The holidays kinda gummed up the works around here—not that the holidays were bad, but I definitely didn’t have time to do anything on the ‘stack—and barring some weird shit going down, we should be moving into a place this month, so who knows what the next month will look like. I’ve got a backlog of things I intend to write about soon, but I’ve got a few things on my plate that I have to try to clear off first.
We caught up on some of the queue backlog over these past couple weeks.
Finally watched Severance (on Apple TV+). I loved it. Can’t wait for another season, and I really want to see how the Ms. Casey storyline progresses. Production design is top-notch. Kind of the perfect show to shoot in COVID, and a shining example of using a limitation (it shot before vaccines were available) and turning it into a strength, as placing the quartet of MDRs alone in the center of a large room really added to the sense that they were small pieces of a machine they couldn’t understand. It got the expected great performances from Adam Scott, Britt Lower, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken, but it also featured some great supporting turns from Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman, and of course Michael Chernus. Tillman slayed every scene he was in (especially the Music Dance Experience scene), and Chernus was everything a Patriot fan could expect of him with Ricken’s book reading being one of the highlights of the show’s first season. My only quibble was that I found Patricia Arquette’s accent work distracting, but it wasn’t enough to knock this down from being one of the best things that was on TV in 2022.
We also finally got around to watching last year’s The Worst Person in the World from Norwegian director Joachim Trier. The accolades (96% on Rotten Tomatoes, 90 on Metacritic, two Oscar nominations, Best Actress at Cannes for Renate Reinsve) were absolutely deserved. Reinsve is stellar, getting to use the experience of being adrift in your late 20s and early 30s, wondering how you became a passenger in your own vehicle, to show some serious range. Despite its foreboding title, it’s very much a character-driven comedy, and Reinsve’s Julie is many things—disaffected, charming, funny, lost, sad, confident, insecure—but she is far from being the titular being that could scare an audience off. It’s a beautiful exploration of what it’s like trying to find oneself, with all the mess, sadness, tragedy, humor, and joy you could hope to see along the way.
I rewatched Terriers, which is still as rip-roaring fun and tightly plotted as it was when it aired (but was tragically watched by almost no one) back in 2010. It’s on Hulu, and if you never watched it, rectify that. Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James are one of the most lovable pairs of down-on-their-luck partners you’ve ever seen. It’s sort of like if you paired Jim Rockford with Harry Lockhart from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
On the Munchin’ front, Adam and I have continued to drop episodes through the December doldrums while continuing to stay a month ahead on our recording schedule. We’ve dropped episodes 139 - We Might’ve Seen Peen, Everybody (S7E5 Strain), 140 - It’s Sub-Tropical Water Not Dom-Tropical Water (S12E22 Bang), and 141 - Tension’s Building in the Amandolas Relationship (S16E8 Spousal Privilege), and while they’re all fun, 140 is covering the Stamosode “Bang,” which was such a joyous ride of unbridled insanity that it garnered just the second perfect 10 rating that we’ve ever given an episode of SVU. It’s absolutely batshit crazy. If you were ever wondering what was up with this podcast, watch “Bang” and then listen.
Patrons (Munchies) also know that we dropped our December Movie Club entry on The Pope of Greenwich Village. For whatever reason, Adam and I pretty much live in the 1980-1985 zone for our Movie Club selections, having only done two movies released after 1985 of the ten flicks we’ve done so far, and the 11th will be tied in to the aforementioned Stamosode—Never Too Young to Die, which was released in 1986 making it the third-most recent release we’ll have covered.
Adam and I also appeared on the Storytellers podcast on the episode The Gold Cache. Storytellers is hosted by Derik Jones, who also does Ratchet Book Club. We’d been talking back and forth for months about Adam and I coming on, but with guest appearances, I assume it’s not going to happen until it does. Well, after an “oh, yeah, we should definitely do this soon” convo that in LA would have meant “yeah, if we run into each other randomly, maybe we’ll make something happen” but in this case actually meant “I’m gonna email you in the next couple hours and the ball will careening downhill sans brakes before you know it,” this one took off in a hurry. Adam and I were pressed into writing creatively like a day after the initial email was sent. Storytellers is basically a game of telephone in short story form. I went second of the four participants taking the ball that was handed to me, writing/recording a seven-minute segment, and then handing it off to Adam. I had a blast and got a chance to take it to some fun/weird places.