THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup February 2024

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

I don’t have time to do full conversations on everything I’m watching but here are some stray thoughts on everything I’ve watched in the last month. I’ve also been requested to include content warnings for shows that need them, so you can see those beneath each title!

Abbott Elementary (Season 3) — ABC/Hulu
CW: nothing, you have no excuse not to watch this masterpiece

Some people look at critics as cynical. “Why do you keep reminding me of all the shitty things around us?” they ask, “Can’t we just appreciate what we’ve got? Why do you have to be such a downer?” To me, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is to be critical, whether the object of your criticism is art, government, or society.

To be a critic is to be optimistic by nature—to believe that better things are possible. That doesn’t mean ignoring issues for some blissful ignorance, it means facing those realities head on. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a show that understands this dynamic as well as Abbott Elementary. Other mockumentaries have certainly depicted systems that deserve criticism—like The Office and capitalism or Parks and Rec and duopoly—but they often stop short of actually facing the problems of those systems, instead trying to find the happiness we can find within them. “Yeah, corporate America sucks, but what if you just made your work family your real family?” It’s a perspective that offers resignation to making the best of things, rather than believing that better things are possible, even if they are difficult.

Abbott Elementary never shies away from the systemic issues that face public school teachers and their students, and it’s still one of the most joyful shows on television. It recognizes the struggle, but embraces it with creative problem solving. And this extends beyond the plot of the show. The show’s third season was delayed by the Hollywood strikes of 2023, but the show simply wrote that time jump into its story, chalking the absence up to the documentary camera crew being robbed. You see, whether it’s on TV or not, the problems with public schooling remain, as do the people fighting the good fight.

Shōgun (Season 1) — FX/Hulu/Disney+
CW: nudity, violence, gore

Shōgun is the newest miniseries adaptation of the 1975 novel by James Clavell, a book that has aged…quite poorly. The new series attempts to curb some of that underlying racism and orientalism by shifting focus from the white foreigner in a strange land, John Blackthorne, to the socio-political Japanese landscape he finds himself a pawn within. We see the world from not just his perspective but from the perspectives of the Japanese lords and vassals, and much of the show is spoken in the Japanese language.

But there are still a number of eyebrow-raising aspects to the show. The first episode depicts Blackthorne and a Portuguese navigator saving a Japanese ship from a storm, since apparently the seafaring Japanese people have no idea how to pilot their own ship in a storm and need to be yelled at in another language to know that they should row. There’s also the fact that while the Japanese is Japanese, the Portuguese is presented as English to the audience, which aligns the audience intuitively with the white settlers. There’s also the fact that this show was shot in Vancouver and that most of the top line producers are white1 and that we have to wait until the 6th episode for a non-white director.

It’s difficult for me not to compare this show in my mind to Blue Eye Samurai, another show written and created by an interracial couple2 and focused on white minorities in Edo Japan. Blue Eye Samurai also features its fair share of white producers, directors, and writers but crucially is built off the lived experience of Michael Green and Amber Noizumi, who have been developing that story for 15 years, based on their mixed-race daughter. I’m not sure Shōgun will ever be able to approach that level of introspection because it is still somewhat beholden to its namesake novel.

I’m not saying we should write off Shōgun, but I do think that it should be watched with a level of scrutiny, given its problematic source material.

1 Wikipedia lists the Executive Producers as Edward McDonnell, Justin Marks, Rachel Kondo, Andrew Macdonald, Allon Reich, Michael De Luca, and Michaela Clavell.

2 Both writing teams are a white man and a Japanese-descended woman. This adaptation of Shōgun is created by Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, who wrote the first two episodes together; Blue Eye Samurai is created by Michael Green and Amber Noizumi, who wrote all but 1 episode.

True Detective (Season 4) — Max
CW: gore, domestic/sexual violence

I’ve never been a huge True Detective fan, even though I’ve seen almost every single episode of the series (I never finished the third season). I always felt that the hype surrounding that first season was due to the incredible filmmaking of Cary Fukanaga and the big name performances of Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. Once those elements were replaced in subsequent seasons, we were left with more of creator and writer Nic Pizzolatto’s writing, which doesn’t cut it for me, and frankly didn’t cut it for the other people involved.

I’ve always found Nic Pizzolatto’s writing to be really, really pretentious in a way that gets old by the end of a single episode. Plus, he probably didn’t even write the best parts. That’s to say nothing of the show’s rampant misogyny. I couldn’t tell you what the plot of the first season is if you held a gun to my head. Death, take me.

But I decided to give season 4 a shot because of how upset it was making Nicky on Twitter, which surely had nothing to do with those earlier accusations of misogyny. This season follows cops Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Navarro (Kali Reis) in rural Alaska working a case that is an obvious homage to John Carpenter’s The Thing. Weaved into the story is an undercurrent of gendered violence, from numerous instances of domestic violence to the unsolved murder of an indigenous woman to the way some men feel entitled to a specific kind of wife.

From my perspective as the copaganda guy, I think it’s interesting to see a cop show try to grapple with the failings of the police when it comes to women and people of color. I think it’s interesting to see a show portray the relationship of the police to the local mining company which both provides an economic base for the town while also creating so much pollution that the number of stillbirths has skyrocketed. Yet, the police don’t keep them in check. Instead, Danvers is called to break up protests and scare off vandals so the mine can continue its work.

Ultimately though, I do think the show was a bit of a mess. Like many True Detective seasons before, it alluded to a supernatural force only to back away, leaving me unsure whether I’m supposed to believe in monsters that go bump in the night or to simply understand those monsters as a way of us rationalizing the horrors humans can inflict on each other. And without that same level of Fukanaga filmmaker pizazz, all we’re left with are the half-baked ideas.