Much as I would love to save episodes up and watch whole seasons at a time, the fact of the matter is that bingeing, still fun in its own if you have great stretches of time free, is more stressful than its worth.
The fact of the matter is that watching two to four episodes at a time of something gives you just enough of a hit to be fun without feeling like you’re weighed down by too many episodes for one night or day.
It’s a happy place somewhere between too little (sorry but one episode was frustrating when I was kid in the ’70s and it’s exactly the same now) and too much (a whole season of drama? Nope, too much and too intense; I want to be entertained, not feel like I’m working to keep with too much TV) and it works for me and my blogging.
So, here’s the first gathering together of various shows, the exact mix of which will change but which will reflect what I’m watching at the time and why I am having a great time watching it.
Monsters, monsters everywhere …
It’s a common trope in apocalyptically-inclined storytelling to wonder who the greater monster is – the actual nightmarish beings laying waste to humanity’s sense of security and civilisational sanity or humanity itself, bent out of its tea-sipping, art-appreciating shape to a significant degree by the simple ethics-degrading, moral-destroying urge to survive.
Oft-times, it’s us – sorry everyone but strip away the rule of law and enforced societal decency and many of us turn into the kind of people you’d be happy to shoot on sight … and often do in these types of unnerving tales – and nowhere has this been on more stinging display in the last fortnight than on The Last of Us, which once again delivers up the kind of raw, affecting broken humanity that makes for utterly arresting viewing.
While not quite as emotionally arresting as the gloriously uplifting sadness of episode three, “Long, Long Time”, episodes four and five, which took us Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), and by extension us to the stark ruins of Kansas City, once home to a particularly vile and sadistic branch of FEDRA, introduced us to Kathleen Coghlan (Melanie Lynskey) who leads the revolutionary group that dethrones the tinpot dictators that have terrorised the survivors in the city for twenty long and brutal years.
Joel and Ellie simply want to get in and out with minimum fuss but this is the apocalypse so that was never going to happen and after a gunfight with what turns out to be Kathleen’s people who act like common highwaymen out to pillage rape, they become enemy #2 for the newly-minted regime which is showing all the signs of being as violently abusive as it predecessor.
While you could argue that it takes a monster to kill a monster, what is disturbing about Kathleen, who is all quietness and reasonableness on the surface, is how deeply evil she ends up being.
Whether it’s assuring a group of imprisoned collaborators that she won’t kill them – she does – or pursuing the new regime’s #1 enemy, a collaborator named Henry (Lamar Johnson) who sold out Kathleen’s good and virtuous brother Michael, onetime leader of the resistance who would’ve forgiven the collaborators of any stripe, to get his Deaf kid brother Sam (Keivonn Woodard) the leukemia drugs he needed, Kathleen is RUTHLESS.
To the point of being almost an enemy to the very cause she has championed.
Yes, she has rid Kansas City of FEDRA but at what cost? Is the new regime, which has no mercy and little heeding of basic, forward-looking humanity, simply going to be another iteration of the old?
It’s looking that way, and while The Last of Us, in characteristically nuanced fashion, helps you to understand why Kathleen is the way she is, she is nevertheless a war criminal herself, someone who will do what she has to to survive, a strategy that may be pragmatically effective but which renders us every bit as bestially authoritarian as FEDRA.
So, not much gained but what makes “Please Hold to My Hand” and “Endure and Survive” such compelling viewing is that the humanity on display, both monstrously corrupted and not.
While Kathleen is shaping up as FEDRA 2.0, we also come to understand why Henry did what he did and how desperately saddened and conflicted he is by his actions; while Kathleen pathologically shrugs off her many murders (even stupidly killing their only doctor in a rush of fury), Henry is horrified that he had to go so far to save Sam.
He doesn’t regret keeping his brother alive, but he is deeply conflicted by it and it’s his struggle to reconcile his brief journey to the dark side that stands him in stark contrast to the guilt-less, regret-free evil of Kathleen.
Humanity is also on display in the way Joel and Ellie are bonding – they even share a silly laugh over a book of puns, proving Joel may yet find his way back to being fully human again – and the closeness between Ellie and Sam, who though she doesn’t sign, finds a way to communicate with Sam.
There is both darkness (Henry and Sam alas do not get the happy ending they deserve; instead they experience an horrific ending, brought about by infected people who burst forth in a climactic action set piece that is all tension and death) and horror in these episodes, where glory be, The Last of Us actually acts as if the world is breaking down (petrol is breaking down, making Joel and Ellie’s cross-country drive slow going) as this brilliantly realised show muses on who the real monsters are.
While the answer is unequivocally clear, the way it arrives at this pronouncement is arrestingly nuanced, a salient exploration about how humanity reacts to apocalypse that underscores we always have a choice, we just have to take it.
Here’s a preview of episode 6 “Kin” …
Can grief be the stuff of comedy?
You may tempted to say no since what is even remotely funny about losing someone you love dearly and feeling that searing loss each and every day.
There’s nothing funny about that, not even a titter or a giggle, but in the deft hands of Bill Lawrence who brings us the nuanced delights of Shrinking, it’s possible for grief to be thoughtfully and winningly comedy adjacent.
How you might wonder, how can grief even find humour in its surrounds, in what must surely be an emotionally scorched earth desert of nothingness and despair.
The answer, it turns out, is finely-tuned writing, a keen eye for raw, if sitcom-softened humanity and some superlative performances that recognise the inherent sadness of the premise but also the promise it holds for slow healing and yes, perhaps, some laughs along the way.
Lots of them, in fact, as it turns out.
And that includes its pilot episode where we meet therapist Jimmy Laid (Jason Segel) who, a year down the track from the car accident death of his wife Tia (Lilan Bowden), is not, most definitely NOT, handling the aftereffects of his cataclysmic loss even remotely well.
Lost in a haze of drugs, alcohol, bikini-clad hookers, and late night pool parties, Jimmy hasn’t really begun to grieve, using every delaying tactic under the sun to forestall that moment, and in the process pushing his daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) away and testing the forbearance, love and patience of colleague and close friend Gaby (Jessica Williams) and his effective boss, Paul (Harrison Ford), his BFF Brian (Michael Urie) who he’s effectively ghosted for being too sunny and supportive, and neighbours Liz (Christa Miller), who’s become a surrogate mum of sorts to Alice, and her wisecracking, hilariously hands-off hubby Derek ( Ted McGinley).
It can’t go on for much longer like this and it doesn’t with Shrinking, more sitcom than drama, getting Jimmy, through an epiphany that he needs to offer unconventional honesty to his patients rather than play the long-term self-realisational game, to a point where he finally begins to grief like he likely should have twelve months earlier.
While it is nowhere near as deft in its handling of the normality-destructive effects of grief and how hard it is to keep real life functioning when you feel like it has ended in every possible meaningful way as British series After Life, which brings together humour and loss in ways that hit the soul hard while giving you a gentle chuckle, Shrinking nonetheless deliver on its aim of exploring how grief can lay waste to life as we know it.
It also charmingly underscores how establishing some sort of new normal can feel like an impossibly herculean task when you have changed beyond all recognition but on one else really has; or at least, not in a way you have yet acknowledged.
Because the truth is that Alice has lost her mum and Gabby her best friend and wrapped up in his own chaos of grief, Jimmy can’t see that … until he can, which is where Shrinking really gains some traction.
It establishes fairly quickly a community of people pockmarked by grief who are trying valiantly to live business as usual but who are finding they can’t really do that, especially not with Jimmy on massive avoidance land.
Mixing together quirky patients, one of whom Sean (Luke Tennie) becomes a regular feature of Jimmy’s personal and professional landscape – an army veteran with anger issues, Sean should be only around for his sessions but going all unorthodox on his therapeutic approach, Jimmy instead gets moves him into his home and becomes his friend, which proves good for them both but not for the practice of the kind of hands-off therapy Paul especially espouses – and hilariously intrusive neighbours and friends and family trying to get close after Jimmy has pushed them away, Shrinking is a comedically inventive look at grief, loss and its lingering pain, all served up with quirky, whimsy and an eye on the hilarious absurdities of life.
Anchored by just-so writing that holds the balance perfectly between sadness and humour, performances that speak of reality and warmth, and a sitcomic predilection for wrapping some things up neatly while leaving others to fester as they do in real life, self-awareness epiphanies about the nature of your own grief aside, Shrinking is a promising addition to the what happens to life when grief does and how getting back to the business of living can be trickier, and funnier, than any of us expect.
Shrinking is currently screening on AppleTV+
For all of its great charm and whip-smart sense of fun, it’s highly unlikely that Not Dead Yet is going to be of television’s great sitcoms.
Who knows, it may yet surprise us, but based on the first two episodes, currently available on Disney+ for those outside of the US and possibly Canada, it is seems more destined to be one of those innocuously sweet and funny sitcoms that amuse us but don’t demand a pound of flesh in enjoyment.
And you know what? That’s not a bad thing.
There’s a great deal to be said for sitcoms that simply get on with the business of entertaining and which, while they may may a tilt at social commentary or drama of the small “d” variety, don’t seek to do anything much more than divert us from the real world for a while.
In that respect, Not Dead Yet is a warm hug of a delight.
Set in California where onetime high-flying journalist Nell Serrano (Gina Rodriguez) has slunk back home to the newspaper she used to work for and where was an up-and-coming journalistic star, after a move to London for love has gone life-wreckingly sour, Not Dead Yet has a lot of fun with the idea of whether you can ever really go back from whence you came?
It’s an alluring idea, that after the bravely new and the thrillingly unwritten comes to nothing that we can hop straight to something we know and that makes sense to us, but it rarely quite like our rose-tinted glasses of longing suggest it will.
In fact, it often doesn’t match those expectations at all, and while Nell is reunited with old work colleague and bestie Sam (Hannah Simone) and fellow colleague Dennis (Joshua Banday), both have now moved onto become editors of their respective sections, while Nell is demoted to write obituaries, a million miles from the cutting-edge journalism of her unsettlingly recent past.
Colour Nell bemused and dismayed.
But then something happens that suggests she may up for a whole new experience after all, and that maybe you should worry less about what you’re not doing and what you don’t have, and focus instead on what you do have before you.
Which for Nell are friends old and new, a whole set of new writing challenges and yes, the fact that she can see dead people.
A sitcom riff on The Sixth Sense but with way less creepiness and way more laughs, Not Dead Yet‘s ghosts tend to be wisecrackingly meaningful, as apt to steer her to something good as they are to find peace with the obit she has written whereupon they disappear, ready for the next episode’s incumbent.
Let’s be honest – this is no journey through the dark night of the soul but there are moments of real emotional impact and gravity such as when the first ghost Nell encounters, Monty (Martin Mull), the one who has her vroom-vrooming a hand-vac to ward him off (unsuccessfully obviously), introduces Nell to the woman with whom she becomes friend, Cricket (Angela E. Gibbs).
Where this hits home, in the gentlest of ways admittedly, is that Cricket is Monty’s wife and he desperately wishes he could Cricket how beautiful she is one more time; he can’t clearly but Nell can and so a friendship is born and Monty finds peace.
There’s also some touching moments, again decidedly lo-fi and in passing only, between Nell and her roommate who’s on the autism spectrum, Edward (Rick Glassman) who is direct and somewhat rude until Nell appreciates what makes him tick.
Granted, they are only small character moments but together they give some sweet, if passing depth, to Not Dead Yet which keeps its focus primarily on amusement and entertainment, but which, thanks to Rodriguez’s gift for wearing her heart on her sleeve in-between wisecracks and comedic asides, actually tries to say something about life and the human condition in a way that hits the soul without weighing you down.
OOOO