THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup August 2023

Hope y'all enjoyed your Labor Day Weekend!

“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!

I’ll keep spoilers to a minimum unless otherwise marked. These are ordered by how much I’m interested in talking about them, to you, right now, in this post.

How To with John Wilson (Season 3) — HBOMax
CW: nothing but also everything

I said most of what I wanted to say about How To with John Wilson in my video from last week, so I’ll just share a little personal experience here. Although the series finale came out on Friday, I’m not sure when I’ll get around to watching it. I took my time getting around to the second season finale as well, and while I’m really excited to watch it at some point, I don’t want the show to end, I feel like I have so many more things I still need to learn!

Reservation Dogs (Season 3) — FX/Hulu
CW: Language

Likewise, I am woefully behind on Reservation Dogs—not because I don’t like it, but because I love it. Especially since starting copaganda and watching shows that I’m much less positive about, I tend to try to savor the shows I truly love and to try to make them last. This gets even worse when I know I’m not going to be making a full video about said show (I still haven’t seen the final season of Barry). I always want to have something good to look forward to, and if I actually finish these—well, who knows when the next great thing will come around.

Telemarketers — HBO
CW: Language, drug use

I talked about Telemarketers briefly in my lil skippy, but as the copaganda guy, I could not have found this show more fascinating. Was I surprised that police unions are involved in the shadiest and lucrative scams in the history of the United States? No. Was I surprised that they suffer no consequences because politicians are afraid of them? No. But it was still a wild trip to see it all play out—to see regulators bluntly say “we’re afraid of the police.” The show ended without any real resolution, because what resolution could there possibly be? However, I think that the journey the series takes us on is valuable because it lays out neatly that, so often, there are no consequences for those in power.

Harley Quinn (Season 4) — HBOMax
CW: Language, violence, sex

I’ve always enjoyed Harley Quinn and its forays into obscene political commentary, the comedic genius that is the show’s version of Bane, and how many jokes they get in about The Dark Knight Rises. Last season, in a very fun twist, a reformed Joker became mayor of Gotham on the back of a socialist message. However, this season, we’ve seen Harley join the Bat Family of cops and there have been some troubling messages in the background about how Gotham is a crime-ridden hellhole now because the Joker defunded the police, which I’m a lot less happy about! We shall see how it all shakes out!

Winning Time (Season 2) — HBOMax
CW: Language, sexual content, drugs

There are moments of excellence in this show. The acting across the board is incredible, particularly from Jason Clarke, Solomon Hughes, and Adrien Brody. The stylistic mixed media, while jarring at first, has really grown on me. And, of course, I love basketball. The first season caught a lot of flack for its representation of reality, and I defended it. It’s a dramatization, not nonfiction, and so heavily stylized that this distinction feels pretty apparent from the jump. And if not from the jump, perhaps when a ghostly leprechaun cackles in the bowels of Boston Garden. But some of the liberties taken this season have been a little more forced. Larry Bird’s father did die by suicide, but it’s not because Bird dropped out of college—he was already dead by the time Bird enrolled. In fact, him dropping out of college likely had something to do with his trying to cope with that loss.

There’s certainly no easy answer for the ethics of portraying public figures dramatically like this, and I think that it probably has to be taken case-by-case. But that one stands out as a pretty egregious change in my mind.

Silo (Season 1) — AppleTV+
CW: Language

I started this show because I saw it in a bunch of “Top 10 Shows of the Year so far” lists. It is not. I only got through the first 3 episodes before tapping out, but fear not, I read the Wikipedia summaries of the remaining episodes, and I made the right choice! It did not get better.