THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup August 2021

“What are you watching?” is pretty much the automatic question I get when I tell people what I do for a semi-living.

For most of this year, it was a really hard question to answer—mostly because there wasn’t that much interesting stuff going on. Usually in July I’ll make a list of the top 10 shows of the year so far, but I honestly couldn’t think of 10 shows I had watched and was excited about. I’ve seen most of the shows on this list for example, but nothing on it really tickled me. I liked almost all of the shows but it felt more like a list of everything I’d seen that was any good, rather than the 10 best. I foolishly thought, “hey maybe now is a good time to plan some rewatches.”

And then August happened. All of a sudden there are a dozen shows worth watching or looking forward to. Here are all the shows currently on my mind that I’ve touched in the last month and 3 sentences for each one!

Brooklyn Nine-Nine (season 8)

Rest assured, I will be making a follow up episode of copaganda for this season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine so I’ll be brief here: the show is doing a decent job. Rosa has already left the force, and Jake has willingly let himself be suspended in order to shine light on corruption. I’ll reserve my full comments until the season ends, since it feels as though Dan Goor and the rest of the Nine-Nine might be going somewhere, but the show is taking on the criticisms that have been levied against the police in the last year seriously and examining their own place as a show that sugarcoats a specific version of the police.

Dave (season 2)

Dave’s second season was a lot more trying for me than its first, mainly because its main character was so incredibly obnoxious. In the first season we saw his redeeming features—he could be selfish but he tried to be a good partner and friend—but in the second, episodes were much less forgiving and, as a result, I found the season a lot more meditative. However, I couldn’t help but think of another white man coming to terms with his own privilege in Bo Burnham who notes in my favorite segment: “I think that, ‘Oh, if I’m self-aware about being a douchebag, it’ll somehow make me less of a douchebag.’ But it… but it doesn’t.”

Friday Night Lights (season 1)

I watched the pilot of this TV classic the other night and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since in a way that usually ends up in a video essay. If you haven’t seen it, it is an extremely mid-2000s drama about high school football in Texas that is also extremely over-the-top, cheesy, and heartfelt (“Mr. Street, do you think God likes football?”). I did some research into the target audience of the show and I am now convinced that the reason this show has remained popular is that it is a safe space for male audiences to experience and express emotions usually reserved for soaps and female-coded shows by focusing itself on FOOTBALL.

Harley Quinn (seasons 1-2)

There are great critiques of this show, notably from Princess Weekes (which I strongly encourage you to read if you’ve seen the show), but as someone who is very, very behind on whatever DC comics is up to, I really enjoyed it. I’m not going to defend the show against those critiques because I think they’re very valid, and one of them—that Poison Ivy and Harley are not romantically together—is something rectified in season 2, and the main reason why I picked up the show at all in the first place. I didn’t know that Poison Ivy and Harley are a canon romantic couple beforehand, and watching the show grow into that was pretty fun for me (although a reminder that the bar is still on the floor for representation). I do truly love that the show is dedicated to making fun of Tom Hardy’s Bane voice, we should never forget.

Line of Duty (season 1)

SO many people have told me that I have to watch Line of Duty, a British cop show that follows an Anti-Corruption Unit. I was pretty hesitant since there are so many nuances to policing that can change culture-to-culture (the American gun epidemic for one changes a lot of police interactions), and in the first episode my worst fears were realized when a character compared being Catholic in the UK to being black. Somebody please put me in touch with British people who can speak to exactly how ridiculous that is.

Lucifer (season 6)

In just under two weeks, this show will return for its sixth and final season and I feel like I’ve really committed myself too much to this show to not tune into that final season. I thought hard about including in my video about the show that there’s a decent chance that the show will end with some kind of message about how the punishment system of Hell has to change, but we just don’t know yet. Soon, we will, although I’m not sure a 10-episode arc would change 83 episodes of pro-punishment themes.

Reservation Dogs (season 1)

One of my favorite things about visual media like film and TV is the ability to build empathy. This is a tool that can be used poorly when the groups being represented are a small sliver of lived experiences, but it can also be a powerful tool in exposing audiences to groups of people they’ve never met before. Reservation Dogs, the new FX series from Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, does just that by providing us an image of Indigenous Americans in Oklahoma from all Indigenous writers and directors. It’s funny as hell and completely one of a kind.

Succession (season 1-3)

I’ve started my rewatch of Succession leading up to the show’s third season and with the intent on making a video about the show so far, and let me tell you, it is incredibly rewatchable. The first time I watched the show I remember feeling like it took some time to find its footing, and that is definitely true for the show’s tone and dialogue, but each of the show’s characters are fully realized from the start. You can see who each character truly is in that very first episode, even if you don’t fully meet them until later.

The Americans (season 4)

You’ll hear more in-depth coverage of this next month in the rewatch podcast, but oooooooooh boy does this season hold up. Season 4 of The Americans is one of my favorite seasons of television ever because of how many different ideas the show is able to juggle at the same time, somehow melding each of its previous three seasons into one masterpiece as the ever-escalating Cold War reaches a boiling point. There’s global politics, identity crises, family dynamics, bioweapons, and some of the best character writing and acting ever put to the small screen.

The White Lotus (season 1)

I talked at length about this show on a video podcast that will come out at some point next week with friend of the channel Thomas Flight, but this is my favorite show of the year so far. For the uninitiated, this 6-episode HBO series follows a group of wealthy guests at a Hawaiian resort named The White Lotus, as well as the staff that serves them. The show manages to touch on colonialism and white entitlement from a number of different angles without ever feeling preachy and while managing to be funny and scathing at the same time.

Twin Peaks: The Return

I’m still working on The Return because, you know what? It takes a long time to digest every episode. Most of the time I have no idea what’s going on and when I do, it doesn’t exactly make the show any easier to follow. That might not make any sense but if you’ve seen the show you know what I’m talking about. The Return is going to be really hard to tie into Copaganda, but goddamn it I’ll do it.

Others I’m looking forward to consuming soon
Ted Lasso (season 2)
For All Mankind (season 2)
Y: The Last Man
Sex Education (season 3)
What We Do in The Shadows (season 3)