Editor’s Note: Per a recent chat with a pal who just subscribed, I decided to open comments to free subscribers as well as paid, as an experiment. Be nice to me, and maybe it’ll stay that way! This is a corrupt dictatorship.
Well folks, I’m finally back. It’s been a year since my last newsletter, and … just kidding. I just annoyed you last week. It’s felt like a year for me, though. After a few days of weird eating habits and the sudden surfacing of an alarming little tumor, my furry child Oscar had surgery over the long weekend. Now he’s on three different medications, violently wheeze-coughing, and refusing to eat his very expensive food (he’ll take hard-boiled eggs and cheese, however). I’m several thousand dollars poorer and waiting on the biopsy results, which is not nerve-wracking or scary in any way! Above you can see him in his little bandage shirt. I would die for this creature.
What else is up with me? Hmm. I got a cheap little under-desk treadmill that I love, and am trying out contacts for the first time. I made a teriyaki salmon on Sunday that actually tasted good. Also, I bought a turtleneck sweater on Poshmark that Derrick says makes me look like the star of a children’s TV show (derogatory). It is the second-meanest thing he has ever said to me. (The first was that I am a bad driver. He’s not wrong, but also, stop.)
What I’ve been watching
If you don’t know (though at this point, I fear that you very much do) I’m an aficionado of what we’ll call “competence-porn procedurals.” Person of Interest, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Good Wife, even 9-1-1 have all been in rotation at some point. (Fringe and X-Files, too, though those go without saying. And ZOO! Good god, who could forget Zoo????) The criteria are simple: the show must be character-driven and ‘ship-friendly. The plot and dialogue need to be loose enough that I can do something else while it’s on and still follow. And it needs to proudly indulge in the kind of dada absurdity that makes television so much more fun than movies. Like, at some point, the show needs to have gone off the deep end — not in a jump-the-shark way, but in a “mods are asleep, let’s put a shark on the 405” way.
Leverage — which looks like your average milquetoast boomer TNT show at first glance — hasn’t exactly fought a giant, invisible snake, but it is unique for another reason. While so many competence-porn procedurals are, in essence, cop shows, it is extremely anti-cop. Leverage is literally about a bunch of criminals who team up to fuck up rich people’s lives. Cops are regularly the butt of jokes, dopey police and clueless FBI agents alike happily taking credit for the team’s exponentially more efficient solutions. It was definitely ahead of its time (it premiered in 2008), because this is the perfect moment for watching billionaires ruined, health insurance companies sabotaged, and working-class people vindicated. (Apparently there’s also a very good sequel series, Leverage: Redemption, to pick up afterwards?? An embarrassment of stolen riches!)
I do wonder, though, whether its being underrated and too early wasn’t in fact the best part of the whole deal. Because to work, a show like this — the thesis of which is that rich and powerful people are a plague, and plenty of crime is righteous, actually — can’t have too much prestige. It is simply impossible to be subversive about the rich and powerful when you’re in the zeitgeist making rich-and-powerful money. (Take, for example, White Lotus, a show whose popularity put it the bourgeois-irony pantheon alongside The Wolf of Wall Street and American Psycho.)
Every successful Hollywood satire or revenge narrative is going to prop up the system it seeks to critique, but the more low-brow and under-the-radar it manages to be, the more power it has. Take Person of Interest, a show that started as a post-9/11 vigilante cop show and ended as a chilling referendum on the morality of artificial intelligence and mass surveillance. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, NCIS or Blue Bloods or the Dick Wolf Cinematic Universe, all pervasive copaganda that has been steadily poisoning our country’s ability to think criticially about the justice system for decades. Basic cable syndication is where the power’s at; don’t let HBO tell you otherwise. Watch Leverage, watch Person of Interest — and for the love of everything holy, watch Zoo.
Also on my TV lately:
The Last of Us: Against all odds — odds being “I have played some of the game and the first episode is, like, a beat-for-beat remake, how boring” — I’m hooked. I think my favorite part of the series is going to be thinking about how much fun everyone but the main actors and directors (and certainly not Pedro Pascal’s body) are clearly having. The clicker stuntpeople ricocheting off doorways and walls like fleshy pinballs? The production designers and practical artists combining the video-game graphics with Annihilation-style grotesquerie to create an aesthetic that can only be described as “fungal apocalypse baroque”? These people are living. (Also, if you weren’t aware: Anna Torv!!!!!!)
Tár: What if bad man was woman actually???? I know everyone loved this, but it felt about 40 minutes longer than it needed to be. Derrick and I also talked a lot afterward about the filmmaker’s intent re: the ending; the whole vibe really changes depending on whether you interpret it as a punishment or an escape.
The Menu: I wish I’d seen this in the theater. The communal screaming would have been immaculate. (More seriously, I did have issues with Ralph Fiennes’ character’s positioning as this radical moral authority; it seemed like he was meant as a mouthpiece for the filmmaker’s feelings on art and capitalism, but his choices also kinda recreated the same kind of feedback loop I described above, where art people just end up talking to themselves, about themselves, forever.)
Bodies Bodies Bodies: Imagine if Spring Breakers and TikTok had a baby. Kind of loved it.
The Jerk: Somehow hadn’t seen this. Poor Shithead.
Btw, I am on Letterboxd now, because I, too, am a culture writer desperate for community. Let us surveil each other’s watch habits.
A few extra links, for the fans
I trust Christina Orlando and Emily Hughes’ 2023 sci-fi/fantasy and horror book picks with my life.
I thought this profile of Bella Ramsey (who plays Ellie in The Last of Us) was extremely paternalistic, but they did come out as gender-fluid in it, which is so lovely.
This was from July but surfaced in my tabs recently: an excerpt about An American Tail from Don Bluth’s 2022 book. Context below.
Oh boy am I here to talk about Leverage! And Leverage: Redemption!!!! Devon! I did not know “competence-porn procedurals” was also my preferred genre!! We have talked about Person of Interest before, and I'm trying to think about which other shows I consider in this category, iZombie? I am increasingly excited about the existence of procedurals that are not Copaganda, and I would like to expand the list.
We started watching Leverage because it was filmed in Portland, Or but supposed to be Boston. An amusing combination for me because I was living in Boston at the time (and eventually the team "moved their operations" to Portland which I imagine made the show slightly cheaper to produce and / was like an homage to a place they all liked working!
I have just re-watched the first Season of Redemption and am working through the second and it gets more radical! The show is much improved without Nate Ford (played by Timothy Hutton) and with Harry Wilson (Noah Wyle).