THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup June 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!

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.

The Bear (Season 2) — Hulu
CW: language

I’ve been largely disappointed in this TV year. Some of that has to do with some lackluster seasons from shows I expected to enjoy (Yellowjackets, The Last of Us), but I think more of it has to do with burnout. I’ve been professionally watching TV full-time for about 5 years, and whenever you take something you’re passionate about and turn it into work, it loses some of its magic.

In the season premiere of The Bear, Richie says to Carmy: “You know what the fuck you’re doing. You love all this shit. It’s fun for you…You love it”

Carm responds, “That doesn’t make it fun.”

There’s a difference between loving your work or passion, and it being fun for you. There’s the passion and then there’s the business that makes that passion sustainable. Once you start layering on expectations, ambitions, and the economic realities that this has to work in order to pay your bills, it becomes stressful. It doesn’t happen right away, it doesn’t happen overnight, but eventually you feel different. Most people think of food or—in my case—TV as a source of enjoyment. And yeah, I enjoy and love my job. But it’s still hard work.

I’ve only seen the first 2 episodes so far, because I’m trying to savor every minute, and let myself sit with each episode before moving on to the next. But you run into pressures that other people don’t think of: seeing every other critic having crushed the season in one weekend or being asked constantly for your professional opinion by friends.

I’m not complaining, I love TV. But there are things about the job that aren’t TV that make the job possible. You’ve got to stay engaged in the DiScOuRsE, you’ve got to check video analytics, you’ve got to sell your videos.

I feel very seen by The Bear.

The Other Two (Season 3) — Max
CW: Cringe

The Other Two ended its third and final season earlier this week and, for the most part, never rose above the status as cult classic. It never boasted huge ratings or critical acclaim. But it should have!

The show follows 30-something Brooke and Cary Dubek as they deal with their insecurities as their younger brother becomes an overnight Justin Bieber superstar and catapults past them in career trajectory. Over the years, Brooke and Cary have become successful in their own rights, but the third season showed us that that success doesn’t equal happiness. It’s another show that does an incredible job of portraying the pitfalls of career and passion chasing at the cost of all other relationships in your life.

Personally, I think this third season was the show’s best, maintaining its entertainment industry humor (Highlights include: The AIDS play, Chase dating Kiernan Shipka, Brooke driving a jpg of an armpit across the country, and #GlobsAreGay), while also grappling with the personal costs and emptiness of being single mindedly ambitious.

Black Mirror (Season 6) — Streamberry (I mean, Netflix)
CW: Language, violence, disturbing visions of humanity

I said most of what I wanted to about Black Mirror in my most recent video essay and in my interview with Jessie Gender, but here are some more general thoughts and notes that I didn’t find space for in the video. The first is this interesting article from Emily St. James about how the best episode of Black Mirror in 2018 was actually an episode of The X-Files revival. I watched that episode for prep for this video but ultimately ended up going in a different direction once I watched season 6 and came to my thesis about media criticism.

That episode of The X-Files is quite enjoyable though, and I do think would make for an excellent addition to the Black Mirror catalog. I used a clip of it in my ad read at the end of the video. It’s largely without dialogue, both funny and poignant about the things about ourselves that we pass on to the technology we create and think of as “neutral.” This kind of ties into my larger point about the limited perspective Black Mirror represents, this idea that people in charge view things that uphold the status quo as apolitical because they’ve never had to look at them any other way.

I’d also like to give a quick shoutout to How TV Ruined Your Life, which was an incredible watch for this video. If you like my copaganda series (I mean you’re here, you probably do), this is pretty related, talking about how TV changes our perception of the world and talks about it with subject material I was less familiar with, as an American. This was, somehow, the first time I’d heard about Cultivation Theory and his commentary in the Aspiration episode is particularly funny.

Loch Henry was by far my favorite, followed by Joan is Awful, Mazey Day, and Demon 79—in that order. Beyond the Sea might be the worst Black Mirror episode of all time in my book.