THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup January 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!

Minor spoilers.

Blue Eye Samurai (Season 1) — Netflix
CW: language, animated violence/gore

Every year, for my own records, I like to try to rank out every single TV show I’ve seen. I don’t really love top 10 lists or whatever, but I like to track my own opinions of things and see how they change over time and to keep track of all the stuff I watch. Blue Eye Samurai was my #1 show of the year. This show SLAPS. The attention to detail on the lighting and textural elements bring the animation a ton of life and the direction of the fight scenes is engaging and easy to follow. But beneath what can be most neatly pitched as “Kill Bill meets Mulan,”1 Blue Eye Samurai is a layered and nuanced story about gender, performance, and dare I say, trans-ness. Obviously, being set in the 1600s, the characters don’t have a modern conception of those things, but the show has a lot of really interesting things to say about all of the abstract things that we tend to assign a gender to in society—revenge, military prowess, empathy. And that’s to say nothing of the way it directly confronts racism and imperialism. Great show, can’t wait for season 2.

1: I know Mulan is Chinese and Blue Eye Samurai is Japanese but I think when it comes to gender roles on the battlefield, I think it’s a relevant text

The West Wing (Seasons 1-2) — Max
CW: liberalism, long soliloquies, a startling lack of self-awareness

Believe me, I’ll have more nuanced things to say about this show in a massive video essay this year, but a few first impressions. First, I expected to not really like this show—but I do! It’s very well-structured as a TV series. Every episode has a strong number of plotlines that tend to coalesce around very interesting themes. The characters have great chemistry. I’m not a huge fan of Sorkin, but I’ll be damned if some of the long soliloquies he writes don’t make me go “You are good with the words, man.”

Second, it is fascinating to go back to 1999, a pre-9/11 America, and see the political topics of discussion—stuff from eliminating mandatory minimums to campaign finance reform. While these are both issues that are still political platforms (since they were never solved), it’s fascinating how dated the show’s politics feel now that we live in a hyper-partisan neoliberal political climate. We hear that President Bartlet is the first president to have a higher disapproval than approval rating, which in 2024 sounds par for the course. Many of the issues that the show brings up have become more pronounced since, just in the opposite direction. The Bartlet Administration champions campaign finance reform, which was basically squashed by Citizens United v. FEC (2010). They argue vehemently for public education over vouchers, which *checks notes* is still a discussion, as the GOP war on Education remains as fraught as ever. It’s hard to take the show’s idealism in the face of these present facts seriously at times, but then again, sometimes someone just says something that makes you go, “You are good with the words, man.”

Yellowstone (Season 1) — Paramount+
CW: conservatism, a startling lack of self-awareness

I watched the pilot episode of this show when it launched all the way back in 2018, thought it was solid, and then couldn’t find anyone to talk about it with and decided to check out. Since then, it’s become a complete smash hit, as a kind of “conservative prestige TV.” Part of this is deeply funny to me. Yellowstone is a show about an incredibly wealthy family as it exerts its money and political influence to protect its interests as the aging patriarch starts to plan on which of his children will be his successor—which is sooooo different from the woke mind virus on Succession, I guess. I decided to rewatch the pilot and maybe the rest of the show, with the idea that I might make a video about it, and was really blown away by the lack of self-awareness. Kevin Costner’s character continually opines that this is his land, his family’s land, and he’ll protect it from anyone and everyone who tries to take it from him. The people trying to take it from him are people who want to build affordable housing and…indigenous Americans. It was, after all, their land and their family’s land first, before it was taken from them by Costner’s family. This is fertile ground for an interesting self-inspection over land ownership and the way that the Great Plains were violently taken by white settlers, who professed its beauty while drilling for oil. But the show isn’t interested in any of that, it’s more interested in just replaying the same cowboys-and-indians film tropes that dominated the John Wayne era of westerns. I might still hate-watch it though, idk.

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

*SPOILERS*

I think that For All Mankind kind of bungled this fourth season. While I enjoyed a lot of the themes the show was playing with—namely labor—I think that it ultimately did not really have a clear message. This season revolved around the discovery of an immense asteroid with a wealth of mineable resources and the debate about who should own those resources and who will get the jobs of mining it. The wealth the rock will provide is constantly framed as something that “can change humanity,” but we can see from the worker strikes on Mars and against Helios (the tech company run by Elon Musk stand-in, Dev Ayesa) that these giant leaps forward “for all mankind” tend to just enrich the richest, while the poor are left to fight for scraps in dangerous jobs. Yet, the greatest ally of the poor Mars workers is also Dev Ayesa. After he squashes their strike (one that was very quite effective), he leads the charge for creating a sustainable and permanent Mars colony. It’d be like if striking Starbucks workers got replaced and then they all went and worked for Howard Schulz in his new coffee company.