#bingeingmicrodosed

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Bingeing, microdosed: Everything's Gonna Be Okay (created by Josh Thomas, 2020-2021)

I used to really like Please Like Me, Thomas's previous series, and at first I got weirded out by how similar tone-wise these two shows seemed, and how occasionally annoying Thomas's persona had become. Now that I finally went through the first season and a bit of the second (and the last, unfortunately), I came to really appreciate the storytelling and characterization of everyone involved. There's a sweet dryness to the overall tone, which navigates, increasingly throughout, the complicated family dynamics around a sibling in the spectrum. The ending of the first season and its immediate aftermath, coinciding with the COVID-19 outbreak in the second season's opening episode is particularly gutting. But also funny, tender, and smartly written. Great show!

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Second season: Hunters (created by David Weil, 2022)

While Greg Austin is again the series super-hot villain in an over-the-top muscular (and naked) body, it is Jennifer Jason Leigh and her virtuoso accent work, who's the only sustainable reason to watch it. While I am not a Pacino fan, this series uses him well, which is why the potentially risky gimmick of re-introducing him through an abundant series of flashbacks actually keeps the narrative running.

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On second viewing: Feud (created by Ryan Murphy, Jaffe Cohen, and Michael Zam, 2017)

Susan Sarandon is the main reason to watch this, as of now, still one-season limited series, built around the infamous, legendary, and likely overblown year-long animosity between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The latter is played, also fantastically, by Jessica Lange, who adds a generous amount of empathy to the character, otherwise written as petulant, vindictive, and haunted by the painful awareness of Davis's acting talent. Sarandon, who consistently delivers great roles in smaller films, is breathtakingly luminous, while having less screen time but more potent scenes than Lange. It is particularly the intimate moments that stand out, presenting her character as way warmer than her screen persona: rehearsals with her untalented daughter (ironically unconvincingly played by Kiernan Shipka), hang-outs with her almost-out co-star, Victor Buono, chats with Olivia de Havilland. The supporting cast is uniformly good too, as are set design, makeup, and costumes, making this my favorite Murphy production.

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Bingeing, Microdosed: Hearstopper (created by Alice Oseman, 2022)

A perfect short series about a few queer teenagers freely relating and emoting, with the generous support of their parents and teachers. Sensitive, empathetic, playful, and smart. It would've been so great to have access to when I was a teenager.

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Second season: Hacks (created by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, 2022)

The winning second season of this great comedy series is both shorter and expanded. There's more characters, with a few outstanding guest stars (Metcalf, Essman, Harris, Wen), and fewer episodes, due to which some of the recurring and secondary characters (Adams, Olson, Liu, Sibilly) are given less screen time, which, while a pity because almost everyone is greatly written and acted, may actually be beneficial to the overall plot, focusing mostly on Smart and Einbinder. The only weak, while still entertaining, plot is the one starring Downs and Stalter, who, up until the last episode, live on their own, slightly annoying, planet. That their thread eventually coalesces with the central one brings much relief.

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Bingeing, microdosed: Reservation Dogs (created by Sterlin Harjo, Taika Waititi, 2021)

After hugely successful What We Do in the Shadows, Taika Waititi signed another FX series, which is not only politically potent, being written by and featuring almost exclusively Indigenous voices, but also warmly and (simultaneously) bitterly entertaining slice-of-life representation of subalterned (though not at all homogeneously) teenage coming-of-age experience. Though every episode slightly veers towards singular characters, it's a strong ensemble work, whose tone, warmth, political agenda, and collective spirit are akin to other "auteur" productions by FX.

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The latest season: Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 11 (created by Larry David, 2021)

The 6-year-long hiatus between this show's seasons 8 and 9 showed a change that is likely both within and outside my reception. Curb, to me, was a bit like 30 Rock: enticing in its toxicity and cringy laughability. Most likely, my favorite seasons (7 & 8) simply came during the time when I was most infatuated with this type of humor from which I now distance myself way more. The seasons released after 2017 are also differently paced: longer, slower, and somehow clumsier, bitchier, and even more misogynistic in a way that is just happy to be mean. That was particularly the case of season 9, which I find the least interesting out of the three. This one, however, brought one massive advantage in the form of Tracey Ullman's gassy Irma Kostroski, plus two other characters: Keyla Monterroso Mejia's Maria Sofia and Bill Hader's trio of not-cousins with non-descript Eastern-European accents.

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Bingeing, microdosed: Loot (created by Matt Hubbard, Alan Yang, 2022)

I hope this greatly-cast series will turn around and become more interesting than what it is now: a mild satire at an awfully rich lady who means well but knows way too little. How is Maya Rudolph still without a good show?

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Double bill: American Rust (created by Dan Futterman, 2021), Your Honor (created by Peter Moffat, 2021)

I've been Maura Tierney's biggest fan since I saw her first episode in ER on Polish TV. This might have been the beginning of me getting into watching TV series, which would become a way of escaping the pain of writing my M.A. dissertation on a topic I would later find out that I didn't care much about. ER would soon fill in the gap between the ends of Sex and the City and Six Feet Under and the beginning of Weeds, probably the last single-series experience I would have before I started watching multiple series simultaneously. She showed up as Nurse Hathaway's obstetrician to then join the series' core staff a few weeks later. She was amazing, her face registered every tiny emotion, she didn't give a fuck, yet she cared so so much. I later discovered Newsradio, where she was the stabilizer to everyone else's zaniness. Each of the above titles would eventually bring me disappointment: Newsradio lost Paul Hartman, Weeds got lost in its constant transitions, Six Feet Under would get mean and implausible, while Sex and the City was like those people in your life that suddenly you understand that had toxic throughout but you just failed to notice. Out of these, ER is the most fascinating case of a show that weathered through its most spectacular loss of Edwards' Dr. Green into the unexpectedly well-written season 9 to then, equally unexpectedly, dramatically drop in quality especially in the last three seasons. Tierney was great throughout, particularly in her last full season, where her character suddenly, but credibly started drinking again. Tierney then had a fantastic guest stint at Rescue Me, returning to the show for a moment two years later, just after recovering from cancer: due to that, I think, her character, already a broader, funnier, and more sexual version of Abby Lockhart, would be given a raw cancer storyline, which, for me, became one of her three best performances. The second would be a variation of it, a blunt prosecutor on Your Honor, a show that was not so great and super popular, yet it had three great supporting roles (Tierney, Landecker, Toussaint). My third would be her winning supporting-to-lead performance in The Affair, a show as consistently flawed as it was entertaining to watch. American Rust is more frustrating. It is bleak and tries so hard to emulate the poverty of its characters that it comes off as gratuitous. Both shows have recently been renewed for second seasons, both were in a limbo for a while, which shows how unimpressive they turned out. I am looking forward to Tierney being offered funnier and punchier productions, her own Veep or Mare of Easttown or Hacks, something funny, potent, and smart as she always makes her characters.

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Bingeing, microdosed: The First Lady (created by Aaron Cooley, 2022)

It's one of these infuriating situations when a bunch of actors, especially actresses, are wasted by a generic script, uninspired filmmaking (like in those late-period Gena Rowlands TV movies I have been watching lately), and exposition-heavy dialogues that sound like a summary of superficial Wikipedia articles. Michelle Pfeiffer, however, deserves all accolades, with her performance further elevated by great Judy Greer.

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Bingeing, microdosed: Klangor (created by Tomasz Kamiński, 2020)

It's another out of many Polish crime limited series with great casts and twisty plots. Compared to Rojst and The Woods, it's exactly in the middle: with no major implausibilities or moments of creative bliss.

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Slow slow burn: Claws (created by Eliot Laurence, 2017-2022)

Their above face expressions represent how I feel about Claws in its fourth season, which I am currently catching up with. I guess it's that thin soap-opera premise that made it burn so sadly fast, since season 3's only interesting plot came from a secondary character, Uncle Daddy's lover boy, Toby Evans, whose departure was not even properly addressed in between the last two seasons. The leading five actresses keep being exciting, especially Reyes and Preston, who have the most complex characterization. Nash, though, seems less enthusiastically engaged, which may simply have to do with weak writing (her role in Getting on is still my all-time favorite).

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Bingeing, microdosed: Only Murders in the Building (created by John Hoffman, Steve Martin, 2021)

It's an old-fashioned, by-numbers-cliffhangery, and expensive-looking whodunnit, anchored by Martin, Short (both of whom are here at their most typical), and Gomez (who's disappointingly too one-note for her star turn), with playfully nuanced guest appearances by Ryan, Dominguez, Hoffman, Houdyshell, and Randolph (the MVP of the prematurely cancelled High Fidelity). When none of the latter is on screen, it's an uneventful watch.

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Bingeing, microdosed: Feel Good (created by Mae Martin and Joe Hampson, 2020-2021)

It's smart, teary, uncomfortable, and funny, it is a beautifully smart piece of writing and a crispy piece of filmmaking, it has two amazing leads (Ritchie and Martin), generously extending their vulnerabilities, it's a pity it was cancelled!

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Bingeing, microdosed: Shrill (developed by Aidy Bryant, Alexandra Rushfield, Lindy West, 2019-2021)

It's a fun, well-observed, and greatly cast series, anchored by Aidy Bryant, with the fantastically bingeable second season, and slightly less smooth two other seasons. Harrison and Adefope are absolute highlights. Too bad it got cancelled.

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Bingeing, microdosed: Mrs. Fletcher (developed by Tom Perrotta, 2019)

for a new cycle starter, this is such a dishonest choice, since I did no actual binge, but, instead, excitedly unpacked the series episode by episode, week by week, just after each would premiere, thinking of it, I realized that it was one plot, involving, spoiler alert, three characters who would end up in a beautifully filmed threesome at the finale’s end, that has cannibalized my memory of everything and everyone else to the point that I have forgotten about Cameron Boyce’s nuanced, if sidelined, queer character and Jen Richards, whose romancing storyline, underdeveloped as it was, luckily veered off possible clichés, also there’s an unavoidable, though the least interesting (because what else can you say about it), toxic masculinity plot