Idiotboxing (Patreon)

Okay, so when you're under quarantine with your partner, you do things you might not otherwise do, to insure domestic tranquility. As some of you know, Jen is not much into movies. She prefers the pacing of television, and I have done my best to go with the flow and watch more TV with her than I ordinarily would.

Some of these shows have been consuming more of my screen time than normal since March, so I figured perhaps they merited at least a brief mention, just to explain (for example) why my sorry ass still hasn't watched Da 5 Bloods or Shirley. I'm working on it. But here's some other stuff that, I can honestly say, I have not been working on.

Watchmen (Season 1, HBO) -- I can see why other people got so jazzed about it. Thematically, it is the anti-Marvel Marvel property, sort of turning the implicit conservatism of fanboy culture against itself. But I guess I just wasn't that invested in the target of said deconstruction. Marvel rules the waves, so it's a bit self-congratulatory when it waives the rules.

Insecure (Season 4, HBO) -- Kind of a major disappointment. With a couple of significant, last-minute plot twists in the season finale, Rae set everything back to zero, almost like a sitcom would. Men were jettisoned, changes were eschewed, and it all came back to the core women friendships, like a black Sex and the City. I could ask if we really need that, and someone could justifiably ask, "why shouldn't we have that?" And I'd answer "fine, but it's not for me." And we'd all go back to our identity corners.

Perry Mason (Season 1, HBO) -- Slow, plodding, another "dark soul of Los Angeles" procedural. I guess we really are going to get a gritty reboot of everything.

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels ("Season 3," Showtime) -- But this has fuck-all to do with the first two seasons of Penny Dreadful, so it's a blatant attempt to retroactively turn that highly original show into an American Horror Story-style anthology. More "dark soul of L.A.," more examination of racism of the past, as if to show how enlightened we are now... This show and Perry Mason both feature characters based on Sister Aimee, which makes me wonder exactly why showrunners have rediscovered her all of the sudden. Anyway, this show had Nathan Lane as the Moral Conscience, which helped, I guess.

35 Days (Season 1, ITV / Britbox) -- One of those "procedurals" everyone enjoys, this one in Welsh, so it was at least linguistically novel. But its twist was that one character was dead from the start, and the action kept going back over the course of 35 days to unravel the mystery of her death. It was pretty preposterous, and certainly did no favors for the Welsh Tourism Board. What a collection of lowlifes.

Ozark (Seasons 1-3, Netflix) -- Reasonably diverting and well acted, although most of its moves can be traced back to Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. It also made the irksome decision to mimic Breaking Bad's single worst trait, its gleeful adoption of the Lady Macbeth trope. Feckless men, conniving women: I guess this is what counts as empowerment in a society that cannot imagine an outside to dog-eat-dog capitalism. Anyway, it's utterly devoid of those cinematic moments that Chase or Gilligan or Matther Weiner could sculpt, the kind that would lodge in your memory for years. I'm already forgetting this.

Dollface (Season 1, Hulu) -- Completely disposable Kat Dennings vehicle that's supposed to be about mourning the loss of a relationship but is too uniformly stupid to really be about anything. Gave up after the seventh ep. Points, I guess, for casting the Second Hottest Pretty Little Liar.

Dead To Me (Seasons 1-2, Netflix) -- In tone, approach, and overall sensibility, this plays like a junior-league Weeds, in the sense that loopy intrigue drives the thing and sends it in unexpected directions, making suburban normalcy impossible. Not exactly worthwhile, but it's got two winning leads in Applegate and Cardellini.

A Confession (Season 1, Britbox) -- Above-average British procedural, kicked up a notch-and-a-half by a bitter lead perf from Martin Freeman. In certain ways, A Confession is a solid primer for exactly how US and UK cop shows differ, and why they both have their own rabid but mutually-exclusive fanbases. American shows lionize the maverick or lone wolf who bucks the system. British shows are all about solving cases by following the rules, and being smart enough to make the rules work for you. 

A Confession is a show that's all but unthinkable in American terms: Freeman's detective fails to Mirandize a mass murderer (or "read him caution," as they call it) because the guy is about the lead him to the site of another victim's body. By law, they needed to take him back to the station and read him caution for this new charge. So the show is about the detective becoming a pariah for botching the case, and the victim's mother (Imelda Staunton) leading a crusade to change the law. CSI it ain't.

Central Park (Season 1, Apple TV) -- "From the producers of Bob's Burgers," and boy, does it look it, and sound it, except it's centered around a single (idiotic) problem, that's sort of about privatization, but not really. It's a useless show, really. I only watch it because it's there.

Secrets of the Zoo (Seasons 1-3, Nat Geo Wild) -- I know what you're thinking. But this is based on the British program Secret Life of the Zoo, and takes its cues from British reality TV, rather than Animal Planet and its "too cute" mandate. This is a detailed look at how the Columbus Zoo works, from care and mating to preservation efforts and, yes, medical emergencies that quite often have tragic outcomes. Sometimes a team of specialists is working their asses off around a sick baboon and she still dies. Shit is real.

Schitt's Creek (Seasons 1-6, CBC / Pop) -- I started becoming a regular viewer in the middle of Season 4, so I went back to the beginning and watching the whole thing, and wasn't sorry. This basic idea, it seems to be, has been done numerous times in American TV, and the writers worked overtime to make the "fallen rich" as cartoonishly unlikable as possible. (The "snobs vs. slobs" template is too hard to resist, I suppose.) Schitt's Creek, which is premised on the most puerile of gags -- get a load of that town name -- is instead a "learning and growing" show that doesn't feel smug or preachy, ever. It just proceeds from the premise that everyone is a bit damaged, a bit odd, and that people are fundamentally decent. I'm not sure if this show would have connected the way it did without Trump, but who cares.

Pointless (Season 23, BBC / Britbox) -- This is the only UK gameshow that is pleasurable strictly because of the game play, not because of the witty banter (there really is none) or the dickslappingly erudite content (it's mostly upper-middlebrow). It's a brilliant concept. Reverse Family Feud. A set of questions are provided and the object is to guess the answer that the lowest number of people selected, ideally aiming for a "pointless" answer (zero). I've seen articles about the show wondering why it hasn't been adapted for the US, but come on. We don't do obscure. We're people of the herd.

Defending Jacob (Season 1, Apple TV) -- Captain America and Lady Crawley team up with director of The Imitation Game to .... [next].

Better Things (Season 4, FX) -- All the things that people used to say about Louie, and that people still (correctly) say about Atlanta, apply in full to Better Things. It is auteur TV, operating mostly on mood and theme rather than plot, allowing characters to unfold in organic, undirected ways. What is most interesting about it, and what I think is Pamela Adlon's unique contribution to this genre (and maybe why the show doesn't have the fan base among the TV cognoscenti that it should) is that it is about a family. 

TV likes to tell us that modernist time -- the expansive, memory-driven, often-asynchronous experience of existence that replaces narrative convention with phenomenological pull and drift -- is typically reserved for stories about individual male subjectivities (Don Draper, Tony Soprano, Louie). Instead, families are shown to be comforting, ideological pillow spaces. Better Things, which is about a woman, her mother, and her three daughters, is a project about social bonds apart from men, and the process of becoming a woman, a process that never really ends.

Westworld (Season 3, HBO) -- I watched the first two seasons only intermittently, much to Jen's annoyance. So I really sat down and watched Season 3, and it sucked balls. [/shrug-emoji]

[and oh! how could I forget...]

The Bold Type (Season 4, Freeform) -- The trashy yet self-important travails of three millennial women in New York who work at "Scarlet," a Vogue-like fashion mag. Week after absorbing week, Kat, Sutton, and Jane are on a nonstop journey of discovery, learning the most important lesson of all: who they are. Very obviously modeled on Sex and the City but retrofitted for the Age of Wokeness, this show is just darling. Watching it is like having a dirty-old-man crush, but it's completely harmless.