The Antisocial Socialist

By no one's request, I have downloaded Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent season 2 so that I can watch it so you don't have to.

This one is bad. Like, I normally like my trash TV but it's possible for a pop culture product to be actively harmful and the season opener, "White Squirrel City," is definitely that. It's also an incredible microcosm of our cultural moment.

Which is to say, a few years ago the cops cleared a tent encampment at Bickford Park. Residents were violently displaced, their possessions confiscated, and either forced to go elsewhere, minus their belongings, or shoved into insufficient temporary shelter. This is a major cause of death for homeless people.* Then, to film the copaganda show, they set up a fake tent encampment in the same place where the city had evicted real ones.

So it's one of those situations where even if it had been Great Art, the price of creation would have been outweighed by the moral violation. That said, it's also bad art.

Here is an article from the excellent Grind magazine about all of the things wrong in this episode. The author says it better than I could, and also points out its most egregious flaws, leaving me to nitpick and mock the minor ones.


( spoilers )

I don't even know what to say. I was an Art Kid in the 90s; his influence on who I am and how I think cannot be overstated.

I hear that the wildfires may have played a role in his death and I am even more livid.

I don't even know what this is.

( episode 9 )

This one has to do with sexual assault so, trigger warning.

( episode 7 )

It's the Crack Mayor one everyone!

( RoFo and Roll! )

I have started watching Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent. Should I blog my thoughts? Is this something you're interested in hearing about?

( episode 1 thoughts under the cut )

In the interstitial period between Christmas and New Years, I traditionally do lists of things that I read, watched, and listened to. But since covid it's been increasingly a problem. What aired in 2023? What even is time? Do I even remember all the things I watched?

Okay here are the things I liked the most, in no particular order except for the last two.

Atlanta
I think this ended in 2022, but I only saw it this year. What starts as a kind of cool slice-of-life show starring the guy from Community and that "This Is America" song ends up being...not that. I heard it described as "Twin Peaks with rappers" and that's essentially it. Not that the first season is bad per se—it's got a real "city-as-character" vibe and really compelling writing, but as the show spirals into further levels of surreality, it gets brilliant. It's like Black Mirror if Black Mirror had kept the quality of its first season instead of turning into "what if cell phones were your mom." The less you know about it going in, the better. But truly one of the most inventive, incisive TV shows I've seen. 

Doctor Who
I'm as surprised as you are to see this back on my list. It was only specials this year, but after several years of the show being really bad, I am pleased to announce that it is good again. Like I am actively looking forward to each new episode instead of it being something to slog through in hopes that it will change back to the thing that I liked. It has now changed back to the thing that I like. (Obligatory note that this has nothing to do with 13 being a woman and everything to do with Chris Chibnall being the showrunner and turning the Doctor into a neoliberal cop.)

The Bear
A show about a chef who tries to save his dead brother's neighbourhood restaurant with the help of an ambitious sous chef. I had no idea what this show was about when I started watching it—someone just said that I'd like it, and I did. It's like those baking shows that I watch, except it has an actual plot. It's very low-stakes drama that makes you feel how huge the stakes are for the characters. And it involves a lot of competence porn, which is a thing I adore.

What We Do In the Shadows/Our Flag Means Death/Good Omens
These are all the same show and I like it a lot. I would say that WWITS did the best job of continuing from strong earlier seasons and GO did the worst, but they were all very fun to watch. Middle-aged slow burn queer longing is kind of my favourite thing and I like that there are three shows that give me what I want in that regard, even if they are determined to torture every other viewer who doesn't want that. Too bad. They can have all the other shows that have nonproblematic gays who have healthy relationships in them.

Andor
This was not a show I expected to like, since it was Star Wars, which has worn out its welcome for me, and on Disney+, which is not exactly the home of radical politics. But instead it was Leftist Infighting Simulator: The TV Show, and actually amazing??? to the point where I kept asking if anyone at Disney was checking, because I don't think they were. I think someone who had read a lot of Marxist and anarchist theory (and has possibly spent time in radical organizations) somehow ended up in the writing room and just got away with putting all of that in the scripts. Even if you don't like Star Wars this is very much worth your time.

Weirdly it is also the most true to the initial themes of Star Wars, which included a Viet Cong-inspired anti-imperialist teddy bear uprising, but the franchise has kind of lost the plot since then.

Succession
My other favourite thing are shows where absolutely no one is a good person and they all do terrible things that you don't want them to do, and yet you still end up feeling sympathy and attachment to the characters. American shows tend not to do this, whereas British shows do it splendidly, so I was not surprised when the showrunner turned out to be the guy from The Thick Of It who wasn't Armando Iannucci. This is just one of the most well-written character dramas I've ever seen and takes a sharp scalpel to the bloated corpse of the American ruling class. Everyone is hateful and compelling, and I couldn't look away. The way the show plays with your sympathies, focusing on one sibling as the Least Bad Person Who You're Kind of Liking only to turn it around on you and reminding you what little billionaires are made of is just masterful. The election episode was probably in my top five episodes of TV ever, where every character has a chance to do the right thing and fails to do so in exactly the way you'd expect, while paying off every bit of characterization established in the rest of the series. Capitalism is bad, actually, and inevitably leads to fascism. God this is good, and would have ranked as my favourite TV show of 2023 were it not for...

Reservation Dogs
Obviously this takes the #1 spot for a third year in a row as it's one of the best things on TV ever. It came to a close this year, which I think everyone was a little sad about, but look. You can have three perfect seasons or you can drag it on forever until it sucks, and they made the right choice here. And it really was perfect—a story that in the end is about the bonds and responsibilities of community, and what we owe to generations to come. I was sobbing through multiple episodes but in a good way. It does the thing that great literature does where the themes are universal but the characters and setting are so highly specific that their world and inner lives are immersive. I'm glad it ended where it did because I don't think they could top the final arc. I do hope that everyone involved goes on to be in a million other things that I can watch, as the level of talent involved at every level, from writing to cinematography to music to of course acting, is just off the charts.

How about you? What are your telly thoughts?

 This is normally an easy post to write, since I watch a lot of telly. The problem is that things kind of blur together, especially with shows that run over multiple seasons during a pandemic. Like I almost said that Good Omens was one of my favourite 2022 shows except wait wtf, that aired in 2019. I'm probably leaving something off the list that I watched and loved just because I don't remember what year it aired. Fuck a duck. Here's what I liked.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Basically I thought this would suck, and it didn't, which is cool. Like all Trek ever (except, I hear, the animated ones, but I am sorry and it's just really difficult for me to get into animated shows), it's flawed and messy and I can make a million critiques of it. But it captured the sheer thrill of space exploration and science, featured a charming cast of human but aspirational characters, and managed to revisit a lot of the fun and campy elements of the 60s Original Series without either drifting into fanservice or sacrificing contemporary notions of diversity and political commentary.

Our Flag Means Death: Speaking of fun! it's fun that when I say "that gay pirate show" I now have to clarify which one I'm talking about. Part loopy comedy, part surprisingly poignant exploration of middle-aged dudes grappling with identity and masculinity. I kept thinking that it was the comedy version of Black Sails, which it is both in terms of its subject matter and its use of said subject matter to explore dynamics of sexuality, race, class, and imperialism. I won't go on at great length because you've already seen it a bunch of times, probably.

What We Do in the Shadows: And speaking of Taiki Waititi. There are three Taiki Waititi shows on my list this year. We live in a blessed time for TV. This one has been going for a few years but I only watched it this year despite having seen the movie a number of times. It's a mockumentary about four vampire roommates and their familiar, which is such an incredibly silly concept that it's a wonder they manage to squeeze so much engaging character dynamics and drama out of it. But they do. And it's wonderful.

Interview with the Vampire: It's fun when I say "that gay vampire show" and I have to clarify which one I'm talking about. This is the dramatic, angsty one. The books and the original movie were always guilty, trashy pleasures for me, but what if someone took that trash and made it art? The series leans in to the tensions that go unexplored in the source material—the magnetic but abusive dynamic between Lestat and Louis, the racial and economic disparities of New Orleans in the 1920s, the very fucked up family that they form with Claudia (aged up into an angry teenager rather than a tiny child, which is the only relief that the show allows). 

Ms Marvel: I mostly don't care about Marvel or superheroes these days, but Kamala Khan is my favourite so I was thrilled to see a show about her. First of all the casting is amazing. They found a young actor who just embodies everything that makes Kamala so lovable. The changes from the comic really serve the story well—her origin story is more rooted in her Pakistani heritage rather than just being a legacy character for a white superhero, and her powers look better on screen than her comics equivalent would. It's charming as hell.

The Boys: This is the other superhero show that I care about, and once again it does a fantastic job of elevating its source material above its nihilistic shock schtick (don't bother with the comic, just watch the show). It deconstructs the superhero genre as fundamentally reactionary in nature, a product of corporate America that mythologizes fascistic strongmen. It's gory and bombastic but that violence serves a point and scathingly satirizes contemporary politics and culture. It's a measure of how relentlessly entertaining this show is that it took until season 3 for the MAGA chuds to realize that it's about them and they're not the good guys. Watching them get big mad about this is almost as much fun as the show itself. 

Extraordinary Attorney Woo: A K-drama about an autistic lawyer in her first job at a massive law firm. I'm not usually into procedurals as a genre but Woo is just such a fantastic character, and I found myself rooting so hard for the romance, that I absolutely binged this one. It's not without its flaws—ultimately, casting an allistic actor as an autistic character is a bit Not Great—but they did do their research and the compassion and empathy outweighs them.

The Serpent Queen: This is a criminally underrated historical drama about flaw-free badass Catherine de' Medici, who never did anything wrong and came here to slay, as the kids said a decade ago. Young Catherine, raised in a convent after the Medicis fell from political favour in Italy, is sent to France to be married to the King's second son, Henri. She's plain and worst of all in the eyes of the court, common. Also, Henri is in love with Catherine's cousin, Diane, who is old enough to be his mother and engaged in complex political machinations of her own. This is one of those historical shows with very modern aesthetic sensibilities, breaking the fourth wall and tossing in metal soundtracks, which some people find jarring and which I quite enjoy. It's not something to watch for historical accuracy; it's something to watch if you want to see antiheroic women doing Machiavellian politics.

And now we come to my favourites.

The best returning show of the year was Reservation Dogs, yet another brilliant offering from Taiki Waititi, who is God's gift to TV even if Thor: Love and Thunder sucked a bit. The second season of this slice of life dramedy about four Indigenous teenagers made me laugh and broke my heart. The latest season hits the themes of reconciliation and forgiveness. Willie Jack deals with the fallout from her curse, Elora and Bear try to repair their friendship, Cheese grapples with the youth justice system, and the community continues to grapple with the fallout of Daniel's death, the story's inciting incident. The story expands well beyond the Rez Dogs to explore their former rival Jackie and her gang, and the various adults in their lives. The episode where Big accidentally ingests psychedelics is hands-down the funniest thing I watched on TV this year, and the transcendent grace of Mabel's episode and the finale had me in tears. 

The best new show was The Sandman because. Obviously it was. Do I need to explain why? I did a whole post on it. I have been waiting for an adaption of the comic that got me into comics since I was 14 years old. The adaptation is excellent, barely any notes, and honours the vibes of the original while still making necessary changes for TV. It's a joy to watch from start to finish and I can't wait for the next season (which will cover my favourite of the books, Season of Mists).

I am sorry, I am so very sorry, but I am going to hold forth about Star Trek, about which I have Opinions. Not because there are not more important things going on in the world, because there absolutely are, but because I am procrastinating on editing a scene that is annoying me and blathering about pop culture is fun, and because I think there will be more interesting discussion here than in the comments on YouTube where I initially expressed some of these ideas.

So! I am really enjoying Strange New Worlds, with the exception of the one episode that was a blatant rip-off of a famous Ursula K. LeGuin story that made no sense for the setting. All of my critique here is said with love—I think it's the best written of the NuTreks and it in general makes me very happy to watch every week. But we must also criticize the things we love because we are nerds and nitpickers and because culture reproduces ideology, etc.

And while I think it does most things well, it does disability kinda badly.

( Spoilers for everything up to and including the penultimate episode below. )

I did this in the other place but I should probably do this here. If you have feels about the Expanse, consider the comments section a free place to scream about them. My thoughts under the cut.

( spoilers )