THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup May 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 some stuff I watched in the last month (not included: Love & Death, The Other Two). 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.

Succession (Season 4) — HBO
CW: language, cringe

More to come in my next Lil Skippy. I’ll also be podcasting with friend of the channel Thomas Flight for my super extra detailed thoughts later this week as well. I’ll be sure to post it here for your viewing/listening pleasure.

Ted Lasso (Season 3) — AppleTV+
CW: orbital ejection

*Spoilers*

Ted Lasso had long since lost the drive of its first season once its premise ran dry and characters started to genuinely love Ted unconditionally. Conflict evaporated, runtimes became bloated, and the show became a series of PSAs for things that the writers appeared to be learning for the first time. We had entire scenes about how it’s okay to be gay, how you should delete nudes when a relationship ends, and that workplace sexual misconduct is bad (except when Rebecca dates an employee, that’s fine and good). Of course, the finale continued all of that—culminating in a scene where the Diamond Dogs ruminate on whether human beings can change or not—but the episode also fell apart in really basic ways that have me convinced that they decided this would be the series finale at the last possible minute. In fact, it was so disjointed that I can only really talk about it in bullet points. Not to go all cinema sins, but this deserves it:

• The incredibly light and bouncy music on this show hypnotizes you into thinking you’re watching a sweet moment, when in reality you have no idea what the actual emotions of the scene are or why. Case in point, Ted and Nate—a rival dynamic that fueled the season’s first half—have their second conversation of the season in this episode, say almost nothing, and hug.
• Ted said “I know people are a bit divided on the police these days” and I just about threw my remote at the TV. WHO IS THIS SHOW FOR?!
• Zava, another character I totally forgot about, re-emerges with his avocado farm for a brief moment just so Jamie can say, “Holy guacamole.”
• So does Ted just not have panic attacks anymore?
• This is nitpicking but Zoro commits a pretty obvious handball out of the box in the final match.
• Each character has been saving one piece of the “Believe” sign in their lockers, independently, just so they could put it back together at halftime.
• The kiss Collin Hughes gave his boyfriend after the match was so tightlipped and lifeless that it is in fact homophobic.
• Jamie, Roy, and Keely are apparently a sexless throuple now.
• So is Ted back with his wife now? And is it because her new boyfriend didn’t like soccer?

As Roy Kent said, “ruff. ruff.”

Dave (Season 3) — FX/Hulu
CW: sexual language

Dave is a show that continues to baffle me. At times, it truly makes me giggle, like when they made Anne Frank whip. Other times, the show is almost somehow too aware of itself and also lacking any kind of actual self-awareness. A great example is the episode “Met Gala,” where Dave learns about climate change for the very first time and decides to make it his personality. He goes to the Met Gala to pull a ripcord on his costume that will inflate in bomb-like fashion to a 40 foot globe. People are going to get knocked over, but he’s going to make a statement and fuck those out of touch rich assholes anyway. When he gets there, he becomes instantly wowed by the celebrity glamor and gets caught up in petty squabbles with Jack Harlow. He wobbles on whether to do his performative activism or not but eventually decides against it because he maybe wants to leave his girlfriend for Rachel McAdams. Then he accidentally pulls the ripcord while he’s leaving, far away from anyone and without any political statement whatsoever. Roll credits.

Let’s start by pointing out that Lil Dicky has, in real life, released a music video called “Earth,” a star-studded vague virtue signal about environmentalism. The song was critically panned, with a Pitchfork reviewer writing that it “sounds less like a charity single and more like a theme to a downmarket Disney clone made explicitly to launder money for an offshore criminal enterprise.”

So here’s a question: what is the point of that Met Gala episode? It’s clearly making fun of his song “Earth” right? He’s aware that it was a cynical celebrity-fueled attention grab disguised as charity. That’s what he’s saying here. But at the same time, this episode is that. The Met Gala is loaded with celebrity cameos from Don Cheadle to Travis Barker to Megan Fox. Dave is seduced by celebrity and abandons charity and that’s the end. There’s no lesson, just some schadenfreude.

There used to be consequences for Dave’s narcissism on the show. In the first season he loses his relationship with his longtime girlfriend because he completely ignores her for his longshot career. He’s confronted on The Breakfast Club for the appropriative nature of his comedy-rap, which at some level is just the joke that he’s “not the kind of guy who you’d expect to be rapping” if you know what I mean.

And what I mean is he’s a white Jewish guy. That’s the joke. It’s not the whole joke, but it’s part of the joke. Dave has to answer for that to some extent at the end of that first season and stand on his own. But now, there are no consequences. Everyone supports and loves him. He has a manic pixie dream girlfriend who doesn’t mind that he let her think he was dead for better streaming numbers.

It seems like Dave acknowledges the narcissism of Lil Dicky, and makes fun of it. But it’s not actually interested in answering for it. It is, structurally, a temple to the narcissism of Lil Dicky.

Yellowjackets (Season 2) — Showtime
CW: violence, cannibalism!

Look, I’m not going to bullshit you. This season was a clusterfuck. On paper, I liked almost everything that the show was trying in the second season. I thought the slow exploration of the occult and supernatural was just enough to keep audiences wanting more. I thought the additions of Elijah Wood and Lauren Ambrose were outstanding. I even grew to really like the present-day adult plotlines that often fell flat in the first season. The problem was that the show tried to do too much, and got caught between too many interests. The genrebending that made the first season so powerful and special became too rapid to keep up with tonally. Instead of feeling fresh, it felt confused. Some of this is bound to happen in a second season, where shows generally have to pivot from “cool premise” to “actual tv show,” but Yellowjackets wasn’t able to really pull off the transition. Its aesthetic still has me absolutely hooked and it’ll get another shot in its third season (and knowing Showtime, I’m sure it’ll get at least 7 seasons regardless of quality), but it’s got a lot of work to do.