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Post by otherscott on Dec 29, 2020 12:03:25 GMT -8
I do want to make a longer post on I May Destroy You, and particularly my issues with episode 5. That being said, your capsule on Episodes 6-9 being the stretch of the year is absolutely bang on (I would argue the stretch of episodes from 4-8 on We Are Who We Are is the only stretch I consider better.) The flaws in that show bugged me a lot more than they did you, and I think there's many critics who they basically did not affect at all. I like the show, I like the ambition, and I'd be happy to see more if Mikaela Cole decides to make more. But I just think holding that up as the hold standard of anything that aired on TV this year misses a lot of shows that I think were a bit more complete and certainly more polished.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Dec 29, 2020 12:36:30 GMT -8
You know, here's the funny thing about "political" messaging on TV. Insofar as shows about race relations or gender are "political messaging" (which they can be, I just prefer to use that term more narrowly for lazy Trump-bashing, etc.), I mean. There are lots of shows these days which are "about" race, and yet I think a lot of these shows which are "about" race ironically have less to say about race than shows which are not explicitly about race. I was thinking about this when watching Undone, which I went into because it looked totally beautiful (as I assume everyone else also did), but felt sucker punched (in a good way) by just how much the universe of that show revolved around race, without explicitly saying so. I mean, you can totally ignore that part of the show - a lot of critics did, even the ones who loved it! - but it's there, and the show is richer for it. Whereas a lot of shows are very explicitly about the same sorts of themes, and yet have far less to say about them.
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Post by Jeremy on Dec 29, 2020 12:45:05 GMT -8
I do want to make a longer post on I May Destroy You, and particularly my issues with episode 5. That being said, your capsule on Episodes 6-9 being the stretch of the year is absolutely bang on (I would argue the stretch of episodes from 4-8 on We Are Who We Are is the only stretch I consider better.) The flaws in that show bugged me a lot more than they did you, and I think there's many critics who they basically did not affect at all. I like the show, I like the ambition, and I'd be happy to see more if Mikaela Cole decides to make more. But I just think holding that up as the hold standard of anything that aired on TV this year misses a lot of shows that I think were a bit more complete and certainly more polished. Yeah, I recognized a lot of the flaws in IMDY; it's just that none of them really damaged the show in my estimation. And the show's high points were really good. I agree with those who call it one of the best shows of the year, but the sheer number of critics who have hailed it as the #1 show makes me think some of them are ignoring the flaws entirely. Speaking of which, I have a vague idea of what your #1 show is, although I don't think it's a show I've watched.
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Post by Jeremy on Dec 29, 2020 12:57:11 GMT -8
You know, here's the funny thing about "political" messaging on TV. Insofar as shows about race relations or gender are "political messaging" (which they can be, I just prefer to use that term more narrowly for lazy Trump-bashing, etc.), I mean. There are lots of shows these days which are "about" race, and yet I think a lot of these shows which are "about" race ironically have less to say about race than shows which are not explicitly about race. I was thinking about this when watching Undone, which I went into because it looked totally beautiful (as I assume everyone else also did), but felt sucker punched (in a good way) by just how much the universe of that show revolved around race, without explicitly saying so. I mean, you can totally ignore that part of the show - a lot of critics did, even the ones who loved it! - but it's there, and the show is richer for it. Whereas a lot of shows are very explicitly about the same sorts of themes, and yet have far less to say about them. I get this, and it's totally understandable. I freely admit that I try not to focus on race when writing reviews (at least if the racial messages aren't notably textual), mostly because of how sensitive a subject it's become from both ends of the political spectrum. For instance, when Spider-Verse premiered, many critics brought up the film's racial aspects, and I personally chose not to mention those in my review. There's definitely a way to look at the film from that angle, but I felt that there were plenty of other things about the film that were worth praising, and I didn't want to give the impression that I was praising the film for surface-level identity politics.
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Post by otherscott on Dec 31, 2020 11:24:03 GMT -8
Number 1: Devs (FX on Hulu)
I never claim to be a critic, which means I'm under no obligation to pick the most well made show of 2020 as my number 1 show, I'm perfectly free to pick the show that suits my interests the most. Which isn't to say Devs is not well made, because it is. It's actually one of the most beautiful shows of the year, and the older I get the more that starts to matter to me in picking great TV shows.
But at heart I like philosophy and I like shows that tackle philosophical questions in an ambitious manner, and Alex arland is very capable of that. It's a show that has an interesting and engaging plot, and tackles determinism in a way that makes it easy to understand and absorb.
The characterization of people is a bit weak at times, but when the show tries to hit it like it does with Nick Offerman's character it shows that it's more than capable of delivering on that front, it just primarily has other interests. I really enjoyed every minute of this show and I enjoyed trying to tackle and absorb the ideas behind the finale and trying to reconcile it to the show's pure concepts.
2020 was a very good year for TV, and I'm very happy that it provided a unique niche show like this one.
I'm also curious what Jeremy had as my number 1 show.
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Post by guttersnipe on Dec 31, 2020 14:21:49 GMT -8
Number 2: We Are Who We Are (HBO)My number 2 show, and probably my highest recommendation of the year. I watched the first episode of this a few weeks ago because I love Luca Guadagnino, but honestly, I found it a bit of hard work. It's topically interesting and carries the kind of formalist breathing space that I expect of a very atmospheric film director, but frankly the character of Fraser was fairly repugnant (particularly when the elderly couple offer him a drink when he's a complete stranger who doesn't bother saying a word to them). I dare say I'll pick it up again, but the only moments I really zeroed in on so far were the Oedipal/abuse scene with his mother and when he stood out like a sore thumb with his indifference at the parade. I agree with you that Devs was show of the year, but bear in mind I was drawing from a smaller pool, so folks can interpret that however they see fit.
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Post by Jeremy on Dec 31, 2020 15:11:30 GMT -8
I never claim to be a critic, which means I'm under no obligation to pick the most well made show of 2020 as my number 1 show, I'm perfectly free to pick the show that suits my interests the most. This sounds exactly like something a critic would say. Anyway, I think I completely misread your earlier comment. I thought your hint about your #1 show was referring to a show in its second season (that wasn't as beloved as it was in its first) - maybe Ramy or PEN15. But no, you were referring to genre shows of the sci-fi/fantasy variety. Sorry. I blame the quarantine for making me dumber. Devs is a perfectly good pick for #1; I think the flaws bugged me a little more than they did you (like a reverse of IMDY), but it certainly was one of the year's most ambitious shows. It surprises me how few critics put it on their lists. Although Sonny Bunch, one of my favorite film critics, said he considered naming it his #1 film of the year, because "there are no rules in 2020." (He ultimately left it off, because there are, thankfully, still a few rules.)
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Post by otherscott on Jan 3, 2021 7:56:37 GMT -8
I watched the first episode of this a few weeks ago because I love Luca Guadagnino, but honestly, I found it a bit of hard work. It's topically interesting and carries the kind of formalist breathing space that I expect of a very atmospheric film director, but frankly the character of Fraser was fairly repugnant (particularly when the elderly couple offer him a drink when he's a complete stranger who doesn't bother saying a word to them). I dare say I'll pick it up again, but the only moments I really zeroed in on so far were the Oedipal/abuse scene with his mother and when he stood out like a sore thumb with his indifference at the parade. I agree with you that Devs was show of the year, but bear in mind I was drawing from a smaller pool, so folks can interpret that however they see fit. The tone really shifts after that first episode. Fraser softens a lot over the course of the show (with flashes of that first episode but never quite so concentrated). I think part of the theme of the show is how people can impact each other for the better of both parties so starting one of the characters with a lot of rough edges in order to smooth them out later is what Guadagnino sems to be going for here. Personally I quite like that first episode, but I have to admit I didn't quite know how to react to it at the time.
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Post by guttersnipe on Jan 5, 2021 3:51:08 GMT -8
I've actually since watched the second episode, and I'm starting to get a better feel for the tone and thrust of the series. It helps that Caitlin is immediately a more interesting protagonist (I loved the ambiguity of her muted reaction to her father receiving a delivery of MAGA hats), and I'm detecting a Rashomon-type structure in how it presents familiar events from different perspectives. I'm probably enthusiastic enough right now to dip into it every week or so.
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Post by otherscott on Jan 7, 2021 13:09:26 GMT -8
Okay social media has made me annoyed enough to do my "complaint about Episode 5 of I May Destroy You."
One of the things that has annoyed me the most about today's society is the stretching of words beyond their traditional definitions to emphasize how significant we should view them. A good example is the word "genocide." Traditionally this has been used to mean the deliberate killings and executions of specific groups of people just because of who they are. Obviously the biggest example is the Holocaust, but there's also Rwanda, and many examples throughout history further back of entire ethnicities being targeted by another group of people with the intent on mass murder and extinction.
In Canada in particular, we've defined two things as genocides as of late - the placing of Native Children in residential schools, and a host of killings of Aboriginal women. The residential schools is now called something that is referred to as a "cultural genocide" and 70% of Canadians agree with that term. While I agree that what happened was wrong and abhorrent in many cases, using an equivalent term to mass murder sets up what to me is a false equivalence. Similarly, while it's awful that many Aboriginal women have been killed, this is not a targeted attack by a group of people that we've traditionally used to refer to as a genocide, this is a series of homicides. Using a shock word to bring people's attention to things may get the desired results, but it loses sense of proportion.
And I think that's what things have come down to for me. I do believe cancel culture has become real, and it's not just a matter of "Actions have consequences." Everyone agrees with that, the issue is when the consequences become completely out of proportion with the action. Further, consequences are more and more being determined by the effect they had on the victim rather than the level of infringement and particularly the intentionality of what was done by the perpetrator. Justice has become a sense of "you need to suffer in proportion to what your victim suffered" rather than "you need to suffer in proportion to the offense you have committed."
So we come to episode 5 of I May Destroy You, and we see cancel culture in action. And I'd like to state with clarity that taking a condom off during sex is gross, and wrong, and a violation on a lot of levels, and should indeed have consequences. But I'm sorry, it is not equivalent to actual rape. And it feels like Arabella was uncomfortable with it and didn't have a chance to express it. But it felt like what turned her reaction from, "that was uncomfortable and wrong" to "this is a horrific violation" is the fact that the term rape could be applied to what happened. The word, and the extreme use of that word, influenced her reaction. Words shouldn't have that much importance. We shouldn't be using the use of whether this "word" fits this "action" to determine how bad an action was.
We have the ability to create new words, or assign words that maintain a proportion to the level of violation that occurred. But it feels like more and more that society has no interest in maintaining proportion. There is increasingly no spectrum on wrong actions. Bad actions, however bad they might be, deserve whatever consequence comes of them. We just suffered through a whole bean dad scandal where someone was harassed off social media altogether because he didn't tell his daughter how to use a can opener.
I'm not saying we should let bad actions slide, and I'm not saying actions shouldn't have consequences. But to me maintaining a sense of proportion is important, and this rush to define things by the absolute worst word that is somewhat adjacent to it is actively working against that.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 7, 2021 20:21:00 GMT -8
I agree with the crux of your argument (my feelings toward cancel culture aren't exactly a secret). And the episode you cite isn't one of IMDY's better ones. But I'm not entirely sure that you're meant to sympathize with Arabella in the episode. Obviously, many people (including most TV critics, natch) will see her position as the only defensible one. But I thought the episode was showcasing public pressures and the equalizing of different levels of immorality in at least a partially negative light.
I May Destroy You is a very nuanced look at the #MeToo movement and the wider web of Internet culture that surrounds it. And it's not the kind of show that will equate Aziz Ansari with Kevin Spacey. But by showing the way offenses of different levels are blended together in our "one size fits all" culture, it points out that a lot of activists do fail to make these distinctions. And that should frustrate everyone who wants to see creepy men brought to justice.
If you're saying the episode didn't handle the topic delicately enough, I get that. I think other shows have handled similar topics well before, some many years before cancel culture was a thing. Felicity did a great episode in the '90s that handled the "Does it qualify as rape?" question effectively and maturely. Although that was a two-parter that was able to tell the full story over ninety minutes; I May Destroy You has to contend with thirty.
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Post by otherscott on Jan 8, 2021 6:26:33 GMT -8
And I think a big part of the negativity was my assumption that this was supposed to be a victorious moment for our hero, as the show hadn't quite gotten to its good stretch of episodes yet and proven that it was very adept at handling nuance. But the reaction in the moment that you're watching tends to be the most important one, and I don't think the whole "we'll try to show you we actually can handle this with nuance" trick fully works. I mean, the next episode was one of the best the show came up with in that regard.
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Post by guttersnipe on Jan 8, 2021 14:28:40 GMT -8
In Canada in particular, we've defined two things as genocides as of late - the placing of Native Children in residential schools, and a host of killings of Aboriginal women. The residential schools is now called something that is referred to as a "cultural genocide" and 70% of Canadians agree with that term. While I agree that what happened was wrong and abhorrent in many cases, using an equivalent term to mass murder sets up what to me is a false equivalence. Similarly, while it's awful that many Aboriginal women have been killed, this is not a targeted attack by a group of people that we've traditionally used to refer to as a genocide, this is a series of homicides. Using a shock word to bring people's attention to things may get the desired results, but it loses sense of proportion. ... The word, and the extreme use of that word, influenced her reaction. Words shouldn't have that much importance. We shouldn't be using the use of whether this "word" fits this "action" to determine how bad an action was. ... But to me maintaining a sense of proportion is important, and this rush to define things by the absolute worst word that is somewhat adjacent to it is actively working against that. I'd like to venture forth (as something of a linguistics enthusiast) that I'm absolutely fine with this, and I'm going to set myself the challenge of trying to respond without quoting Frantz Fanon. Thanks to recent lockdown measures I've ended up spending more time with people outside my age bracket for quite some time, and I'd found myself often bristling for arguments about language given the regularity with which I'd encountered statements about "PC gone mad" and the importance afforded to the 'insult' of people not speaking English. In these instances I usually refer to Ben MacIntyre's etymology book The Last Word, in which he makes the claim that a key dividing line between the durability and extinction of certain languages is their ability to adapt and mutate or their stubborn refusal to accept deviations, citing English, Russian and Mandarin as the "linguistic sharks" of modern parlance. Within this notional framework, "cultural genocide" seems to me a sort of inversion of George Carlin's explanation of the "soft language" process of shellshock to battle fatigue to operational exhaustion to post-traumatic stress disorder. I've used it a lot myself, often in reference to the Stolen Generations of Australia, where newborn Aboriginal children were abducted and sent off to British and Irish convents and orphanages so that they might never learn 'Abo' ways. In other words, a systemic approach to eliminate an indigenous culture so that it dies with its existing users. To me, the approach is analogous, because whilst there isn't an attempt to destroy a physical people, the intention is to wipe out a way of life with a broad sweep of silence and division. Invisible barricades. I can think of another example in Adam Zamoyski's Poland: A History, which I read over the past month or so, in which the once-superpower had its borders crushed ever closer three times in the space of twenty years by concerted efforts on all sides by Austria, Russia and Prussia (and that's between more-famously prolonged conflicts with Sweden and the constituent bodies that eventually formed Germany). The catalyst for this triple partition was a joint convention between the belligerents that stressed "The absolute necessity of abolishing everything which might recall the existence of a Polish kingdom in face of the performed annihilation of this political body". The Russian-occupied areas arguably suffered the most, wherein the use of Polish language and history was sometimes punishable by death, resulting in an attempt to 'smuggle' the culture outwards via secret meetings, dossiers and books. By contrast, Poland itself is very much the pacifist black sheep of the continent, expanding its domains by marriage rather than conquest, ignoring the Vatican's calls to Crusade and becoming something of an umbrella for oppressed peoples, especially whenever their neighbours decided (with some regularity) to blame the Jews for various domestic calamities. The Vietnam of Europe was naturally rewarded for its educational and social aspirations with near-constant invasion. Finally I came to the thought of South Africa's apartheid situation, as reported in Richard Dowden's Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, in which the Dutch attempted to take a kind of moral high ground over their approach to the Africa Scramble, maintaining a stranglehold over their swarthy subjects long after the other imperial powers had relinquished their territories: "[In contrast to the United States, Canada, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand], in South Africa, the indigenous people are 75 per cent of the population. I once heard an Afrikaner politician quip to an American diplomat trying to foist a non-racial constitution on South Africa, "At least we left our natives alive."" Here again, a comparatively low death toll is only marginally preferable when one is forced to accept a top-down system of perpetual everyday oppression, wherein a miniature, sunnier replica of the Netherlands and Britain were established in an effort to make the existing society seem meagre, primitive, dirty and ultimately worth aborting. In summary, I believe that language is robust and adaptable enough to forever permit a distortion of weight, so I would also state that "character assassination", for example, is a welcome term because whilst defamation isn't hardly as severe as the actual act of murder implied by its source definition, an understanding is immediately arrived at by anyone who hears it as to the new implication. In fact, I'd argue that probably the only truly immutable word in English is "literally", as that has a very specific definition that doesn't allow for distortion into "akin to" or "comparably". Incidentally, I also like travel-based misunderstandings, like how Indonesia's "antik" means something new made in a traditional style rather than a vintage piece of work, and Japan's "manshon" is actually a block of flats, because that's their understanding of a large building that isn't a palace.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 10, 2021 6:51:58 GMT -8
While perusing the Metacritic compendium (having little else to do, of course), I noticed that Richard Roeper had a Best TV of the year list published for what I believe is the first time. I enjoyed watching him and Ebert back in the day, and I'm always happy when a film critic highlights TV shows in their writing. That said, his Top 10 is one of the year's more unusual lists - including shows like The Wilds, Bridgerton, Big Sky, NeXt, and Fear City.
But the most unusual list this year - like most years - is from Reason's Glenn Garvin, whose Top 10 of 2020 includes Homeland, The Chi, Killing Eve, Laurel Canyon, Stateless, and The Conners. None of these shows made it on a single other critic's list (although he does share Big Sky with Roeper). And his #1 show of the year is The Flight Attendant - which no one else put above #9.
I'm not at all trying to knock Garvin (heck, I liked The Flight Attendant a lot). Just find it interesting how his tastes differ from the overall critical consensus each year. I feel like, a la Armond White, maybe there's a cultural/political bend here, since most critics lean strongly left and Garvin is more of a libertarian sort.
(Also, I feel like crunching some of these list numbers to get more of a consensus feel.)
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jan 10, 2021 9:57:04 GMT -8
I don't think that's directly influenced by his politics - The Chi, for instance, does not strike me as an obvious pick on your best-of list if you're a hardcore right-winger - but isolation from other TV critics might have influenced that list somewhat slightly.
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