THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup April 2024

“What are you watching?” is pretty much the automatic question I get when I tell people what I do for a living.

With the stress of the last two months I haven’t gotten to watch as much TV as usual, but I do have some thoughts on some shows! I’ve also included content warnings for shows that need them, so you can see those beneath each title! 

X-Men ‘97 (Season 1) — Disney+
CW: cheesy dialogue, discussions of oppression

I don’t usually talk about cartoons or anime on the channel—that’s what I watch for fun, not for work. They’re a break from the TV I write about. But I can’t NOT talk about X-Men ‘97, which is by far the best thing I’ve seen so far this year. I’m a fan of both the comics and the original animated series, so there is certainly a nostalgia factor. And since it was a show I watched with my dad as a kid, I’m sure there’s some processing/grief going on, but I’m obsessed with this show.

At its heart, X-Men is a story about resistance and oppression, of people who are given the short end of the societal stick simply because of who they are. It’s a metaphor that can extend to so many different kinds of people, from racial minorities to the LGBTQ+ community, and it shows us how all of those struggles are really the same. The targets of oppression might change (it’s very eerie watching the show as war crimes rage in Gaza), but the song’s tune remains the same. On top of that, the show has touched on the kind of white moderates that Dr. Martin Luther King famously wrote of from a Birmingham jail cell: “the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’”

It is a show about the ideals we were raised up to believe, and having them crash into a world where, actually, racism and sexism and discrimination have not been defeated at all. About how they’ve merely mutated, and how the struggle continues. It is an absolutely incredible show, and I have already watched every episode at least 3 times.

Fallout (Season 1) — Amazon Prime
CW: gore, violence, domestic/sexual violence

As a TV critic, it’s easy for Fallout to remind me of The Last of Us. After all, both are prestige-y shows about a post-apocalyptic wasteland adapted from very popular video games. But that’s about where the comparison ends. The Last of Us painted a bleak picture of the future, a kind of doomsday prepper wet dream where every stranger is an enemy, resources must be hoarded, and might makes right. Fallout is far less pessimistic. Sure, the wasteland is dangerous, but the show is defined by the friends that Lucy makes, not the betrayals. When her sheltered and privileged ideals are challenged by the world, she doesn’t reject them at all. Walton Goggins’ radioactive Ghoul tells her that he’s just her given more time in the wasteland, but she responds that “I may end up looking like you, but I'll never be like you,” defiantly sticking to her guns. She refuses to compromise her humanity for the sake of survival, because if you do make that sacrifice, what were you really preserving anyway?

Baby Reindeer (Season 1) — Netflix
CW: sexual violence, stalking

I just started this bad boy and have only seen the pilot episode, but this is a show with a lot of confidence in a tone that is very difficult to hit. The show follows a bartender in England who is stalked by one of his regulars, a middle-aged fat woman. She is unassuming and the story is told from the perspective of the bartender who tells us in narration that the first thing he felt when he saw her was “that he felt sorry for her.”

I’m very interested to see how the genderbending aspect of this show plays out. Most stalker media (and real life scenarios) focus on the implicit threat of gendered violence—which Baby Reindeer flips on its head with its premise. While our main character is certainly disturbed by the attention he’s receiving, he does not carry the same level of fear. Instead, we see him welcome the attention and consistently underestimate her in a way that feels like a conscious subversion. I know the series has gotten a lot of hype, and I’m really excited to keep going with it.