A Show So Bad It's Good

Plus: Emmys recap and another show that's good-good!

Happy almost-midnight, East Coast night owls! No, this is not the optimal time to send out a newsletter but sometimes you just roll with life! Tonight: Emmys recap, a bad-good show, and a good-good show.

Y’all hear about that baby pygmy hippo?? The internet fell in love this week with a positively adorable glob of shiny mud with eyes and a mouth pygmy hippo named Moo Deng who was born two months ago at a zoo in Thailand. Then, almost instantly after Moo Deng achieved stardom, the zoo had to install cameras and issue warnings to keep her rabid fans from harming her with their enthusiastic fervor.

As Taylor Swift, a person who may understand Moo Deng’s plight more than anyone, hath saith: This is why we can’t have nice things!

Anyways, I’m gonna be problematic here and say I thought Moo Deng looked a little slimy for my taste in snuggly animal babies and that zoos make me feel deeply uncomfortable and desperately sad and existentially adrift — but I guess the pygmy hippos are endangered so let’s save them and whatnot! Long live Moo Deng, relatable queen!

My question for you, because at this juncture of an election year WE NEED THIS: What has made you smile this week?

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The Emmys — TV’s night!

In case you’re wondering: Yes, the Emmys are the one where we award TV shows! The Oscars of television!

If you’re thinking “Wait, didn’t we JUST have the Emmys!?!” — also yes. The Hollywood strikes delayed the 2023 Emmy Awards to January 2024, so we got a two-for-one this year, baby! The strikes also impacted the supply of shows for this awards round, with noticeably fewer nominations in most categories.

The big winner of the night was Shōgun, a show I watched two episodes of and felt was regressive to the white-man-tells-Japanese-people’s-story basics of the 1990s. But now I fear I may have judged it too quickly! Or, this was a weird awards because of the strikes? By many accounts, Shōgun does suffer somewhat from that legacy, but in many ways also massively overcomes it. I am INSPIRED that Anna Sawai became the first-ever Asian performer to win Lead Drama Actress. There’s nothing that’s not WONDERFUL about that. Have any of you watched Shōgun? Any thoughts to share?

Here were my favorite parts of the night.

• Lamorne Morris wins an Emmy! He won for Fargo, which I loved. But also there’s a collective of us out there in the world who love the show New Girl and whose favorite character was Winston Bishop, and we feel he also won this retroactively for being one of the all-time greats in sitcoms. I am so happy that our community is thriving right now. Like here and here and here.

• People got to argue again about whether The Bear should be categorized as a “comedy.” The correct answer is No. Drama can be funny, but that doesn’t make it comedy. However, the show’s team chose that category for themselves, likely because they felt they had a better shot at winning it. This year, that strategy didn’t work out, as the *actual comedy* show Hacks won.

  • I highly recommend both shows! The Bear is a show everyone should watch: Beautiful, deep, funny, tragic, human. Hacks is a show you might need a tougher skin to watch: It’s darker and harsher in its worldview than The Bear, though hysterical and one of my favorites of the past few years.

• Baby Reindeer — which was truly a viral phenomenon — won several Emmys. My mom texted to ask if she should check it out, to which I said, and I say unto you: “Only watch it if you are ready to be unsettled in your heart and disturbed in your spirit.” I watched and thought it was very good, but also felt like I needed to sage the inside of my eyeballs for weeks afterwards.

• Ripley got a directing win! I really loved Andrew Scott in Ripley. It is quite slow and might demand an acquired taste; however, I found it to be, almost, indelible.

• Jodie Foster thanking her wife! I loved that: Something about seeing a woman who has been in the public eye so long and lived through so many years of homophobia and hiding, now openly showing her love. I also really enjoyed True Detective: Night Country, even though it didn’t quite stick the landing.

• Reservation Dogs star D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai was nominated for a MUCH-deserved acting award, and chose to take the opportunity to raise awareness about the plague of missing and murdered indigenous people (MMIP). Stop what you’re doing and watch that show! It’s so good, so funny, so dear, and SO educational [quadruple threat!].

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The Perfect Couple on Netflix

This is a soap opera starring Nicole Kidman. I ate it up.

Is it literature? Honey, it’s not even Lit 101! The Perfect Couple mimics prestige shows like Big Little Lies or White Lotus, but is absolutely more pulp than prestige, and I’m *pretty sure* it knows it and is having a bit of fun. It’s the equivalent of a ridiculous, fun, plot-driven, heavy-on-the-metaphors, not-intellectually-challenging beach read. In fact, it’s based on a novel of the same name by the “queen of beach reads,” Elin Hilderbrand.

In short: This show is not serious. It’s a show where people keep asking a woman whose best friend got murdered 12 hours ago why she’s upset; it’s a show where bags of drugs have the word “Caution!” taped on them in case you weren’t paying attention or were just born into the world yesterday. It’s tonally inconsistent, it dumbs everything down to a third-grade reading level, it’s deeply uncomplicated. You are not gonna have to put anything together with your brain; they are gonna do it for you, babe!

To bring this home for you: I’m not the gal who watches a murder mystery and figures it out. I’m usually the most surprised person in the room when the cops finally read the pepetrator their rights. But in this show, I knew who had done it by episode two.

It’s the television equivalent of a sugary cocktail, and I love a sugary cocktail at the end of a long day.

I realize I’m shitting on this show a bit, but I binged it in two days and had a great time. [Ben got hooked, too!] The beauty of the setting and camerawork and the elite cast really elevate it to something worth a zero-guilt trash watch: Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Dakota Fanning, Eve Hewson from Bad Sisters, Meghann Fahy from White Lotus!! [I think about these White Lotus S2 moments constantly.] They elevate a script that, in less capable hands, might be occasionally unwatchable.

Writer David Mack coined the phrase “Nicole Kidman’s Beach-Reads Cinematic Universe” and this fits in the oeuvre just perfectly.

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English Teacher on Hulu

English Teacher had me scream-laughing on my couch by myself. Most sitcoms take a while to warm up — you have to get used to the tone, the characters, the pace, the cast often takes a bit to really get rolling.

For me, English Teacher took no such preheating time. The first scene just starts right in, so hot and so funny, as if we’re halfway through the season and everything is already firing on all cylinders. The characters are fun, the plot is kooky, the script is perfectly smart and tight. Every episode ends with some feel-good togetherness, which is what sitcoms are for.

It also feels to me like one of the most hopeful views of what America can be, like Parks & Rec or Abbott Elementary if not quite to that level. [But with a lot more f-words than either of those shows.]

I’m curious to hear from y’all if it’s kind of a Millennial Show. The writer and creator, Brian Jordan Alvarez, is of my generation and it’s very much of a tone that hits just right for me. Anyone feel it was off for them? Too little? Too much? Just right?

That’s all for this week! Thank you so much for reading, for supporting, for commenting, for “liking,” for engaging with me in culture. It makes me so grateful to chat about things we love!