Hawkeye, Selling Sunset, Wheel of Time, & Your Spotify Wrapped

What I'm Watching, Reading, & Listening To This Week

Welcome to the most wonderful time of the year — a season when we as a community get to gather together and lie to each other’s faces about all the bad music we’ve been listening to!

[“WHAT!? I have never in my LIFE heard this song from High School Musical The Musical The Series!!! Spotify must have played it on loop behind my back while I was in a COMA for twelve months!!”]

Anyhoo—even though Spotify Wrapped is basically Spotify being like, “Look how much we’ve been tracking you all year, let’s celebrate this invasion of privacy!!”—I still absolutely love it. And I love that “Escape” by Enrique Iglesias is in my Top Ten, surrounded by the more expected participants: BTS, Taylor Swift, and Monsieur Harry Styles.

What I want to know this week is this: What’s the weirdest, most unexpected, OR most embarrassing song in your “Spotify Wrapped” playlist?? Tell us in the comments if you are brave! I wanna hear it!

Other than Spotify Wrapped, I’ve spent most of this week bingeing Selling Sunset [Everybody raise your waif-thin arms and yell, “Escrow!!!”]. But I did manage to watch a few other great shows. The holidays have hit us with TV riches! So, in lieu of my “Listening” and “Reading” categories this week, it’s going to be ALL TV ALL THE TIME.

Let’s get on with it!

In the News

• Rihanna was crowned Queen of Barbados! The Colonizers are Out! The Good Girl Gone Bad is In!!! We stan a Queen!

• OK…the actual facts on Rihanna are that Barbados officially said “Boy, bye” to Queen Elizabeth as their Head of State, elected a President, officially became a Republic, AND declared Rihanna a National Hero! You shall no longer call her RiRi, you shall call her Right Excellent Robyn Rihanna Fenty! That’s true! [Also, Rihanna is emphatically “NOT!” “PREGNANT!” ! ]

• The Annual Comedy Wildlife Awards came out and my two favorites were (1) this pigeon risking it all on a new lewk and (2) this harassed mother taking her child to Otter Time Out.

• Andrew Garfield is on a press tour for the new movie musical, Tick, Tick… BOOM! which is reportedly fantastic, but looks uncomfortably sincere, so I’m not sure I can watch it, to which Ben said I’m a bad person. *frowny face* Anyhoo, Andrew Garfield is proving to be the World’s Best Human. Please enjoy (1) this incredible interview where he explains grief in the most beautiful way, (2) this adorable video of him fangirling over the cast of, you read it right folks, Cobra Kai, and if you’re up for a longer read, (3) this article about his faith journey.

• Kristen Stewart got engaged to her producer girlfriend last month (!!!!!) and also revealed that she is a major Kirsten Dunst fangirl while sitting at a table WITH Kirsten Dunst, and sorry but that was the cutest moment I’ve seen on television in a while???? [This video at 43:40 minutes in] I would just like to repeat that this Blog is a stan of K&K (Kristen & Kirsten) and they both keep being the nicest, chillest people in Hollywood. Give them their Oscars now!

• Also engaged: Lindsay Lohan! Color me surprised! She also apparently lives in Dubai?? The news never sleeps!

• WSJ Magazine profiled Katy Perry—giving the world its first serious journalistic profile in which Orlando Bloom is referred to as “Daddy” SEVERAL times, and in which we learn that Katy’s favorite show is Succession because it taught her—*checks notes*—“how to strategize.” I do not know which Succession she is watching but it is not the one I am watching.

SNL Highlights

The host this week was Simu Liu, also known as Shang-Chi, also known as the cameo from Season 4 of Selling Sunset when Chrishell “““accidentally””” popped a boob out. The writing fell short of Simu’s breathtaking levels of charisma, but he seemed super game for anything. [Which honestly we also learned from his aforementioned willingness to appear on Selling Sunset, to which I can’t decide if I’m embarrassed for him or slightly impressed he was ready to risk it all for that group of vapid, hurting, passive-aggressive women who wear couture cocktail dresses and Louboutins to a dog’s birthday party.]

The musical guest was Saweetie but I didn’t see any of her performances because Peacock and Hulu appear to be in a streaming war even though Peacock is a stakeholder in Hulu? So we have to watch SNL on Peacock now?? And it only loads as individual sketches??? Instead of one continuous show as God intended???? I hated it! I want my money back! Fix this, Peacock! Let me skip the musical guest ON MY OWN!!!!!!

• Highlights: (1) “Simu & Bowen,” aka “being the first Asian” (2) “Touch Up” with Please Don’t Destroy, (3) “New Military Weapon,” a recurring sketch that’s only so-so but I can’t resist the inherent chaos of having a live animal on stage, and (4) “Karaoke All-Stars” which wasn’t as funny as it was recognizable [best part is Cecily at the end going all out on I Will Always Love You].

Watching - Hawkeye on Disney+

Okay, so it’s possible I was once overheard saying the following words in no particular order: “Hawkeye is so boring.”

And you know what, prior to November 2021, I stand by that! Hawkeye ~the character~ doesn’t have any real powers! He just shoots arrows, owns a farm, and *SPOILER ALERT FOR ENDGAME*, lets Black Widow die for him even though she ALSO HAS A FAMILY AND A FARM, CLINT, YOU JUST NEVER ASKED.

The secret to this show is that it’s not about That Hawkeye, it’s about Hailee THEE Steinfeld becoming New Hawkeye. And y’all I don’t care what you think about the Pitch Perfect franchise, she is a star machine. She’s Sandra Bullock in Speed, plus Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, plus Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, plus Emma Stone in every Emma Stone movie. She sells this show SO hard and I will throw Jeremy “Generic-Brand Daniel Craig” Renner a bone and say he has great on-screen chemistry with her.

Overall, my one-sentence review is: This show is whatever the TV version of a “bop” is. It’s super-duper fun, set in NYC at Christmastime, and ends every episode with a Christmas song. What’s not to like?

Watching - Wheel of Time on Amazon Prime

NERD ALERT!!!!!! Where my High Fantasy fans at?! [Shout out to Joseph for defining High Fantasy for me last week while we all slumped on the rug overstuffed with Thanksgiving Dinner. “High Fantasy” is one of those things you think you understand, but when you have to define it you’re like, “Uhhhhh…elves?”]

A very rough-and-ready definition is that “high fantasy” is set in a completely separate world from ours with its own physical laws and rules [think Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones] while “low fantasy” is where the fantasy world intersects with ours [think Harry Potter or Spirited Away].

Anyhoo, Wheel of Time is a set of high fantasy novels published starting in 1990. Amazon Prime brought it to television in a new series starring Rosamund Pike from Gone Girl and a very pleasantly diverse cast of actors!

It’s about a world where there’s magic, but the dudes effed it up, so only women can use magic anymore. [To which I say, sounds about right.] But now a powerful magical person—a Chosen One, if you will—is prophesied to come of age and they’re either going to save the world or destroy it and of course, we have to watch to find out which.

Three thumbs up!

[Caveat: You WILL see blood and guts but not as much as in Game of Thrones?]

Watching - The Sex Lives of College Girls on HBO

You’re either 1) already watching this, 2) never heard of it, or 3) only know it as “the new Mindy Kaling show.”

I’m only three episodes in but I really like it! It’s warm-hearted and lightly funny and it’s great to watch shows pitched solidly from the Female Gaze. [Don’t @ me.] Like Wheel of Time, they clearly put in the effort to find a diverse cast AND chose to tell diverse stories. To me, that’s the best thing stories can do in the end — show us what the world is like in someone else’s shoes. Don’t get me wrong, this show isn’t doing anything crazy profound, but it’s just enjoyable to watch. So far, it’s not nearly to the level of Never Have I Ever, the last show Mindy helmed, but it’s cute.

Sidenote: The craziest fact about this show is that the lead actress turns out to be TIMOTHEE CHALAMET’S OLDER SISTER!??!?!?!? This Blog is still recovering its senses! Also, there is a VERY hot guy who looks exactly like Natalie Portman if she was a 27-year-old man.

[WARNING: Don’t watch if you’re a parent of teenagers and worried about their eventual foray into The S*x. This will stress you the HELL out. Also, it’s an HBO show so you know that means there’s nudity in it. You’ve been warned/tipped.]

That’s all for this week, folks! I’d love to hear from you in the comments! Tell us about your Spotify Wrapped, your opinions about the shows above, or your latest scoops!