Thursday, February 29, 2024

Did the Controversial Host Shane Gillis Succeed on SNL?


Shane Gillis was fired five years ago from SNL before he was able to appear on a single episode of the show. I don’t like or dislike him, but I’ve watched with intense fascination at the internet chatter since he was first announced to host the February 24th show.

His presence is the perfect geopolitical chokepoint upon which cancel culture, political correctness, and capitalism comes into play.

When analyzing this episode, there are two things at play.

One is where he first in the whole culture wars narratives. Was it a backwards or offensive move? The second is along the lines of whether he was talented enough to merit a spot on the show and whether he delivered on that end.

Most of those entertainment journalists who have covered the shane Gillis controversy have a lifetime of advocating from an extremely social justice warrior based perspective. The writing staffs at sites like Indiewire, Rogerebert, The A.V. Club, Slate, and Vox (which did a particularly scathing piece on him) are full of people who have spent their writing careers as a platform to boost and protect the margianalized, so they will come at it from a certain angle.

As I’ve said beforeSNL is an institution because it has maintained credibility as an institution. Part of that institutional practice (AKA whatever goes on in Lorne Michael’s head) is that the show includes voices from every side of the aisle. The show would completely lose its edge if it didn’t, and comedy has to push the envelope. The same boundary-pushing attitude that allowed them to hire queer comedians like Terry Sweeney, Kate McKinnon, Punkie Johnson, and Bowie Yang, or body-positive comedians like Aidy Bryant, is the same kind of ethos that would allow for the invitations for people like Dave Chapelle and Gillis to host.

Some might call this an annoying habit of courting controversy, as Judy Berman writes for Time. This is not an illegitimate claim: Art and commerce can’t be divorced from each other, either. One can also make the case that when SNL makes bookings outside the realm of entertainment voices, it can negatively affect the world like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. However, people like Gillis simply are people who present ideas. Audiences shouldn’t be afraid of those ideas being voiced out loud on TV. The kinds of people who don’t like whatever they think Shane Gillis represents (more on that later) have plenty of avenues to voice that, and many powerful allies in the media who will pick up that baton.

As for what Shane Gillis represents, he is very likely a democrat (or at the very least apolitical), even if his defining moment in the public sphere to audiences who aren’t comedy nerds was as an example of cancel culture.

The idea that Shane Gillis has grown as a person and reconciled is one reason that he has become more palatable.

While one can always judge the sincerity of the apologies or the growth of Shane Gillis, there’s a habit of hashtag warriors to judge apologies as insincere no matter what. So I’m inclined to give Gillis the benefit of the doubt. As any couples therapist or workplace conflict mediator can tell you, it’s never a helpful to try to measure the sincerity of apologizes and assume what’s in the person’s head when they make it. It’s very much an act of projection with celebrity culture that today’s followers of celebrity feel they can act out these complicated mental states through their celebrity scapegoat of the week.

In recent interviews, Gillis has mentioned attempts to detach himself as a poster boy for Conservative fans, friendships with figures such as Andrew Yang, and that he’s trying hard to not use offensive language (the thing that first got him in trouble).

To a zoomer, this seems laughable. They likely have been raised in places with zero policies towards offensive language and have been trained to villainize minor slights as hate speech. Again, this is not so much an indication that Shane Gillis is horrible, but that generational differences can train us to not recognize the growth in another person if they’re so far behind us on (our own self-defined) bell curves.

It’s helpful to recognize that Shane Gillis’s attempts to be a decent person will still be judged by anyone on the internet who think he’s a good enough ally. We are free to judge him as bigoted, but that might not be the most accurate view of who he is if we’re not careful with context. On the contrary, there has been audience pressure for him over the last five years to lean into stereotypes and offensiveness. Many comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, Aziz Ansari, and especially Louis C.K. have gone harsher into attack mode at woke audiences after they’ve been cancelled. For his part, Gillis at least deserves credit for sticking to his funny bone.

As for whether the episode was a failure, there were sketches that might have been seen as problematic. There was a sketch with misguided employees who didn’t understand sexual harrassment in a meeting with H.R.

It played off the image that Gillis was politically backwards. At the same time, Gillis didn’t play the only character in the sketch with questionable morals. The sketch never condoned anyone’s wrong-headed views, and it’s target squared with the voices of reason in the HR characters (Bowen Yang and Chloe Fineman). The main comic premise was how frustrating sexual harrassment seminars must be for the presenters. It’s a fairly soft space in which to make edgy jokes since the audience is clearly on the right side of the moral equation.

The sketches varied in terms of offense. One sketch premise involved Jamaican accents and some might have found the cultural appropriation aspect unfunny when Shane Gillis couldn’t stop himself from speaking in a Jamaican accent. However, if that criticism is widespread (I haven’t seen anything in the reviews so far), I’d maintain that it comes from criticizing comedy without context. Here, the comic premise wasn’t about how a Jamaican patois sounds funny. Instead, it’s about the awkwardness of a White man in a Jamaican Church.

This school of criticism of judging comedy without context has been pretty prevalent since around 2015. As someone who’s not a fan of people overusing “cultural appropriation” or “white savior” criticisms, it’s extremely refreshing for Shane Gillis to be on the show skirting the line of political correctness.

However, it should be noted that all of this is moot because SNL is never written by the host of the week. Everything said in sketches was heavily scripted by a writing room that's heavily staffed with female and queer writers. In the last decade, female writers Sudi Green, Allison Gates, Anna Drezen, and Sarah Schneider have all held head writer positions on the show and the non-binary writer Celeste Yim got promoted to writing supervisor. Three of this season’s new hires — KC Shornima, Asha Ward, and Auguste White — are women of color as well.

Last season, this Try Guys sketch was heavily criticized for brushing off the power dynamics in a buzzworthy internet conflict (a semi-famous content creator being fired from one of YouTube’s big channels for cheating on his wife). It later came out that one of the writers of the sketch (Will Stephen) went to college with the content creator in question. What the media didn’t focus on as much was that the sketch was also written by Celeste Yim and Bowen Yang as well. It’s easy to pass the show’s more offensive moments onto the least margianalized writer (Stephen is White) but SNL has always been a group effort.

The only think that Shane really did as Shane was his monologue. In my opinion, this was underwhelming, which seems to echo much of the internet reaction. In that sense, he might have “bombed” but that is different than being deliberately offensive in an Andrew Dice Clay kind of way.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for all the hooplah around the episode and preceding hype, I found the experience of Shane Gillis highly cathartic. Rather than witness the divisive impulses of cancel culture, I watched a guy clean up his reputation, be accepted by his peers and have them make art together. I believe the generation below me thrives on criticism, but collaboration and happy endings warms my heart more.

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee, 2020)




It’s kind of funny how the press tries to portray Spike Lee as a provocateur more than he is. The way the media has portrayed it, Spike Lee,is at a near-constant war with film makers: He has amassed various beefs over the years: With Steven Soderbergh (for beating him at Cannes with Sex Lies and Videotape back in 1989), Clint Eastwood (for not putting enough black people in his Letters from Iwo Jima/Flags of Our Fathers companion movies), Driving Miss Daisy, Green Book, and the Oscars So White Movement, and probably more. In reality, Spike Lee saves most of his trash talking for the Knicks court. If you look at the actual quotes, he’s a very classy individual who seems to have a great camaraderie and respect with most of his fellow film makers.

The degree that Spike Lee really responds to White art is really through his work.  Da 5 Bloods has a film with a lot to say about the Black experience in war, and even then it’s not a film that feels exclusively for a Black audience.

It’s a war film about four Vietnam veterans (played by character actors Norm Lewis, Delroy Lindo, Clark Peters, and Isiah Whitlock Jr.) who return to the war zone years later to recover some lost goal. Joining them is one of the soldiers’ sons (Jonothan Majors) who acts as an audience surrogate. There’s an aura of celebration like friends at a reunion, but come on, this is a war movie:  The façade is quickly broken by revelations of post-war economic hardship and PTSD.

Like Platoon, Bridge on the River Kwai, or Apocalypse Now, this film turns tragic as the crew is immersed into psychologically and physically hellish situations. The main actor, Paul (Delroy Lindo in what might be an Oscar-bait part), loses his mind, and survival is far from guaranteed for any of them.

Perhaps, this is even more tragic than those other films  in that these veterans have been through this before; it was clearly a difficult experience (as evidenced by the haunting of the 5th blood); and they decided to undergo a mission through the Vietnamese jungle again. Were they misinformed about how much those jungles would be guarded by Vietnamese and mercenaries? Were they deluding themselves into thinking this would be easy? Maybe the tragic reality (and subtle economic commentary) is that they needed the gold that badly.

Either way, getting invested in these people’s lives means you will be hit by the senseless of how it ends, but that’s par for the course of a war movie. In other words, it’s an affecting film and a rich one.

Taking a look at the Writer's Guild of America List of 101 Best Written TV Shows

https://www.wga.org/writers-room/101-best-lists/101-best-written-tv-series/list

1. “The Sopranos”
2. “Seinfeld”
3. “The Twilight Zone” (1959)
4. “All in the Family”
5. “M*A*S*H”
6. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”
7. “Mad Men”
8. “Cheers”
9. “The Wire”
10. “The West Wing”
11. “The Simpsons”
12. “I Love Lucy”
13. “Breaking Bad”
14. “The Dick Van Dyke Show”
15. “Hill Street Blues”
16. “Arrested Development”
17. “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”
18. “Six Feet Under”
19. “Taxi”
20. “The Larry Sanders Show”
21. “30 Rock”
22. “Friday Night Lights”
23. “Frasier”
24. “Friends”
25. “Saturday Night Live”
26. “The X-Files”
27. “Lost”
28. “ER”
29. “The Cosby Show”
30. “Curb Your Enthusiasm”
31. “The Honeymooners”
32. “Deadwood”
33. “Star Trek”
34. “Modern Family”
35. “Twin Peaks”
36. “NYPD Blue”
37. “The Carol Burnett Show”
38. “Battlestar Galactica” (2005)
39. “Sex & The City”
40. “Game of Thrones”
41. (tie) “The Bob Newhart Show;” “Your Show of Shows”
43. (tie) “Downton Abbey;” “Law & Order;” “Thirtysomething”
46. (tie) “Homicide: Life on the Street;” “St. Elsewhere”
48. “Homeland”
49. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
50. (tie) “The Colbert Report;” “The Good Wife;” “The Office” (UK)


My thoughts on the list:
1. Unlike film history, TV history is unpleasantly rigid over what's classic and what isn't. I've seen quite a few best of TV lists and Simpsons is always considered a classic but Futurama isn't. Ditto for Bewitched over I Dream of Jeannie or Bob Newhart over Newhart. Likewise the one medical show everyone always includes is ER, the one old-timey Western show is Gunsmoke and the family-themed sitcom from the 80s everyone includes is Family Ties (I preferred Growing Pains, Who's the Boss or Mr Belvedere)
2. Socially significant shows like All in the Family, Cosby Show or MASH always rank high regardless of actual laugh value though I suspect some people find MASH or Cosby Show funny.
3. What's odd is that All in the Family, in particular, is highly dated and it's reputation has remained the same over the years despite the fact that it's pretty much unwatchable today. Coincidentally, I suspect Cosby Show is losing classic status fast. I also feel like Seinfeld is getting dated. It's a show mostly about dating and dating today is nothing like dating in the 90s. Larry Sanders Show seems heavily dated to me. Will and Grace (#94) is extremely dated and by today's standards, those characters are so stereotypical that people would find them offensive. Even Will is more stereotypical than many of the gay characters on TV today.
4. I don't know anything about what shows were highly rated before the 90's, but Fraser, Friends, and ER were the highest rates shows of that era IIRC and coincidentally they're the entries on the list which lends credence to the fact (the Emmys support this notion) that any show that's highly rated is gonna have a place in history. If you ask me the best shows of the 1990s were Newsradio, Spin City, and 3rd Rock from the Sun, but I suppose they didn't get to be the "dominant" show
5. Freaks and Geeks is on the list. OK, great, but on the brilliant-but-cancelled list, where's Commander In Chief, Clone High, Pushing Daisies, etc.
6. There are a number of shows like Beverly Hillbillies and Three's Company that I personally thought were extremely clever and hilarious, but I guess they weren't classy enough?
7. Kind of glad that Happy Days didn't make the list. It does seem kind of bland in retrospect although I thought it was cool growing up. Then again, I thought Saved by the Bell was cool. Aren't I gullible.
8. I would have thought Alias or Prison Break would have made the list. Among newer entries, I'm happy to see Downton Abbey, Boardwalk Empire, and Modern Family there

Monday, February 19, 2024

The Firm (1993)

 



During the early Spring dumping ground – the time between when the last of the great films has come out and the prestige films come in –it’s rarely a good bet to see a film during this time. The studio benefit from putting something new in the theater but don’t want to put their best material in the area.

So I watched a few films outside the realm of the current cycle, including this one.


John Grisham was the JK Rowling of the 90s: An unlikely author who published a book that caught on and created a literary empire.


As a child of the 1990s, many of the dramatic films I watched- A Time to Kill, Pelican Brief, The Client, and Rainmaker —were legal thrillers that were adapted from his books. Surprisingly, none of these films were over my head or inappropriate for me. 


I was a child when I watched The Client in 1994, but the story was told from the POV of a child so I could relate to it. I watched A Time to Kill in 9th grade so I was able to fully absorb its adult themes.  In this sense I grew up with him but strangely enough, I never saw The Firm. I’m not sure why, but this film appears to have the best reputation from various measures (awards buzz, polls I’ve seen of best 90s films, etc.).


Looking it up, I’ve discovered that A Time to Kill was technically Grisham’s first book (and he only got it published after 28 rejections), but it barely sold. It was his second novel, The Firm, which stood atop the New York Times best seller list for 40 weeks,  that put him on the map. The film rights to that film for $600,000 is what put him on the map.


Upon watching the film, it’s easiest to read it mostly as a Tom Cruise vehicle. Like Top Gun or Cocktail, Cruise as drawn as—well, for lack of a better word, Tom Cruise. He sticks out as the most gifted of his peers, he has an intense gaze, he has a fierce independent streak, he’s drawn to monogamy, and he loves to sprint in formal wear.


Tom Cruise films traditionally revolve around one key relationship (in every case that I know of, a male, maybe Eyes Wide Shut is an exception?) in which Cruise’s narrative arc goes from being cocky to learning humility. Films like Rain Man, Top Gun, or Jerry Maguire pair the Tom Cruise persona with a morality pet – a dumb jock, a simpleton rizzo, or a mentally deficient half-brother – that humbles him in learning not to look down on other people. The other type of foil to the Tom Cruise persona is the person who’s even cockier than Cruise himself and earns his respect that way: Paul Newman in Color of Money, Ken Wattanabe in The Last Samurai, and Gene Hackman in the Firm. Hackman even manages to seduce Cruise’s wife (Jean Tripplehorn, I’d be curious to know the etymology of that name). Considering how attractive Hackman is compared to Cruise (not very), that’s swagger!


The twist here is that Tom Cruise’s mentor is not what he seems to be. In a sense, this is the nakedest Tom Cruise has ever been. While he has a fierce independent streak, he rarely is complete without a mentor or sidekick, as I’m discovering while writing this essay.


Beyond Gene Hackman, this is a cast of heavy hitters that would set the template for future John Grisham novels. Ed Harris, Hal Holbrook, David Strathairn, Margo Martindale,  and Wilford Brimley (a mainstay in commercials for Quaker Oats and later Diabetes, but he was also in at least a few good films). Holly Hunter got nominated for an Oscar for this film in the supporting category but I can’t remember her, which is either a sign that the Academy must have owed her for a past snub or it was just that packed a cast.


The odd thing about the film that would put Grisham on the map as the king of the legal thriller genre, is that this isn’t a film with a tremendous amount of court scenes. It devolves into a movie about corruption and personal accountability.


Fortunately, the film made enough money—it was the third highest grossing film of 1993 – to ensure some of the better films in the Grisham repertoire that would mark much of my childhood.

Saturday, February 10, 2024

The Big Lebowski: Both Essential and Overrated

 I recently saw the 2014 Paul Thomas Anderson film Inherent Vice. It’s a film that generated a lot of buzz in 2014 and one aggregation ranked it number 10. I was immediately struck by how this film is begging to be analyzed side-by-side with The Big Lebowski. The two films have so much in common that it’s as if Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen Brothers started from the same points in some sort of film workshop and worked outwards. For further reading, here’s an excellent essay:

Today, out of boredom, I decided that I would post if anyone else thought “The Big Lebowski was a good film but not worth this insane level of a cult following” and I got one positive and negative response, so I thought I’d address them both.

One person said that it was her son who didn’t get the hype, so that’s why it was written to her son.

I would say to your son almost no movie can live up to its hype on first viewing when the hype reaches a certain level. Ever heard of a movie called Citizen Kane? It has long been considered the greatest film in American history (I know the American Film Institute solidified that status in 1998). And since then, 90% of people who I know who’ve watched the film have been disappointed. So it’s best not to measure a film against hype.

I’d say the cleverness of the film isn’t apparent on first viewing, and it’s through outside sources (whether from other films, discussing with friends, or reading an essay about it) that someone might get all the meaning. The question is if he likes movie going to be a deep multi-layered experience or if he’s looking to be entertained for the two hours of the film.

That’s at least what TBL tries to be (and many people other than me say it succeeds). At the same time, some would argue that it’s very entertaining on a scene-to-scene level and that the characters are very original creations who intersect at interesting angles.

The Coen Brothers generally have a strong sense of place (O Brother Where Art Thou is a very interesting fusion of Dust Bowl era Mississippi with superficial biblical elements; I’ve hardly seen a better film that captures the inanity of the DC Bureaucracy and culture than Burn After Reading, A Serious Man has a lot to say about Jewish culture and academia and I’d argue it’s the most quintessential film ever made about the suburban Jewish experience), and that’s evident here is the film examines a confluence of values and a generational nostalgia that traces on the last remnants of Vietnam Era disillusionment. Beyond that, the Coen Brothers process in making their films is very scatological. I won’t say random, but they mix and match a lot of plot elements that most others wouldn’t think of, and for a good number of fans the mixing and matching is likely what connected here.

NOW THE REASONS THAT I DON’T THINK IT’S NOT ALL THAT AND A BAG OF CHIPS:

The film has certain thematic elements that I don’t think are fully formed. One of the big themes is that the Dude is treated as a deadbeat, but he’s really a more caring and responsible citizen than the other Lebowski who is respectable looking, but really corrupt. I can’t see any reason that the Dude isn’t a deadbeat.

The film is loosely based on a confusing noir, the 1946 film The Big Sleep (a much better film than this one), where a man gets implicated in an extremely complex case and decides to go out and find the truth. Here he doesn’t appear to have any agency. He just drifts towards the answers. Could he have just displayed an iota of brain activity? If the film is about a subversion of our expectations, I don’t know if the Dude ever became anyone other than what I expected him to be.

I also think the film has a number of interesting characters, but Walter is a bit too hard-edged for the comedic tone the film goes for and doesn’t appeal to me as much as other fans.

Some might also point out that it has an incredible cast, but I’m moving away from recommending films because they have a good cast. You can see these actors in better things and they’ll still act well.

Sunday, February 04, 2024

Coming Face to Face with the Christian Film Industry

 Rather than target a general audience, this next review is going to target a specific new Patreon who asked me to review a Christian film: “The Girl Next Door” (2022).

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Top 12 Shows of 2023

 

Photo by Freestocks on Unsplash

Here is my annual Top 12 in TV (for past editions, see here and here). My list of honorable mentions is here:

1. Party Down (Starz)

Party Down

When it debuted in 2009, Party Down was one of the early runners of TV’s Golden Age with its strong ensemble, dripping ennui, and envelope-pushing humor. The show centers around six creative has-beens and not-quite-there-yet characters in Hollywood during their downtime at various catering gigs. In the original run, a status-quo-favoring Murphy’s Law kept the characters from getting too successful. To counter this depressing set-up, the characters fully embrace their purgatory with a sense of hedonism that rubs against the subculture of the week in hilarious ways.

To see Party Down return without a single change is worth celebrating, but the show opted for the more challenging route and allowed them to exit and find success. Or at least the possibility of it, however fleeting. The show’s hiatus lasted 14 years and a decade has passed in-universe. To keep the truth and fun in these characters amid such changing conditions is no easy accomplishment.

Stories are made and broken based on how they resolve. At the end of the day, Party Down resolved on the most pitch-perfect note for me.

2. Futurama (FOX)

Futurama (FOX)

Good news, everyone! Like Party DownFuturama came back from the dead. For the third time, no less! The show continued to provide sharp evergreen humor balanced with seasonings of topicality: The show approached anti-vaxers, Amazon warehouse conditions, cancel culture, binge-watching, and a particularly clever cross-genre episode set in the old West amidst a Bitcoin mining rush. The show also continued to navigate the aftermath of the Leela-Fry relationship while keeping things fresh.

3. Killing It (Peacock)

Peacock’s ode to the bizarre scheme, Floridians is so popular that it grows in its sophomore season to cover more challenging moral implications while maintaining the sense of free-for-all fun. As the second season opens, the two protagonists (Claudia O’Doherty and Craig Robinson) are enjoying a brief respite of success as proprietors of a palmetto berry farm before getting entangled with a truant inspector (Beck Bennett); a white trash family (led by Dot Marie Jones) who are not above coercing our heroes for free health care); a mob boss (Tim Heidecker) and his adorably vicious daughter (Anna Mae Quinn); and the FBI because that’s where all these stories tend to end. The now well-established chemistry between Robinson and O’Doherty grows into the rare opposite-sex platonic relationship on TV that grounds the show with warmth. This is a season that establishes itself as next-level TV, however, by adding another layer to show their subtle moral differences and how unadulterated kindness can only take you so far in the business world.

4. Pain Killer (Netflix)

Limited series docudramas have made quite the dent in the TV landscape as of late with Inventing AnnaDrop Out, and the like. None have had the bite and emotional truth of Pain Killer. The show presents a tapestry of people involved in the opioid crisis. Matthew Broderick epitomizes the modern-day corporate oligarch who’s completely detached from the deathly consequences of his profit motive. He’s so slimy and aloof in this role, that he washes away any goodwill that used to come with his boyish features since the days of Ferris Bueller. Facing off against him and his corporation is a federal prosecutor in rural Virginia on the side of the righteous (Uzo Adoba). While the series is set with the proper gravity of the opioid crisis (AKA it can be a downer), there are glimmers of hope and pathos. It’s a thoughtful series, but also a kinetic one like a police procedural.

5. American Auto (NBC)

American Auto https://www.nbc.com/nbc-insider/american-auto-season-2-on-nbc-what-to-know

Justin Spitzer’s follow-up to NBC hit Superstore aims for a target in the upper-income bracket. Starring SNL alum Ana Gasteyer, the show takes place in the executive suites of a Detroit motor corporation. Our audience surrogates are put-upon communications officer Sadie (Harriet Dyer) and the blue-collar worker Jack (Tye White), who got promoted upwards through sheer dumb luck. As the series progresses, however, Jack and Sadie show signs of being more comfortable in their first-class digs than they do being among the common people. Rather than poke fun at rich and powerful people for simply being rich and powerful (the method of present-day satire like The Menu or Glass Onion), American Auto presents rich people as both being victims of their detachment but also a product of an ecosystem of enhanced scrutiny and increasing demands on the shareholders. Most of the time, however, it’s just a damn funny workplace sitcom.

6. Rough Diamonds (Netflix)

Rough Diamonds on Netflix.com

The issues of insularity, abuse, and lack of free will in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, have made a rife breeding ground for great drama in film and television. Rough Diamonds adds a European flavor to the mix as it is set in the shady world of the diamond trade in Antwerp, Belgium. The story centers around family pariah Noah who went straight from an insular, religious life into the criminal underworld of London. A dozen years later, he returns when one of his three siblings commits suicide. He soon learns that despite their holier-than-thou attitude (quite literally), his family isn’t much better at keeping their professional aims above criminal activity. The parallel compromises in morality that Noah and his brother must make, are a theme here. It is a tense pressure cooker of the show that provides a relatively even-keeled look at the issues surrounding the community.

7. The Class of 07 (Amazon)

The Class of 07

The 10-year reunion at an all-girls Australian school turns into a semi-apocalypse whereby all the participants’ old grudges resurface. If Crayola’s top engineers ever arrived at a color blacker than black, that would be the best description for this show’s brand of comedy. Few shows so tonally bleak have ever been played out for comedy like this — at various points, the characters resort to eating shoes, hold a town hall over which survivor they’ll be eating, and make their peace with intended murder. Yet, it’s all juxtaposed against the kinds of delights of long-lost friends reconnecting and working out their struggles. To the degree that the Bechdel Test still is a thing, this show deserves credit for adding so much weight to each of its female friendships and treating them as a means to their end.

8. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon)

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

In its fifth and final season, the show boldly incorporates several time jumps to show that there’s light at the end of the tunnel for our struggling Borscht Belt comedian and her cantankerous agent. Managing parental expectations, commercial success and lasting love will never be easy for someone who ventures so far outside of the bounds of her era’s norms, but that’s what makes Midge a character to root for. That, and she can work a room with such charm. In its final season, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was as sharp, funny, and warm as ever. In other words, it left us wanting more and that’s what any good performer would hope for.

Check out my interview with Caroline Aaron ahead of the final season

9. Schmicago AKA Shmigadoon Season 2 (Apple)

Schmicago AKA Shmigadoon Season 2 (Apple)

What do Sweeney ToddHairPippenAnnieGodspellChicago, and Cabaret have in common? If you’re thinking “Virtually nothing”, you’re not wrong. This is why Schmicago (AKA Schmigadoon) deserves much credit for integrating such a tonally wide range of musicals and weaving them into a coherent story in just episodes. As with the best parodies, the production values and quality of the songs veer razor-thin to the source material while making notable departures when there’s an opportunity for a good joke. Cecily Strong and Keegan Michael Key play the audience surrogate and Strong in particular has to be given credit for her deadpan reactions. Several heavy hitters on Broadway (Aaron Tevit, Dove Cameron, Kristin Chenoweth, Jane Krakowski, etc.) set the bar even higher, and now how to add a winking dose of humor to an authentic show-stopping number.

10. Tiny Tunes Looniversity (HBO Now)

Tiny Tunes Looniversity (HBO Now)

Another reboot that hit some chords with me. The show re-imagines some of the beloved figures of our childhood (I’m assuming that everyone is a child of the 90s. If not, I apologize for your imperfections) as existing within a more coherent universe. In contrast to the original which struggled to maintain any geographical continuity in sketches that took place outside of the shared high school that the characters shared, this show takes place entirely within the confines of a university for toons, allowing for a lot more world-building. The five main characters (Babs, Buster, Daffy, Hampton, and an ascended extra in Sweetie Bird) all are dorm mates coping with the rigors of college. The strength of the show is how well they tweak the characters where needed: Characters like Bugs and Babs are the same, but Sweetie (who was only featured in one episode in the original) is maniacally bipolar; Shirley the Loon is more modern-day hipster than a clairvoyant Shirley MacLaine expy; and Dizzy Devil is a needy manchild with a kind heart.

11. Ghosts (CBS)

Ghosts (CBS)

Eight ghosts from different eras (the 60s hippie movement, the Guided Age, Wall Street excess, the Revolutionary War, etc) inhabit an upstate New York mansion with the ability to talk to just one of the home’s two owners. But as anyone can tell you, it’s the delivery that makes the difference. The eight actors (largely unknowns outside of Rebecca Wiscocky) create comically rich characters with rife potential for great comic dynamics (imagine a Victorian-Age snoot interacting with a free-wheeling Prohibition-Era jazz singer: You get the idea), and the dialogue never fails to exploit these possibilities. The eight ghosts provide the laughs while the couple at the center (Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar) provide the TGIF-ish heart.

12. Jury Duty (Amazon)

Jury Duty (Amazon)

This one’s gonna take some explanation, so bear with me. This show is a reality/comedy hybrid in which everyone in a Los Angeles court trial is an actor except one unsuspecting sweetheart named Ron. The goal of the actors is to A) Convince Ron that they are real at whatever they’re supposed to be (judges, lawyers, fellow jury members, etc.), B) Create comedy by adding bizarreness through the proceedings, and C) Give opportunities to show Ron as a good guy. Also, mid-level actor James Marsden is here and he plays himself. Only a little more conceited. Again, it’s one of those things It’s nowhere near the first reality show in the medium’s history to give its contestants or contestants a skewed version of the truth, but few have engineered the story arc in such a heart-warming, funny, and clever way. Credit where credit is due: Showrunners Gene Stupinsky and Lee Eisenberg were big forces behind The Office, and their next project looks to be equally promising.

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Honorable Mentions (covered in a separate article):

The Afterparty (Apple), Captain Fall (Netflix), Florida Man (Netflix), Hello Tomorrow (Apple), History of the World Part II (Hulu), Krapopolis (Fox), Mulligan (Netflix), Night Agent (Netflix), Poker Face (Netflix),