episodes that just came out on Netflix, but as far as seasons go, what was it? A mini-season of the Vox-produced docuseries Explained, which came out last year? Yes, probably. But that show's got its own, actual second season debuting in a week or two, and Netflix very clearly categorized these five episodes differently. Sow what is this? Is it a special? Is it a series of specials? Fuck it, no one cares, it's its own thing.

The five episodes in this miniseries (sure) were "Memory," "Dreams," Anxiety," "Mindfulness," and "Psychedelics." They were fine! Not great. Generally I felt more bored and less into these, particularly the later episodes, than I was last year watching Explained proper, but that might be because after an hour and forty minutes I was tired of hearing Emma Stone explain the hypothalamus to me. Hey, whatever, it was solid background viewing and I learned a thing or two I'm sure.

Derry Girls: Season 2

Oh hey it's another show I finished, forgot I finished, and have nothing to say about like two weeks later.

As always, major props to British comedies for delivering six half-hour episodes every year. These are easy one-night binges and we're so much better off for having them in the Era of Too Much Television.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Third time's a charm!

This was the oldest game on my backlog by a few years, first purchased all the way back in 2002 before I had any idea what it was, honestly. I remember firing up my PS2, starting the game on normal difficulty, and... immediately getting seen by guards, and killed, in the tanker level. Stealth, as a concept, just wasn't for 14-year-old me; that guy had been conditioned to blast his way through action games, killing every bad guy along the way, and as soon as I realized this was a game about sneaking around quietly, I dunno, it just had no appeal.

Flash forward a year or so and I decide to give the game another go. I use easy mode, I sneak around and try not to draw any attention, and still the whole thing just isn't my speed. I quit the game after what I'm later convinced is a couple of hours, but a recent memory card check reveals was only half an hour.

Nine years later, I finally get around to playing Metal Gear Solid, the first one. I like it but don't love it. I convince myself, however, that it'll be the push I need to jump back into Metal Gear Solid 2. It is not.

Seven years later, I do it. I do the damn thing and finally play Metal Gear Solid 2 as a 31-year-old man. As a father with limited free time living in 2019, I play on "very easy" mode and use a damn walkthrough. (Why not? I'm here for the story anyway!)

This game... is a masterpiece. I mean, it's hard to say I even enjoyed playing it, given my history with it. But the plot, the themes, the tricks it pulls... holy shit guys, what a mindfuck. What an eerily accurate prediction, pre-social media, of our "post-truth" world. Smarter and more invested men than me have written all kinds of praise about this game and about what an epic trolljob it was when it came out and about how finely it has aged.

(Still kind of played like ass, though. First-person shooting on the PS2 is an experience best left in the past!)

See you in five to ten more years with Metal Gear Solid 3, I guess.

Black Monday: Season 1

Black Monday was a show I liked enough - a Showtime comedy with plenty of recognizable names in the cast, ten episodes, half an hour each, very clearly a limited series.

Wait, what?

https://deadline.com/2019/04/black-monday-renewed-season-2-showtime-don-cheadle-andrew-rannells-regina-hall-1202604074/

Goddammit. Why? It's okay for things to just... end, you know? The entire structure and format of this show was that it was a countdown to the infamous Black Monday, a cheeky and fictional explanation of how one group of people trying to con each other made the whole thing happen. The first season ended with the cons completed and the market crashed. What need is there for a second season? Where does it go? What does it look like?

Anyway, what I liked most about Black Monday was its willingness to dunk all over '80s Wall Street culture instead of trying to venerate or celebrate it. These are all extremely shitty people with very bad morals and I think the show did a great job staying just barely on the right side of the "laughing with these people" to "laughing at these people" ratio when it came to depicting, say, sexual harassment in the workplace or systemic homophobia.

Give it a shot, maybe? Andrew Rannells, Don Cheadle, Regina Hall, Paul Scheer. You can do worse.