TV Dinner: Ode to Oh
You know you’ve probably been watching a little too much television when your book stack keeps increasing in size. It’s getting embarrassing. The Mermaid & Mrs. Hancock is still up there? I haven’t put that away yet? Goddamn. You’ve definitely been watching too much television when a trailer announces an adaptation out of nowhere, with a reliable brand (hint hint) behind the production process, a hell of a cast doing the chutzpah, and really no tangible reasons not to tune in. Y: The Last Man is a thing in a few weeks, and I’ve been promising myself a dive down that graphic novel omnibus since, well, TIME called Gears of War (1!) an artistic accomplishment.
Since I’m working hard on not writing ‘reviews’ anymore, or just per se, I’ll level with you — since it turns out we inhabit the same planet. I’m worried the world is closing off Africa, making the shape of the global free market even more uneven by:
Questioning the validity of vaccines it signed off on, just ‘cause they happened to be manufactured in other emerging economies;
Red-listing those emerging economies and ours without bothering to investigate what data systems exactly determine viral diversity, or to help implement new ones; and,
Effectively signing off on a world where Africans, with even less access to intellectual resources (prestigious college degrees, venture capital, and, yes, the opportunity to participate in viable creative economies), will take forever to escape their dependence on Western software — and, particularly, today’s dominant social media platforms.
So after I’m done with what’s usually a hard day’s work, I turn the lights off ‘cause I haven’t been to the theatre in a while and I escape. I help Tony and the boys ‘take care of things’, on docks in New Jersey. I visit college towns in New England and revel in (or get reviled by) all the history. I feed my confirmation bias, regarding my view that Hawaii must be the most magical place on earth.
I weep for New York; for the delis, the bodegas, even the Yankees when they beat the Cardinals’ highlights to my YouTube feed — or, rather, I weep for how long my becoming is taking.
The Chair (Netflix)
It should never be understated how much of a revolution Grey’s Anatomy was when it happened. It began the rise of Shondaland, and placed an African-American storyteller at the epicenter of primetime television’s map. It brought the college dramedy, which hitherto had only existed in Scream sequels and Freddy Prize Jr. rom-coms, into the very familiar world of the medical drama. It gave ER loyalists a second chance at life. It gave the world Sandra Oh.
I love how her no-bullshit approach, so suspicious of romance, has filtered into some of my favourite pieces of content over the years; breaking Thomas Haden Church’s nose in Sideways, hunting and then falling under the spell of Jodie Comer in Killing Eve. Even in The Chair, Oh has a way of occupying very important square meters of space, floundering inside them because of external stupidity, and then righting herself with a huffing, puffing trust in gravity.
There’s lots of external stupidity to deal with in The Chair, which is maybe little more than a decent Saturday afternoon’s stream if Oh isn’t there to suffer, correct and therefore legitimise so much absurdity. She’s barely been in the job when she has to deal with professorial ego upon professorial ego; a campus cancellation rally borne of an ill-timed Nazi salute; and David Duchovny (the real-life author of a couple amusing books, post- The X-Files) delivering an important address at the behest of meddling trustees. All she needs around her is a half-decent cast (no disrespect to a quite excellent one), and then you can just watch her go.
The homie Jay Duplass plays the rock-star lecturer responsible for the ill-timed Nazi salute, and for the chair’s wayward emotional priorities. Duplass is such a perfect, generous foil, a creative trait that was on full display in Transparent — a series whose natural conclusion I mourn every couple months. (It was such an honour, to educate myself and my nephew on trans existence whilst also developing a modest understanding of Jewish culture, and its mistrust of a world that’s tried more than once to destroy it.) If the entire cast is a solar system, and Oh its blazing sun, Duplass is all cosmic spontaneity, crash-landing more than once and shrugging at all the debris like really intergalactic fallout is no big deal.
I loved The Chair and its cutesy wit, and really wish there’d been more than six half-hour episodes.
The Plot Against America (HBO)
Speaking of a modest understanding of Jewish culture, and its mistrust of a world that’s tried more than once to destroy it, you should really indulge the dark hypothetical of The Plot Against America sometime — for how eerily prescient its what-if feels.
It’s 1940. Charles Lindbergh, a legendary pilot and also apparent Nazi sympathiser, defeats FD Roosevelt in the presidential election. His anti-Semitic rhetoric and clear lack of a stance against Nazi Germany slowly fosters a world in which, suddenly, the Holocaust threatens to replicate in America — where so many families have sought and found refuge. The show most likely owes to the Philip Roth novel from which it’s adapted an uncanny ability to make you Wiki the facts real quick, if your American history is as loose as mine; and also the feeling exactly, I imagine, of what it’s like to be a Jewish parent and hear an unexpected knock on the door.
More than once, the show has carried me gently into my dreams, for the cinematic ambiance I’ve enforced upon my chambers, and also the amber glow that slowly submerges the colour palette as the series progresses. Zoe Kazan’s performance, as the matriarch of the Levin family, intensifies in tandem with the social deterioration of an America not quite different enough from the real one — especially under President Trump. It’s a note to Hollywood that Kazan is ready to play powerful women, and besides the polite DM from Morgan Spector (as Herman Levin), whose fatherly presence is calm and assuring, and a dignified reminder to stay our best when humanity indulges its worst.
A good binge qualifies as reading, methinks, when it reminds you your people’s pain isn’t the only one in recorded history.
The White Lotus (HBO)
If you’d told me the dude that wrote The School of Rock also wanted to tell stories as rich and complex as that of The White Lotus, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. I’m not even knocking the value of a project like School of Rock (all hail the god Jack Black) … It’s just testament to the hidden wealth of the creative industry, when creators like Mike White are handed somewhat blank cheques.
You don’t need this New Yorker interview (but do read it) to tell you The White Lotus, by centering on the travails of a bunch of holidayers at a plush Hawaiian resort, is a neatly interwoven study of race, gender and class in America. There’s a marriage of convenience. There are snooty ass millennials and out-of-touch boomers, all working hard to disprove their disconnectedness from real life. There are subtle promises and reassurances, between white and black or brown, that neglect to acknowledge how much is inherently owed.
The wildest feat of The White Lotus is it manages to navigate such choppy waters without preaching at you even once; without sacrificing the deceit that you too are riding a boat into the sunset. The ocean around it all serves as an intimidating reminder of how futile our aspirations are, especially as surface-level shots rock the entire frame. At one point, I think in episode 2, the show had cast such a spell over me that I was convinced it had closed with a mermaid.
A second season has been mooted, and I trust White won’t even have to write a shopping list this time.
