I’m not one for the hard watch – I like my fiction to be thematically relevant and courageous, but not depressing. So Netflix did an amazing job recommending me what they called a dark comedy about stalking, but what is actually a goddamn psycho thriller disguised by jokes. By all accounts, I should not like baby reindeer (written affectionally without caps). But like a lot things in life: the AI knew my taste better than I did myself.
I don’t want to spoil too much – and I honestly don’t see how I could write anything on this blog that couldn’t be said better and more eloquently by a real reviewer – but you should donate three and a half hours of your time in seven half hour increments to watch this show. It goes all the place you might expect, and does so by the end of episode one. Then, around the middle, it throws a real curve ball at you and it transforms into something completely different. And in the end, it leaves you with an incredibly frustrating resolution that is just fitting for the story that was told. Just be warned: This show can be quite hard to stomach, and has quite a bit of trigger themes going on. Still, it treats them with respect and uses these themes for a reason.
And that’s pretty much all there is to be said. Other than:
I was 13 when a friend of mine gave me a single copied CD-rom that said “Fallout”. My PC was terrible, it could barely run the game, but god damn if I wasn’t completely engrossed in that isometric RPG set in a post-apocalyptic, fifties-style desert world. It was hilarious, dramatic, dark – and my first entry into the so-called CRPG genre. And even if, a year later, Baldur’s Gate was an objectively better game – this one felt so much more original. Even if I had never heard of the atomic bomb or the cold war – this game sparked my imagination.
To be completely honest, Fallout has fallen of my radar the last ten or so years. Fallout 3 and New Vegas were amazing, but Fallout 4 was a complete dud to me. The wonderful roleplaying world felt reduced to a poorly written stage to shoot stuff in. And yes, of course, the next one could be better – but it’s been ten years without a Fallout in sight…
Okay, honestly? Storywise, it’s not great. Characters appear to have clear goals, but some of them get insanely side-tracked just for the sake of filling more episodes, but boy, those episodes are awesome. In Fallout, the devil’s in the detail: What weird stuff do our quirky heroes stumble upon on their trip through the wastelands? And how do they react to it?
If anything, you should watch this series for its tone. One second, our heroine, who spent her entire life in a vault underground and is about to be wed to an unknown outsider, is yapping about how happy she is about finally moving beyond “cousin stuff”, the next moment someone pulls a machete and body parts are flying left and right. I’m at awe at how they pulled this show off, tonally, and I’m often laughing out loud. Fallout is dark, cynical in its worldbuilding, but our characters are funny and kind of stupid – but with a lot of pathos. They, along with what is honestly perfect costume design, sell this unsellable world.
So dear Todd Howard, please use this show as a base for the next Fallout game. These games can be good again!
One of the things I miss here in Germany (or in most of Europe for that matter) is the holy grail of television: The 30 minute comedy. Sure, everyone fawns over Succession or Breaking Bad or whatever high-profile high-stakes drama is coming out – I know I do! – but damn, without 30 minute comedies TV would be a hella sad medium.
The thing is: Comedy is effing hard. It’s hard to make – but it’s also hard to enjoy. Back when 30rock was on the air, it was my show. There was nothing else out there with humour quite as far up my alley as Tina Fey’s TV show about making a TV show. And that had little to do with the topic as much as the humour, the music, the joke density…
When “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” rolled along (also helmed by Fey), I was super happy, and while I loved that show, it was too out there to truly scratch my 30rock itch. By the time the fourth season rolled around, I had fallen out of love with Kimmy, Titus and the gang hard.
If you’re reading this and you, like me, have a 30rock-shaped hole where your heart used to be (I think Jack Donaghy put mine in a suit and then a microwave), please give Girls5eva a try. The pitch is deviously simple: A girl band from the 90s unexpectedly reunites after their song is sampled by a well-known artist. They try to rebuild their former glory, but there’s only one catch: They’re not 20 anymore…
Girls5eva (run by Meredith Scardino, who was, amongst others, a staff writer on Kimmy Schmidt) starts off as a riff on showbiz, kind of reminiscent of 30rock. Our girls are weird, their music is horrible, yet everyone they meet is somehow weirder and more horrible. But over the course of its (currently) three-season run, the show gradually sheds its 30rock-like roots and turns into something better: A show about four women who want to make art on their own terms, without abusive men telling them how to do it. In that way, it’s an incredibly empowering show about the female perspective – and a hilarious one to boot.
I missed this show because it was on peacock and as a European, it was inaccessible to me. who the hell has that?! But now that it’s on Netflix and it only has 15ish episodes, it’s something you should really give a try. I binged the entire thing (I’m currently unemployed and I have a fever, ich darf das!!) and wholeheartedly recommend it.
Here’s a little suggestion: Go watch One Piece on Netflix. It’s really, really good. And I can’t really wrap my head around the fact that they managed to pull it off.
A little background: One Piece is originally a manga. And not just any manga, it’s one of the longest running manga series ever. I bought the first volume back in 2002, and by that time the series had been running for five years. This year, the piratey adventures of Monkey D. Luffy, Japan’s version of Guybrush Threepwood or Jack Sparrow turned 26! And it’s still good.
The story: Happy-go-lucky Monkey D. Luffy wants to be King of the Pirates. The only problem is: A magical devil fruit robbed him of his swimming powers. Now Luffy doesn’t care, he’ll just be the kind of pirate that doesn’t fall in the ocean. And more importantly: The devil fruit granted him magical powers – by turning him into rubber. On his 1000 chapter and rising long journey, he goes from rags to riches, gathers a crew consisting of, amongst others, a samurai, a thief, a sniper, a cook, a woman who can summon hands everywhere, an antropomorphic racoon, a cyborg and fucking skeletonJimi Hendrix. This series gets incredibly weird, and the adventures of the straw hat pirates get insane – but even after all these years, I’m still enthralled. The reason: Eiichiro Oda, the mangaka, is a storytelling genius, who can create stories as complex as Game of Thrones (but weird) and still never lose track of what the emotional core of the series is: Dreaming big.
I have no idea why it took so long for someone to do a live action version of this story, seeing how it’s so insanely popular. But what I understand even less is that, in world in which Cowboy Bebop (a grounded rock-music-themed anime that is a pastiche of Sci-Fi and Film Noir) gets a show, One Piece is the one to actually be good. Yes, it’s silly, but it gets the emotions just right. It features shockingly little CG (for a show about a rubber man). And it has a stellar cast that’s just plain fun to watch.
Will they adapt the entire run? Unlikely, seeing how that would take them at least ten years. Will this show stay good? Hard to say, but season two is a true trial featuring the first truly outlandish stuff in the story. But hey: I’m giddy. Because after 20 years of reading One Piece, I can finally write this post and convince everyone to partake in the magical journey I have been on all this time. So what are you waiting for?
Not gonna lie: Netflix is kind of dead in my household. We’ve got half a season of the crown left that we haven’t watched because apparently, in the nineties, the entire royal family really sucks – but other than that, there is nothing on there I even kind of want to see. So I’ve been seeing other streaming services on the side. At least they still try to be interesting, man.
And interesting is definitely a word I’d use to describe Fleishman is in trouble on Disney+. Not exactly good, but interesting. In this adaptation of the book with the same name, Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg), a New York doctor, wakes up to find his kids in their beds. The only problem: he’s freshly divorced, his wife wasn’t supposed to bring them until tomorrow, and now she’s not answering the phone. What enfolds is a story about a lot of things: Divorce, sex in your fourties, mental health, success… The story never finds its focus with one thing, it’s not even focused on one character, Fleishman is the title of the show but the corny voice over belongs to his best friend, who inexplicably carries a) the one thing tying this story together and b) the entire fucking final episode. It’s honestly kind of a mess.
But as far as slices of life (which is what messy shows always end up saying they are) go, Toby’s is quite interesting, and I think he is an interesting male lead in a world filled with uninteresting ones. He’s a successful doctor, but his more successful wife (Claire fucking Danes who does a better ugly cry than in Homeland!) vastly overshadows him. He loves his children and cut back on his job to be with them. He cries a lot. And he loses in life because of all of this.
It’s weird to find this refreshing, because characters like this shouldn’t be as rare as they are, but hey, that’s the way it is. I hope a lot of people watch Toby Fleishman cry on the hospital toilet as he loses his patient to Morbus Wilson and are inspired by him constantly losing in life, not because he’s kind of a neurotic asshole, but because he’s a very emotional human being. I know I am.
When Psychonauts 2 released in the Summer of 2021, it completely blew me away. A cartoony game about a kid-slash-psychic-agent going into people’s minds to sort out their bagge was every bit as good as its predecessor which came out 15 years prior. In fact, narratively speaking, it was better: underneath its wacky surface hid a very adult, nuanced story about how everyone has the potential to be a hero and a villain and the same time, depending on who is telling the story.
I think I played the game to completion three times since that Summer, and I’m looking forward to starting my fourth playthrough sometime this year. So color me surprised when – out of nowhere! – Psychonauts developer Double Fine released a TWENTY-TWO HOUR documentary detailing the six years of development this gem has gone through. Yes, you read that right, it’s twenty two hours long. And I watched it all.
I’m going to be completely honest: This is riveting TV. Double Fine, if you are unaware, is the studio lead by Tim Schaefer, one of gaming’s rockstars. The studio is independent and quirky, and the thing they are trying to create is so ambitious it almost tears them apart. In fact, if not for some crazy bad luck turning into lucky breaks, neither Psychonauts 2 nor Double Fine would exist this very day. The interviews are open and honest – finally, a documentary shows artists at work instead of suggesting everyone working in a creative profession is just loafing around.
Psychodyssey ist not just an amazing look behind the scenes of a triple-A video game, it’s also a deep dive into creative processes involved into making any piece of media. As someone who co-lead a team of writers, I have often said the things these leads say. People working on this game break the way I’ve seen writers break. But they also have the feeling they’re building something truly incredible the way we do.
Over the course of these 22 hours I watched way too fast, I wrote down a lot of quotes by Tim Schaefer, because I truly admire the way he leads his team and I wished I were one tenth the leader he is. But even with Tim, you notice he’s fighting a losing battle. Even he can’t keep everyone happy and get great output at the same time. The discussion on crunch culture (i.e. mandatory night shits to get the damn game out the door) in the final third of the documentary is vicious, but in the end, it is completely true: There is no way to completely protect people from theirselves.
Anyway, check it out. And check out Psychonauts 2. It’s an amazing game made by amazing people.
Here’s two random things I feel conflicted about that suddenly collided at the tail end of 2022: Netflix and Tim Burton.
Concerning Netflix: If they are the future of streaming, I don’t want anything to do with it. For every interesting good thing they put out, there’s at least five weird, trashy ones. I honestly hate the idea of dropping a season in its entirety – mostly because I love TV show watercooler talk and it’s pretty much my only way to engage in small talk without feeling awkward – and because I think it’s a financially terrible model. TV shows are hella expensive, that’s why they stretch them to infinity, yo!
Concerning Tim Burton: please see this 2012 review for Dark Shadows or this 2010 review for Alice in Wonderlands. Tim Burton is, to me, a visionary who can create wonderful things – but who needs artificial restraints. Ever since CGI has become a standard thing in movies, Burton has lost most of its appeal because everything is possible. And when everything is possible, Burtons movies lose every sense of cohesion. They are all over the place.
So when two separate people recommended Wednesday, Netflix’ Addams Family reboots featuring a 16 year-old Wednesday Addams in a supernatural high school, I was very weary.
Trailer!
But as it turns out, Wednesday is quite nice and definitely the best Burton thing I’ve seen the last decade! The dialogue is terrible, but that’s the point; the show’s supernatural aspect feels very cheap, but sort of by design; and the plot is entertaining young adult pulp in the best possible way – until Burton obviously loses every bit of restraint in the final episode and just tanks the whole damn thing.
You know, it seems about half of new Netflix shows are revivals of old ones. Most of these shows are just not good – because they just want an excuse to re-feature old characters and actors and settings and whatnot. They fail because they don’t have an original idea. Wednesday is, at its core, one of these revival shows. It features well-known characters, cracks inside jokes for the fans, waits until the final bout of episodes to reveal the last known character, and it even has the fans’ OG Wednesday, Christina Ricci. But it’s also completely new: The setting, genre, side characters – we haven’t seen the Addams Family like this.
2022 is the year in which my kids got older and the pandemic died down and I finally started watching TV again. Yay! So without further ado, here’s some randomly assorted TV stuff I loved this year.
First off: SO MANY INTROS!
2022 was the year of the amazing TV intro. Here’s a few:
I think Severance has the best intro. I’m not done writing about this show yet!
Season 2’s intro is amazing, and so dense, an art student could write an essay about it.
Technically not this year, but whatever, this song slaps.
Better Call Saul’s Ending
Remember when Breaking Bad ended 2 episodes before it actually did? Better Call Saul fixed this by reaching its climax about 5 episodes before ending and then creating an incredibly powerful epilogue that is basically the essence of the show.
And it gave us this incredible scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm0tKZs-XCk
Severance. Like, all of it.
Severance was probably my favourite show of the year. It was at the same time hilarious, dark, absurd and incredibly touching. If you watch anything released this year, this show about people who surgically separate their work selves from their private selves should be it.
Yellowjackets for being a better LOST
Yellowjackets is a show about people stuck in the wilderness after a plane crash juxtaposed with their lives many, many years later. Sounds like a certain show I love? That’s because it is. Only it’s better, because it has teenage drama mixed with cannibalism and it doesn’t just try to be like Stephen King, it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5xkrmem8P4&t=9s
White Lotus
I got a bit late to the White Lotus party, but that meant I could binge-watch the first season and start season 2 in one go. And boy, did I binge-watch the first season and start season 2 in one go! The White Lotus revolves around wealthy families visiting fancy resorts and the cringe-worthy problems that ensue. These include but are not limited to getting the wrong room, drugs-so-many-drugs and pooping in suitcases.
And it features a very unhinged Jennifer Coolidge:
I finally got around to watching Succession
Succession had been on my list for ages, but I just didn’t have the brain for prestige drama. But this show about the, um, succession of a huge media empire is amazing. I secretly think it’s where Veep’s dialogue writers went after that show ended, because boy, there’s some amazing dirty words being said by some amazing actors.
But at the core, it’s not about the jokes, or about Kieran Culkin’s hilarious performance – Succession is a very recognisable family drama. There’s three seasons out, I’m halfway through the second season but I’m savouring any moment. If you don’t care about spoilers (but you totally should), here’s a scene:
Guilty pleasure of the year: Stranger Things
Because of how cool it is to like Stranger Things, it’s not cool to like Stranger Things. Go figure. I had actually given up on this show, but as soon as I had finished the fourth season’s first episode, I knew the love was just sleeping. Season four pulls the team apart in multiple substories, one which I skipped because it suuucked (sorry, Hopper). And in hindsight, the other two stories weren’t so great, either. But god damn if this isn’t one of the best-produced shows in the world right now. Even if the actors and every word they say are the worst.
I mean look at that scene – probably the most iconic one of the entire season. It doesn’t make a lick of sense. Max hurts Vecna. She runs back to the gate, giving the impression of being chased. But she’s not chased, Vecna just stands there. And stands there. And she looks back. So she knows!
But god damn if tears weren’t running down my fucking cheeks watching this INCREDIBLE episode.
Show I am most conflicted about: The Boys
The Boys – the show about superheroes that depict them the way they are (fascist) – is pretty much what reinvigorated my passion for television. It’s tense, funny, dark – and a perfect counter to my current Marvel fatigue. And with Stormfront, it has one of the most daring characters I’ve seen all year. Spoilers below:
But by the time I got halfway through season three, I started feeling Boys fatigue, too. Maybe I shouldn’t have binged it. Maybe the whole Soldier Boy plotline didn’t resonate with me. I think the fourth season will tell.
For shame award: benching This is Us
So I (finally) watched the first episode of “This is Us”, a family drama. It was the perfect pilot. It was so perfect, that I quit watching. Oops. I’ll probably get around to this show in 2023, but there’s just so. Many. Episodes…
Rediscovered from my childhood: Battlebots
When I was a teen and the weather was good, our TV could receive ITV. And ITV had “Battlebots”, a show in which home-made robots duke it out for fame and glory.
Well, it’s on Netflix now. And I watched a whooooooole lot of it.
Best stuff to watch while cooking: Starcraft 2
2022 was also the year in which I watched a whole lot of Starcraft 2 while cooking, cleaning or whatever menial task comes to mind.
My love for the best game I suck at was reinvigorated in 2022. Maybe in 2023, I’ll finally become good at it?!
Anyway, this was my 2023. There’s some honorable mentions, like finally getting around to watching “Kidding” and finding it “just fine”. Or catching up on Rick and Morty and seeing a rollercoaster in quality. Or half a season of the crown, which is turning into “Breaking Bad with Royals”.
It’s an odd thing, finishing a TV show. As someone who’s been writing for the same series for about six years now – granted, we’re not high concept drama but a long-running medical – I can’t imagine how hard it must be to write something that not only pleases yourself, but all the people involved in making the show – and in the end, the crowd. There’s so much riding on those final minutes! I mean, people still talk about the final scene of the sopranos (don’t stop! believing!) or LOST (we’ve been waiting for you). This is your last chance to reveal your hand. If you’re too obvious, people will think you’re an idiot. If you’re too open, they will think you didn’t know what story you were telling – and then think you’re an idiot.
When Breaking Bad ended, I wasn’t worried. The third to last episode, Ozymandias, was an incredible piece of television, a riveting hour in which Walter White’s entire house of cards came crashing down and almost ever promise the show made in its five previous seasons was fulfilled. For me, the show ended with that episode, and the two following episodes were an epilogue in which they would tie up Walter White’s and Jesse Pinkman’s relationship about a year after Ozymandias.
Now, with Better Call Saul, we have a similar story construct: throughout the show’s six seasons, there’s black in white scenes which function as a flashforward teasing Saul’s life after the events of Breaking Bad. The show itself, however, takes place before Walter White ever happened. For about five seasons, the black and white scenes are nothing more than fluff. Very little happens, and while watching Saul’s relationship with his brother, with Kim, with Lalo, you kind of forget about it.
As the series progressed, I grew increasingly worried. The further we went along, the more the show – which started as a courtroom drama – revolved around the doings of Gus Fring and Lalo Salamanca, two drug baron rivals who had very little to do with our main character. And when a showdown between Lalo and Saul finally happened five episodes before the series would end, I was scared of the consequences. Was this the endgame of this show? A showdown between Saul and a dude selling meth?
Turns out, I shouldn’t have worried. An episode later, the Lalo storyline ended. A new conflict – one which had been subtly brewing under the surface for six seasons – was established. And this conflict pushed the story into the future realm of black and white.
Breaking Bad’s and Better Call Saul’s cinematography is amazing. I could watch scenes from these shows all day just to admire how they were shot. They are often daring and linger on things a smidge longer than anyone would dare, and this is especially true of the final episode, which – with a few exceptions – are entirely in black and white.
It’s consistent storytelling, and it’s such a rare thing. Anyone in. the industry in their right mind would say that after one episode, the show had to switch back to its vibrant colour palette. But it never did. They had a concept and they stuck by it.
And it pays off: Better Call Saul absolutely nails the ending. The final five episodes are the best the show has made. And the finale not only finishes the series, but give an organic extra layer to Breaking Bad’s ending without retconning what arguably was and is the best show ever produced on television (fight me).
There’s so much more to say about Better Call Saul (and Breaking Bad), and I think I deserve a spanking for not writing at least three more pages about Kim Wexler, one of the most interesting characters on the show, portrayed by Rhea Seehorn. So I’ll just leave this here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm0tKZs-XCk
See that performance? See how they frame that? See that hand? What madman who do this? And why aren’t we all doing it?!
So I just finished the final episode of Better Call Saul. What an ending. I’m blown away – as I expected. The entire series may not have been quite as good as breaking bad, but it was the best thing I watched on television nonetheless.
It’s weird that this show is over. I’ve spent 13 years in New Mexico, following two stories about people reinventing themselves and finding out who they are. Oh, and about drugs and money. And now it’s just gone. No more unexpected plot twists. No more incredible montages. No more wonderful, drawn-out cinematography and storytelling that takes its time.
