THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup February 2022

“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 two months. Some mild spoilers for shows that are not in season 1.

Euphoria (Season 2)

If you caught my video earlier this month about Euphoria, you might have sensed some conflicted feelings. When the show is great, it’s undeniable, but sometimes it has a habit of venturing into exploitation. That being said, I no longer feel conflicted. Euphoria is a masterpiece, and while I haven’t watched the finale just yet, it’s penultimate episode is one of the best episodes of TV I’ve seen in recent years. This show is operating at such a high level in every possible facet—its camerawork, lighting, acting, and direction are second to none. The way Sam Levinson is able to seamlessly meld reality, the surreal, a self-referential play, memories, dreams, and nightmares without ever losing his audience is something that I just frankly haven’t seen on television before. Barring absolute disappointment, I’ll be making a quick video about the two-part finale.

Inventing Anna (Season 1)

Inspired by the real life story of Anna Sorokin, a convicted con artist who defrauded major financial institutions (nice, screw them) and some of her friends (less nice) while pretending to be a German heiress, Inventing Anna has a lot of promise. Ultimately, I think that it’s a show that fails to live up to it, pulling its punches when it comes to the systems that make the story so interesting. Was Anna a Robin Hood character? What does this say about barriers to wealth and power? Was Anna living the American dream? Julia Garner, Anna Chlumsky, and Arian Moayed all put in solid performances, but I was left thinking the show should have been better.

New Girl (Season 3-5)

Here’s a peek into my personal life. I’m on dating apps and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen people have “looking for my Schmidt” on their profile. So you could forgive me for patiently waiting for this noble Schmidt to arrive. I’d ask myself “Sooner or later he’s going to stop being so casually racist, sexist, and homophobic, right?” No. He’s not. Max Greenfield is a great performer, but Schmidt is terrible. Also they made Winston (the goofiest character) a cop and have just been doing copaganda in the background of much of the show since then. I do love the actors’ chemistry with one another and the general low stakes vibe, so there’s still a lot to enjoy about the show, but there are some major bummers when you stop to think about it.

Murderville (Season 1)

Murderville has one of the greatest premises I’ve seen for a show: a famous guest star joins Will Arnett to solve a murder, only they aren’t given the script to the episode and have to guess the killer at the end. The episodes themselves can be a bit inconsistent (as improv often can be) but when gags work, they really work. Marshawn Lynch was great, no notes.

Severance (Season 1)

Severance is a high concept drama on AppleTV+ where workers at the corporation Lumon have their minds “severed,” a procedure that separates their work mind from their home mind, leaving them with no memory of the other. While it’s early and shows with high concept premises can go off the rails quickly, I expect this show to be one of the best of the year. It feels like a really good Black Mirror episode but far less preachy, using its sci-fi elements to comment on late-stage capitalism from so many angles. In only three episodes, they’ve deftly handled ideas like alienation from yourself and others, the way our comfort is predicated off the suffering of unseen laborers, our intentional ignorance about the violence of our system, and the way capitalism has become a religion unto itself. Absolutely brilliant stuff.

Single Drunk Female (Season 1)

Boston has often been a punchline on TV, from Julianne Moore’s atrocious accent work on 30 Rock to Diane’s family on Bojack Horseman. But in the past two years we’ve gotten some decent representation! Kevin Can F**k Himself nailed Worcester and now Single Drunk Female is nailing Bostonian alcoholics. I have definitely known people like Samantha Fink, and Sofia Black-D'Elia is making a name for herself. The show is funny and has a lot of heart, check it out if you’re in the market for a new half-hour comedy.

The Bachelor (Clayton’s Season)

One of the central tropes of The Bachelor is that in order to bond with the bachelor and stay on TV, women have to expose their deepest insecurities and traumas. This lets everyone know they’re very serious, because why else would you tell everyone about the most painful thing that’s ever happened to you on national television? There have been bachelors who react poorly. There have been bachelors who don’t know what to say. I’m not sure any bachelor has so obviously just waited for his turn to kiss them afterwards like Clayton. This guy just has the monkey with cymbals in his brain.

The Expanse (Season 6)

While its final season wasn’t exactly its most impressive, I’ll miss The Expanse a ton. It was one of the most well-thought-out hard sci-fi shows ever put on television, creating a vivid world that made sense. Often it can be difficult to balance that kind of systemic worldbuilding and individual character growth, but The Expanse was one of the few shows to really walk that fine line. Perhaps more than any non-David Simon show that has aired since, it reminded me of The Wire in the way that it cared for people across the socio-political spectrum, and sought to understand where they were and why.