THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup August/September 2024

“What are you watching?” is pretty much the automatic question I get when I tell people what I do for a living. Usually I lie to people so I don’t get into a massive debate about the police while I’m trying to hang out. But to you, dear patron, I shall never lie!

I’ve just launched my longest and most in-depth video ever with To Catch A Predator and am heading out on a two-week vacation, so we’re going to combine August and September into a big roundup of the things I watched while trying to distract myself from the world of CSA.

FROM (Seasons 1-2) — MGM+/Amazon Prime
CW: violence, disturbing images, brief nudity

FROM is a show that has been suggested to me many times by friends, but one I resisted for a long time. It was on some obscure streaming service called MGM+ and sure you can watch the first season on Amazon Prime but then what are you going to do after that and so on. But both seasons are available on Prime now, so I had no more excuses.

Here’s the premise. A family of four takes a wrong turn on their road trip and end up in a town that they cannot leave and where the night brings monsters who torture and eat their victims. It’s like a more horror-focused version of one of my favorite TV shows: Lost.

It’s hard to miss the parallels. Both share a premise of a group of strangers being stranded in a small community. Both are heavy on questions and mysteries and light on answers. Both star actor Harold Perrineau. Both are directed primarily by Jack Bender, famous for directing episodes of TV that treat time and space in new and exciting ways (“The Constant” from Lost and “The Door” from Game of Thrones). Both shows feature a diverse group of people meant to represent some cross-section of America. Without giving anything away, the first season finale of both shows share a lot of themes.

I’m not bothered by these similarities though. First of all, I love Lost, so more sounds good to me. Second of all, I’m glad Perrineau gets more shine in this version, especially following the exposé last year surrounding the racism he and his character experienced working on the first show. FROM is a bit less focused on character and more focused on those mysteries, which might end up backfiring down the road, but for now it’s just exciting.

Veep (Seasons 4-5) — Max
CW: election trauma

I’ve been watching The West Wing for my November video about it, and I’m currently in the thick of the Season 6 election campaign. I won’t go into too much detail about why that’s driving me absolutely insane (gotta save it for the big video!) but I needed some balancing out. I needed a show that openly mocked the very boring things that The West Wing is idealistic about, and something cynical about the same process.

And as I watch seasons 4 and 5 of Veep—the ones where the President resigns and Selina Meyer holds the office while also running for it—I can’t help but see Kamala Harris. The Vice President, who was entirely shut out from the public eye, handed the most radioactive and toxic issue in “the border.” The candidate who waffles back and forth, refusing to take a stand on almost any issue, instead gesturing vaguely towards change that won’t be too scary for anyone, because we won’t really change anything.

There are obvious differences of course. For one, Harris has staked out a pro-choice position on abortion that Meyer hilariously could not. 

I know that Armando Iannuucci himself has dismissed this comparison, because, as he writes “I fear we’ve now crossed some threshold where the choreographed image or manufactured narrative becomes the only reality we have left.” I think this is a real concern—the way mass media tries to only tell the story of history through other mass media in a way that only perpetuates all of the mistakes and tropes we’ve ever made. But I also think that there is a lot to learn from a satire of American politics and the ways in which it mirrors reality.

To me, from the left, my frustration with the Harris campaign has been the way she portrays herself as a fresh new candidate, while also not separating herself from Biden at all. She’s not as mask-off as Biden when it comes to selling arms to Israel to conduct ethnic cleansing, but she’s still going to do the same thing. She’s not going to push for Medicare For All or for a Green New Deal or even police reform the way the Democrats seemed to be genuinely considering in 2020 and 2016 when Bernie Sanders commanded more of the conversation. Maybe she supports the Paris Climate Accords, but she also wants to increase fracking. Most of her policy positions are either unclear or status quo.

Yet I can’t deny that there is way more energy around Harris than Biden. I’m not trying to take that energy away from anyone. And of course I agree with the idea that Trump would be worse. But it’s hard for me to see Harris and not think of the empty contradictory words of the Meyer campaign: “Continuity with change.” 

Rings of Power (Season 2) — Amazon Prime
CW: fantasy violence

I know that it’s popular to hate on Rings of Power. Certainly a lot of that energy is coming from the Anti-Woke crowd, but there are plenty of other people vaguely disappointed with it. I don’t sit here to really defend any aspects of the story or its dedication to lore. I do think that the story largely feels slow and rudderless, which is odd considering how we all know where it’s going (these films called The Lord of the Rings).

But I’ll be damned if this isn’t the best looking thing I’ve ever seen on a TV screen. Visuals are ambitious and interesting. The music rocks. The world is immersive. As a video editor, I’m consistently blown away by the image quality—seeming to suffer from none of the compression issues that Max and Hulu have. 

I look forward to turning off the lights and watching this show every week like it’s a Windows Media Player visualizer.

I’m Sorry (Seasons 1-2) — TruTV/Max
CW: vulgar language

I picked this one up on a recommendation from a friend, and it feels like a time capsule to a totally different moment in TV history. The show ran from 2017-2019 on TruTV (although it’s available now on Max, and feels a bit more HBO-like in tone), focused around the semi-fictionalized life of comedian Andrea Savage. The show is witty, well-written, and even more well-performed.

It brings me back to this time period where comedians were getting TV deals to make 30-minute content essentially completely based on their personality. It could be surreal (Atlanta), personal (Fleabag), reflective (Better Things, Ramy), or even deeply sad (Louie).

While I wouldn’t place I’m Sorry in that echelon of TV show, it’s solid, carried by its personality and distinctive perspective. Recently I feel like I’ve seen less of these creator-personality driven half hour shows. Hacks feels similar but I think it feels like it has more of the weight of a writers room behind it.

Maybe I’m just out of the loop, but where are the comedies?

The Umbrella Academy (Season 4) — Netflix
CW: cgi violence

I’m always fascinated by TV series finales. Sure, there’s the proverbial “landing the plane,” but the episode is often just as much about the creators saying goodbye and thank you to their own art and to the audience they shared it with. It’s why you often see so many characters return for a finale, as a way of looking back at the show as a now completed thing. It’s inherently bittersweet, celebrating the series while also being sad that it’s over, essentially dead and frozen in time.

I think that both creators and audiences can focus a bit too much on either part of this equation—landing the plane vs saying goodbye—and the ways in which they succeed or fail are sometimes more interesting than anything else because of what they reveal about the creator’s intention.

I think it’s hard to make the argument that the finale of The Umbrella Academy landed the plane when it comes to its plot. There were a ton of unanswered questions and a number of barely-explained changes, from the “how did we get here” parallel nature of the season’s premise to the driving doomsday mechanic that they all had to try to band together to stop.

But I think that in that other piece—that is, saying goodbye to characters and how that reveals the intentions of the creator—was very interesting. The show has always been focused on these characters broken and molded by their trauma, bonded together in their shared suffering at the hands of their father. It’s like X-Men meets The Royal Tenenbaums. And I think that the choice to end the show on the rather bleak note that it picked, was fascinating, not because of the neat way it tied the plot together or how it completed every character’s arc, but because of how it kind of refused to, instead focusing on some level of acceptance that all things do end.

I’m not sure I’d say the show succeeded here either, but to me, it felt like a choice to me, and I can respect that.