mchenryjd

[mchenryjd]

2017 in Review

Necessarily incomplete, mostly for my personal record. I will probably regret this.

MOVIES

10.  mother!

Got to a screening late, had to sit in the third show, could barely tell what was happening and spent most of the movie staring at J. Law’s flared nostrils. An ideal viewing experience.

9.     Personal Shopper

Nothing captures the purposeful emptiness of spending time online like Kristen Stewart texting a ghost.

8.     Get Out

I kept telling my dad this movie was funny to get him to see it, not realizing he didn’t already know it was a horror movie. Afterwards, he texted me, “that was not a comedy!” Feels like that’s enough a metaphor. Daniel Kaluuya for best actor.

7.     Star Wars: The Last Jedi

A Star Wars movie about loving Star Wars movies, which means loving the epic, silly struggle between good and epic, loving the spiral staircase that is John Williams’s force theme, loving it when character always do the coolest possible thing followed by the next coolest possible thing, loving dumb furry creatures and sarcastic slimy ones, loving it when characters kiss when you want them to kiss, loving the hundred-million-dollar sandbox of it all. After the constricted dance steps of The Force Awakens and Rogue One, give me this bleeding freestyle any day.

6.     Phantom Thread

Finally, proof that everyone in a serious relationship has lost it.

5.     Call Me By Your Name

I refuse to believe that being stuck in rural Italy would be anything other than deadly boring and if my father insisted on turning everything into a lecture on classical art, I would run away. Also, there’s a contrast between the book (vague on the details of place and time, vividly specific on matters of sex) and the film (more contextually specific, sexier, but less horny than the original). Also, who am I kidding, I was moved and unsettled by the force of the thing. *Michael Stuhlbarg voice* Pray you get a chance to fall in love like this.

4.     Dunkirk

Having your tense, churning, clanking, thrumming, score transform into Elgar right when the beautiful, imperiled young heroes are reading a stirring speech (and Tom Hardy is heroically sacrificing himself in what looks like the middle of a Turner painting) is a level of craft so deft if feels like cheating, but it works.

3.     BPM

A film about a community in danger that acts as both a memorial to and rallying cry for that community. Uncompromising, accommodating, queer in the best way, BPM makes you want to cry and go dancing at the same time.

2.     Columbus

The kind of movie that makes you want to get in a car and keep driving until you find something beautiful, it has stuck and expanded in my memory ever since I saw it over the summer. Like the architecture that looms large in the setting, the plot can feel uncomfortably schematic – John Cho wants to leave and gets  stuck, Haley Lu Richardson is stuck and gets to leave. The question is how people live within, and blur the edges of, those confines. John Cho has a winning, curdled decency; Haley Lu Richardson gives the hardest kind of performance, in that she often seems unaware of her character’s own wants. I’d watch her quietly assemble dinner for hours on end.

1.     Lady Bird  

A movie that feels less plotted and more prefigured – every fight between Lady Bird has happened before, every high school landmark lumbers by with inevitability, every boy disappoints in the way you expect. What redeems all this? Paying attention, which is also love, in this movie’s pseudo-religious sense. Between Lady Bird and Marion, between Lady Bird and Julie, between Lady Bird and Sacramento. Watch people closely, as Greta Gerwig does, and they reveal glimmers of themselves (I know so little, and yet everything, about Stephen McKinley Henderson’s drama teacher from a few moments that feel perfect, in the sense of contained, past-tense completeness). It’ll all so ordinary. Fall in love with it.

Honorable mentions: Regina Hall’s speech about friendship in Girls Trip, Sally Hawkins tracing a droplet with her finger in The Shape of Water, Meryl Streep on the phone in The Post, Cara Delevingne in Valerian, Rihanna in Valerian, the part where the ghost jumped off the building in A Ghost Story, the fact that Power Rangers was surprisingly good, the soldier who gasps as Diana whips out her hair in the trenches in Wonder Woman, Ansel Elgort’s jacket in Baby Driver, whenever anyone tried to explain anything in Alien: Covenant, Elisabeth Moss in The Square, Anh Seo-hyun feeding Okja in Okja, Lois Smith being in movies, the kids eating ice cream in The Florida Project, the Game of Thrones joke in Logan Lucky, Vella Lovell in The Big Sick, and finally, most preciously, the moment in Home Again where Reese Witherspoon kissed Michael Sheen and someone in my theater shouted “she’s not feeling it!”

TELEVISION

10.  The Good Doctor

Listen, he’s a good doctor.

9.     Riverdale

They’re hot. They’re angsty. They do drugs that look like Pixy-Stix. They never seem to do homework. They love to hook-up in weird locations. They have terrible taste in karaoke songs. They love hair dye, and a well-defined eyebrow. They have really hot parents. They’re TV teens! I love it.

8.     Insecure

This is just to say that I am far too invested in Molly’s happiness as a person. I would also like to view a full season of Due North.

7.     American Vandal

From Alex Trimboli to Christa Carlyle, the best names on TV are on this show. Also the best reenactments, and somehow the most incisive take on what fuels, and results from TV’s true-crime obsession. Jimmy Tatro mumbling!

6.     Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

More shows should take the opportunity to explode in their third seasons, rocket forward at full speed, diagnose their main characters, and give Josh Groban wonderful, unexplainable cameos.

5.     Alias Grace

A show that conjured a performance for the ages out of Sarah Gadon and somehow made Zachary Levi palatable as a dramatic actor, this miracle of collaboration between Mary Harron and Sarah Polley is all the better for being binged. Down it in an afternoon, think of Grace under her black veil, daring you to disbelieve her, for years to come.

4.     Twin Peaks: The Return

A show that drove nostalgia into itself like a knife to the chest. Totally absurd. The best revival/exorcism yet on TV.

3.     Please Like Me

“Sorry about your life.” “I’m sorry about your life.” In a time when things tend to peter out, what a final season, in which everything goes to shit and then some. Maybe TV’s most prickly comedy, Please Like Me’s heart is of the “stumble along and keep going” sort and never does it test itself as much as it did with this bleak, pastel final statement.

2.     The Leftovers

Do you believe Nora Durst’s story? Sometimes I do. Sometimes I think it sounds ridiculous. Sometimes I relax in the comfortable, academic premise that it only matters that Kevin does. It’s a haunting idea, though, this image of world even emptier than The Leftovers’s own, where it’s possible to wander for untold time in darkness. Carrie Coon’s description of it is a kind of journey to the underworld – we’re there with her, maybe, and then we make it back, maybe. The trick of The Leftovers is the wound’s never fully healed.

1.     Halt and Catch Fire

The world changes. People sorta don’t.

Honorable mentions: the twist in The Good Place, the Taylor Swift demon character in Neo Yokio, Claire Foy on The Crown, Vanessa Kirby on The Crown, the stand-up in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Cristin Milioti in Black Mirror, the televised Academy Awards ceremony, the weeks when Netflix didn’t release new TV shows I had to watch, Girls’s “American Bitch,” the fact that Adam Driver is both in Girls and Star Wars, Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys performances on The Americans (and life in Brooklyn), the moments in Game of Thrones that were good enough to make me stop thinking about what people would write about Game of Thrones, season 2 of The Magicians’s resistance to any sort of plot logic, Jane the Virgin’s narrator, Nicole Kidman at therapy on Big Little Lies, Reese Witherspoon’s production of Avenue Q in Big Little Lies, Alexis Bledel holding things in The Handmaid’s Tale, Maggie Gyllenhaal directing porn in The Deuce, Alison Brie’s terrible Russian accent in Glow, Maya Rudolph in Big Mouth, Cush Jumbo miming oral sex with a pen in court in The Good Fight, the calming experience of watching new episodes of Superstore and Great News on Fridays, Eden Sher in The Middle, the fake books they make up for Younger, and Rihanna livestreaming herself watching Bates Motel.

THEATER

10.  Indecent

History, identity, community all mangled together in something that’s both excavation and revivification. I’m so mad I didn’t get to see it with my mom.

9.     Mary Jane

A nightmare that goes from bad to worse, which Carrie Coon performed with the endurance of a saint.

8.     SpongeBob SquarePants

Highlights: The tap number, the Fiddler on the Roof joke, the many uses of pool noodles, David Zinn’s design in general, the arms, the volcano setpiece, the fact that somehow I kept laughing for two-and-a-half hours at something SpongeBob SquarePants. Tina Landau, you’re a hero.

7.     Hello, Dolly!

I had a wonderful viewing experience like this, in that I sat alone on an aisle next to an older gay man who turned to me right when the curtain came down on the first act and said, “man, we love Bette.” (Shout out to any and all gags involving the whale.)

6.     Groundhog Day

Proof you can dig deeper into the material you’re adapting and still find more. Sometimes, the funniest gags come out of old-fashioned repetition. Andy Karl has the Rolex-like ability to make it all speed by without revealing any of the ticks, and then wallop you in the second act.  

5.     The Glass Menagerie

A lot of unconventional ideas piled onto each other that go so far into strange territory that they loop back around to being immediate. Maybe distant to some, but enough to unsettle me. I can still smell the onstage rain.

4.     The Wolves

A sign of a good play is probably that you remain invested in the characters long after you see it, and I’m going to spend so much time worrying about all the girls on the soccer team in The Wolves for the rest of my life.

3.     The Band’s Visit

Katrina Lenk has a gorgeous voice. Tony Shalhoub is restrained to the point that he could move his baton with nanometer accuracy. The songs are transporting. But most of all, The Band’s Visit manages to capture loneliness better than nearly any musical I’ve seen. Everyone, audience included, experiences something together, and then it all, slowly, both lingers and drifts apart.

2.     A Doll’s House, Part 2

What, you think I wasn’t going to include a play with a Laurie Metcalf performance? ADHP2 is perhaps clever to a fault in its set-up, but in the right hands, it turns into something both funny and moving – a story about what it takes to become a complete person, in or outside the influence of other people. Nora’s monologue about living in silence near the end is the full of the kind of simple statements that are so hard to act, and so brilliant when done just right.

1.     The Antipodes

Both an extended meditation on what it means to run out of stories and a brutal subtweet of Los Angeles, The Antipodes is my kind of play, in that it’s mostly people talking, Josh Charles is involved and very disgruntled, and everyone eats a lot of take out.

Honorable mentions: the music in Sunday in the Park With George, the pies in Sweeney Todd, the ensemble of Come From Away, seeing Dave Malloy in The Great Comet of 1812, Alex Newell’s “Mama Will Provide” in Once on This Island, Cate Blanchet having fun in The Present, Imelda Staunton in the NTLive Follies, Michael Urie in Torch Song, Patti LuPone’s accent(s) in War Paint, Ashley Park in KPOP, and Gleb.

[mchenryjd]

2016

Here is one of those exhausting “how my life went in 2016” posts. Ignore it at your leisure.

Also, my apologies if this starts to wander into nonsense. It’s been a busy year, and I’ve put off a lot of self-reflection, the way you slowly stop cleaning a room. First, you falling off the routine. Then, you imagine you will set aside a day to put in some elbow grease and really dig into the crevices. But eventually, you just adjust to living in the muck. Or maybe you don’t, but I literally do; there’s a dusting of dirt on my windowsill now and instead of cleaning, I’m writing this. (That’s not true. I’m in the airport waiting for a flight – but wouldn’t that be more poetic?)

What else is there to say? I got a new job, one I love. I started to adjust to life in New York. At some point, I imagine, it’ll all start to feel a little normal, but most of the time, I feel like I’m trapped in one of those car lot balloon men – the simulacrum of a person with no skills except for the ability to flail its arms and drag attention to itself. The goal for 2017, I guess, is to become solid. To do more work of real substance. Given the state of America, it would be wrong not to.

A few movies I loved* *roughly arranged in descending order of my continuing passion for them, with several exceptions for films I haven’t gotten around to, including Silence, 20th Century Women, Toni Erdmann, Fences, and Paterson.

Jackie Politics as seen through a macaron-colored glasses. Decadent, disgusting, and absolutely fascinating. There’s a scene where Bobby Kennedy (accent middling) asks Jackie what the world will think of them, the beautiful people, which ends up being the question of the whole project – especially one you involve spike pit that is Jackie’s Catholicism. I read that Pablo Larrain made Natalie Portman say “I love beauty” while shooting every single scene, and then cut it out of course. That always makes me laugh. I love this movie, and beauty, I guess.

Moonlight More hopeful than its given credit for being. The slow arc of a love affair (or rather a human personality) rising like a shark fin above the water, and then collapsing back into it, later to reemerge as something else.

Manchester by the Sea My favorite kind of movie, in that is a movie about an asshole who returns to his hometown and learns nothing and is a movie that includes jokes about Star Trek.

Right Now, Wrong Then The same day plays out twice, once wrong (mostly), then right (mostly). In the months since seeing it, I’ve found myself cataloguing the differences between the versions. How much of a difference could they make? And how could they even make a difference in the first place?

Everybody Wants Some!! My favorite kind of movie, in that it ends with a professor explaining its central theme while the leads fall asleep. Bonus points for a) ridiculous levels of charm b) many cute boys c) being wise in a stoner frat bro philosopher way that is sneakily gripping.

Mountains May Depart A messy third act is redeemed by the single best final scene of the year. Will make you both want to read everything you can about modern Chinese and also dance.

Things to Come A very French strict philosophy professor treats the youth, her husband, her mother, and a cat with great disdain while the uncertainties of middle age test her convictions. Of the many movies about women who end up alone this year (see Arrival and Jackie), this may have been the most heartening.

Hail, Caesar! A rollicking fun old movie about Hollywood, God, political philosophy, and whether there’s any point in making rollicking fun old movies. Also, Channing Tatum.

The Edge of Seventeen A very good movie about being very, very mad at your brother. I saw it twice, and cried.

Certain Women I grew up going to Livingston, Montana every summer. It is exactly as austere, desolate, and beautiful as this film. Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone big parka’d romance gets most of the attention (for good reason), but it also feels like I’ve met dozens of Michelle Williamses; they all kick their feet in that same way when they sneak off to smoke in their expensive athletic tights.

A few TV shows I loved* *with the caveat that nobody has time to watch all the TV.

Halt and Catch Fire Time jumps never landed so well.

Atlanta Black. Justin. Bieber.

Fleabag Quince with a razor blade buried inside. (Special notice for Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s other show Crashing, which is just some good quince.)

Rectify A confession: I haven’t watched the last episode because I so love the feeling of being able to watch the last episode at any moment.

The People v. O.J. Simpson Juuuuuuice!

Girls Girls has always been better than it gets credit for being; this year, especially as was wise enough to divide Hannah, Marnie, and Shosanna and give them each some lonely time in the spotlight, it was especially so.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin Which both make me very happy and worried about all the main characters.

The Americans Which mostly makes me worried about the main characters.

Timeless C’mon, it’s so fun.

More of a webseries than a TV show, or really some sort of dangerously potent Norwegian future technology that consumed my life for a weekend and then made me lie on the floor thinking about the universe and wishing that I had the comfort of watching its knowing, kind vision of coming out when I was myself coming out, and even then, feeling somewhat transported back to that period anyway, because, in the face of a story that strikes you to the quick (the scene where Isak watches Romeo + Juliet, my god), you (or at least I) recoil a little bit because why let anything affect you that much? Skam

Best Dream Ballet La La Land

Special award for best and worst costumes in a single year Alicia Vikander (knitwear, The Light Between Oceans; that butterfly clip, Jason Bourne)

A good book I just finished The Nix

Special award for being back in the news and making me briefly feel cool Pokémon

Best Acting Amy Adams, Arrival

The best movie I saw that wasn’t released in 2016 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

The best TV show I saw that wasn’t released in 2016 The Sopranos

[mchenryjd]

Felicity Had TV’s Greatest Love Triangle, But No Great Couples

“Felicity wasn’t really about the men, it was about its protagonist’s desire, her confusion, how she was overwhelmed most of the time, and just a little bit in love with that feeling — in the way that, for most of the big moments in our lives, most of us are.”

[mchenryjd]

How Real Was Taylor Swift’s Fourth of July Party? An Investigation

Hmmmmmmm........

[mchenryjd]

“Death is never just another twist: Everyone in The Americans lives in a structure that could crumble, whether it’s a marriage, a nation, or simply a body.”

[mchenryjd]

[mchenryjd]

Goodbye Manhattan

I wanted to watch something in the shape of Manhattan — expansive, thoughtful, but gnawing at the root of something thorny and dark in people — today, but I couldn’t find the right now. Then, I remembered I wrote this awhile back and forgot to put it up here. So now the post is up here, but Manhattan still isn’t on TV, which is a false equivalency, but whatever, it sounds nice.

[mchenryjd]

2015

I promised myself I’d start taking notes in 2016. I don’t know if I will, or exactly what it will look like, but I drew up a Word document and made a list: “books,” “movies,” “TV shows (old),” “TV Shows (new),” “articles,” “sentences,” “moments” (I just went back and added “plays,” since that’s part of the plan too). My goal is to compile a list of the things that have happened, like those catalogues of ships in the Iliad. At the end of the year, I can read it and, well, I don’t know if it will mean anything, but listing is something.

2015 was like that moment in movie scenes where people fight in a clock tower, where the gears stick, grind, and give way. The hands spin quickly. The characters keep fighting, but suddenly at 20, 30, 45, and then 90 degrees. The first half of the year is connected to a pendulum-like pattern of semesters that came before; the second, I don’t know (does grown-up life have rhythms? This is part of the reason I’m making a list).

There was: Classes, finals, that time my friends and I got stuck on the George Washington bridge after beach week in South Carolina and read Tarot cards on a phone and made up an imaginary Kesha ft. Ariana Grande song; the time later, pregaming for a party in senior week, when I got email saying the job I thought I had didn’t exist; the time I got drunk because of that, the part after that I don’t remember (“I saw you naked at a club,” my friend said; I wasn’t naked, I woke up in bed wearing underwear).

Then, imagine an indie film in a cloud of sympathy it doesn’t deserve: Returning home, sleeping, mostly, for two weeks; deciding to apply for other jobs, deciding to work out every day (running, occasionally); seeing Magic Mike XXL and smiling the whole time (that moment when Channing Tatum eats a piece of cake and does a kick turn); reading Crossing the River and thinking the first section is one of the best things I’ve read (still true); the time my dad was sent to the hospital with a false diagnosis, watching Lost for the first time, watching The Third Man, watching Citizen Kane.

Later: Moving to New York, feeling like Lola Kirke in Mistress America when I saw it alone at 11 a.m. in Lincoln Center (or was it 1 p.m.?); sitting at Magnolia Bakery with a friend late at night and hating myself for not knowing somewhere cooler, sitting on a rooftop with a bottle of wine and two friends and thinking that no other place could be; hearing from an old friend about a new apartment, moving to that apartment, watching three seasons of The O.C. while waiting for Wifi; getting more work, getting a job; having my grandmother die, my mom’s mom, the one my mom didn’t talk to, not being able to remember a conversation with her, not going to the funeral; having a different friend visit, hearing him asking “you really like it here?” not knowing how I would be anywhere else.

Outside: A dryer cycle of shit, murder, racism, war, terrorism global warming; people secure in their ideology, people terrified of other people, looking away, making the easy, the wrong choice. I had an argument with a friend about whether it’s wrong to do evil in an evil circumstance (to shoot someone with a gun to your head, for instance). I said it was, that’s just temptation to do wrong. She said it wasn’t—how could you say that every compromise is a wrong? Wouldn’t that just make you permanently sinful, connected to a system that hurts people, commits drone strikes, and ignores the needy, making it impossible for you to be good? I said that’s true, you’re always doing wrong, and all that matters is trying to be good. That’s a terrible way to look at things, she said. I agree, but I have Catholicism lodged in my genes like shrapnel.

Somewhere in between: Driving to Joshua Tree; reading Infinite Jest in a coffee shop while listening to a woman who described herself as the “Carrie Bradshaw” of science who only took flights to other countries on airlines based on those countries because “they knew how to get home” (she was on a date; I think he liked her); going on a second date with a guy, who, halfway through, revealed that he was supposed to get married three months before, his apartment cluttered with things, half of which, he said, weren’t his (I only thought, “will I ever own so many things?”); reading a prayer in an old manuscript for a class that tells the story of the passion, owned by a half-literate 15th century British woman given this book on her wedding day (her name, according to her scrawl, was “Jane,” or maybe “Joan”). There are descriptions of clothes, bodies, faces. Instructions on where to look. When to wince. To cry. Tactile things: thorns, grace, blood. Read it under your breath. Repeat it. You’re there.

—

Here is a partial list of things I read, watched, and/or otherwise consumed that I particularly liked in 2015:

The Flick (play by Annie Baker) This list of TV episodes (plus many, many more TV shows) Infinite Jest Crossing the River The Neapolitan Novels Magic Mike XXL Carol Jupiter Ascending (I am not kidding) The Big Short The Hateful Eight The Tribe Autobiography of Red, The Glass Essay, Men in the Off Hours, Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho This essay and this sentence: “Sam was showing me — slowly, hypnotically, the way a magician lays out cards — that he did not love me anymore.” Lolita Any part of The O.C. that involves Taylor Townsend Deadwood (I know) Lost (I know!) Citizen Kane (I know!!!) Rose Byrne in Spy, also all of spy That buttery piecrust I made that I can’t replicate Late Spring Emotion (album by Carly Rae Jepsen) “Glitter,” the imaginary Kesha ft. Ariana Grande song my friends and I made up while stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge (it’s a blast) “Nettles,” by Alice Munro

—

Here is the best thing I wrote: “Goodbye to All This.”

—

Have a good 2016.

[mchenryjd]

10 TV Episodes from 2015

Here are some noteworthy episodes of TV from 2015. Literally. I took notes on them and it was worth it. I didn’t watch all the television that aired this year, and I didn’t watch all the episodes of the shows I did watch. I don’t want to compare series, which may be half-complete, twice as long, or released in very different than their competitors, as I can’t stake a claim to list or ranking with any authority. I can, however, talk about episodes. A series might be limited or theoretically endless; an episode strut and frets and ends. It has an allotted number of minutes to do something, for its characters, for the show’s themes, with or against the trajectory of its plot. Here is a ranking of ten that did.

10. “Return” — UnREAL

A woman arrives at the taping of a Bachelor-like reality show wearing a “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” T-shirt. She then proceeds to seduce the suitor and turn the contestant who seems to be the standard-issue villain into a sobbing mess. It’s blunt, outrageous, and thrilling; you’re definitely watching the rest of the season.

9. “All About That Paper” — You’re the Worst

You’re the Worst’s second season seemed like it was coasting on tepid relationship drama until the last three minutes of this episode, when Gretchen gets up in the middle of the night, takes her phone, and drives off alone. The following episodes dove into an exploration of depression that was both successful and occasionally too on the nose, but this moment captured that sensation of stumbling into a crater in a friend’s life—and the responsibility and fear of trusting another person, which is at the heart of the show—better than any other.

8. “Looking for a Plot” — Looking

“Oh God, look at him,” Patrick says, watching a boy at the other end of a bar in rural California. “Getting drunk, probably snuck out of his parents’ house, wearing his sister’s jeans, probably thinking about killing himself, obsessively listening to Evanescene.” Of course, that boy has a boyfriend, and Patrick’s there for Doris’s (a spectacular Lauren Weedman) father’s funeral. It’s really not his place to grieve, but it’s also not the place for any of our heroes, who spend the episode in a looking glass world that stands in for the past for Dom and Doris, an alternate life for Patrick. Coming out, in many cases, means leaving something behind: A place, a family, the person you once were. Isn’t it strange to come back?

7. “Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?” — The Americans

A bottle episode in which guest actress Lois Smith plays the part of the audience, questioning the basis of Philip and Elizabeth’s amorality before they, inevitably, kill her. The Americans’ morality is so swaddled in gray that sometimes even its characters’ worst deeds come across as comfortably ambiguous. In this show, the two powers at war, besides Russia and America, are ideology and individual morality, are rarely are their pressures so distinct.

6. “Person to Person” — Mad Men

A series known for powerful imagery gives an indelible send off: Don Draper’s smile.

5. “Trouble’s Brewing” — Other Space

Milana Vayntrub deserves her own sit-com, rom-com, comedy special, variety show, whatever. And Other Space, a low-key sci-fi (mostly Star Trek) satire, found its voice in this charming standout episode. She and Eugene Cordero get stranded on planet where time moves more quickly, and they skip through the standard awkwardness-and-then-romance plot and then onto a something deliciously weirder.

4. “Trust No Bitch” — Orange Is the New Black

After a slow third season, Orange Is the New Black hit a new high with a plot centered on Black Cindy, who adopts Judaism first as scheme to get better food and then in earnest. In another episode where a show’s themes crystallized around something bigger than they had before, Orange Is the New Black extends its exploration of guilt and freedom with a moment of grace. A part of the fence is left open, and the inmates escape for one glorious trip to the lake. Cindy gets a mikveh and, for once, something like peace.

3. “Gifted and Talented,” Cristela

Cristela, a sixth-year law student stuck living with her family, preps her niece to test for her school’s Gifted and Talented program. But she decides to fail the test so that her older brother feels better about himself. The classic sitcom plot seems to unravel as you would expect it to: Cristela didn’t get into the program as a kid, which motivates her to push her niece to take it again. But, in a twist, Cristela’s mother opposes the idea, and later reveals that she threw away her daughter’s acceptance to the program. “A good parent,” she says, “Would not send her where she doesn’t belong.” The resentments that accrue between generations, the effects of institutional racism, the immigrant experience, the reasons why people hold each other and, in doing so, hold themselves back—Cristela aimed at more targets than any other sitcom. For one glorious episode, it hit them all.

2. “Lens” — The Leftovers

Nora Durst might be, but probably isn’t, a lens that causes the departure of other people, specially the Murphys’ daughter Evie. Watch her stew with rage at the suggestion. Watch her confront Erika with a survey designed to test whether her daughter really departed. Watch her refuse to offer any consolation to the woman most like her, because, if she’s ever vulnerable, she’ll fall apart. In short: What TV performance this year has been more thrilling than Carrie Coon’s? (Two other contenders: Regina King, also at the center of this episode and Clayne Crawford, see below.)

1. “Thrill Ride” — Rectify

An unforgettable scene: Clayne Crawford as Ted Jr., the bro who’s been giving everything, in a car with his brother, fumbling to tell the story of the time he coerced girl into sex, all while watching his estranged wife in the distance. Crawford’s retelling of his advances—“pretty pretty please, Julie. Pretty pretty please”—is at once disgusting and pitiful, guilt pleading for forgiveness it does and doesn’t deserve.

A few more, alphabetically by show: “FOMO,” Broad City “The Lyon’s Roar,” Empire “Success Perm,” Fresh off the Boat “Biscuits,” The Great British Baking Show (or Bake Off) “Antipasto,” Hannibal “Time & Life” and “The Milk and Honey Route,” Mad Men “The World of Tomorrow,” Manhattan “The Source,” Rectify “Testimony,” Veep

Also, I watched “The Constant” for the first time in 2015. It is perfection, and I felt I needed to note that somewhere.

[mchenryjd]

A Few Thoughts About “The Leftovers”

“But if

God's gift is simply random, well for one thing it makes a more interesting TV show.”  — Anne Carson, “TV Men: Lazarus” (from Men in the Off Hours)

1. I’ve given up recommending The Leftovers to my friends, mostly because I’m worried that they’ll see it as the show it is, on its surface at least, and not the show it isn’t, but sometimes, in its desperation, becomes.

Why tell someone to watch a show that’s built on one, unearned dramatic gesture? (The sudden disappearance of two percent of the world’s population) Which lacks a clear sense of its characters? (Justin Theroux’s Frank Garvey is the dramatic equivalent of a Sham-Wow: He looks good and absorbs everything around him nicely, but why should you care?)  And which makes the most obvious music choices? (The latest episode tracked a character’s descent into insanity with “Where I My Mind.” Yes, really.)

2. The first season of The Leftovers is a ponderous mess, redeemed in a large part by Carrie Coon, who gives her character, Nora Durst, a woman who lost her whole family in the Sudden Departure, fully over to impulses of guilt and anger, which compete for control like hands climbing a baseball bat. “Guest,” the series’ sixth episode, focuses entirely on Nora, and it’s the season’s best. She still buys breakfast cereal for her children. She hires a prostitute to shoot her in the chest. She goes to a conference on the Sudden Departure and finds that someone has impersonated her. When Nora breaks down in the conference room, the show gets a rare moment of catharsis. In a world filled with mystery, this is an identifiable wrong.

I wrote about the second season of the show after seeing three episodes, and I stand by my assessment that it called bullshit on the first. The Garveys’ move to the Departure-free town of Jarden, Texas sets a lot more plot spinning: They meet the Murphys, the Murphys’ daughter disappears, maybe due to another Departure, maybe due to something more mundane. John Murphy (Kevin Carroll), a firefighter who enforces Jarden’s peace by lighting fires, gives the show a kick of gunpowder, and his wife Erika (Regina King), has this furious dignity, which she starts to direct outward after her daughter’s disappearance.

3. The Leftovers’ sweet spot is the overlap between the extraordinary and mundane. The series’ best scene comes in season two, episode six, “Lens,” when Nora (who has just heard a theory that some people are “lenses” that can cause the Departure of others) reads Erika (who has just yelled at everyone in Jarden for their stupid traditions during a public vigil for her daughter) a new questionnaire designed to determine whether Erika’s daughter Evie really disappeared. In the process, Erika admits that, before Evie disappeared, she was planning to leave her family. Nora calls Erika out on her shame, possibly because she doesn’t want to feel responsible for her own family’s disappearance. The drama of supernatural invention acts as a substitute for the biggest fears of any parent. Or maybe it isn’t a substitute. Maybe Evie ran off, and—this might be the source of Nora’s anger, which is also jealousy—Erika has experienced something terrible, but ordinary.

4. Damon Lindelof’s influences (per Wikipedia): Stephen King, Twin Peaks, Watchmen. Throw in Flannery O’Connor (as seen on Lost). Not cited, but impossible to ignore: Greek tragedy, because who isn’t influenced by that if you’re writing any sort of a drama? Things in common: Myth-building, mystery, unknowable God(s), sudden and transformative acts of violence.

Lindelof co-writes most of The Leftovers with Tom Perrotta, who wrote the novel, but by now the series has left behind the written work, and most people treat it as a document of the former’s state of mind (his depression etc.). You could spend a lot of time comparing Lindelof’s new series to Lost, which left many unsatisfied, and he invites the comparison.

Lost, for instance, was about characters dealing with absent and abusive parents (and especially absent fathers). The Leftovers is about guilty parents dealing with their absent children. More importantly, in most interviews, Lindelof promises that, unlike Lost, The Leftovers won’t give any answers. According to him, it’s not that sort of project.

But on another level, it seems that Lindelof doesn’t like what answers do, which is to limit possibility. A lot can resonate in an empty space: Why did Nora’s kids disappear? Why did Erika’s? Why does the grandmother reach out to the man that shoots her at the end of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”?

5. Building a TV Show around raising questions and not answering them is also, of course, a cop out. The result typically feels like a gluten-and-everything-else-free pastry: virtuosic in execution, terrible to taste. The Leftovers is proud of its moments when the string-laden soundtrack soars, and an actor makes yet another befuddled look just above the plain of the camera. Oh my, isn’t this shocking? The looks says. Yes, yes, we get it, you think.

6. If you keep watching people, they tend to do the same things over and over (that’s both the great insight of the very TV-like Boyhood, and the premise of most sitcoms). The Leftovers follows people who, because of a massive global event, live in a world where everything they do is laden with meaning and difference.

And yet, maybe because of this, they tend to do the most ordinary things, and have the most ordinary reactions. It’s like watching a dog spin its legs in the air, expecting the rules to be the same as on the ground. To be clear, spinning your legs, in this instance, means joining cults, enacting martial law, throwing a brick through a neighbor’s window, or hallucinating Ann Dowd. It’s only because the show treats each of these bat-shit moments as so expected, so predictable, so oh, yeah, you can’t shock me, I saw this coming, that they seem mundane. It’s tautological terror: The Leftovers doesn’t shock you with something new, it shocks you with the most shocking thing you can think of, which isn’t shocking, because you’ve already thought of that thing. In the latest episode, a character downed a jar of poison and then another shot himself instead of administering the antidote; I laughed and clapped, because of course that would happen.

7. In “TV Men: Lazarus,” quoted at the top, Anne Carson imagines a TV Director of Photography on the hunt for the next human-interest story, which just happens to be Lazarus’s miracle of death and resurrection, which just happens to mimic Christ’s. It’s not original. Nothing is. “our reality is just a TV set,” Carson writes, “inside a TV set inside a TV set, with nobody watching / but Sokrates, / who changed / the channel in 399 B.C.”

But, and this is the key thing that makes The Leftovers work (if you want it to work), we pretend that things are original. We pretend to have answers for the questions that don’t have answers. We pretend to be shocked when the same terrible and wonderful things happen again and again.

“Our sequence begins and ends with that moment of complete innocence and sport— when Lazarus licks the first drop of afterlife off the nipple of his own old death.

I put tiny microphones all over the ground to pick up the magic of the vermin in his ten fingers and I stand back to wait for the miracle.”

[mchenryjd]

How the Young Stars of Saved by the Bell, Friday Night Lights, and More High-School Shows Were Cast

“Holy fuck, let’s hope these kids can act”

[mchenryjd]

What Happens When Actors Leave High-School-TV Shows?

A.k.a. graduations, disappearances, drop outs, and deaths.

[mchenryjd]

Gossip Girl Reports on Your Early Twenties

Your one and only source into the scandalous lives of those crushed by student debt.

“Spotted: A Seamless delivery to K’s apartment with food to share. Do those dumplings signal a steamy rendezvous, or did a new season of Mad Men just drop on Netflix?”

“Another social climber falls off the chart and into a bunch of other charts: Word is Lonely Boy just picked up an office job. Goodbye, Lonely, for the next few months the only sheets you’ll be spreading are on Excel.”

“Gossip Girl’s always up for a soapy scandal and the next one’s a real mess: Someone left an unwashed bowl in the apartment kitchen. The post-it notes and group text messages are becoming a monster, but which hero will fall on his sword and clean it up?”

“A little bird told me that F responded to a text from M with an eggplant emoji, and F’s pretty poop emoji about the situation. Sorry, M. Didn’t anyone tell you that you should keep the produce in your pants?”

“We’ve got a hot tip that two long-time friends have matched on Tinder. Will this ignite a fire, or will both of them pretend nothing happened and quickly delete the app?”

“Here’s a hot tip for all you faithful readers: H keeps posting positive updates and selfies on Instagram, but Gossip Girl has it on good authority that she’s wallowing in confusion and despair just like the rest of us. It’s like I always say: The harshest #nofilter is the truth.”

You know you love me, XOXO.

[mchenryjd]

Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child (trans. Ann Goldstein)

[mchenryjd]

'The Leftovers' is a new kind of religious TV — especially Season 2

“In essence, The Leftovers has called bullshit on itself.” — on the show’s second season, Lost, and the new religious TV.

[mchenryjd]

‘Casual’ Tidiness

How do you represent text messages on screen? If you’re making The Mindy Project, you let the pop up like snapchat doodles over the rest of the characters. If you’re making House of Cards, you let them hang ominously, like damning paper trails they are, over the empty vistas of the capitol. If you’re making Casual, you don’t. Well, you superimpose a “looking for...” dropdown panel over the action in place a title card, but don’t otherwise throw text onscreen otherwise. You shoot the rest of the show with soft lighting and shallow focus, with the deep blues and browns and greens of well-funded faux-realism. In a show about online dating, these decisions amount to a disdainful sort of propriety: This is real, the direction argues, not that stuff online.

Valerie (Michaela Watkins) is going through a divorce, so she and her daughter Laura (Tara Lynn Barr) move in with her brother Alex (Tommy Dewey), who happens to have created a popular dating site. Alex, perhaps predictably, tinkers with the site’s algorithm to get himself on dates with hot women and also, more predictably, because he doesn’t match with anyone when he’s honest online. Alex is a new, if not particularly exciting, addition to Judd Apatow line of defensive man-child. Dewey’s line readings are quippy and efficient and when, more than once per episode, he has to put on that puppy dog “oh no, I need to grow up now” face, he  collapses into himself well. Executive producer Jason Reitman sees more clearly into difficult women (did you see Young Adult?) and Valerie is a more exciting, more original creation. It’s a little cliché for Valerie to be a therapist with no sense of herself, but Watkins, who so often has to play icy, distant women, quickly fills out the character. Under her poise and sympathy, you can sense anger and disappointment. One one level, she can’t stop herself from self-destructing, on another, she loves doing just that.

I’d watch Michaela Watkins for years and years, but unfortunately, Casual has other business to attend to. Valerie’s daughter pines after her photography teacher in a squicky, “isn’t this so daring?” Crazy, Stupid, Love. sort of way. Alex gets entangled with a woman in an open relationship (Eliza Coupe, a bolt of electricity in everything, stuck in a low-voltage role). Casual exudes a bitterness about love, as if everyone (even Laura, somehow) just missed the moment when things were sweet and easy.

And, almost reflexively, this all becomes a commentary about The Way We Live Now. The series settles into a solid groove after a rocky, preachy pilot, but it internalizes that preachiness instead of growing out of it. The sex is sweaty, but often vanilla, and for the characters and audience, pretty disappointing. The characters get dick pics, but we never see them (can’t this happen on streaming?). Casual is especially good at the morning after and bad at the night of. There are so many things that its neatly constructed melancholy cannot touch. I imagined it as a kind of prudishness, the friend who won’t stop texting in perfect sentences.

Once, just once, try an emoji.

[mchenryjd]

Fake College Blues

Having the core characters head out of town to college "presents creative challenges," Schwartz admits. But they will not unrealistically be kept in Orange County just for the sake of continuity.”

Commercial art often doesn’t like acknowledge that it’s showing you an illusion. If you’re watching a television show, then you’re supposed focus on the show’s characters and world, never mind those contract deals, exec notes, and other coincidences controlling things behind the curtain. Enjoy the sexy people with their sexy problems. Let this be a seamless view to another, seemingly complete world.

If a show gets big enough, or if the writers and viewers are savvy enough, that relationship changes. Actors might sound off in interviews. A poor decision on the writers’ part might be lampshaded to save face. You want the person driving your car to at least acknowledge that they made a wrong turn, even if they keep going the wrong way.

Sometimes that messiness along the edges has to become part of the text itself, because the show doesn’t make sense otherwise. My favorite instance of that comes in pretty much every teen drama when the characters start to apply to college. Not a single show—from Gossip Girl to The O.C., or even Friday Night Lights—has done a college subplot right. The application deadlines are always mixed up. Characters apply only one college each, or have weird expectations about where they have a fighting chance, or hear back from one place much, much later than the others. Inevitably, if a show is going to last, it has to make concessions within its own reality. The characters all end up at a place you’ve never heard of (Buffy, Veronica Mars, this whole list), or they all vaguely stop going to school (Gossip Girl), or the show splits in two (Glee), or half of them just have to age out (Friday Night Lights).

Often, this makes for terrible drama. Where are the stakes if you can pretty much squint and see the railings holding the characters together? But the college application plot, in my opinion, always makes for fascinating television, because it forces a TV show to reckon with itself as a TV show. What do the writers value: The consistency of the world, the core relationships of the characters, the format that the viewers tune in to see? In order for a show to keep moving forward—and most don’t, after moving to college anyway—you have to prioritize, like a modernist painter deciding to choose texture, color, or line as their one honest goal. 

The shows that survive the transition from high school to college tend to be about something other than teens: A specific relationship (Gilmore Girls), a community (Friday Night Lights), vampires (Buffy). The best teen shows (My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks, the first season of The O.C. considered on its own) were these incandescent one-season wonders, which, (even if some of them weren’t cancelled) couldn’t last anyway, because they were about a moment that doesn’t last. And if you wanted to keep making a show that honestly depicts change, you’d have to create some sort of analytic cubist piece of television in which you could see from all perspectives at once. The characters would all exist in their own stories—some going to college, some staying home, some never leaving in the first place. Occasionally they’d run into each other on breaks or, years later, all converge at a reunion. Or they would stop meeting and just continue wander, each to their own way.

And even choosing one specific group of people to follow would be a bit of artifice. Because another illusion of a teen drama lies in the idea that there’s some reason to watch this specific group of people once a week, some central idea, center of gravity, or perspective. But real people don’t stay together forever, and they aren’t always together for a good reason. Sure, you might imagine there was, and that in leaving behind some group of friends you lost a bit of that purpose, but that’s a weight you learn to process, a regret you have to place in the architecture of your life.

I, for the most part, love the college application subplot. Partially because I spent most of my time in high school obsessed with college applications and I can call out all the mistakes. But mostly because there’s a sadistic and sentimental part of me that doesn’t want to let people change. In some twisted way, it’s fun to watch the walls close in, to see the dark fulfillment of that fleeting teenage wish: That you could bend the rules, ignore the future, and trust in the sweeps week-loving hand of fate to keep you and your friends beautiful, stunted, and together forever.

(I wrote this because I’ve been working through The O.C. to test a theory about my nemesis Seth Cohen. More on that later.)