THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup September 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 month. I’ve also been requested to include content warnings for shows that need them, so you can see those beneath each title!

Some mild spoilers for shows that are not in season 1. Ordered from my favorite-ish to my least favorite-ish.

Midnight Mass/The Haunting of Hill House — Netflix
CW: Gore

It’s Spooky Season, baby!! This was my first watch of Midnight Mass and is my second of The Haunting of Hill House as I get ready to do a video on the Netflix works of Mike Flanagan. I’m blown away by the way Flanagan uses the genre to tell his stories, weaving in themes of grief, trauma, and existential dread, all based firmly in well-developed characters. Horror films sacrifice character development to keep the tension high and to get through their premise. Usually that’s fine! But TV is a character-driven medium, and without those characters, it falls apart quickly, regardless of the scares or plot. Flanagan has an incredible sense of pace and balance (probably due to his background as a film editor) and it is on full display in these beautifully haunting stories.

Atlanta (Season 4) — FX/Hulu

Atlanta’s final season is here, it really feels like it snuck up on us. The first two episodes felt like classic Atlanta, following the gang on surreal hijinks that use race as a theme without making entire episodes into pure cultural morality tales (“Three Slaps”, “The Big Paycheck”, “Trini 2 De Bone”, and “Rich Wigga, Poor Wigga: all fall into this category from Season 3). Instead, we’re hanging out with the characters that we’ve grown to know and love over the years and watching them live their dreamlike lives (which is itself a kind of cultural critique known as afrosurrealism). In particular, the second episode, “The Homeliest Little Horse” stands out in the way it expertly balanced deep emotional character beats for Earn with shenanigans.

House of the Dragon (Season 1) — HBO
CW: Violence, gore, nudity, graphic sex, showrunner's clear disdain for women

Boy, oh boy. House of the Dragon is a very ambitious show, which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s tackled interesting and nuanced topics like the politics of sex while building some interesting and compelling characters (Rhaenyra, Viserys, and Alicent). On the other hand, it hasn’t necessarily done those things…well. Some of this is due to the timeskipping nature of the story, but again, that’s the drawback of ambitious ideas—sometimes you can’t keep up with them. As a result, large swaths of the story have fallen to the plot device—ahem, character—known as Criston Cole. Cole is an incredibly underdeveloped character, whose motivations are murky at best. To have him be this poorly constructed and this essential the plot is a huge mistake and makes the whole show feel rickety.

Reboot (Season 1) — Hulu
CW: Nudity

Here’s a show that nobody asked for! Reboot is a Hulu TV show about a gritty reboot of a sitcom that airs on Hulu. I know, it’s complicated. But the upshot of a really meta sitcom about a pretty meta sitcom is that the show is able to toggle between all sorts of different genres. It can be a gritty hard-hitting modern comedy for a few scenes before lightening the mood with some classic zingers. The show definitely is more on the 30 Rock end of the spectrum rather than the BoJack Horseman side, mostly concerned with laughs over character development or gutting emotional drama. There’s only one 30 Rock, but this definitely scratches a similar itch for me.

Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power (Season 1) — Amazon Prime
CW: Fantasy Violence

I don’t have much more to say about this show that I didn’t say last month when only two episodes had dropped. There’s been a deluge of criticism aimed at this show from online friends of mine, but I just don’t see it. The “plot” leaves something to be desired, but boy is this an immersive worldbuilding experience. You’re never going to build a political system as complex as something on Game of Thrones or The Expanse here—there’s just too much “pure evil” in the story to have room for that—but every week I look forward to Friday night, when I turn off the lights, take an edible and begin my own journey into Middle Earth. The visuals are incredible, and I’ve really started to like some of these new characters, like Arondir and Bronwyn. I’m not taking this show too seriously, and I think that is frankly the best way to consume it.

Harley Quinn (Season 3) — HBOMax
CW: Violence

I really liked the first two seasons of Harley Quinn, although I will note that I have no attachment to the comic book characters the show is based on. I know that some fans were disappointed with the slow rollout of the Harlivy relationship, but hopefully this third season (with Harley and Ivy officially together for the entirety) is better? Who knows, comic book people do love to be picky. Speaking for myself, I think I liked this season the most so far. While not quite as outrageously funny as some of the highest moments of the show, I really enjoyed the way the show balanced the conflicting motivations and goals of its two main characters, who still love each other.