Top 12 TV Shows of 2021

 

1. White Lotus (HBO) Season 1-Mike White’s astute tableaux of human shallowness explores whether people on vacation can truly escape who they are through three interlocking groups of vacationers in Hawaiian paradise. For those who still mourn the cancellation of “Enlightened”, this is sweet redemption (More here and here)

 

2. Wanda Vision (Disney Plus) Limited Series- With such mind-boggling layers of symbolism, this is as if the world's best escape room writers were tasked with writing a sitcom that entrusts viewers to be active rather than passive participants in decryption. The series takes the viewer on a journey through various sitcom tropes on a decade-by-decade journey with underlying storylines dealing with grief, manipulation, and escapism as a form of evil. With all the painstaking detail that the prodution team implants its easter eggs, this is a sure contender for the most intricate show on television if not its most ambitious. I have little familiarity with the MCU (full disclosure: I hate the MCU) but was able to peace most details together.

 

3. Resident Alien (SyFy) Season 1-Alan Tyduk hits the right notes of not-to-be-believed silliness, as an oblivious alien who improbably manages to integrate into a small town in Colorado. In its own hokey way, the show is endearing, rich in character, and features a marshmellowshly  portrait of small-town life with plenty of scenery porn in the background. The show also features a sizeable Native American cast but doesn't resort to being pedantic. (More here)

 

4. We Are Lady Parts (Peacock) Season 1-A six-episode inaugural season takes us into the often unseen world of Muslim urbanites in Europe. The diverse quintet of women in London are united by their love of punk rock. If Dewey Finn’s mantra (whose words, ironically were written in “School of Rock” by Mike White of “White Lotus”) that “one great rock show can change the world”, these hijab-clad women are rocking their way to just that. (More here)

 

5. The Great (Hulu) Season 2-The spiritual sister to “The Favourite” (Show runner Tony McNamara also wrote that film about the decadent court of a European royal) is set in the glorious decadence of the court of 18^th Century Russia with bored aristocrats feeding their basest desires. In “Hamilton”, Washington says to the titular character, “Winning was easy young man, governing’s much harder” which is an apt description of this season as Catherine the Great has won.  Now what? This is a slate of psychologically multi-layered characters who are constantly re-evaluating which side of the fence they sit on.  (More here)

 

6. Never Have I Ever (Netflix) Season 2- Never Have I Ever tells the story of a teenage girl breaking away from the mores of a traditional Indian-American family grieving for her late father, and discovering boys. This year, the show proved the epitome of how a show should expand its side characters and mix up the dynamics in its sophomore season.

 

7. Doctor Death (Peacock) Limited Series-Adapted from a podcast, this is a high-takes parable of a medical narcissist (played by Joshua Jackson, yes, that Joshua Jackson) who left a trail of paralyzed patients in his wake while the medical establishment took way too long to catch up with him. It’s a tale of bureaucracy working exactly as it should and still leading to classic nightmare fuel. It’s also a tale of the upstream battle two doctors (Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater at the top of their game) must take to stop an atrocity.

8. What We Do in the Shadows (FX) Season 4-It’s been the best of times (for Colin Robinson who appears to have made at least one trusty comrade) and the worst of times (geez Nandoor, you need some Prozac) for our gang of Staten Island-based vampires. The joke here is that as the quartet (plus everyone’s favorite lackey, Guillermo) ascends the ranks of the vampiric council, they continue to be tripped up by the banalities of life (chain letters, toy store, neighborhood meetings).

9. Mr. Mayor (NBC) Season 4-Another entry in the canon of Tina Fey and Robert Carlock that's a little more "30 Rock" than "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." The humor is clever but skin-deep. Don't expect pathos-driven growth with the narrative highs of Kimmy, Titus and Jaqueline. At the same time, the show, set in the Mayor's office of L.A., has much less of an insider vibe. As it's mostly episodic, the show lives or dies by the episode but it's hard to deny that the show has been hitting a lot of home runs in the back half of the season.

 

10. Bless the Harts (Fox) Season 2-Though the show was cancelled, we can at least celebrate how the show got a lengthy second season run. The brainchild of ex-SNL writer and former North Carolina native Emily Spivey, the show split the difference between homage and parody of small-town Carolinian life. The show is about a lower-class family in small town North Carolina features a waitress with modest aspirations to rise within her station, her sly mother (whose primary motivations in life are besting her rival, feeling young enough that she can flirt with construction workers, and pulling off semi-fraudulent schemes), her boyfriend (a trucker persona with a teddy bear persona underneath), and her dead panning daughter. It’s an extremely strong quartet of characters who exhibit great chemistry.

 

11. American Crime Story: Impeachment (FX) Season 3-As a child of the 90s, I knew very little about this incident other than feeling my heart broken by Bill Clinton when  he went on TV and flat-out admitted to saying he did the thing he previously said he didn’t do a million times. Boy, would 8^th grade me loved to have heard all the juicy details (for educational purposes about sex, if nothing else). Better late than never! ACS is essentially found art: Monica and Bill is such a juicy news story, that even in mediocre hands it would make good TV. However, the credit goes to Ryan Murphy and crew for such adept casting and editing.

12. House Broken (Fox) Season 1- Lisa Kudrow plays a poodle, Honey, who leads a therapy group for all the neighborhood pets. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit here for the jokes—simply imagine what your pet would say if they could talk to a therapist and viola! – but the jokes really hit and the large ensemble of characters (for example, Will Forte voices a turtle who’s in love with a croc shoe and Clea Duvall plays a rescue cat in desperate need of validation) establishes their comic beats with an extremely impressive speed. (More here)

Honorable Mentions:

AP Bio (Peacock) Season 4, The Chair (Netflix) Season 1, Cruel Summer (Freeform) Season 1, Ghosts (CBS) Season 1, Locke and Key (Netflix) Season 2, Kevin Can Go F*** Himself (AMC TV), Maid (Netflix) Limited Series,  Studio C (BYU TV) Seasons 13 and 14, Saturday Morning All-Stars (Netflix) Season 1, Schmigadoon (Apple TV) Season 1

Everything Else I Saw:

And lest you think I’m being hard on these shows, this is everything else I watched this year that didn’t make my top 12 or Honorable Mention list that these shows rank above:
Abbott Elementary (ABC)^,  Animaniacs (Hulu), AP Bio (Peacock), Attack of the Movie Cliches (Netflix), B Positive (CBS)^, Call Me Kat (ABC), Call Your Mother (ABC), Cobra Kai (Netflix), The Circle (Netflix), Disenchanted (Netflix), Frank of Ireland (Amazon), Explained (Netflix),  Great North (Fox), Inside Job (Netflix), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FX), Home Economics (ABC), Kevin Hart’s Olympic Show (Peacock), Kim’s Convenience (CBC), La Brea (NBC/Peacock), Lost Symbol (Peacock), Love Death and Robots (Netflix), Mr. Mercedes (Amazon), Mighty Ducks (Disney Plus), Miracle Workers: Oregon Trail (TBS), Mosquito Coast (Apple TV), McGruber (Peacock), Mr. Corman (Apple TV), Mythic Quest (Apple TV), Nora From Queens (Comedy Central), Nine Perfect Strangers (Hulu), Only Murders in the Building (Hulu), The Premise (Hulu), Rebel (Amazon Plus), Reservation Dogs (Peacock), Rutherford Falls (Peacock), SNL (NBC), Solar Opposites (Hulu), Squid Game (Netflix)^, To Tell the Truth (ABC), Young Rock (NBC)^

 

^ means I watched just one or two episodes. I didn’t necessarily watch every episode of a show if it’s not marked

The Icky Age Gap of Licorice Pizza and the Standardization of Consent

 

Check out my anatomy of a pitch for this one. 

“Licorice Pizza” is being lauded among critics though very few are mentioning the glaring problem wherein a 25-year-old woman doesn’t shut down the advances of a 15-year-old man. The relationship is described as chaste by most critics.Alison Wilmore attempts to downplay, it for example, with the headline “Licorice Pizza’s Unlikely Romance is the least interesting thing about it.”

First, let’s be clear, the movie ends in a romantic kiss (more on this movie trope here) and the 25-year-old professing “I love you” as the closing credits role. The ending is criminal and has been deemed unacceptable in 98% of contexts outside of this one

For example, Indiana Jones (and its three venerable screenwriters: George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kadsan) nearly got cancelled because of the ickiness of the Marion-Indiana dynamic and there was a miniseries on TV less than a year ago “The Teacher” in which a young teacher who seduces her 17-year old student is seen as the devil. Additionally, in real life we have been pretty unforgiving of Woody Allen’s courtship with a 19-year-old Soon Yi Previn was “the heart wants what it wants” and have rejected the “It was the 70s” approach with Roman Polanski’s rape defense.

For a society that has worked consent into its common cultural vocabulary in the last few years, there seems to be a lack of consistent standards the more this film is embraced.

I am all in favor of allowing works that challenge our ideas and provoke to go out into the ether. After all, few would argue that the Hayes Code that restricted the morality of movie characters (for instance, mandating that criminals or homosexuals had to be punished by the end of the film) was a good thing. However, what determines how the public decides when such a work of art or someone’s personal life
(for example, Sean Connery, William Hurt, and Kirk Douglas have openly admitted to acts that could be considered assault on women or sexual assault) is a moral affront? I’d like to address that in an essay and discuss perhaps the solution is to cast a wider net in letting art exist unfettered so that people can comment about what is portrayed that is right or wrong within that art.

Sixteen Most Impressive Athletes from the 2018 Winter Olympics

 

Reprinting this article from before. I'm not yet excited about this big Winter Olympics thing but let's try:

I can loosely be described as a Winter Olympics obsessive. I grew up in a skiing family (other families took vacations to the beach or camping, we took our big vacations to the Rockies) with a father who owned a condo in Lake Placid, attended the 1980 Olympics and raced. I was similarly on a club racing team in college (not particularly good at the two disciplines I raced: It's an extremely frustrating sport I'd describe as playing a game of chess against gravity with very little time to think about how to make each move) and have dabbled in terrain parks and cross-country skiing (I don't know how to do most of the stuff these Olympians do if you're looking for tips), but I mostly forget to watch these great sports in the off-years. When the Olympics come around, I'm suddenly hooked on this stuff like it never left:

Here's my list of athletes that impressed me the most with the disclosure that I'm watching from a US-centric perspective:

1. Ester Ledecka-CZE Republic-Alpine Skiing (Super G) & Snowboard (Parallel Giant Slalom)-Ledecka wanted to make history as the first snowboarder to compete in a ski race. She never finished above 19th in a World Cup race and she borrowed someone else's skis and ended up winning Gold in the Super-G in a win so unexpected that NBC had switched over the broadcast and the NBC broadcasters only issued a half-apology saying it was "extremely unlikely" she'd make a medal podium. Her own reaction to winning was even more apropos.

 Credit: The Guardian

2. Martin Fourcade-FRA-Biathlon-For my money, the most dominant performance of the games. He came through in the clutch, he handled the lead, he took the relay baton and won from there, he eked out a photo finish. He started his Olympic performance in terrible shape and it was easy to believe that the four-time medalist would evaporate but he dominated the next event. He also came back from a fall and a series of misses in the mass start to win by 0.19 seconds. Biathlon was constantly airing during the day whenever I'd turn off the TV and I had the opportunity to watch a lot of athletes shoot. Maritn Fourcade stands out visibly: He has pure ice when he shoots.

Credit: Frontier Parisians

3. Chloe Kim-USA-Snowboarding Half-Pipe-Part of this is the narrative: An assimilated 2nd generation South Korean succeeding in an Olympics in South Korea. Kim is a media-friendly personality and a South Korean who navigates both cultures well: When my slightly conservative mom didn't like the blond streaks in her hair but was impressed with her interviews, I knew Kim was onto something. Under big pressure, Kim dominated her event with a 93.75 out of 100, and then when the Gold was assured, she turned her encore into an epic mic drop with a score of 98.25. Insane!

Credit: NBCOlympics.com

4. Jessie Diggins-USA-Cross-Country Skiing-Watching her battle it out in five events and come so close to making history as the first American to medal in a Nordic-dominant sport was heart-breaking. She soldiered through three individual events where she was achingly close to the medals (5th, 6th, and 5th) and skied the anchor to a relay that collapsed on the first two legs. In a staggered event (because people start at different intervals, when you cross the finish line doesn't equate with final standing), she skied herself to exhaustion against the clock and came in within 3 seconds of the bronze . In the sprint relay, Diggins not only made the podium but one the freakin' thing with teammate Kikkan Randall. She then competed in a 6th event-the 50k (basically a marathon but probably more puke-inducing)- finishing 7th. Quite an aerobic workout.

Credit: Voanews.com

5. Marcel Hirscher-AUT-Alpine Skiing (technical events)-If not for his slalom blunder, he could have been the most dominant guy in the games. I was partially influenced by hearing how meticulous and dominant he has been and how to approach a slope. He won golds in combined and giant slalom and flirted with the idea of being the first person since 1992. He flirted with the idea of being the first man since 1968 to earn 3 Golds in the same Olympics.

Credit: www.STL.news

6. Mikaela Shiffrin-USA-Skiing- Fourth, second, and first through three events Alpine events. If you were one of the people calling her performance a failure, go away. Because you're not seeing your competitors as you're skiing down, skiing is a sport with a humongous variation and Shiffrin largely kept her nerves, was a menacing threat in everything she raced, and should be applauded for her strategic decisions (dropping the downhill to focus on Combined). She's incredibly consistent in a skiing program that today just doesn't compare to the Austrians, Swiss, Italians, French or Norwegians.

Credit: Fox News

7. Yun Sung-bin AKA Iron Man-SKOR-Skeleton-The 23-year-old has swag galore and dominated his event like nothing I've seen. He had the fastest time on all his runs and set a track record. This is a guy who rose to 5th in the world rankings within a year of first picking up the sport. He's a fast learner and a fast slider.

8. Nathan Chen-USA-Figure Skating-The AV Club did an inventory on fictional champions in sports films who don't actually win at their sport. The sports world needs more of these stories to show us the listen that we were always told in little league but never applied as sports spectators in adulthood: "It's not whether you win or lose but how you play the game." Nathan Chen didn't medal but he came so close from so far away with such an unquestionably extraordinary performance. Few times have American sports fans been happier with a fifth place finish.

Credit: LA Times

9. Sven Kramer-HOL-Speed Skating (distance)-Remember all the hype about Shani Davis trying to win three golds back-to-back. Kramer did it here leading another all-Dutch sweep. He's a nine-time medalist with a boatload of other claims to being among the greatest ever at his sport. He failed to do much else, falling out of the medals in the 10000 m, a disappointing bronze in the team, and failing which places him a little lower than expected. Still, three golds consecutively in the same event is exceedingly rare. No American male has never done this.

Credit: JapanTimes.com

10. Shaun White-USA-Snowboard Halfpipe-On his last run, White catapulted back into Gold with a run of 97.25 out of 100. Near perfection under pressure. White is the first male American to win 3 Golds in separate Olympics. Also worth noting, he did this non-consecutively (4th in Sochi). Love him or hate him, that's pretty amazing to be at such a high level for 12 straight years.

Credit: BaltimoreSun

11. Marit Bjeorgen-NRW-Cross-Country Skiing-Now the most accomplished athlete in history, Bjeorgen owns eight gold medals and fifteen overall. At 37, she had ten medals and her age left doubts over how much damage she could do against Bjorn Dahllie who previously held the record at 13. She anchored the 4 X 5 km medley relay's hopes as an underdog and won the grueling 30km mass start.

Credit: FIS

12. Aksel Lund Svindal-NRW-Alpine Skiing (speed)-For someone who gets so electrified by watching this sport, I should pay attention to it more often. But even though I tune out in the off-years I have remembered the name Aksel Lund Svindal back to the mid-2000s. This guy has been dominant forever through World Cups and Olympics and what a great swan song to come back from injuries debilitating enough to prevent him from doing any slaloms (greatly decreasing his possible medal count) to be able to win the Gold. At 35, he is the oldest alpine skiing medalist ever. Maybe there's hope for me at a year younger to make an Olympics podium. The camaraderie between Svindal and his Norweigan teammates was also touched upon in the broadcasting and in articles: The guys have a "no jerks allowed" rule and eat meals together where they turn off their cell phones beforehand...can you imagine that level of intimacy?? 

Source: CNN.com

13. Jamie Anderson-USA-Snowboard Big Air and Slopestyle-This freewheeling personality defended her title in slopestyle and took silver in big air tying her with Shaun White and Kelly Clark being the only other to win three medals in one Olympics. She's also quite the hippie.

14. The Late Steve Holcomb-USA-Bobsledding-One of the most gooey stories of the Games was from a guy who wasn't even there. Steve Holcomb piloted the bobsled to an improbable Gold in 2010 and died this past May. He must have been quite the personality because every bobsledder and luger has been sobbing when his name came up. If anyone's positive effect on his or her peers was portrayed through the inspirational background videos, it was this guy. His mom was at the games and watching the other athletes hug her mom filled me up with all sorts of goo as well.

15. Red Gerard-USA-Snowboarding Slopetsyle-This 17-year-old from Colorado with a huge family on site was adorable. His winning run was a work of art. The first US Gold medalist in the Olympics, he had time to fly to the US, work the talk show circuit, and come back in time for a Big Air event where he made the final 12. Sadly he doesn't have red hair but his name seems fitting in an old-school kind of way. Also, look at that hat!

16. Anna Gasser-AUT-Snowboarding Big Air-Her duel with Jamie Anderson and winning run was just a "you had to be there" moment. Gasser came back from a deficit to catch Anderson on the last run with one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. Also for fun, watch this photo mash-up (part of which is seen below) of Gasser's jump.

Credit: NY Times