EPISODE 727: HOLLYWOOD COULD YOU PLEASE MAKE IT WEIRD
Yasss, Queen!
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome to another episode of me thinking about pop culture and sometimes God and sometimes other stuff. There’s a lot going on this week, so let’s just jump into it.
How To Train Your Dragon to Not Pull Focus
House of the Dragon’s HBO Max’s Game of Thrones prequel starts tonight, and I have a a prediction, which is that its chances for success are inversely proportional to the amount of time it spends with the dragons.
My gut instinct is that this is one of those bad “I am too smart for the world” predictions that will be tossed back in my face in three months (or 90 minutes), like my feeling that a show about a high school chemistry who cooks meth is just lame, or that a sequel about his too slick for words lawyer is too much of a good thing.
But just to make myself as much of a fool as possible, here’s my thinking: I recently rewatched a bunch of Game of Thrones, and the thing that surprised me was that in the latter seasons, anytime the dragons (mostly Drogon) are really around and doing their thing (aka burning everything around them), their presence completely overwhelm everything else. They’re just operating on a scale of threat (and maybe size) that nothing else can approach. It’s like having King Kong as one of the six characters on Friends. Like, how can I possibly pay attention to Joey’s latest audition if there’s also a 100 foot ape there, and at any point he might grab Gunther and take him up the Empire State Building?
(Enough with the Empire State Building, Kong. We get it, for a giant ape it’s the “urban jungle” equivalent of trees, but it offers you literally no protection.)
That was a show with one dragon (most of the time). House of the Dragon apparently has 17, 9 of which will appear in season one. Now, who knows, maybe the show ends up being mostly about them and not the humans, like that live action sitcom Dinosaurs but with better effects. Certainly there is tons about dragons that has not been explored—starting with their relationships with their riders. And it is called House of the Dragon.
(Also what an amazing fake out it would be if after all these trailers depicting a million people with white hair angling to rule Westeros the show ends up being a comedy about dragons.)
I am definitely fascinated to see what House of the Dragon has to offer. Given that it takes place 200 years before Game of Thrones, I’m hoping the world has some really different elements to it. Mostly I want more things to wonder at. I get it, the brand is political maneuvering. But there’s so much cool stuff in this world, too. I want a taste of that.
I wrote a piece for America about House for the premiere, sort of a “Hey, House of the Dragon, Catholics Have Some Notes For You.” And yes, I might have suggested that the notes came from Pope Francis, and until you get him to say otherwise that is my story and I am sticking with it.)
No spoilers, but I saw the premiere. Live feed of me:
What do you mean you don’t wear a Star Trek: The Next Generation onesie when you’re watching TV?
A Voice Crying Out In the Weirderness
I’ve got so many shows I’m trying to catch up on right now—Severance, A League of Their Own, Euphoria, Gentleman Jack, Foundation, She-Hulk, Uncoupled. A lot of it is really quality work—good characters, compelling stories. League of Their Own feels like it’s in the same universe as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, but with women’s baseball. Severance is creepy and artful. Everything I’ve heard about Foundation sounds like a visual feast. She-Hulk’s pilot was just plain fun.
But I find myself kind of having to push myself to actually keep going with most of it right now. And as I’ve been trying to figure out why, this is what I’ve come up with: Pop culture right now needs more weirdness. I need scenes that come out of nowhere and seem to have nothing to do with anything that comes before and are explained only obliquely three seasons later. I need aliens tap dancing in top hats through a military trauma unit before they abduct everyone with bullet wounds. I need a character who dresses as the Joker, and maybe behaves like them, and no one comments on it.
I’m not saying give me more mysteries, or Big Bads lurking in the background who it takes us a whole damn season to meet. God no. I am tired of Big Bads, and conspiracies, and answers that I’m supposed to hold out for. I want more things that are never going to be explained, or don’t fit the plot but satisfy in some other weird way. Give me a story going on in the background of a romcom where cars are randomly disappearing, and don’t ever explain it. Instead of musical episodes give me episode long dream sequences in Portuguese, and then have a dream sequence within that in Urdu that turns out to be maybe reality?
Give me a show where any time one of the characters gets sick they have to be strapped down because gravity no longer works on them—and the show is not about that. Give me a dog that talks once, and never again, and let the main character be haunted by it. Give me an office comedy where one of the characters stumbles on a little park in midtown Manhattan, and the whole episode is the joy they find in little things like caterpillars and the inscriptions on benches. Have someone who screams a lot for no reason.
Enough with not just intricately layered plotting but plotting in general. Give me moments that are random and experimental and incoherent. Give me enough credit as a viewer to let me see you at your messiest and intuitive and nonsensical. Forget the executives who need everything to make sense; put on your Hawaiian shirt and favorite shoes and leap out of a damn plane. Trust that we who are watching will love it exactly for that, even if it absolutely fails.
The critic it me wants to step back from all this and wonder whether there’s some cultural thing that I’m reacting to here. Maybe this is a response to the insanity of the last three years, and a feeling that maybe we’re now in a position from which to reflect on what we’ve been through, and madness is definitely a big piece of that.
Or maybe it’s just that I miss David Lynch’s third season of Twin Peaks, which really is one of the strangest seasons of television there has ever been, and I can’t say I understood a lot of it, but I can definitely say that is part of what made me love it so much.
Anyway that’s me. I’m good with great storytelling, but I need more random stuff to happen.
HBO MAX EXPLAINS WHY THEY CUT EPISODES FROM ITS SESAME STREET COLLECTION
As part of what appears to be our premiere cable/streaming network being torched by its new ownership, it was discovered last week that HBO Max has removed 200+ episodes of Sesame Street, for reasons that have been undisclosed.
Until now….
DRAFT MEMO
From: Your Biggest Fans Jim In Legal (lol) Your New Overlords (lol) WBD+ Management
To: The “Creatives” Whoever is Left After the Next Round of Cuts (j/k) (There are two more rounds to come) All HBO Max Staff
Re: That Kids’ Show with Luis from the 70s The Kermit Show The Muppet Show Sesame Street
Hey everybody,
So you might have heard that as part of our attempt to payoff the debt we incurred by buying the network new annual August firesale lack of interest in children’s programming (you want kids’ shows, go get a job at Nickelodeon, losers) important cost saving measures we’ve removed a number of episodes of Electric Company Mister Rodgers’ Playhouse Sesame Street.
Just to be clear, it’s just a few hundred of them, not all of them yet. And the process by which we decided which episodes to remove took place while we waited for Grubhub was largely about getting rid of every trace of Snuffalupagus (Snuffalapagus is the stuff of nightmares) (also it is impossible to spell his !%!ing name) involved widespread conversation among the four of us and a desire to offer only the very best of what Sesame Street is (we also got rid of Grover) (Seriously, !%! Grover and his weird chicken fetish).
We want you all to stop !%!%ing leaking about how pissed you are it’s a puppet show for Christ’s sake we just fired a ton of your colleagues, do you really want to test us? know that we are absolutely committed to the Sesame Street brand lol for as long as it makes us a ton of money (but also, Abby Kadabra Cadabra 4vr <3) (wait, why isn’t it Kadabra, that’s how we always spelled it) (screw how Doogie Hauser Howser spells it, it’s Abby Kadabra now, if you don’t like it we’ll off her too). And we’re also very much not open to hearing from you about anything, goddammit, get out there and make us some damn money if you think there are any episodes that we should put back on the service (yes please, tell us about how we need more episodes where an enormous bird giggles, that’s not creepy at all).
We appreciate that this transition is not hard for us. Truly, if you think there’s anything we can do to help make it easier, please grow up, crybabies let us know.
(I swear to God if this dragon show is not a massive hit we’re going to take the whole Sesame Street cast and burn them alive in the season finale, see how you like us then.)
THREE TWEETS
This Week in I Don’t Know What This Means, but It Feels Right
And in I Definitely Know What This Means and It Is Right
Also, This
I BET IT'S GOOD THOUGH
Wow that obituary from two weeks ago about the guy who wrote so much music for Sesame Street was fantastic. I really love to hear artists talk about how they do their work, their special skills or instincts. And Lawrence talks in a blog post mentioned in the obit about repetition as a key idea to his work. Once you hear that, you see that it's everywhere.
This week’s article is a real test of this whole “Let me suggest you read random stuff I haven’t yet read” concept. Let’s see how it goes.
Lastly, I got asked to write a piece this week about the Queenship of Mary, which is not a concept that I relate to like, at all. But I’m pretty happy with where I got to take it.
If you’re looking for the tl;dr:
Have a great week!
🙄🤡😂😂🤪😉🤭🤣🤣🤣🙃
😂😂🤔🤪🙄🤡 ppl