THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup November 2023

“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!

No spoilies (except that we won WW2)

The Pacific (Season 1) — Netflix/Max
CW: Violence, gore, language, nudity, racism…the show is about the Pacific Theater of WW2 in pretty graphic detail, idk what else I can say

This might surprise some of you, but I actually really like Band of Brothers, the HBO miniseries from 2001 following Easy Company throughout their European campaign, from D-Day to VJ Day. While the show is pretty clearly a patriotic circlejerk, it has a pretty high level of historical accuracy and goes a long way towards exploring the people behind arguably the defining achievement of 20th Century America. The actual people being portrayed were interviewed on camera, there were a host of primary accounts, and the filmmaking really brought the intensity of war to life. It’s certainly not an anti-war piece of media, but if there was one conflict you were going to valorize, it’s gotta be fighting the Nazis and freeing concentration camps right?

This was the first time I’ve tried to watch The Pacific, the 2010 followup focusing on the Pacific Theater, which is a much stickier conflict. As somewhat of a history “buff” (sorry I just threw up a little), I’m familiar with the Pacific Theater, which involved just SO many war crimes. On both sides! There’s the obviously sticky nature of dropping the bomb (I recommend this video) but you have Americans collecting Japanese “trophies,” the Japanese massacres in Bataan and Nanjing, and propaganda that led many Japanese civilians to suicide rather than live under American occupation.

The Pacific has done an admirable job considering just how brutal the conflict was, depicting the specifics of this theater that made it so scary (tropical diseases, jungle rainstorms, and night attacks on difficult terrain) while also not shying away from the overt racism that existed across the American forces.

That being said, it’s not Band of Brothers. It doesn’t have the same level of continuity by following around a specific group and thus loses a lot of the fraternal themes of the original series. Instead the show focuses on graphically depicting combat, which I think is a bit of a double edged sword. On the one hand, it gives the audience a sense of cycles of violence. On the other hand, those soldiers do look like pretty badass heroes…

The Curse (Season 1) — Showtime
CW: Language, CRINGE

The Curse follows Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone as a couple making a fix-it-up reality series for HGTV in New Mexico. Ostensibly the show is about building sustainable housing for a forgotten community with a large indigenous population, but in reality, the couple have bought up real estate and are hoping the show brings enough attention to raise property values before they cash out and leave all the people they “helped” behind. As with any Fielder project, the show is built on a strong foundation of cringe, inviting us to laugh at main characters who are equal parts incompetent and sociopathic. It has also introduced some light fantasy and supernatural aspects—the curse from the title is placed on Fielder after he takes back money he gave to a child for a shot, and might be real, who knows—in a way that makes the show very difficult to predict. All the while, it’s shot in an incredibly voyeuristic way that gives me the heebie jeebies. The camera is always looking in through windows or around corners on a tripod in a way that feels like security footage in a true crime documentary. I’m not sure where it’s going, but I’m definitely aboard for the ride.

For All Mankind (Season 4) — AppleTV+
CW: Language, the cruel and empty vacuum of space

For those who have been around a while, you might remember For All Mankind, the alternative history show that branches off from our reality when the Soviets win the race to the Moon, and find water there. Now in its fourth season, and up to the early 2000s in its own time, humanity has colonized Mars. Although the show has always been about the promises of space travel and the things humans can do when we band together, from reaching the Moon to colonizing Mars, it’s starting to more accurately represent a world that is all too familiar—one where wealth is king. The life-seeking projects that were the backbone of NASA have fallen by the wayside in the name of dangerous asteroid mining, since that’s more profitable. On Mars, workers are exploited to a degree that would make Jeff Bezos blush. And in the Soviet Union, a faction has taken control of the government after seeing the country slowly become the same capitalist nation as the United States. It’s a show that simultaneously feels historical and forward looking, hitting major points of history like the 2000 presidential election while also following the Elon Musk plan for Mars.

Loki (Season 2) — Disney+
CW: confusion

I rather liked Loki’s first season, and there were individual elements of season 2 that I liked. I enjoyed Loki’s personal character growth in the way that it charted his change from selfish to selfless. I liked that Ke Huy Quan was in it. I liked a lot of the visuals. And that’s about as much as the show made sense to me. I could not possibly begin to explain what happened in the finale of the show or why it was necessary, and this is my job. The stakes of the season were only mentioned in the vaguest of terms like “if we don’t do this everyone dies,” without explaining why the world was ending. It has something to do with a temporal loom, but why such a loom is necessary was also poorly explored. Loki’s fix of the system was left completely unexplained beyond making him look like a really cool Norse god and letting us just kind of assume that his magic just works that way. Even on a more fundamental level, the show never really reckoned with the fact that the TVA was the villain of the entire first season and then all of a sudden, Loki is trying to save it in the next. Just a really weird and confusing show (with very cool visuals!) that will successfully keep me from watching any new show on Disney+ for at least another year.