casey

i watch a lot of tv! here's what i think about it

[casey-watches-tv]

Hi nice to meet you! Because doesn't taste in tv tell you everything you need to know about a person?

At The One Where Casey Watches TV, you'll find reviews on some of television's biggest shows. Run by a TV writer by day and TV watcher by ni

I'm Casey and I really love tv- watching it, thinking about it, writing it, and writing about it. To scratch that itch, I've started a blog where I'll post weekly long-form reviews of tv episodes that stand out to me, in no particular order. I'd be so stoked if any of these episodes resonated with you too, if they did you should lmk!

Here's a quick snapshot of my vibe, to get an idea of the kinds of shows you can expect to see: I love a good family dramedy, most 90s sitcoms, and overall feel-good stories. I'll do a lot of throwbacks for personal favorites, but I do try my best to stay up on most current hits. There is simply too much nowadays to hit it all, but I'm open to requests if there's something you wanna see!

Before you start reading (thanks for doing that btw) here's a little bit about how I approach them. Firstly, there will be spoilers about the episodes I focus on, as well as the shows as a whole. I try to use an episode or two that really stands out to point out something broader about the series itself. I'll go through the plot of the episodes in decent detail, but I'm also assuming you've already seen it and will push past a lot of things that may not make sense if you haven't. Feedback on my writing as well as the content is always welcome!

I'll post all my reviews here and would love to interact with y'all if you shoot me a message or ask me a question, but if you wanna learn a little more about me feel free to check out my website!

[casey-watches-tv]

I Love LA episode 1.01 "Block Her"

Adults wasn’t for me, Girls wasn’t for me, and I’ve become desperate for a show about 20-somethings that doesn’t depict them as entitled, lazy, or ‘angry young men’. After seeing One Battle After Another, I was left wondering if anyone knows that Gen Z does more than go to protests and correct people’s pronouns.

I Love LA is the modern-day comedy I’ve been waiting for. I wasn’t in the Rachel Sennott fandom before- and I know we’re only one episode in- but I think this show is such a breath of fresh air. I’m going to unpack the pilot episode and why I liked it so much, but please give it a watch yourself and support LA-based productions.  

This episode follows Sennott’s Maia as she embarks on her lowkey plans to celebrate her 27th birthday. First, she has morning birthday sex with her boyfriend Dylan (Josh Hutcherson) in their Los Feliz apartment. He seems to be a genuinely sweet guy, and they have a palpable comfortability around each other. As they get ready for the day, Maia steels herself to ask her boss for a promotion.

But before work, she does a quick lap around the Silver Lake Reservoir with friends Alani and Charlie. Maia is all disgruntled because her former friend and current influencer Tallulah has posted a big brand partnership on Instagram. It’s unclear at this point what exactly Maia’s beef is with Tallulah, but Charlie encourages her to block her, while Alani argues that that will bring bad karma. Maia blocks Tallulah.

Maia gets to work at the talent agency, Alyssa180, where she works as an assistant. She knocks on her boss, Alyssa’s, door and delivers an articulate and well-supported argument advocating for her promotion. In the pilot of Adults, one of the main characters attempts to capitalize on someone else’s #MeToo moment to blackmail her employers into promoting her (and ends up getting herself fired). It really rubbed me the wrong way. Maia’s genuine professionalism and competence make for a much more compelling, relatable, and likable character- and pave the way for scrappy storylines that actually speak to what young people in entertainment have to do.

Which is exactly what happens next. Alyssa, mid-manicure, is clearly not planning on advancing Maia any time soon, so Maia finally sucks up her pride and name-drops Tallulah. We learn that Tallulah, based in New York, was formerly managed by Maia, until Maia moved to LA and Tallulah flaked on joining her, instead signing with a bigger management company in Manhattan.

Maia takes things a little far when she tells Alyssa that she and Tallulah are still best friends; Alyssa quickly points out that Tallulah doesn’t follow Maia- a result of this morning’s block.

But we soon learn that the emotional distance between Tallulah and Maia exists only on Maia’s end- Tallulah has flown in to celebrate Maia’s birthday.

Tallulah is a great character; I think everyone in this town knows one. She’s the effortless main character, taking up all the space in the room, and somehow always managing to get the whole group to do exactly what she wants to do. It drives Maia crazy, and for good reason, but it’s also clear that Tallulah really does love Maia and wants to give her a great birthday.

Maia begrudgingly agrees to go out with Tallulah that night, even though the big birthday plans are the following night. The next morning, Tallulah turns her nose up at Courage bagels that even Maia is too hungover to eat, bringing Charlie, who got the bagels, onto team Maia (it takes hours to obtain Courage bagels).

Tallulah then decides that she wants to go to the beach, which everyone, including me, balks at. Alani, who flew Tallulah out in the hopes that she and Maia would repair their friendship, agrees to go. But Maia fakes a work emergency while Charlie says outright that he won’t be sitting in two-hour traffic to go to the beach in the middle of a random day.

What Maia actually does with her day is email, call, and argue with Resy in an attempt to add Tallulah to her birthday dinner reservation- and push it an hour, in case there’s traffic coming home from the beach. When dinner time comes, she and Dylan happily check in at the front. But instead of being taken to their table, they’re led to a private suite already bustling with a party.

Surprise! Tallulah has managed to score something even better than a table at this restaurant, so forget dinner. Everyone is happy, even Charlie, so no one understands why Maia is upset that “all they have to do” is pretend that it’s actually Tallulah’s birthday and post a photo carousel celebrating her instead of Maia.

Tallulah and Maia finally have a heart to heart where Tallulah admits that she’s not thriving as Maia thought she was. She’s barely getting by. But her confidence and energy is how she gets the things that she does have. She even admits that she made a mistake in not coming to LA with Maia and asks if she can stay- and if Maia will manage her. They make up and have a great time at the party.

While Maia and Tallulah are really grinding, getting overlooked, and getting older without the things they thought they would have to show for it, the show doesn’t at all have a ‘woe is me’ energy. With remote work and tax incentives elsewhere, it feels like LA-based productions are dwindling by the minute. It would be easy for this show, with this premise and this setting, to take on an embittered tone.

But as a proud east-sider, this was more than the excitement of seeing your neighborhood on TV. The effort to not only shoot here but to embed the endearing character of LA into every element of the story couldn’t come at a better time.  Stylized montages honor LA that are most comparable to the homages The Bear pays to Chicago. It’s clear that Sennott really does love LA, and the way it warmed my heart showed me that I do too.

We'll get a new episode of I Love LA every Sunday at 7:30 pm PST on HBO Max.

[casey-watches-tv]

Atlanta episode 2.08 "Woods"

I really hemmed and hawed about which episode to cover; more often than not, each one had a ‘special episode’ feel. Atlanta had main characters and an overarching story, to be sure, but the show almost feels more like a cohesive body of artwork than a narrative- and I love that about it.

Some episodes were completely isolated one-offs with no regular characters, like a racially charged Black Mirror. Others were bottle episodes, following familiar characters through events completely unrelated to the main story. And yet Atlanta feels laser focused, because the show isn’t about Earn’s fatherhood or Alfred’s rapping career so much as it’s about capturing an emotional reality that is largely abstract. The main characters are individuals with depth and intrigue, but they’re also archetypes in Donald Glover’s trippy contemporary parable.

At first, I was determined to write about “Teddy Perkins”, a Darius bottle episode that was kind of a thriller? Yet also had some of the funniest lines of the whole show (“Yo Paper Boi! I threw some extra fries in there!”/“Take ‘em out.”/ “Just don’t eat ‘em, damn!”). Atlanta is meta as a whole with its consistently self-deprecating episode descriptions (“Season 1 was better”, “Emmy bait fr”), but this episode’s end credit of “Teddy Perkins as himself”, when it was actually Donald Glover in white face, was when I was officially hooked on the show.

But “Woods”, an Alfred bottle episode, is one that’s really stuck with me after finishing the whole show. It’s a master class in writing, and an impactful depiction of both Alfred as an individual and what he represents. The tl;dr of “Woods” is that Alfred, having stormed off after a fight with his girl, gets jumped in a dead-end street and flees into the woods, where he gets lost and scared well into the night.

I think it’s very significant that we tend to see Alfred in situations where he’s frightened and/or vulnerable. Beyond “Woods”, the show’s penultimate episode finds Alfred in what becomes a genuine near-death experience on his ‘safe farm’, which we can assume he purchased after being targeted by the “Crank That Killer” in a previous episode.

Having established that even the comparably unassertive Earn sometimes feels like a “big Black gorilla”, Atlanta challenges that perception by inundating us with Alfred’s humanity and vulnerability. “Woods” is a beautifully written depiction of all the chinks in the armor Alfred is forced to wear as a rapper because “that’s what rap is, making the best out of a bad situation”.

The episode opens with Alfred, asleep on the couch, waking up to a woman cleaning the house and chastising him. An incoming call from Earn disrupts the moment and reveals that there was no one there. Earn asking him if he’s “doing okay today” is all we need to see that Alfred was thinking of his mother because today is the anniversary of her death (Atlanta is wonderful at providing no more information that necessary).

Alfred tells Earn he’s fine, sidesteps Darius who has his foot in dough after learning how to make pasta in a dream, and hops in the car with Sierra, a model who he’s clarified is not his girlfriend. Alfred is even more prickly than usual for reasons we understand but Sierra doesn’t. Nonetheless, we see her make him chuckle and smile and impress him with her take-charge attitude.

But tension builds slowly as she nags Alfred to “level up” his brand. He mostly follows her around while she takes pictures with fans and demands try-on sizes from retail employees, leading her to question why he isn’t behaving the same way. She tells him that his “dope boy from the hood act won’t last long” because “nobody wants someone famous to look just like them”.

Things come to a head as they get pedicures together. Sierra tells Alfred that he “needs to post on Instagram more”, and that they could “attach their brands”, then snaps a picture of them together. Alfred angrily insists that she delete it, repeating that he “ain’t about that fake shit”. They fight:

SIERRA: You sitting over there, whining, acting like you better than me cause I’m trying to get paid.

ALFRED: Look, I ain’t gotta stop being me, alright? That’s something boring ass people like yo ass gotta do. I’m leaving.

SIERRA: I drove.

ALFRED: I can walk, ho.

This is all just the inciting incident that will lead to Alfred finding himself alone in the middle of nowhere, but it’s a super weighty conversation. It shows Alfred’s authenticity and desire not to abandon his community. But both sides of the conversation are a great thematic rumination, and Sierra isn’t just vain and superficial for the fuck of it. She makes some compelling points, namely: “everybody want to be a Black girl, but the Black girls ain’t making no money from it”.  

But back to Alfred, now wandering the street. At the end of a rural dead-end road, he encounters a group of teen boys, who seem to be fans. They recognize him and praise his work, but quickly start asking a different kind of question: “You alone?”, “You ain’t got no car?”

When the answers are no and no, they attack, pulling out a gun and stealing his watch. Alfred sprints into the woods, at one point falling and busting his lip, then running some more as gunshots ring out behind him. Finally, he throws himself behind a tree trunk, gasping for air.

He catches his breath- and comes face to face with a man who’s just plain weird. Alfred tries to go politely on his way as the man rambles on and on: “You want some money? Come on. Let me give you some money. You can’t go to the dance without no money, boy. Let old Wally help you out. Please! I lost my baby”.

This gets Alfred’s attention, and he turns around, with sympathy. Wally continues: “Take some chap stick. I don’t like sharing lip to lip. You got germs?”

Alfred, now feeling fucked with, stops being polite. He tells Wally to stop following him, but he doesn’t listen. Alfred stumbles through the woods for who even knows how long, with Wally following behind being generally eerie and irritating.

Night falls. Alfred, exhausted, sits down on a log. Wally, still here, nags him to get up and make a decision about what to do. Already at the end of his rope, Alfred starts crying when Wally says, “You’re wasting time. And the only people who got time are dead. And if you’re dead, I’m gonna take them shoes, and your wallet, and that shirt.” He reveals a gun. “Imma count to 30, and if you ain’t walked out of here by then, I’m gonna hurt you, ‘cause ain’t nobody out here but you and me, boy”.

Alfred forces himself to flee, again. Crying, he runs through the woods until suddenly, miraculously, he finds himself on the road. Dirty and bloody he gets a drink from a convenience store where he’s recognized by a young boy. A genuine fan this time.

Without the boy even asking, Alfred offers to take a picture with him, coaching him through some poses. Then he sends him on his way with a “stay safe out there”.

This might sound like an admittance of defeat, in a sense, given his stance earlier in the episode, but it reads more like an eye opener. This scene has a warmth to it. And Alfred isn’t any less himself in this moment with his little fan. Alfred’s just been through hell, but the point isn’t that he’s broken. It’s that he now understands that, whether he likes it or not, his place in his community is different now.

It's a great full circle episode that unpacks Alfred’s past and values, as well as what his character represents in both their fictional world and our own. What’s your favorite episode of Atlanta?

[casey-watches-tv]

9-1-1 episode 8.15 "Lab Rats"

After a lot of thought, I’ve decided: this will be my last episode of 9-1-1. This show is off brand for me, but I’ve actually been along for the ride with the 118 from day one. As a huge fan of Peter Krause (here he’s captain Bobby Nash, but he’s stolen the show in many of my favorite series- Six Feet Under, Sports Night, and Parenthood), I was seated for the pilot when it premiered.

I understood that this was going to be a hokey network procedural, and fully expected Krause to be the only reason I kept watching. Frankly, I thought he was too good for the show, and I maintained that I would stop watching when he inevitably made his exit. Well, eight seasons later, that day finally came, and I’m making good on my promise to bow out along with him- but not for the reasons I thought.

 I’ve come to really love 9-1-1 and have defended it on many occasions. It is a hokey network procedural- over these 8 seasons, a tsunami completely destroyed the Santa Monica pier, poor Chimney has lived through a bout of amnesia and a rebar pipe going straight through his skull (two separate incidents- and that’s just the tip of the iceberg with him), and my personal favorite, police sergeant Athena landed a passenger plane on the highway after it crashed into a tornado made of bees. I have been told that I can be pretentious about TV (and this may be true), but for eight years 9-1-1 has had me saying “some things are just for fun, and that’s okay”.

But the way Bobby was written out of the show is much more significant than just the departure of Krause as an actor; it’s a statement that 9-1-1 isn’t just for fun anymore. And maybe, it was never supposed to be.

This aired months ago now, but if you’re invested in the show and haven’t seen it yet, this is the part where I go through what exactly happened.

“Lab Rats” is the second half of a two-parter. In the previous episode, the 118 responded to a fire at a research lab where a new, very severe, airborne virus is released in part of the building. Only Buck made it out before a combination of a lockdown protocol and fire damage trapped the rest of the team inside. In the action, Chimney busted his oxygen mask, exposing him to the virus which- it turns out- has been turned into an even more deadly super virus by a villainous rogue researcher.

 “Lab Rats” picks up with this chick on the run with the only existing dose of a cure hidden in her Stanley cup, and the military now on the scene with the stance that the entire 118 should be sacrificed to secure the contagion. So, Buck and Athena are on a vigilante mission to obtain the cure and circumvent the US Military to save a rapidly deteriorating Chimney and rescue the squad.

So far, this is all par for the course for 9-1-1. A couple weeks prior, 9-1-1 operator and Chimney’s wife Maddie was kidnapped by a police officer/serial killer with multiple personalities and was so close to being choked to death that the next episode had to unpack her inability to speak. On Halloween, Hen’s son Denny was pinned by a rogue car, and Hen was barely able to save his life.

I came to love 9-1-1 for being a genuinely diverse and genuinely heartwarming show, but honestly, the past few seasons had begun to veer a little too close to trauma porn for my liking (particularly with Chimney and Maddie- she is always missing and he is always dying). But I stuck around because in the nick of time, everything always turned out okay. The melodrama and ridiculous plot lines skyrocketed, but hey, some things are just for fun.

This was my expectation for “Lab Rats”, and for most of the episode, that seemed to be where things were headed. Buck and Athena secure the cure and dodge the military who wants to preserve and duplicate it (which, of course, would take longer than Chimney has to live). They make it into the lab and get the cure to Chim, who takes it and immediately improves. The lockdown is lifted and the 118 begins to head out.

 But then, face to face with Athena through thick glass, Bobby seals himself back in the contamination zone and takes off his mask. He holds up his oxygen line, which has been torn in two. He’s been silently declining just like Chimney all this time, but he let Chimney take the only cure. Tearfully, he tells Athena that he doesn’t want to die, that he wants to stay alive with her. They tell each other they love each other. Then he gets on his knees, bows his head, and prays. And then he dies.

It took me by surprise and was very, very sad. Generally, I love being surprised by TV, and an unexpected character death is often a fresh, bold move that I admire. But this just didn’t feel in the spirit of 9-1-1. I was even more surprised to learn that Peter Krause didn’t want to leave the show- it was a completely creative decision. Here’s what co-creator Tim Minear said to Variety about it:

Variety: So what brought you to that choice? Because for years watching 9-1-1 it’s been pretty safe to assume they’ll always survive and always find a way.

Minear: You just answered your own question… After eight years, it just felt like, if we had any hope of creating stories going forward that have actual stakes, then someone’s got to die.

My thoughts on that are pretty succinct: you can have a bee-nado, and you can have Angela Bassett land a plane on the 101, but you can’t ask me to take it seriously. Some things are just for fun, and that’s okay.

[casey-watches-tv]

The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: A Pilot Case Study

I pride myself on my taste, so I rarely admit this but here’s the truth: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is my favorite show of all time.

As a devout fan of Aaron Sorkin, Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, and the concept of television, Studio 60 feels like it was made personally for me. A stunningly poor reception among critics and wider audience alike would support that claim. It was cancelled after one season.

I’m not bringing it up to argue its overall quality; its critics make some valid points. I’m bringing it up because, despite its flaws, it taught me an important lesson about pilot episodes- especially when compared to that of The West Wing.

Aaron Sorkin’s work is so similar to itself it’s a little comical. From one series to another you’ll recognize everything from cast members to episode titles to whole lines of dialogue. In fact, every one of his pilots shares the same plot: a character, fed up with the state of America, can’t stop themselves from launching into a public monologue that is both controversial and correct, and it costs- or almost costs- them their job.

These similarities are actually what made this a fruitful learning exercise for me; the differences stand out and reveal how the same story can be told more effectively. The West Wing, an objectively beloved and significant series, has one of the worst pilots I’ve ever seen. Studio 60, for all its lack thereof, demonstrates a clear awareness of its predecessor’s mistakes.

The West Wing follows White House senior staff and President of the United States as they fight an uphill battle to do right by America. Studio 60 follows the cast, writers, and executives of an SNL-esque late night variety show as they fight an uphill battle to do right by America... by serving it high-brow comedy. You might already be able to tell why one of these did better than the other.

In The West Wing’s pilot episode, deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) is on the chopping block after losing his temper in a televised debate with a Christian politician (“Lady, the God you pray to is too busy being indicted for tax fraud!”).

But before we find this out, the episode opens with deputy communications director, Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe), sitting at a bar with a reporter (Billy), who is begging Sam to go on the record admitting that Josh is about to be fired.

I think of this scene often because when I watched it, I had absolutely no idea which one of these men I was supposed to be paying attention to, who Josh was, why he might be getting fired, or why I should care. I spent the scene desperately looking for something to anchor me into the story and coming up empty. Sam and Billy come across as equally important in this scene. Yet Rob Lowe’s top billing in the opening credits indicates that he's the show’s main character, and we’ll never see Billy again. Who’d’ve thought?

The episode goes on to introduce the rest of the senior staff with admittedly more success. In this case by ‘success’, I mean clear readability into who the main character is in every scene. Nonetheless, Josh's outburst, which dominates this episode is, in the grand scheme of his personality, an anomaly. And beyond Josh's own character, the premise of his potential firing is equally out of place for the show as a whole.

In the pilot episode, everyone’s pervasive anxiety surrounding the President’s potential firing of Josh presents him as a bit of a loose cannon, the wild card and liability among the senior staff. The further you get into the series, the more out of place this tone feels. While Josh is someone who speaks his mind, and will even make the occasional PR blunder- ones arguably much more serious than dissing Mary Marsh on Capital Beat- never again is it presented as such high a stakes failing of the administration, and never again is Josh's job even remotely in question.

Whether the effect is comedic, as in "Celestial Navigation" when Josh tramples over the minefield of the White House press corps ("So not only do I have a secret plan to fight inflation, but now you don't support it?"), or deeply serious, as in "Noel" when Josh's undiagnosed PTSD leads him to raise his voice at President Bartlet himself ("Long as I got a job, you got a job, understand?"), it will never again be in character for the administration to even consider turning its back on Josh. Yet in the pilot, Leo admits that Bartlet has in fact already ordered Josh's firing and he's now trying to talk him out of it.

An added point of confusion is that we only learn of this incident through snippets after it’s already happened. We hear every character talk about it, and we eventually see Josh obsessively watching a recording of the moment in question, but the context of the situation is ambiguous. How important is Mary Marsh, the woman he laid into? What is her job? How does it relate to the White House? Josh’s boss Leo has a conversation with a colleague of Marsh’s that hints at these things, but by and large, The West Wing pilot is a lot of listening to people talk about things that we haven’t been fully clued into. And without a clear understanding of who Josh is outside of this incident, it’s hard to feel overly invested in whether or not he keeps his job.

All of this has shown me what I now consider to be one of the most important qualities of a pilot: legibility. This episode would’ve been a great episode 1.12 or even 1.06; a strong pilot should not be interchangeable with any other episode in the season. A pilot needs to make it abundantly clear who we should be looking at and listening to in every scene. It should show us these people not necessarily at their best, but at their most themselves (in this episode Sam also unwittingly sleeps with a call girl he meets at the bar with Billy. The relationship he develops with her over the next several episodes will end up being very fitting, but in this episode what we learn about Sam is that he is someone who goes home with girls he meets in bars and knows nothing about. Throughout the rest of the series, he will never again do such a thing).

Studio 60, which premiered a year after The West Wing’s series finale, makes what appears to me to be a very deliberate rectification of these exact issues. First, it starts at the beginning. We’re minutes away from Studio 60 going live with their weekly broadcast when showrunner Wes Mendell is confronted by the head of Standards and Practices demanding that he cut an offensive sketch from the show. Wes puts up a fight, but ultimately pulls the plug on the sketch, begrudgingly replacing it with one that he declares has never been funny.

Yet minutes after the show begins, Wes is unable to sit idly by. He walks on stage in the middle of a sketch, sends the actors off stage, and launches into an on-air tirade about how “this show used to be cutting edge political and social satire, but it’s gotten lobotomized by a candy ass broadcast network hell bent on doing nothing that might challenge their audience”.

Wes is a bit of a mysterious character- but in this case, it’s used to the show’s advantage. He’s initially overpowered by the network, yet he’s developed enough loyalty among his staff that the control room leaves him on the air to rant for 53 seconds. Later on- after he is promptly fired- it’s revealed that his replacements, head writer Matt Albie (Matthew Perry) and executive producer Danny Tripp (Bradley Whitford), are former employees of Wes’s and hold him in high esteem. Yet, when re-hashing Matt and Danny’s firing from the show four years prior, the chairman of the network declares that “for the record, when I pointed you to the door, it was your hero Wes Mendell who opened it”. Matt confirms that this is true.

Like Josh on The West Wing, it’s hard to get a read on Wes. How unusual is this behavior? Why is his staff so loyal to him when we’ve only seen him let them down? In this instance, these are good questions to be asking. They add depth and intrigue to the main characters who grapple with them just as much as we are in the audience. Wes himself will be fired and never seen again on the show; we don’t need to have a clear understanding of who he is as a character. His impact on the others is what matters, and his exit sets the stage for the real premise of the show: the return of Matt and Danny and their rescue of an underdog TV show.

After Wes’s on-air tirade and the show’s opening credits, a title card that simply reads “Jordan” leaves no room for confusion in who we should be looking at in the following scene. Sure enough, we meet Jordan McDeere, newly appointed president of Studio 60’s broadcast network (the National Broadcasting System), where her welcome dinner party is interrupted by Wes’s televised outburst. She is thrust into damage control, and it is abundantly clear who she is, what’s at stake, and why we should care.

The rest of the main characters- Matt and Danny, and ‘The Big Three’ (stars of the show-within-a-show Tom Jeter, Harriet Hayes, and Simon Stiles)- are similarly introduced with title cards briefing us on the important people in each scene before it begins. If it wasn’t a pilot, this would feel strange, heavy-handed, unnecessary. Even still, this is an admittedly blunt way to go about it. But it gets the job done, and pilots play by different rules than the rest of a series.

On the whole, television is an intimate medium. We get to know the characters of our favorite shows as well as we know our best friends. We spend night after night with them in our living rooms. That’s the joy of TV. But pilots don’t get this luxury. They don’t get to shock us with characters doing unexpected things because we don’t yet know what is expected or unexpected. So, they have to find other methods to fast-track their way into our hearts- and make sure they don’t lose us along the way. After all, we’re in an unfamiliar place.

So say what you will about Studio 60, but its pilot isn’t confusing. Its characters are crystal clear. We learn Matt and Harriet’s history, Jordan’s unorthodox way of running a television network, Matt and Danny’s complicated feelings towards television as a medium (simultaneous reverence and contempt). All of this is completely consistent with the people we will keep getting to know throughout the tragically short series. The pilot episode is uniquely built to immerse us in the world without getting lost in it, an added consideration that this episode alone is responsible for.

Aaron Sorkin’s straightforward writing and comparable pieces of work make it easy to identify these important elements. With every new pilot I write, I genuinely ask myself if I’m writing a West Wing pilot or a Studio 60 pilot. But I would be remiss, when on this subject, not to mention the best pilot of all time: Friday Night Lights. To this day, it’s the only pilot that has brought me to tears (as it does again and again on every rewatch). In an unfamiliar place with people I don’t know, that is the ultimate feat of a pilot episode.

What do you think? Have you seen Studio 60? What are some of your favorite pilots? What do you love about them? Are there any you hate?

[casey-watches-tv]

Television Ethics on The Rehearsal Season 2

I’m going to have an unpopular opinion here. Nathan Fielder shouldn’t have become a pilot. It's not an ability issue- to the point he’s trying to make, I do believe he’s capable- but it took the show further away from what I wanted it to be. I watched season 2 of The Rehearsal in one sitting after four separate people on four separate occasions told me it was the most incredible piece of work they’ve ever consumed. I’m just not sure.

I’ll give it a lot of props- it is certainly one of a kind.  I couldn’t tear myself away. As a piece of entertainment, I do think it’s pretty stunning- and Fielder was clear that at the end of the day, that’s what it is. But he was also clear that he had a “somewhat sincere” intention, and did want to be taken seriously on the subject of aviation safety. I believe that storytelling should always strive to have a positive impact on the world, however big or small that impact may be. When Nathan Fielder explicitly stated the impact he wanted to have, and involved real people in achieving that goal, I believe he took on an added level of responsibility… and I don’t know that he utilized his power to the best of his ability.

First, I’ll do my best to summarize the show: comedian Nathan Fielder, through extremely thorough research, has been led to the belief that the leading cause of airline crashes is communication difficulty among pilots in the cockpit. With a desire to address this issue, and a “blank check” from HBO to make a comedy series, Fielder attempts to accomplish both goals in season 2 of The Rehearsal by creating a series of entertaining, extremely high production value social experiments that he believes may aid pilots in their communication with one another.

He makes some impressive strides. Purely by following his own train of thought and observations from hyper-realistic recreations, Fielder deduces that copilots interact with each other for the very first time upon entering the cockpit, and a lack of comfortability with one another makes first officers fearful of appearing critical of their captains. In attempting to work through this with a couple specific pilots, he discovers some personal weaknesses that unearth a pervasive issue in the profession: pilots often neglect addressing their mental health as any official documentation of their struggles can risk their license.

I found all of this interesting, entertaining, highly unusual, and productive- all the boxes Fielder stated he aimed to check. Where I start to have issue is when it came time for Fielder to act on his deductions. It began with his “in” to potential policy change: Congressman Steve Cohen. After fears that his online reputation would deter him from securing official meetings, Fielder did some research and discovered a niche fanbase he wasn’t aware he had: the autistic community.

Fielder reaches out to the Center for Autism, where he learns that the concept of The Rehearsal has been validating to many autistic people who mask in social situations and prepare for unfamiliar experiences by rehearsing them. He invites autistic children to his picture-perfect replica of the Houston airport, allowing them work through travel anxiety by becoming familiar with their environment. The relationship he builds allows him to accomplish his goal: gaining an official connection to the organization that he can use as a talking point with Congressman Cohen, an advocate for the subject. The whole thing also hints at the idea that Fielder himself may have autism, though Fielder makes a point to use ‘us’ and ‘them’ language to separate himself from the autistic community.

Fielder scores a meeting with Congressman Cohen- a real, taped meeting with the real Congressman. I have a couple issues with this meeting. My first thought after he reveals that it’s happening is that I don’t think we’re ready for this yet. Fielder’s ally and link to credibility in all this, former National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia, warns Fielder that he can’t go into an official meeting without a plan. They need to have a clear policy change that they are lobbying for. At the time that Fielder enters his meeting with Congressman Cohen, we haven’t yet seen such a plan.

As he enters the meeting, Fielder also makes it a point that he did not rehearse the meeting beforehand. He states clearly that while he finds rehearsals helpful, he is not someone for whom they are a necessity- another explicit distinction between himself and autistic people. He stumbles over himself in the meeting and has to take out his notes, but for me, this is not enough of a comedic payoff to make his pointed othering of the autistic community anything other than odd and uncomfortable.

In the season finale, “My Controls”, it becomes clear why Fielder was making these not-so-subtle distinctions. Over the last two years, he himself has become a licensed pilot; for his final set piece, Fielder will finally get cameras in the cockpit of a Boeing 737 passenger plane by being the one to fly it. As he completes his paperwork that will clear him to fly a passenger plane, he experiences firsthand what the pilots he’s worked with have suggested: a formal diagnosis of autism, ADHD, anxiety, depression, and a host of other things would all pose a significant threat to his clearance to fly.

Fielder does his due diligence of seeing a psychologist and gets an fMRI which could indicate potential mental disorders (the validity of an fMRI alone in diagnosing autism or anything else is a separate conversation), but the results won’t come in until after his meticulously scheduled flight. So, he fills out the form with the knowledge he has at the time and moves forward with the flight. He will personally record the dynamic in his cockpit and attempt to utilize the communication tools he’s come up with.

The solution to in-flight tension that Fielder pitched to Congressman Cohen feels extremely anticlimactic to me. He’s essentially suggested an improv exercise be presented to a captain and first officer at the beginning of their flight. The captain plays the role of Captain Allears, a good listener, while the first officer plays the role of First Officer Blunt, a co-pilot who isn’t afraid to assert themself. Fielder describes this solution as “elegant”, “simple”, and “unobtrusive”. I would call it rudimentary. And for all the elaborate testing Fielder has done to get us to this point, I don’t think he has anything firm to justify this particular solution.

Before the flight, Goglia offers another warning: Fielder as captain inherently changes the social dynamic of the cockpit. Fielder heeds this note and makes a point to select a first officer who has aspirations in entertainment, hoping to simulate the captain/first officer power dynamic in a different way. This is extremely flimsy to me. The experience level, energy level, and intentions in this cockpit are so irregular that I don’t think anything that happens in there will be applicable in any other context.

I’m not under any misconceptions that anything done in The Rehearsal is meant to hold up in court or under the scientific method. But by this point the show has fundamentally shifted in the fulfillment of both of Fielder’s goals: comedy and aviation safety awareness. For me, a large source of comedy was in the massive scale recreations of airports, cockpits, and apartments; not a single thing would differentiate the set from the real thing- except Fielder standing awkwardly in the corner wearing a laptop harness. His presence in the character he’s created for himself- uncomfortable omniscient observer who has somewhat inadvertently stumbled into having ungodly amounts of money to burn- is endearing and funny.

We lose that when Fielder centers himself in the narrative. He’s no longer just an awkward guy spending all of HBO’s money to help some pilots gain some self-confidence. Now he’s a guy spending all of HBO’s money to find a loophole that will allow him to be the least experienced person ever to fly a fully passengered Boeing 737. He’s playing God. And with any real productive outcome more unclear than ever, it’s just unnecessary and uncomfortable.

Narratively, I get it. The entertainment value is huge. The full circle experience of him becoming the pilot plagued by the obstacles he set out to overcome isn’t lost on me. And I don’t think he’s a bad or dangerous pilot. But he asked me to take him seriously. He said he wanted to enact real change. I think he could’ve made more of an impact on the issue if he’d kept being the guy in the corner with a laptop harness.

The thing that really got me was how Fielder justified the flight to Goglia: “I’m willing to take that risk, you know? I have my qualifications, but if I talk about my feelings and, you know, I’m being too transparent and I lose my license, okay. Because I don’t need to do this as a career. If it means I can prove the point we’re trying to make, maybe that’ll be worth it, no?”

He actually pulled me back in when he said this. If he went through the painstaking experience of becoming a pilot just to prove how little it took to lose those credentials, that would feel incredibly in the spirit of what he does. Of going to great lengths to replicate a life scenario purely to make a point. But he doesn’t do that. He discovers that he likes being a pilot. So, he doesn’t keep this promise, and that was a letdown to me.

The flight itself is anticlimactic. Both Fielder and his first officer are palpably awkward and nervous- but there’s no real data to be gleaned from this dynamic. Is it awkward because Fielder is awkward as a person? Is it awkward because there are cameras? Is it awkward because Fielder is in fact excessively checking in with his first officer? At some point in the flight Fielder implements his improv method, giving his first officer the character of First Officer Blunt. I’m not sure why this wasn’t done before the flight, but from what I could see, it had no real impact. And when the flight was over, Fielder offered no significant reflection on what the takeaways were in terms of copilot communication.

Instead, he was caught up in the euphoric feeling of safely landing a plane filled with people. He reveals that he has continued flying Boeing 737s since that flight, transporting empty planes that need to be moved from remote locations. He clearly has come to feel protective over his status as a pilot. When his psychologist calls him back with results from his fMRI, he deletes the message.

Ultimately, I think Fielder succumbed to his fear of not being taken seriously. He sacrificed going the extra mile and crossing the legislative finish line for his comfort zone of making a good TV show. And it did make a good TV show. Blurring the lines of narrator and subject, fiction and reality, is compelling. Becoming a part of the problem he had set out to solve is great storytelling. It’s cinematic. But it’s not helpful.

If Fielder had embraced his autistic tendencies, had seen his potential diagnoses to the finish line, it would’ve been much more powerful. Either he wouldn’t have lost his license, proving that it could be done, or he would’ve, highlighting a systematic flaw in the vetting process. Alternatively, if Fielder had stayed in the background, creating more social experiments for experienced pilots, he could’ve derived a more actionable conclusion that could actually hold weight with lawmakers. These alternatives would change the show, but they wouldn’t cost entertainment value. They would just cost Nathan Fielder the bragging rights of being the pilot front and center of the show that claimed to be supporting the people who actually do this for a living.   

[casey-watches-tv]

Adolescence episode 1.03

I generally think The People have pretty good taste. While plenty of gems certainly fly under the radar and trying to predict exactly what will become a cultural phenomenon is a recipe for insanity, I believe that the things that do ultimately captivate a mass audience are popular for a reason. All that said, I kinda think the people’s taste right now is the best it’s ever been. I watched Adolescence purely because the entire internet was talking about it, and I was captivated from start to finish. And the more I think about it, the better it is.

Each episode felt like a standalone piece that contributed a key perspective that, by the end, painted a complete picture. There couldn’t be any more or any less to it. The single take technique, which I’m often skeptical of as an awards-grabby party trick that serves no wider purpose, in this case cements the laser-focus of each episode. In terms of camera work, the episodes featuring more movement and more characters are more of a feat, but narratively I think it had the biggest impact in the simply titled “Episode 3”.

I don’t think I’ve ever before seen an episode of television that depicted, more or less, a single conversation. And I think it’s the most loaded, twisty conversation I’ve ever heard. “Episode 3” stays on a court-appointed psychologist making her fifth visit to Jaime in what seems to be a facility for the underaged criminally insane. She chats with a guard, gets briefed on an altercation Jaime had with another boy, and gets him a hot chocolate from the machine in the hall, then it’s in with Jaime.

The first thing I was struck by was how comfortable and adult Jaime’s banter was with this therapist. He’s not shy or afraid of her, but he’s not sucking up to her either. They speak like equals but even that’s not quite enough- it’s a power struggle from the jump. The conversation starts innocently enough, Jaime thanks her for the hot chocolate and Dr. Ariston adds that she saved him half her sandwich from lunch. Cheese and pickle. Jaime expresses some skepticism about the pickle, but says he’ll take it. He’s not ungracious by any means, yet now it almost seems like he’s the one doing her a favor by accepting it.

The conversation flows naturally for a bit, making superficial conversation about Jaime’s grandparents and how ‘posh’ he thinks Dr. Ariston is. Then she turns towards something definitively meatier: how Jaime feels about masculinity. She doesn’t get very far. Jaime senses her trying to get her hands around the conversation, and he bluntly calls her out on it:

“This all started because I said you sounded like a granny. And now you’re just going on about masculine stuff… The first time you came you had actual questions. ‘Is this right, Jaime? Do you know whether this is wrong Jaime?’ Now you’re just chatting shit… You are, because the first time you’re all ‘If an adult guinea pig eats one of its kids is that normal or weird?’ and now you’re ‘What do you call bread?’… It feels like a trick.”

This is the first of a few times that Jaime will get frustrated with the unconventional dynamic of this relationship, this interaction, this conversation. It will become increasingly evident that everything Jaime says is hyper-calculated, that he’s intent on ‘winning’ this conversation, but it plays by different rules than other interactions, ones whose ‘rules’ he’s painstakingly learned. Dr. Ariston is a formidable opponent as well, both in the context of this particular dynamic, and- we can imagine- as a conversationalist in general. She’s not rattled in the slightest at Jaime calling her tactics out into the open:

“All I want to do is talk to you, Jaime, and have you talk to me. Yes, I’ve asked some straightforward questions, but I think you, and everyone else for that matter, are far more complex than straightforward questions allow for... I could tell you questions I wrote down to talk to you about today, if that helps… Okay. Well, I wanted to talk about the fight you had… I also wrote down that I wanted to talk to you about what being a man feels like… It’s too big a question right? And the fight’s too small a question. Which is why it’s more useful to me to see where the conversation goes and steer it a bit into what you think of your dad and granddad, for instance. The type of men you think they are. Rather than saying, ‘So, Jaime, what do you think being a man feels like?’ It’s not a trick. It’s just a conversation.”

Move and countermove. Jaime can’t find a flaw in that logic, but he doesn’t like it. He tries a more desperate “Can I just see your notes? What you wrote, how you wrote it?”. But it’s a swift no from Dr. Ariston. And it’s clear that his desire is more nuanced than just power. After calling her out for her ‘trick’, he let out a regretful “And now I’ve pissed you off”. Jaime wants to come out in control of this interaction, but not at the cost of being perceived negatively. So, he lets the conversation continue.

Jaime cautiously entertains her personal questions until they get into his ineptitude in sports. He describes his poor soccer skills and his dad avoiding eye contact from the sidelines.

JAIME: Maybe he just didn’t want me to see him looking sorry.

DR. ARISTON: Sorry?

JAIME: I dunno. Ashamed.

DR. ARISTON: How did you feel when you saw that shame?

JAIME: You’re supposed to say he wasn’t.

DR. ARISTON: Am I?

JAIME: Yeah. You’re supposed to say, “Oh I bet he wasn’t ashamed.” “Bet you just thought that, Jaime.” Or “Is that what you really think? He wouldn’t be ashamed, not of his kid.”

DR. ARISTON: Have other people said that to you?

JAIME: It’s just the right thing to say.

DR. ARISTON: Isn’t it lying?

JAIME: No. I don’t know. I don’t like lying.

Jaime doesn’t want Dr. Ariston’s reassurance to make him feel better. He just wants her to follow the rules. To him, following these social rules isn’t a matter of truth. He’s uncomfortable with the premise of this interaction, which inherently deviates from the rules as is made frustratingly clear to him throughout the episode: Dr. Ariston is here to “get an understanding of his understanding” of his circumstances and the actions for which he’s been accused. As the conversation unfolds, it becomes more and more evident that Jaime’s understanding is chillingly clear.

Eventually, he’s reminded of his lack of control, not just in this conversation, but in his current situation at large. He gets antsy after unsuccessfully pleading with Dr. Ariston to get him moved to another facility. After she calmly asks him to sit back down, he explodes, smacking his cup of hot chocolate across the room.

“I don’t fucking wanna sit down! You do not tell me when to sit down! You do not control what I fucking- look at me now! You do not control what I do in my life! Get that in your fucking little head of yours! Fucking hell! Fuck.”

The guard pokes his head in at the sound of shouting. Dr. Ariston says they’re fine but takes the moment to step out and take a breath. The interruption brings Jaime back to Earth. He apologizes for shouting- and has the balls to ask for another hot chocolate. I don’t think he necessarily expects her to get him one- I think he’s testing the waters to see how much damage he’s done. That outburst wasn’t a part of his plan, it was a momentary lapse of the extreme calculation he carries himself with most of the time. The same lapse that allowed him to kill Katie, the same lapse that we learn in the following episode has always been a part of his personality.

Dr. Ariston returns and Jaime insists that he’s collected himself. Ariston, perhaps herself sensing that Jaime’s outburst has earned her back the power she’d lost in needing to prove that she wasn’t tricking him, gets to her meatier questions. She asks bluntly how Jaime feels about women, if he’s attracted to them, if he’s had a girlfriend, if he wants one, why he thinks he doesn’t have one. Jaime gets increasingly uncomfortable. A grown woman asking him these questions behind a closed door, peppering him with them even, without giving him any comfort or reassurance. Nothing about that follows any rules he’s familiar with. He’s already in the red and now he’s completely off his game.

“The other bloke is much more easy. Him checking whether I understand was much easier. Whether I understand what I did.”

There it is. Jaime’s mortified.

“Look, no, fuck off! I didn’t fucking say that! You’re fucking putting words in me mouth! It’s a fucking trap in here! You are! Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck’s sake. Fuck off! For fuck’s sake. Fuck. Fuck. Fine. I will fucking sit down. You happy now?”

He’s stuck. ‘Winning’ this conversation is pretty much out of the question now. But he also doesn’t want it to end. As far as he knows, she’s his only hope at bettering his circumstances right now. In some ways and in some moments, it’s suddenly glaringly apparent that he’s just a kid. He understands his crime and the potential consequences, but he doesn’t realize how deep he already is. And gaining control over and favor with this woman takes precedent over securing her help. To speak to the show’s title, navigating the maze of social status really is the most important thing to a teenager.

So, he jams himself back in his chair, and the conversation gets even more real. Dr. Ariston has brought printouts of his Instagram interactions with Katie. They unpack the subtext of Katie’s comments, the extent to which he was bullied and perceived as an incel by his peers. This is his real insecurity. He feels both his power and likability slipping through his fingers. He makes a last-ditch attempt to get some ego back, the verbal equivalent of kicking sand in Ariston’s eyes:

“Are you alright? You look a bit red. Did I scare you when I shouted? I mean, I’m only 13. I don’t think I look that scary. How embarrassing is that? Getting scared of a 13-year-old. Wow.”

But Ariston just persists with her questions, and Jaime has no choice but to keep answering them. Checkmate is closing in. Finally, Ariston’s had enough and heard enough. She asks him straightforward questions, maybe all that the first psychologist thought to ask: “Do you understand what death is?”, “You understand that Katie’s gone and can’t come back? That whatever claims you make to her character, she’s gone? That whoever did kill her, they extinguished the possibility of her future life?”, “Do you understand that murder is a crime?”, “You understand that if you’re found guilty, you’ll be held in detention?”, “Understand who will make the decision?”. Jaime answers all those questions, and that’s it. “Okay. Jaime, this is our last session.”

Jaime flounders, trying for this not to be the end, even as the guard starts removing him from the room. Desperately, he asks the question he really needs the answer to, the one thing, in addition to control, that he works tirelessly- and fruitlessly- for: “Can I ask you something? Do you like me? Because I like you. Not like that. Not fancying you. Just as a person. Don’t you even like me a bit? What did you think about me, then? Decide, come on!” And then reality mingles with the teenage desperation to be liked, and he shouts, banging on the windows of the room as he’s dragged down the hall: “Don’t you go fucking telling them what I did! Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare! Fuck! Don’t you even like me a bit? Just tell my dad I’m alright! Tell him that I’m okay! Tell him that I’m alright! Tell him I’m okay, please!”

His temper, his fatal flaw, cost him all those things and more. It’s why he’s here in the first place. But despite this seesaw of rage and disturbing calculation, the episode ends reminding us that he’s just a kid. The fact that he lost the game of conversation that he tried so hard to play is, in a way, childlike. How badly he wants to be liked speaks to his age, as does his simultaneous desire to impress and receive comfort from his dad. It makes the character of Jaime all the more compelling and all the more sad. And not getting a break from it, courtesy of the single take, makes it impossible to ignore.

This was a long one, but there was just so much here, in this one long take. What do you think of Jaime? Am I reading him right? Did I leave anything out? What do you make of it all?

[casey-watches-tv]

Severance: Can 'Weird' and 'Popular' Coexist?

I’m thrilled to report a resounding yes. If you know me, you know I love nothing more than a weird drama. This love has been a bit of a lonely experience; the best weird shows are either ‘cult classics’ (The Leftovers, Six Feet Under, Twin Peaks, Sense8) or started out mainstream but ended up with a legacy that I could only describe as infamous (…Lost…). Today’s streaming era has only exacerbated this lonesome road: with so much to choose from and no appointment viewing, it feels like catching lightning in a bottle to find someone in my life watching the same thing at the same time as me. That is, until Severance.

I don’t need to unpack this season or that finale, but I’ll tell you I loved every second of it. The truth is, I couldn’t do as good a job as all my friends and family members who dissected it with me every week- not to mention the countless people online who managed to make a compelling case for every theory from the Board being a collective consciousness of the Eagan lineage living in Jame’s brain (I’m buying into this one) to Ricken being a goat (this one not so much).

Y’all have shown up for this show in a way that has honestly filled my heart to the brim. I don’t have any light that hasn’t already been shed on the brilliance of the plot, characters, performances, or cinematography. So instead, I’m here to talk about the cultural moment I feel I’ve just witnessed… and make a pitch to bring back standing weekly TV appointments.

I think I had every viewing experience possible with Severance. I actually am pretty late to the game- I watched all of season 1 for the first time in a single day back in December. Needless to say, it was incredible, and from then on, I waited with bated breath for season 2 like the rest of the world. When I first pulled up Apple TV+ on release day and saw only one episode, my initial reaction was “Jesus, all the lead up to this day and we only get one?”. I’ve since done a complete 180.

The time to digest the developments of each new episode, to theorize, to reflect, to discuss, is what allowed it to become as big as it has over the last ten weeks. It’s also what allowed it to build community. Severance is so good that when a new episode did drop, rather than watching it whenever was convenient, everyone was watching as soon as they possibly could. It’s not the only show releasing weekly of late, but it’s the closest thing to synchronized viewing I’ve ever seen in the streaming era.

I was able to attend the Severance event at PaleyFest this past Friday, the release date of the season 2 finale. The event included a screening of the episode followed by a panel with the cast, director Ben Stiller, and creator Dan Erickson, moderated by Ben Schwartz. Despite technically being the same day the episode came out, I was so antsy all day waiting to watch it. I felt behind- all my Severance buddies were checking in, having already seen it, their world rocked. I was checking Reddit to be super sure they were, in fact, showing the full episode at the event, and everyone online shared my anxieties and eagerness to see it.

I’m not quite ready to call “Cold Harbor” the best episode of TV I’ve ever seen (it might be- I’m mulling it over), but I am ready to say that it was the best time I’ve ever had watching an episode of TV. And I generally have a pretty good time watching TV.

Seeing it on a big screen in a room full of fans truly confirmed the quality and community I’ve felt throughout this season. I was gripped. Innie and outie Mark’s camcorder conversation was impressively compelling. Their simultaneous conflict and cooperation had me on the edge of my seat, hand over my mouth. Mark’s reunion with Gemma was tear-jerkingly beautiful. And I simply had the time of my life watching Milchick groove to a marching band under colored fluorescent lighting. I didn’t want the episode to end. But the best part was that I could really tell that the rest of the sold-out theater felt the same way. Everyone cheered, laughed, and clapped in all the right places.

I was concerned as this season progressed that the audience would start to turn on it. Shows like this, which in their early days have weirdness bubbling just beneath the surface, at some point have to take a turn. What, in season 1, were one-off moments, will eventually have to take center stage. A glimpse of a breathing tube and shrine to Kier in Cobel’s apartment will become an entire episode. A tour of the Perpetuity Wing can, in the moment, be nothing more than fuel for the theories of die-hard fans- but soon the whole story will hinge on the seeds planted there. Stumbling upon a room full of goats can be written off as a ‘kinda weird part’ of an otherwise straightforward episode, but it can’t have happened for no reason.

Season 2 spent much more time in the weird, and in doing so turned a hugely popular show with an outwardly simple premise into something incredibly specific, strange, and unique. In the cable era, this would have absolutely been an HBO series, a network whose entire business model is based around the assumption that its shows will have a small audience.

So while I found myself smiling from ear to ear, thinking “this show is so wonderfully strange”, I was also holding my breath for it. But I could feel that entire audience eating it up just as much as me. Laughing at the way Patricia Arquette says “Mark”, clapping along with the marching band. I exhaled in relief and joy. There’s just something so heartwarming to me about so many people getting on the same wavelength with something so thoroughly unique. And something so exhilarating about the successful telling of a detailed, bizarre, yet ultimately very human story.

It makes me feel that as people, we really can understand each other. We’re capable of getting in tune with one another’s nuance. We can perceive the layered, emotional, and murky nature of situations and think about them critically. In fact, we love to. And we’re good at it. That’s what storytelling means to me and what makes me an optimist in this world.

I really think we’ve just watched Severance cement itself in TV history. And if this earnest reflection hasn’t convinced you to give up binge watching… you don’t have to. A weekly release doesn’t prevent anyone from waiting 10 weeks and wolfing it all down at once. But it does create the opportunity for human connection and shared experiences. And that simply has to be what it’s all about.

[casey-watches-tv]

Paradise episode 1.07 "The Day"

This show is so close to being great it’s kinda driving me nuts. The pilot had me leaning in- it’s actually one of the better pilots I’ve seen maybe ever. But it’s a bit of a rollercoaster from that point on. On the whole, it has an abrupt and jagged feel. The episodes don’t flow from one to the next; rather, each one builds to a flashy cliffhanger that the following episode has to go back and explain- time that would be better spent laying the groundwork for what’s to come. Episodes 5 and 6 were action packed and dazzling, but it was at the cost of investing the time to really make it make sense.

But this season’s (they’ve been renewed) penultimate episode reminded me of Paradise’s potential. It felt like a special episode in the best way, and in a way you don’t see much anymore. It convinced me to be more forgiving to the previous episodes and see them in a new light. While episodes 5 and 6 served to make Sterling K. Brown’s action hero reel, “The Day” did some much needed character development.

Aside from tense bookends with Xavier and Sinatra, “The Day” unpacks exactly what happened on- there’s no better way to put it- The Day. As in, the day the world ended. The way everything went down felt hyper realistic, which, on top of being terrifying, made all the players incredibly human.

Until now, Xavier has been a machine, and Cal, while charming, has been held at arm’s length from the audience. Dr. Torabi says that Xavier was brought to Paradise because of his character, but we haven’t really seen his tender side. Meanwhile, all we’ve seen of Cal is his tender side. But he’s pissed off more than a few people, including Xavier who said he wouldn’t sleep until Cal was dead. Cal’s charisma is off the charts and his situation with his dementia-ridden bully of a dad tugs at the heartstrings, but in terms of global-scale ethics, we haven’t really seen him do anything yet. “The Day” gives us the full picture of both of these men.

On the day, Xavier is by Cal’s side through it all. His wife Teri is due back from her ill-fated trip to Atlanta but shit hits the fan before her flight takes off. Through frantic news broadcasts and an emergency meeting of top-level White House staff, we learn that a volcanic eruption in Antarctica has triggered massive tsunamis that will cause global destruction within hours.

Overwhelmed but truly a show of strength, Cal braces himself as country after country goes dark, while others ready their nuclear arsenal. Every projection indicated that there would be at least a few days’ notice before disaster was this imminent- before news anchors were being swept away by tidal waves on national television. And yet, every one of his advisors votes to implement Versailles- which we know is the code name for Paradise- right now, today, immediately.

Cal puts it in motion. And it quickly becomes clear to those within the White House that death is imminent for everyone who isn’t a part of a plan that’s already been made. On a personal and national level, the sheer impossibility of Cal’s position is palpable. He tries going by the book, taping a watered-down address that will appear live, but in reality, will air when he’s already well on his way to Paradise. That plus the fact that it “reads like we’re prepping people for a goddamn snowstorm” is too much for him to stomach.

After taking the time to introduce himself to the White House janitor and urge him to be with his family, he realizes he needs to give all of America that same courtesy. He insists on being put back on TV, live and with no script, derailing the Versailles timeline and putting himself at risk in the process.

“My fellow Americans… I know you’re aware of the situation we now face. And I wanna tell you the truth. Our modeling shows imminent worldwide disaster, including here at home. I’m telling you this so that you can make decisions based on where you want to be right now. And who you want to be with… Despite all the ugliness in our world… despite our tendency to focus on the grotesque, and the conflict. Despite all of that, you are inherently decent. You love your families, your parents, your children. And I hope we can find that decency and love now. And if I may be so bold. To all of you watching who have meant something to me personally. Too many to name. I just want to say I love you. And uh… God bless you and good luck.”

I actually think Cal might be my favorite TV president since Jed Bartlet. I love this speech, and it’s abundantly clear that it’s the only thing in his power that he can do for the American people. Not everyone can be saved. Doing anything more would be futile and only serve to assuage his own survivor’s guilt while jeopardizing the people he can save by following the Versailles protocol. So when from here he lets himself be ushered into elevators and helicopters and planes as chaos erupts around him, it’s a show of both humanity and strength. James Marsden actually does an incredible job- the weight of it all is right on his face and you just want to hug him.  

Now let’s talk about Xavier. His anxiety for his family is palpable, but he doesn’t miss a beat on the job. In the few moments he’s able to get through to Teri, he makes sure someone else takes his place beside Cal. He’s beyond efficient, finding Teri’s best chance at making it to the necessary plane and ensuring his kids stay where they need to be.

All the while, he gets Versailles off without a hitch, holding panicked, lower-ranked staffers at bay, and elevating precautionary measures as needed without going overboard. You can really feel the utmost importance of both his family and the task at hand. And he doesn’t neglect either one. But when they get to the plane and Teri hasn’t made it, we finally see the chink in his armor.

He hesitates to board, finally letting it all out on Cal:

“She’s alone. I don’t know where she is. I don’t know who she’s with… I can’t get on that plane without her… She was there [Atlanta] because she didn’t know what was coming... You hinted! You danced around. There was no urgency!... I would have kept her close! I would have prepared. People would have prepared. But instead you played this game… You think you’re brave because you told everybody the world was ending 10 minutes ago?... You should have told us all 10 years ago… Look at what’s happening… Look at what you let happen!”

Xavier’s right to be feeling all of this. But Cal is also right that it is simply an impossible situation. And in a lot of ways, Xavier had more privilege than most, driven home by Cal’s final statement of “If you don’t want a seat on that plane, there’s roughly eight billion people on this planet who will fucking take it.” And he’s right. So Xavier gets on the plane.

To me, this exchange retroactively justifies Xavier’s leap into action in the previous episodes. To go back for a second, episodes 5 and 6 saw Billy’s death spark Xavier to launch a near instantaneous all-out heist against Sinatra. While Billy’s death was suspicious, it felt like a bit of a leap for that alone to justify Xavier’s immediate and extreme reaction.

While that was happening, we learned that Xavier’s daughter Presley has had the President’s missing tablet this entire time (?). After spending some time with Cal’s son Jeremy, they were able to get it open, and they learned of Sinatra’s secret missions to the surface and the killings she ordered of survivors that were found there.  

If they had gotten the tablet open sooner (which would’ve made more sense anyway- why has Presley been doing nothing with it all this time?), and shared its contents with Xavier after Billy’s death, his full throttle attack on Sinatra would be a completely proportionate response.

That all would still have made for much more seamless storytelling, but emotionally, this conversation on the tarmac in “The Day” explains Xavier’s behavior. All this time, Xavier couldn’t separate Cal from losing Teri, but he also knew him more intimately than most. Deep down, he does understand that it was an impossible situation, and he understands that Cal was a single, good-natured individual who had just been shouldered with quite literally the world’s biggest burden. One that he didn’t cause.

But Xavier, too, did everything right. He executed the Versailles protocol to the letter, and at the same time he did everything he possibly could for his family. His rage and grief are perfectly justifiable, it just wasn’t justifiable to direct it all at Cal. So of course he leapt at the chance to let all those pent up feelings out on someone less complicatedly innocent; someone who isn’t simultaneously responsible for the salvation of him and his children. All this time he was a powder keg ready to explode. If anything, it’s a miracle it didn’t happen sooner.

I’d be remiss not to talk about the last few moments of “The Day”, where Cal and Xavier both prove to us that they’re stand-up guys. On a call with the joint chiefs on another plane- one that isn’t going to make it to Paradise- Cal is urged to use the nuclear football to unleash America’s entire arsenal of atomic bombs. Seizing on the chaos from the natural disaster, other countries have fired their own missiles at the US, and if they’re permitted to make contact, they pose a threat to Paradise. Sinatra drives the point home by telling Cal that every modeled potential outcome of the Antarctica volcano ended in nuclear warfare.

But Cal reveals a third option. In addition to firing retaliatory missiles, the nuclear football also gives him the power to essentially shut off every electronic circuit on Earth with the flick of a switch. It would diffuse any atomic bombs that haven’t yet made contact. “It would also take the planet back 500 years. But that was better than the alternative, because it would give people a chance.”

How this doesn’t affect Paradise is a plot hole I’m willing to ignore. Cal takes this option in the face of Sinatra’s increasingly panicked pleas not to do it, to instead kill everyone left on Earth.

Meanwhile, Xavier has managed to get on the phone with Teri. She’s alone and scared and there’s nothing else to do. As far as he knows, he’s watching a nuclear bomb close in on Atlanta on a map. While Cal finally proves to us that he can do something, Xavier, for the first time, can do nothing. With no protocol to follow, no swift action to take, all Xavier can do in this moment is be present with his wife and love her. With tears streaming down his face (and mine) he does just that:

“Hey, I’m here. I’m here… Yeah. You feel me? I’m… I’m holding you right now. I’m protecting you, baby. I got you… I got you… I love you more than anything on this planet. I love you so much, Teri. I love you.”

So all this to say, I have some logistical problems with Paradise. But I’m willing to ride out plot holes if they come alongside emotionally sound and compelling characters. And I’m looking forward to season 2! What about you? Is this the new show to watch? Or do you not get the hype?

[casey-watches-tv]

The Sopranos episode 6.21 "Made in America"

I’m so often in the minority when it comes to TV finales- I spent this past year beating Lost haters off with a stick- that I was really looking forward to The Sopranos’ conclusion. Despite watching the show for the first time in 2025, I’d managed to get all the way through completely blind, aside from the knowledge that it’s one of the most controversial series finales of all time. In this instance, I have to say I’m with everyone- it was not for me. But the thing that surprised me the most: it didn’t make me love The Sopranos any less.

I generally find finales to be incredibly make or break. I try to reserve my judgement until I see a series through because endings can completely change how a show makes me feel. Shows I’ve loved dearly have taken a turn in the final minutes and even seconds that completely changed my perception and enjoyment- they showed me that they were never really about what I thought they were. I ate up every second of Ozark and Ted Lasso, but now it’s hard for me to think of them fondly- if I think about them at all. And yet, I’ve thought about Tony Soprano a lot since watching “Made in America”. I miss him the way you miss any comfort character. And I think that sentiment is why the whole show worked- except the ending.

I’ll set the scene- and tell you where I thought all of this was headed. I’ve always liked Tony. James Gandolfini deserves every bit of his place in TV history; the entire show is built on the complexity of his charisma. We saw him cry over migrating birds, dead horses, a lack of affection from his mother. Carmela, Meadow, Dr. Melfi- all the most sane and rational characters were never under any misconceptions of who he was or what he did with his time. Yet we saw them love him, care for him, and defend his character countless times.

His position as boss served, in large part, to insulate us from the abundantly gruesome nature of his work. He rarely participated in day-to-day killings so as not to risk getting arrested, which in turn meant we rarely had to see that side of him. When he did choose to involve himself, it was almost somehow selfless, an act of responsibility and honor. His personal murders of Pussy and his own cousin, Tony Blundetto, were preceded by long stretches of emotional torment and struggle. By the time he finally chose to act, his only other option was to let others do the dirty work for him. We’ve traveled far enough down this rabbit hole with him that we understand that that would be cowardly; that given the circumstances, he did the classiest thing possible.

In the last few episodes, something changed. Our trustworthy characters who, through their own complicity, gave us permission to enjoy Tony Soprano, started seeing him in a new light. Dr. Melfi finally began seriously entertaining the possibility of Tony being a sociopath, and we finally learned that all the little bits of his personality that consistently earned our forgiveness- his love of animals, children, family, his inexplicable magnetism amidst his blatant flaws- were all textbook manipulative tendencies. She certainly had access to this information all along, but her insistence on continuing to treat him is well explored. The pacing of her eventual acceptance of this reality is perfectly timed to make us question our own perception of Tony with little time to sort out the implications.

At the same time, the stakes are raised at work and Tony’s business life is starting to bleed more and more into his family life. Not only do we witness other people starting to view Tony differently; we start to see a different side of him ourselves. In rapid succession, Tony kills Christopher (a book could be written on that alone) and attacks Coco Cogliano (member of the Lupertazzi family who drunkenly harassed Meadow in a restaurant). It’s clear in the moment that Tony killed Christopher- or more accurately, finished the job of an extreme car accident- he was thinking of Christopher’s newborn daughter who would’ve died had she been in the car that Christopher was driving high. However, it’s the aftermath that’s chilling. Tony dreams of a session with Dr. Melfi where he reveals his utter contempt for Christopher- his addiction, his weakness, his obsession with Hollywood, an industry that Tony has always believed has done a disservice to Italian Americans. In the dream session he goes on and on about his lack of regard for Christopher, which turns into an admission in no uncertain terms to the killings of Pussy and Tony Blundetto. Tony wakes up in a cold panic over the admission of guilt, not his cruel- and clearly true- comments about Christopher.

In a real session amid a flurry of memorial events, Tony really does go as far as to say that he isn’t sad or grieving. That he feels better now that Christopher is dead and seeing others grieve or pretending to himself makes him angry. The theoretical risk to Christopher’s daughter that kept us in our chairs was not actually his sole motive. Was it even his primary motive?

Shortly after, Meadow reluctantly clues Tony in on the unwarranted and inappropriate comments Coco Cogliano made to her when he ran into her at a restaurant. It was demeaning and predatory, but it didn’t warrant what Tony did next which was so brutal I don’t even want to describe it. This is a far cry from the man who lost sleep over potential executions even a mere few episodes ago.

At this point I was pretty stunned by everything The Sopranos had just pulled off. I felt that I had been duped not by the craftsmanship of the show, but by Tony himself. I was feeling turned around just the same way as those in his life who knew him best. I really thought “Made in America” would confirm that that’s what the show was all about. My guess was that Tony was going to get arrested or killed. I thought this up until the credits rolled; it would be all the more impactful if it had happened at the last second, if we were forced to grieve Tony with no time to. If we were left with the complicated task of missing someone we’d just learned was really bad news. I wish that’s what happened.

The ending they went with made a very different point, and despite my lackluster feelings about it, I do think I understand what they wanted it to be. The final moments of the show would be completely unremarkable if not for excessively suspenseful editing and their placement at the very end of the story; after narrowly avoiding a hit on Tony’s life, the four members of the Soprano family arrive one by one at a diner. Tony’s first. He flips through the jukebox and eventually pays for a play of “Don’t Stop Believin’”. He and a man at the bar seem to be sneaking suspicious glances at each other. Carmela is next and AJ isn’t with her. They were supposed to be coming together. She sits down. He’s driving separate. Everything’s fine. Tony tells Carmela that the man who helped broker the deal for his safety has flipped, and more than likely, Tony will be arrested. AJ arrives. Onion rings come to the table. Meadow struggles to parallel park. She pulls out and tries again one, two, three times. Is the restaurant gonna explode? Is she gonna get t-boned? These are clearly the questions we’re supposed to be asking ourselves. Finally, she parks, trots across the street. The man at the bar stands up, heads for the bathroom. Or is he heading for Tony? He looks serious. Meadow enters the restaurant. Her mouth opens and her eyes widen in surprise. I’m on the edge of my seat, like I have been since for six seasons. And then I lose power or my TV breaks or something. And then the credits roll.

As I approached “Made in America”, I assumed everyone was pissed about this ending because Tony died or went to prison. It genuinely never occurred to me that what was gonna happen would be nothing. I’ll even bite and say that ultimately, the point they’re trying to make is that what happens next doesn’t matter. The feeling of unease that overwhelms that scene, overwhelms an average family dinner, the suspense, the looking over your shoulder, the sizing up everyone in the room, that is the point. Because even if Tony lived a long life as a free man, he spent the whole entire thing feeling like that.

But it was just too heavy handed. It was the first and only moment in the entire series that reminded me that I was watching a TV show and not just peering into their life. My immediate reaction was to laugh out loud and I can’t imagine that’s what they were going for. Ambiguous endings can be beautiful and powerful. But giving every indication that something huge is going to happen, and pulling the plug five seconds before it does, isn’t the same thing. It feels like a cheap trick and we, the audience, are the butt of the joke.

Nonetheless, I have to admire the balls. It’s not that they didn’t know how to end the show: The New York Family was closing in and so was the FBI, but there was still a narrow escape route that would be thrilling yet plausible for Tony to squeeze through. Meanwhile, personal tragedy was afoot at home with AJ’s suicide attempt, Carmela’s diminishing affections for Tony, and Tony’s own health scares with benign cancer and a gunshot wound courtesy of an addled Uncle Jun’. The Sopranos had perfectly set itself up for three or four potential endings that all would’ve been sound and impactful. Almost as if to make sure we knew that they deliberately didn’t pick a single one.

So all that to say, for me, it was a swing and a miss. But part of me still commends the swing. I’ve always known that The Sopranos was The Show of All Shows, and now I know that it’s for good reason. There’s infinitely more to be said about it, so if you’ve seen it, I want to know! Did that ending work for you? Is it crazy that I felt endeared to Tony for as long as I did?

[casey-watches-tv]

From episode 3.10 "Revelations: Chapter 2"

It seems that my parents and I are the only people in the whole world who are watching this show, and I am completely baffled as to why. Realistically, the answer is probably a combination of a weird, unmemorable title that doesn’t fit organically into any sentence (it actually might be the worst title of all time. I’m still not even sure what it means), inaccessibility (what is MGM+?), and an utter lack of star power (which I actually think is a plus). Nonetheless, I cannot hype this show up enough. It’s worth the stilted conversations where no one knows what I’m talking about, paying for it on Prime or navigating its maze to find my way to this mysterious MGM+, and falling into the plot without the distraction or bias of any familiar faces.

After aggressively watching Lost a year ago- and dragging everyone in my life down this rabbit hole with me- my mom sent an article adamantly declaring that this show called From that I’ve never once heard of is even better. I’m the first to come to Lost’s defense, but even I have to agree. On paper, the two shows are so similar that I was skeptical that a rip-off was getting such high praise. It even stars Lost alum Harold Perrineau, the only remotely recognizable cast member, though calling him famous seems like a stretch.

Since I haven’t yet encountered anyone who’s seen it, I’ll start from the beginning. The pilot finds the Matthews family RV road trip impeded by a massive fallen tree in the middle of a wooded street. It’s too big to move, so they reluctantly turn around. With no clear landmarks to get their bearings and a creepy burst of flight from a nearby flock of crows, dad Jim, mom Tabitha, teen daughter Julie, and little (but wise) Ethan slowly roll along. Everyone is relieved when a town comes into view. It’s bleak, shabby, and not much to speak of (think Schitt’s Creek but half the size and even more desolate), but it’s civilization, nonetheless.

Us in the audience are wary of this town after being treated to a cold open in which a little girl, despite adamant town-wide warnings from Sheriff Boyd Stevens, opens her second story bedroom window for a very frightening old lady eerily tapping on the glass and pleading to be let in. When morning comes, the little girl and her mother (the only people in the house at the time) are discovered, rib cages split open, insides hollowed out, blood absolutely everywhere. Smash cut to opening credits (a spooky rendition of “Que Sera, Sera”- I like it).

The handful of townsfolk (a few dozen, maybe) are gathered for the girls’ funeral when the Matthews’ RV comes into view. We learn from snatches of conversation that these flesh-eating monsters tapping on windows after nightfall is an understood, nightly occurrence. The poor deceased family’s absent, drunkard of a husband/father was unacceptably careless in leaving his vulnerable family alone after dark, windows not nailed shut. Yet when everyone catches sight of not only the RV, but another car coming along the road behind it, their reaction makes things even weirder.

Amongst murmurs that there hasn’t been “two cars in one day” in a “long time”, Sheriff Stevens tells everyone to finish paying their respects and then return to their lives- he’ll “handle it”. With the help of his young adult son Ellis and deputy Kenny, he kindly tells the Matthews that if they keep going straight, they’ll find their way back to the highway. But in an aside to Ellis and Kenny, he says he’ll let them “do a few laps” to “prepare them for what’s coming”, and in the meantime, they should get out the tire strips.

The Matthews indeed do a few laps: without ever making a turn, they drive through this same sad little town one, two, three, four more times. Panic rising, they eventually collide with the other car that’s doing the same thing. It’s dusk, little Ethan is severely injured, the driver of the other car soon succumbs to his injury (his surviving passenger Jade, however, will become a key player). It’s all a very high stakes and heart pounding way to learn the laws of the land: when you encounter the fallen tree in the road and the creepy crows, it’s already too late. You’re in town, and you can’t leave. And when the sun goes down, little stone talismans hung on walls behind closed doors are the only thing keeping out the scary human-like monsters that will sprout fangs and eat your guts if you succumb to their pleas and crack a window or open a door.

Throughout the three seasons we have of From so far, the more the eccentrically endearing cast of characters have tried to crack the mysteries of the town and find their way home, the more weirdness has sprouted up. It’s all very Lost- these wayward, quirky people are just trying to survive, but the weirder things get, the more these poor people seem to be fated to be here, carefully chosen by some unknown force for a specific, but as yet undetermined reason. I’ll often compare stories to puzzles, but every episode of From in particular feels like putting just enough pieces into place that you realize the overarching picture is bigger than you ever imagined.

My dad, who felt betrayed by Lost’s chaotic and confusing meandering, sat down almost nervously as we crammed all 10 episodes of season 3 into a 7-day free trial of MGM+. “I hope they don’t ruin it” he kept saying. I didn’t disagree- shows like this that are mysteriously building to a big something can all turn out to feel like a waste of time if the big something isn’t emotionally satisfying and narratively sound. I chose this most recent season finale to cover (I’m getting to it I promise) because this episode put more puzzle pieces into place than ever before. Show creators and writers have referred to it as the “end of the beginning”. To keep the puzzle analogy going, it feels like we have all the edge pieces in place, a border complete. And most exciting of all, I’m incredibly compelled by the image that’s beginning to come together.

If I’ve perhaps just convinced you to give From a chance, stop reading here and come on back once you’ve caught up. It’s time to unpack what I consider to be an incredible season finale.

The second half of this two-parter picks up with Elgin holding a now very pregnant Fatima prisoner in the creepy storm cellar, following the orders of the creepy lady talking to him through his polaroid camera. The whole town is still actively searching for her, but Ellis bursts into the Sheriff’s station, telling Boyd and Donna that he thinks Elgin knows something. They promptly isolate Elgin in Colony House, and Boyd brings Sara in to try to talk some sense into him.

It’s really helpful and compelling that the show drew this comparison between Elgin and Sara; Sara’s experience in season 1 is neither a one-off nor forgotten: it was a precedent for an even bigger event still to come. With now two incidents to consider- along with Tabitha, Jade, and Victor’s simultaneous work on the bottle tree- it seems clear that there are both Good and Bad forces at play in town and the forest beyond. Discretion is key. Fate is an undeniable theme of the series, and the forces of the town certainly nudge characters this way and that, but there is a time to follow and a time to resist. Elgin should have resisted. And this sequence of events only opens the floor for more Bad decisions.

The bottle tree, Victor’s family, Julie’s visions, and the weird little “Anghkooey” children feel very different. There is a very distinct separate-ness between the Elgin/Fatima/pregnancy plotline and the Matthews/Jade/Victor/bottle tree plot line that underscores the town’s division of Good and Bad. Throughout this season I felt increasingly sure that Jade’s obsession with the bottle tree and its numbers was productive, that Julie and Victor needed to face their fears and follow the paths in front of them, while Elgin was making a huge mistake. But not only that, following these forces of Good and Bad made the parties involved better and worse people respectively.

Of course, Elgin was succumbing to false promises just as Sara once made a fatal mistake, but this is only the beginning of Bad-ness surrounding the Fatima situation. Boyd, riddled with reminders of his own wife’s death, doubles down on his determination to preserve his family. Blind with this, he wastes no time filling a tool bag with what he clearly intends to be torture devices. He ignores his visions of Father Khatri (another supernatural source of Good, if you ask me), and actually goes through with it, hammering Elgin’s hand and revealing bone. The whole thing made me feel icky and sad. I couldn’t believe he did it, but really, Boyd’s judgement has been slipping ever since he found out about Fatima. He kept everyone else downstairs while he did it to preserve their innocence, but they’re all bystanders as far as I’m concerned.

Meanwhile, Jim Matthews has been working on himself in a kind of shockingly impressive way. It started with Jade, who actually did heed the ghostly advice of the town’s dead bartender. He slowed down on the drinking and gave Victor’s dad, Henry, the space and wise words to open his mind to Victor and his eccentricity. Henry then paid the unsolicited advice forward to Jim, who at long last stopped yelling at anyone who dared to speak to his family. He actually joined in on Tabitha, Jade, and Ethan’s quest to decode the hidden meaning behind the numbers, held space for the inexplicable, and turned out to be the missing piece of cracking the whole thing.

Things built to a climax (or should I say crescendo) as the group realizes that the numbers correspond to music notes. Things click into place seamlessly from there, the song suddenly coming to Jade as if he’s known it all along. Jim is hesitant to play it- a valid concern to be wary of things at this point, but I agree with everyone else, they have to play it. They just have to. They decide to head into the woods with Victor’s violin and play it at the bottle tree.

At the same time, Sara finally gets Elgin to admit where Fatima is- by cutting out his eye. I’ve been slow to forgive Sara, but this actually felt like a big moment of growth and understanding. She recognizes her mistake in trusting the voices she heard back in season 1, and also recognizes that the experience has already broken her. She actually protects everyone else by slipping upstairs without their knowledge and getting the whole thing done before anyone can intervene. The team races to the storm cellar, where Fatima is in labor and the ghostly woman is pulling a nasty something (definitively not a baby) out of her vagina.

The group bursts in to find an exhausted, childless, and belly-less Fatima pointing at the open trap door on the floor. Boyd doesn’t hesitate to follow the woman down it. What he sees is crazy. It’s the tunnels where the monsters live, and they’re all gathered around the ghostly mother and the lump Fatima just birthed. The lump grows and stretches. A human figure encased in a bloody, gooey film. Finally, out comes the one big-mouthed, smiling monster that Boyd had managed to kill with his skin worms a few episodes ago.

Upstairs, Fatima breathlessly says to Ellis, “Those things that come out at night, I saw what they are. They sacrificed their children because It promised them that they would live forever”.

A lot to unpack here, but it’s given some context by the wave of understanding that washes over Jade and Tabitha. The song seems to call the ghostly children out of hiding, who suddenly now seem pitiable rather than scary. The song also unlocks a crushing recognition for the two of them. “Anghkooey” means ‘remember’ and finally, they do. Tabitha is bowled over by this realization and can barely handle it. Jim, truly being his best self in this moment, pleads with her to explain. He doesn’t understand, but he wants to, he’s listening, he’s ready to hear it.

In broken sentences, Tabitha tries: “I know why I see those children. Why Jade can see them. It’s why there’s more than one bracelet. I kept making them. Somewhere, deep down, I remember. It’s because we’ve been here before, me and Jade. The reason I felt what Miranda felt… is because I was Miranda. And Jade… Jade was Christopher. We’ve come back over and over because we failed the first time. Jade and I were here at the beginning. We tried and failed to set them free because one of them was ours. She was our daughter.”

In Jim’s defense, I also don’t really have any idea what the fuck that means. Her and Jim’s daughter? Her and Jade’s daughter? Are they both incarnations of something even more ancient? And what is this ‘It’ that Fatima said promised the monsters immortality? But it’s a season finale, not a series finale, and these are massive steps in understanding the wider mechanisms of the town. It’s been hinted at for awhile that there are things out there “worse than the monsters”, and it’s satisfying to take a step towards bringing that blurry picture into focus. The way Tabitha said it also suggests to me a clear conclusion that this whole thing is heading towards. It didn’t make sense, but it was specifc. It does mean something, and in time we’ll find out what.

I’ve also come to think that whatever this force of the town is rewards the townsfolks for being on the wrong path and punishes them for being on the right one. The monsters changed their tactics this season, playing mental games as well as physical ones, deliberately shaking Boyd and the town’s trust in him. This moment was such a big win in their quest to understand, to get home, that it brought out the thing even more powerful than them. A piece of the bigger picture- the mysterious shadow that’s been out in the woods, shaking tents and playing by rules we haven’t yet learned.

While all of this was happening, Julie told Ethan that she felt she needed to go back to the ruins, to return to the place she goes when her body goes comatose. It seems that in that place, she’s able to travel non-linearly through time. She had big ideas about preventing some of the tragedies that have already occurred, but Ethan warned her that even if she can see moments in time, she can’t change them. As usual, I agreed with Ethan (like they say on Lost, whatever happened, happened). But it seems she saw something new that made her feel like she had to try. Right after Jade and Tabitha’s emotional revelation, Julie comes tearing through the woods screaming for Jim. Terror on her face, she pleads with him to run, to get away, to get to town right now because “I think this is when it happens! I need to change the story!”.

Tragically, Ethan was right. A man walks casually towards them out of the trees. He nonchalantly warns that “knowledge comes with a cost”, ignoring Jim’s now-appropriate insistence that this man back away from him and his family. Before fatally slashing Jim’s throat, the man says the last line of the season: “Your wife shouldn’t have dug that hole, Jim”. Since Jim is the only one who heard it the first time, this last revelation is more for us than any of the characters. This is the source of the voice on the radio that Jim painstakingly had the town build- the one that preceded the punishment of a massive storm and ruining of crops. All he got out of that radio was a haunting “your wife shouldn’t be digging that hole, Jim”, and a realization that this town doesn’t play by Earthly rules. And that someone is watching.

Season 4 isn’t coming until 2026 which is frankly super upsetting, but I know I’ll be just as eager for it then as I am now. Everything about season 3 suggests a painstaking master plan, a conclusion that will have everything click into place that we got just a little taste of in this episode. And in this regard, I think a lack of popularity may just be a good thing- Lost’s fatal flaw was a network’s insistence that it overstay its welcome due to its massive popularity and profit. With no threat of that, I think From should be able to end on its own terms.

[casey-watches-tv]

Bad Sisters episode 2.06 "Who by Water"

I enjoyed season one- and I mean that as lukewarm as it sounds. I found it campy, the way I find a lot of UK content to be. I liked the premise and the characters and enjoyed its silliness, but at the same time, that slapstick nature took away from some of its heart. But I will say, I’ve been enamored with the Bad Sisters title sequence from the start. I love the song. I love the visuals. I’m a title sequence fiend and this was an instant top 3 for me, rivaled only by Shameless and The Office.

Season two of Bad Sisters rose to meet the quality of its title sequence (which changed its visuals to match the clues of this season’s mystery). I was wary of this show getting a second season. However I felt about it, season one wrapped itself up in a nice little bow. It’s hard not to compare this show to Big Little Lies: an adaptation of a self-contained, women-led ensemble unraveling the suspicious death of an objectively terrible man. And I was nervous about Big Little Lies’ second season as well- they had exhausted their source material and already told a complete story. When they managed to pull off something that genuinely enhanced the characters, it felt to me like a one-in-a-million success.

Sharon Horgan was trying to capture that same lightning in a bottle with this addition to Bad Sisters, and she did it without any creative input from the minds behind the original story (season one is based on a Belgian series; the season two storyline came from her alone). Having seen it all now, I can’t imagine the show ending without it. Everything that happened in these eight episodes was an incredible service to every one of its characters. Where season one was one-dimensional, season two was nuanced and surprising. Where season one was silly, season two was emotional and hard-hitting. Yet I still laughed in all the right places.

But episode 6, “Who by Water” (an ode to my beloved title sequence), is where I decided to go so far as to say that Bad Sisters is the best mystery I’ve ever seen. I was hooked by Grace’s unexpected death earlier on- truthfully, I never really liked her, and I love when a show is bold enough to abruptly kill off a main character. You don’t see that much anymore. But things got even more complicated from there.

The complete lack of dimension to The Prick served to get us on Team Garvey in season one. He looked, acted, and was exactly as terrible as they thought he was. Every new development somehow just made him even more awful. I literally could not stand him. And at the time, the show was silly enough that I didn’t have to think too hard about ethics before saying yeah! Let’s kill The Prick.

In season two, none of the new players are quite what they seem. When we first met Angelica, I thought here we go, someone new meddling in the Garvey’s lives. And she was truly obnoxious: putting her nose into Ursula’s life and Bibi’s family where it didn’t at all belong. And those unlikable qualities made the sisters- and me- completely discount her suspicion of Ian, who has seemed a perfect angel up to this point.

“Who by Water” finds the Garvey’s in the aftermath of Angelica’s fall off the boat and presumed death. It’s not sad exactly- this lady shows up and invites herself to the spreading of Grace’s ashes? Blackmailing the girls into letting her tag along? Who does she think she is? But it was genuinely an accident, and the girls are in a panic trying to figure out what to do. At the start of the episode, Ian seems level-headed and helpful. He convinces them not to go to the guards (it sounds reasonable at the time, but in retrospect- why not? It was an accident, after all). He lays out a plan: he’ll scout out the area and handle any potential footage of the girls going out on the water with Angelica and returning without her while the girls go clean Angelica’s blood off the boat.

It was around this time that I had this thought: Ian sure seems to be rolling with the punches of all this crime, despite being scared off to the point of fleeing when Grace told him about JP. I kid you not, seconds later Houlihan confronts Ian about the friend he “claimed” to have been staying with when Grace died. I was honestly floored by this. I’ve always thought that a good mystery makes you say “oh shit” when presented by twists you didn’t- but should’ve- seen coming. I’ve never before seen a mystery so perfectly and gently paced that I think I’m coming up with things on my own, when I’m really following a trail of narrative breadcrumbs so perfect that it’s imperceptible. I felt proud of myself for being suspicious of Ian, like I had thought of something no one had yet, when that was where this episode had been heading from the start.

Yet somehow, Bad Sisters lets me be a half-step ahead without ever falling behind itself. It’s Ian who suggests that Bibi move Angelica’s car out of the marina, and when the guards show up at the exact same time, she and I are now wondering in sync if Ian didn’t send her there with the intention of getting her caught. The episode closes on Bibi confronting Ian with this very suspicion, turning the whole mystery on its head and decisively acting on thoughts that for me, were still only inklings.

The Prick did some pretty calculated things but compared to Ian’s (or should I say Cormac’s) long con, he was just a small-town douchebag. Under the surface, Ian was everything he didn’t appear to be. And as we- and the Garveys- start to realize, so was Angelica. In the beginning, she’s more comparable to The Prick than anyone. Snooping, meddling, generally making problems worse. But looking back on it now, there’s a glaring difference. Where The Prick would lie and flat-out fabricate things out of thin air, Angelica only ever got in the way by being inconveniently correct. Being nosey isn’t a crime, and ultimately, her massive concussion even serves to make her endearingly silly.

Season one’s twist was who committed the crime- and it was a good one, I didn’t foresee it being Grace just like I didn’t foresee her death. But the characters didn’t change from start to finish. Everyone was who they always were and appeared to be. By season two’s finale, Ian and Angelica both had become people I wouldn’t have believed from the beginning. And it happened both shockingly and believably- a tough combo to pull off. They were exactly what this show needed as their nuance forced that same depth on the Garveys. Eva, the protector, was forced to reckon with making a massive mistake. Becka was forced to grow up in love and in life- she can’t be ‘the kid’ anymore if she’s having one. And while murdering The Prick was a no-brainer, season two forced the Garveys to actually consider the implications of being killers. Not just in terms of prison sentences and consequences, but in terms of right and wrong and the people they wanted to be.

Lastly, I’d be remiss not to mention Houlihan and Loftus. One of season one’s greatest strengths was the Claffins, and season two managed once again to create such compelling adversaries to the Garveys that I wasn’t always exactly sure whose side I was on. Focusing on the police rather than insurance raised the stakes, and Houlihan’s parallel journey mirrored the show’s eventual takeaways of doing the right thing. It wouldn’t have felt like a ‘happy’ ending if one side simply beat the other, and their eventual coming together felt narratively and emotionally sound. Some may see this season finale as a deus ex machina moment with both Loftus and Houlihan suddenly giving the girls their unconditional support, but I see it as a recognition that they all ultimately want the same thing: to be good people.  

At this time, Apple hasn’t canceled or renewed Bad Sisters, but Sharon Horgan has suggested that this is the end. I’ve seen so many successful shows ruined by a network stretching it beyond its expiration date, unwilling to let go of the paycheck, so I can only hope Horgan stays strong. But hey, that’s what I said last season.

[casey-watches-tv]

Agatha All Along episode 1.08 "Follow Me My Friend, To Glory At The End"

I’m usually waist-deep in a lengthy 2000s drama, and therefore late to the game with current shows, but I’m happy to say I’m right on time with Agatha. And I’m glad about that!

Nonetheless, I wish Marvel didn’t put me in the position to say ‘it’s really good… for Marvel.” But it’s really good! For Marvel. I liked so much of it, and the rest I chalk up to a brand issue rather than a problem with this particular show, so I’m deciding to focus on the best parts of it. And I think this show was at its best in the penultimate episode (we can sidebar about the actual ending, it took the wind out of this incredible reveal, imo).

108 picks up right where 107 left off, in the aftermath of Lilia’s really beautiful Tarot reading and sendoff. Agatha makes a deal with Rio, agreeing to convince Billy to willingly give himself to Rio and “restore the sacred balance”. The inevitability of death is a theme I really like in this show. Rio’s scoff at being called evil in the finale really drives that point home as she emphasizes that she’s the most “natural” thing there is. I don’t disagree.

Agatha, Billy, and surviving coven member Jen head off towards the last trial… and instead trip over the shoes they took off at the start of their journey. The Road is a circle, and they’re back where they started. Agatha, seeming to not know The Road as well as she should as the only person who’s ever done it before, insists that they do the whole thing again. Jen refuses out of fear, but more importantly, that just can’t be right.

Billy, seemingly hardened with his newly revealed power, is fed up with The Road. They walked it barefoot out of respect for its path, but he’s fresh out of respect. He pulls his boots back on and suddenly finds himself clawing his way out of a body bag in a metal room. Agatha and Jen are close behind. The room is illuminated with grow lights that go out one by one- another ticking clock.

Without a green witch at their disposal, Agatha and Billy turn to Jen as their last hope of growing something in this soil and water-less room. Instead, their conversation reveals that Agatha was in fact the one who bound Jen decades ago, preventing her from using her magic. Emotionally, Jen performs an unbinding ritual with Agatha and disappears as soon as it’s over. She got what she needed from The Road, and it released her. This leaves Agatha and Billy.

First, Agatha tries pleading with Billy to give her some of his power, the thing she sought on The Road. Billy refuses, not trusting her to not to take it all. Besides, if The Road spits her out, he’ll be alone in there. So, Agatha taps into her motherly side, the side that’s so shrouded in grief that she avoids it all costs. She holds Billy and guides him through his last memories with Tommy. She helps him hold Tommy’s life in his mind, and then helps him scour the world for a body to put him in, just as he did for himself with William Kaplan.

This really is selfless on Agatha’s part- she’s breaking her promise to Rio. Rio wanted him for the exact purpose of preventing him from defying her a second time by reincarnating Tommy. The lines are blurry, though, and Billy can’t tell if he’s simply capitalizing on a boy’s untimely death or causing it. His work complete, he leaves The Road just like Jen and doesn’t hear Agatha’s tender reassurance of “No, Billy… sometimes boys die.”

Left alone, Agatha is forced to confront her own emotional battle with life and death. She opens her locket containing a lock of Nicky’s hair and gently plants it in the dirt revealed by the cracks Billy’s magic created. She waters it with her tears, and up grows a dandelion, primed for a wish. She blows its leaves into the air, prompting the end of the final trial. The ceiling begins to dump rocks and dirt on her, and she escapes up some stairs in the nick of time. She didn’t find what she was looking for, but she completed all The Road’s trials and resurfaces in her yard in Westview.

She comes face to face with Rio, who plans to take Agatha instead now that she’s failed to deliver Billy. Just as she’s about to lose their subsequent battle, they’re interrupted by Billy, now fully transformed into Wiccan. He holds Rio at bay long enough to share some of his power with Agatha. Though she readily takes it, she spares Billy and tells him Death can’t be evaded. She offers to go with Rio, though when Billy selflessly offers himself in her place, Agatha turns on a dime. It seems this was her plan all along to fulfill her deal with Rio.

But in a final telepathic plea, Billy asks if this was how Nicky died, being offered to Death in her place. We still don’t know what exactly happened to Nicky, but this hits a nerve, and Agatha turns on her heel and offers Rio a passionate kiss on the lips. As she does, Death’s magic wraps around her, laying her down. As she sinks into the earth, a beautiful, colorful arrangement of fungi and flora spring up where her body once was. Another pretty indicator that Death isn’t a foil to beauty or nature, but rather a crucial element of both of those things.

Admittedly somewhat anticlimactic, Rio dismisses Billy, who just gets in his car and drives home. While he rejected the idea of embracing Wanda as his mom (“I already have a mom”), we don’t see any real bond between him and William Kaplan’s parents. They fuss over him, having been worried sick that he’s been missing for 24 hours, but he seems detached. I would’ve found it cool and interesting to see him hold more love for them, but I digress.

Billy walks into his bedroom almost as if seeing it for the first time. Clearly a fan of The Wizard of Oz, he suddenly notices uncanny parallels between his interests and his experience on The Road. He has a collection of shoe figurines, tons of Wizard of Oz memorabilia, a Ouija board, a Lorna Wu poster, the list goes on. The show’s homages to The Wizard of Oz don’t stop there, as Billy realizes that he’s already encountered everyone in their makeshift coven at some point in his life- just like fixtures of the Yellow Brick Road bear striking resemblance to people in Dorothy’s life in Kansas.

Yet unlike Dorothy’s awakening from a daze that makes her wonder if the world of Oz was a figment of a concussion-addled dream, Billy faces a much more horrific realization. While The Road was conjured in his mind, its existence, and the deaths that occurred within it, are very real indeed. Like mother like son.

In the series finale we learn that there was never a Road at all. Agatha made up the song with Nicky way back when, and as rumors about it spread, she used it to serve her life’s mission of killing witches and absorbing their power. Her ghost comforts Billy as he wrestles with the responsibility of inadvertently killing their allies in the hellscape his mind created (“I was gonna kill ‘em all on day one”).

A plot twist like this can feel gimmicky if it’s out of left field, thrown in for shock value alone. But this one felt like pieces falling into place, the new reality feeling even more true to the characters than what we thought was happening all along.

I have some less than positive thoughts on both the first and last episode. They really leaned into the detective trope in the pilot in a way that made it more confusing than anything else when they abandoned it ten minutes in. And Agatha returning as a literal classic floating translucent ghost in the finale felt gimmicky, cheapening the sacrifice she made by giving herself to Rio. Not to mention completely rejecting the obvious silver lining of the continuation of their romance in death… on the whole, the sapphic element of this show was highly teased, anticipated, and praised, yet, as I often find with mainstream queer content, anticlimactic and half-baked.

Nonetheless, this has gotta be the gayest Marvel content we’ve ever seen, the song is a banger (and it’s a good thing because they really got their money’s worth out of it), and The Road is chock full of symbolism and metaphor that I’ll be thinking about for days. What’d you think?

[casey-watches-tv]

Pacing and True Blood

Considering the discourse I’d read about True Blood before watching it, which ranged from lukewarm to outraged by the show’s trajectory, I was so pleasantly surprised. And I’m starting to think some people just don’t enjoy stories that unfold over years. I read so many complaints that True Blood “ran out of compelling stories” by the final season and got “too preposterous” because “things just kept happening”.

Folks, things have to keep happening in order for a story to continue. Action is the backbone of narrative. Of course, there are effective and ineffective ways to do this, and many initially strong shows do suffer from repetition or lack of direction after tacking on last-minute plot devices to a completed story in order to milk more seasons out of them. True Blood is not one of those shows. But it seems to be perceived as one for reasons I don’t really understand. In fact, watching it felt like a master class in how not to do that- I’m blown away by the cohesiveness and forethought put into this show from start to finish.

Reflecting on it after watching the series finale, that is what stands out to me more than any one episode, scene, or character- and I consider that a good thing. It’s more than a set of individual moments that all have their own merit; seasons 1-7 are one entity, it stands collectively as a unit. Not only are plot lines thorough and foreshadowed well, but they are informed by and consistent with the rich characters of Bon Temps, Louisiana.

I’ll start from the beginning: the pilot alone sows seeds that aren’t harvested until years later. The circumstances in which Sookie meets Bill in the very first episode are both mysterious and highly specific. She’s drawn to him because of her telepathic abilities that have been a fact of her life from birth- she can’t hear his thoughts and that’s incredibly refreshing. She then rescues Bill from a hate crime attack, hurling a chain around an assailant’s neck with superhuman strength and precision. She herself is clearly surprised by this, but nothing is said about it for a very long time. The episode ends with a target now on Sookie’s back when she is attacked by the same couple seeking retribution. This time she’s rescued by Bill, who nurses her back to health with his blood.

By the time the details of these events become relevant, I had forgotten about them- this is good storytelling. Revelations should be hard-hitting because, as an audience member, you didn’t connect these dots yourself, but you could have. You had all the information and now that it’s out in the open you realize it’s been staring you in the face all this time.

Towards the end of season three, Sookie finally learns that she is part fairy. This is why she is a telepath, why vampires have made it impossible for her to lead a normal life, and why she had surprising success in a life-threatening brawl in the pilot. Sookie embodies many qualities of the damsel in distress trope, but there is a reason for it all, and this allows her to seize control and turn the trope on its head. She doesn’t just happen to be beloved by several suitors for no apparent reason; she isn’t just ‘different’ than everyone else for some quality no one can put into words.

Sookie’s fairy identity is at the very heart of the series in so many layered ways. Revealing this so late in the game in a show that has already broached shapeshifters and werewolves in addition to vampires could have had the disheartening effect of feeling like an afterthought (now there are fairies?! Come on) had it not been clearly intentioned from the start- and had the show itself not quickly acknowledged and dispensed of the potential fantasy fatigue (“I’m a fairy?! Well, isn’t that fucking lame.”). Not only has Sookie’s telepathy been well-established and normalized from the start, but it’s had a well-explored impact on who she is as a person. After a life of fatigue from hearing a bigoted town’s every thought, from running from every potential relationship after hearing men’s frightening intentions, it’s no wonder she’s so compelled by a seemingly open-minded vampire whose thoughts she can’t hear at all.

In addition to all of this, it turns out that Sookie’s fae blood has catalyzed everything we’ve seen so far without her even knowing it. A couple episodes after Sookie learns who she is, Eric drops the bombshell that Bill has known all along; in fact, Sookie drinking his blood after the brawl in the pilot was a pre-meditated move on his part to manipulate her into falling in love with him. This kind of attention to detail isn’t cooked up in retrospect, and the ramifications carry us through the rest of the series.  

The way fairies are handled in True Blood is unique, and despite its central importance to Sookie’s journey and the emotional heart of the story, it fits right in among the other happenings of Bon Temps. The revelation of Sookie’s identity struck me as a very delicate thing for the show to navigate- it certainly could have been a low, but I think it’s actually one of the series’ high points.

While there has always been cause to wonder why Sookie is a telepath and why vampires seem particularly interested in her, the fairy community is foreshadowed in earnest several episodes in advance when Sookie meets another telepath. At the time, she is thrilled because she has never met anyone with her ability before and wants to connect with this stranger. As a standalone moment, it serves to make Sookie feel less alone and othered, and the juxtaposition of this new, fearful telepath highlights Sookie’s strength and sense of self. In the bigger picture, it opens up the reality that there are others like Sookie and raises the questions who are they? Where are they? How many are there?

Consistently, happenings that were not out of place at the time- and in fact, had significant implications as a standalone incident- end up having long-lasting ramifications that allow a new chapter of the story to begin seamlessly.

Like Sookie herself, the fae are traditional in a lot of ways. They are deeply desirable woodland beings that lure people in with their irresistible beauty. Sookie even has a fairy godfather. Once again, the ‘classic’-ness of these qualities is exactly what allows them to be played with in a fun and different way. Sookie breaks the ice of the introduction of yet another supernatural being with her underwhelmed reaction upon learning her identity. It’s an endearing self-awareness of both her character and the show that allows us to accept this level of fantasy. The show is very silly; the characters are very down to earth.

In the season three finale, Sookie visits the fairy plane, a very classic fairy tale setting that seems like a wonderland, with the caveat of a mysterious and delicious fruit being forced on her. Sookie, never the fool, doesn’t eat it, and without its magic the beauty of the fae plane quickly falls apart. Within minutes, Sookie sees through the illusions, learns that the fairies are attempting to lure and trap their entire bloodline in their plane, and promptly breaks free of it. She also meets her grandfather, who has been missing all her life. Her grandfather is devastated to learn that he’s been gone for years- he could swear it’s only been a few hours. The absence of any familial figures in Sookie and Jason’s life has informed so much of who they are, and once again, there is a relevant explanation for their circumstances.

Her grandfather dies moments after bringing Sookie back to the human plane- eating the fruit makes it impossible to return. Despite having not eaten any herself, Sookie learns that the 15 minutes we spent with her there has translated to a year in Bon Temps. This time jump is maybe the most masterful piece of storytelling in the whole show.

One of my favorite things about True Blood is the sheer size of its ensemble. There is so much going on in Bon Temps, all of it intertwined. Characters and events weave in and out of each other with precise, seamless timing. While Sookie, Bill, and Eric explored vampire royalty and the existence of fairies throughout season three, the entire Bon Temps clan was being carefully set up to be in incredibly compelling positions after the one-year time jump revealed in the season finale.

Arlene, finally at peace with the loving Terry, discovers she’s pregnant with the late Rene’s baby and is convinced the child will be evil. Sheriff Andy has the first inklings of experimenting with V. Jason’s lustful ways have abruptly left him with the obligation to care for a backwoods, impoverished community of were-panthers. Nice guy Sam has finally snapped and shot his own brother. Tara has reached her limit and left Bon Temps in an attempt to escape her trauma along with it.

As soon as Sookie returns from the fae plane and learns how much time has passed, it struck me how deliberately every one of these plotlines have been threaded- they had all been building organically throughout the season, but they left off in a place where they will be at their most compelling one year later. Time jumps can feel abrupt and disorienting when we’re invested in the current timeline, but this timeline was crafted with the time jump in mind. One meaningful look at an evidence vial of vampire blood, and we’re ready to explore Sherriff Andy’s full-blown addiction. Now that we know Arlene is pregnant with a serial killer’s baby, we can get right to the real plot point- how she and Terry fare once he’s born. It’s all an immense trust in the audience to pay attention to detail and connect the dots on their own- and it pays off.

These long-game moves continue throughout the series: the cowboy boots gifted to Sheriff Bud at his retirement party turn out to be the fateful clue that exposes him as the center of a violent hate group; Sarah Newlin’s frantic downing of some mysterious vial during the prison revolt is only later revealed to be the cure to the fatal hep-V virus; Mrs. Fortenberry’s very in-character death proves to be a vehicle for Hoyt’s return and reunion with Jessica.

All this to say, True Blood is the most intentional show I’ve seen in a very long time. Its eventual conclusion is true to its characters and core message. At no point did I feel it had lost or gotten away from itself, and it’s all due to its foreshadowing of upcoming storylines well, well in advance in ways that are so relevant to the ‘now’ that they are remembered but not questioned.

I’ll close by briefly joining the conversation that piqued my interest in the series in the first place: I don’t at all consider True Blood’s vampires to be a queer allegory. Alan Ball, a gay man himself, has said this view is harmful and (not that it matters what I think in relation to him), I agree. Don’t get me wrong, True Blood has a rich and decisive political message, but it doesn’t hide behind its fantasy elements to express it. The blue collar, rural Louisiana setting is not a superficial choice, and everything the show has to say about race, religion, and sexuality, it says outright. The juxtaposition of high fantasy with hyper-realistic characters, setting, and dialogue is part of the show’s allure, and a big part of that is not shying away from southern culture and the political beliefs that come with it. If you really want to get to the meat of the show, we should talk about Sookie’s relationship with Christianity and pretty much everything about season 7. And I would love to! This show has been such a refreshing watch for me and I’m not ready to put it behind me, so hit me up if you have thoughts and opinions!

[casey-watches-tv]

The Bear episode 3.06 "Napkins"

I’ve seen a lot of discourse and criticism for this season already, which at first glance is hard to argue with, but after finishing season three I think there’s a big line to be drawn between Carmy’s values and The Bear’s values. From what I’ve seen on Threads (I’m on Threads… you should come), people are falling off The Bear because of what they perceive the show has become: a glorification of a privileged white man’s gentrification of a down to earth, local family restaurant.

People will clap back to these statements with things like “but it’s literally his restaurant.” and “they’re still making the sandwiches at a window in the back!” which is all true, but I think equally missing the show’s larger point. With each passing season, I feel more and more committed to viewing The Bear as a whole entity. It’s not a procedural, a 9-1-1, a Law and Order, or a Grey’s Anatomy that returns to its core theme every single episode. There are episodes with huge emotional meat and weight, with observations about life, grief, food, and the characters to be gleaned throughout, but every episode is a stroke of a paintbrush in a painting that we’ll only be able to really step back and digest when the series ends… hopefully a long time from now.

Season one forced Carmy back to his roots, shoved his unprocessed grief in his face all day every day. It turned him into the ticking time bomb he is today, but it also served as a reminder of the love of people and reverie of food that got him into this business. And this fueled him into season two, where he put everything on the line to do food the only way he knows how: intensely. Enter season three.

This season, Carmy’s the problem. His freezer meltdown wasn’t a cathartic release that freed him to love and work smoothly; all season it’s like he never left that frenzied headspace we last saw him in. The pressure is on financially, but more than that, Carmy simply can’t stomach not being exceptional. His non-negotiables are certifiable. A new menu every single day that he comes up with entirely by himself? Needing these brand new dishes cooked at breakneck speed? An environment of “excellence” where it seems he’s the only one allowed to yell?

If people’s critiques of The Bear were redirected to be critiques of Carmy, they would be spot on. Carmy’s need to be on this insane level is going to be the very thing that is going to run this beautiful opportunity to the ground. He’s veering off the path he was set on by good people and good food; he’s forgetting those things in favor of tweezers and the old, toxic work environment that he can’t get out of his head. But The Bear is well aware of these shortcomings. Not a single person didn’t balk at the idea of a new menu every day. His ingredients are racking up such a bill that The Beef sandwich window, run singlehandedly by Ebra, is the only part of the business making a profit. Richie is laughed and shouted out of the kitchen when he tries to set his own non-negotioables for the front of house, recognizing the importance of guest satisfaction. When asked to recreate a dish from several nights prior to be photographed for a review, no one can remember what was in it. When Sydney tries to help Carm work on tomorrow’s menu, he’s so dismissive of her that it’s hard not to want her to take this new job. The season finale’s episode description merely says “Carmen thinks about apologizing”- and we’re sucked in because we all know he’s overdue for some apologies.

But nothing really confirms that The Bear knows what it’s about quite like “Napkins”. A flashback episode detailing how Tina first started working at The Beef, five minutes in had me declaring that “just because it’s a good filler episode doesn’t mean it’s not a filler episode”. I was so wrong that now I’m here to say that it’s this season’s central episode, the one that really zeroes in on what they’re trying to say at this moment in time.

With Carmy nowhere in sight, Tina, Mikey, Richie, and some Faks are tugging at the heartstrings of people trying to juggle making ends meet with finding some meaning in life. After being let go from her job after a decade of loyal service, Tina has been striking out on the job hunt for weeks, and it’s starting to get dire. She sees an online posting for an open interview tomorrow, and full of optimism, she heads to the office. When she arrives, a receptionist who can’t even look up from his computer tells her the post must be old because the position has already been filled internally. She could cry, I could cry.

She wanders into The Beef, in all the loud, chaotic glory of its heyday. An ever-pleasant Richie does more than take her order for coffee- he introduces himself and gives her a sandwich on the house. She takes it to the back by the arcade machines, bites into it, and promptly bursts into tears. Both caring and concerned about having a crying customer, Mikey sits down next to her. That guy was so personable and seeing him take the time to sit with her in such a genuine, laid back way depicts all the traits that Carmy lacks. Carmy needs to slow down, interact with people, remember why he’s here. The Bear knows that food is a form of caretaking and a source of community. It’s just Carmy who’s forgotten.

And the heartbreak of the show is that he would absolutely have that lightbulb moment if he were able to hear his brother say:

“Full disclosure, this place… like, this fucking place, it sucks. Like, it sucks. It’s like, you go home, and you fucking smell it, you know? And it’s, like, insane. And there’s so much fucking yelling here. But, I swear to you, there are days that it is so much fun. Like, it is so much fun. And- and the pay is shit, right? But there are days we make a rack of fucking tips, and it’s like… it feels fucking good, you know?”

And when Tina offers him her résumé:

“What the fuck am I gonna do with a résumé? I’ll go clean the toilet with the fucking résumé. I don’t need a résumé. I talked to you.”

The Bear is about connecting with people through food. It’s also about Carmy’s journey of remembering this after being broken by both the rigors of the high-end culinary world and the loss of his brother, the embodiment of that love and connection.

The Bear (the restaurant) is doing way too much right now, but The Bear (the show) is most definitely on the path of seeing Carmy’s lunacy to a turning point where he and the restaurant both can return to their roots. Stories are journeys and characters are flawed. Let’s let it breathe and see where we end up without conflating a character flaw to a shortcoming of the show itself.

[casey-watches-tv]

Lost episodes 2.03 "Orientation", 2.21 "?", and 2.24 "Live Together, Die Alone Part 2"

Despite having the worst title sequence I’ve ever seen in my whole entire life, Lost is really very special. It’s affirmed how much I love things that are bizarre and spiritual with a sprawling yet intimate ensemble cast. The amount of people they managed to cram on this island is truly crazy, as is its incredibly rich, decades-long history. I love everything about Lost, but what I love most is the hatch, which really had its moment to shine in season two, although of course the implications of what happened there reverberate throughout the series.

John Locke and Boone spend much of season one excavating the underground metal bunker that they and everyone else comes to refer to as ‘the hatch’. First of all, the way this show normalized its own verbiage and experimental plotlines is incredible to me. The amount of times I heard “I gotta go back to the hatch” without ever thinking anything of it, but then realized I couldn’t even begin to explain what was going on to someone who hadn’t been along for the ride. Lost was so itself.

John got pretty obsessed with the hatch as he and Boone tried and failed to get it open. It was only when Rousseau came to the beach and warned the camp of an impending attack from the Others that more people got involved with attempting to get the hatch open- namely Jack, Kate, and Hurley. The group got some dynamite from The Black Rock to blow it open, but at the moment of truth Hurley noticed the numbers embossed on the metal- his numbers, his cursed, evil numbers. He frantically tries to stop John from blowing the hatch open, which only proceeds to make John hurry the fuck up. I was John’s biggest fan in season one, but this was where I first started to see some cracks in his philosophy and motives. You’d think a man of faith would want to hear about these evil numbers, so that begs the question, what is it that he has faith in, exactly?

What’s actually in the hatch proves to be even more interesting than the shrouded mystery of an unknown underground structure. Desmond Hume is down there, on the fringes of sanity from three years of isolation and getting no more than two uninterrupted hours of sleep. Desmond, who, it turns out, has met Jack in LA (in another life), shipwrecked on the island while attempting to sail around the world. After coming ashore, he was brought into the hatch by a representative of the Dharma Initiative, who has since died. Desmond has since assumed the representative’s task of entering those fateful numbers into an ancient looking computer every 108 minutes. If he doesn’t, the world will end. Or something to that effect. He’s not exactly sure.

In episode 2.03, “Orientation”, Jack and John discover and view the Dharma Initiative orientation film that gives them all the same information that Desmond has, which really isn’t much. The film has clearly been spliced in places, with sections missing, but the ominous gist is this:

“Welcome. I’m Dr. Marvin Candle, and this is the orientation film for Station Three of the Dharma Initiative. The Dharma Initiative was created in 1970. Following in the footsteps of BF Skinner… imagined a large-scale communal research compound where scientists and free thinkers from around the globe could pursue research in psychology, parapsychology, electromagnetism, and utopian social… whose financial backing made their dream of a multipurpose social science research facility a reality. You and your partner are currently located in Station Three, ‘The Swan’…

“Not long after the experiments began, however, there was… an incident. Since that time, the following protocol has been observed. Every 108 minutes, the button must be pushed. From the moment the alarm sounds, you will have four minutes to enter the code into the microcomputer processor… Do not attempt to use the computer for anything… Congratulations!”

Matthew Fox and Terry O'Quinn in "Orientation". Image courtesy of IMDb.

John wins me back for a moment here by voicing my exact thought: “We’re gonna need to watch that again”. Jack, on the other hand, surprises me by how viscerally he rejects everything he just saw. The two men are incredulous at each other’s reaction to the film, and in this moment, I’m on John’s side. And ultimately, as much as he fights it, Jack is too.

The question that Jack furiously insists be answered isn’t even if the button is real, but why Desmond and John so readily believe that it is. When Jack first asks if Desmond really believes this is happening, he replies, “Why wouldn’t it be?” Sayid, who was brought down to the hatch to fix the broken computer that is still counting down, feels similarly: “All I need to know is that that timer is counting down to something, and that this computer needs to be repaired.” Jack is mystified by everyone else’s participation and pushes on:

“It says ‘Quarantine’ on the inside of the hatch to keep you down here, keep you scared. But you know what? We’ve been up there for over 40 days, and no one’s gotten sick. You think this is the only part of it that’s true? Did you ever think that they put you down here to push a button every 100 minutes, just to see if you would? That the computer, the button, it’s just a mind game? An experiment?”

While Desmond and Sayid fulfill what they see as an odd but important duty, John eats this whole thing up with a soup ladle in a different way. Desmond answers Jack’s question by admitting that he thinks about this possibility every single day, and even hopes that it’s true, but won’t risk blowing up the island. But just as John’s desire to open the hatch was clearly not rooted in saving the group, so too does he not push the button to save lives, but rather because he is confident that his pushing the button is part of his walk on a predestined divine path for which he will ultimately be rewarded.

Where Desmond and Sayid give the loyal, but reality-based responses of “I dunno about you, brother, but every time I walk past that wall out there, my fillings hurt,” and “I’m sure you’ll tell me why once I’ve [fixed the computer]”, John practically joins the Dharma Initiative right then and there:

JOHN: You saw the film, Jack. This is a two-person job, at least. It’s a leap of faith, Jack.

JACK: Some man takes you down here, shows you a movie, and you push a button on faith alone? Nothing is going to happen!

François Chau in Lost. Image courtesy of IMDb.

This is John’s worst quality, but I think at this moment it has a positive impact. Whatever John decides to do, the whole group has to do it. If he wants to push the button, everybody has the push the button. If he wants to stop, everyone has to stop. If he wants to stay on the island, he blows up the submarine so nobody can leave.

But at this moment in time, Jack needed to be put on the spot… and with seconds to spare, he pushes the button. Little does anybody know, Jack is actually the one on a divine path, and this is his first step on a journey that will end with him being the one adamant about destiny and what he’s “supposed” to do.

John seems like a man of conviction, but his belief system is actually incredibly fragile. I honestly just feel kind of sad for him, but my sympathies only go so far as he continues to make the same mistake over and over again. He puts all of his beliefs, faith, and livelihood into things outside of himself and is repeatedly left utterly lost when those things don’t care about him as much as he cared about them. On the mainland it was his father and the marijuana grow house community, on the island it was the hatch, the button, and then the nebulous character of “the island” itself.  He’s the definition of a servant, and I appreciate what his ultimate fate suggests about living a life without independent thought.

In line with this behavioral pattern, John’s belief in the button, and subsequently his belief in himself, is shattered in 2.21, “?” (sick episode title also). In this episode, John begrudgingly helps a born-again Mr. Eko follow his dreams (literal dreams) to something he believes the island wants to show him. John’s impatience for anyone else’s faith-based escapades is another trait that annoys me, but it aligns perfectly with who he is- no one but him should be receiving any special treatment from the universe.

John and Eko discover yet another hatch (there are a few, it turns out), and yet another orientation film, not to mention a wall of screens that reveal that their hatch is under surveillance.

Terry O'Quinn and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje in "?". Image courtesy of IMDb.

“Station 5, or The Pearl, is a monitoring station where the activities of participants in Dharma Initiative projects can be observed and recorded… your tour of duty in The Pearl will last three weeks, and during this time you will observe a psychological experiment in progress. Your duty is to observe team members in another station on the island. These team members are not aware they are under surveillance or that they are subjects of an experiment. What is the nature of the experiment, you might ask? What do these subjects believe they are accomplishing? All you need to know is the subjects believe their job is of the utmost importance. Each time a notebook is filled with the fruits of your diligent observation, roll it up and place it in one of the containers provided. Then simply place the container in the pneumatic tube and presto, it will be transported directly to us.”

This time, when Eko asks John if he’d like to see the film again, he most certainly does not. He’s completed deflated. Eko, interestingly, is invigorated, feeling more called to push the button now than ever. The possibility is raised that there’s no way to know how deep the layers of experimentation go- maybe the observers are in fact the ones being duped into a useless task. John doesn’t care anymore:

JOHN: I’m sorry, weren’t you just watching the same thing I was?

EKO: Yes, John, and I believe the work you have been doing is more important now than ever.

JOHN: What work?

EKO: Pushing the button.

JOHN: That’s not work. That’s a joke. Rats in a maze with no cheese.

EKO: It is work, John. We are being tested. The reason to do it, to push the button, is not because we are told to do so in a film.

JOHN: Oh, well, then, what is the reason, Mr. Eko?

EKO: We do it because we believe we are meant to. Isn’t that the reason you pushed it, John?

JOHN: I was never meant to do anything. Every second of my pathetic little life is as useless as that button. You think it’s important? You think it’s necessary? It’s nothing. It’s nothing. It’s meaningless. And who are you to tell me that it’s not?

This should have been an eye-opening moment for John. While I agree with Eko, John was also right about himself and had some important realizations- but not quite enough. He has had a pathetic little life, but that’s exactly because he is happy to be a rat, so long as there is cheese. While Desmond accepted his bleak life’s purpose of pushing a button forever to thanklessly save the world over and over with no expectation of getting anything in reward, John was only doing it because he believed some unknown entity would be pleased with him.  

Terry O'Quinn in "Orientation". Image courtesy of IMDb.

I don’t blame John for wanting to stop pushing the button here, but instead of refocusing his energy on finding what he is meant to do, he rededicates himself to making everyone else stop pushing the button. Where Jack had the attitude of “push it yourself”, John is full of spiteful rage and wants to let the timer run out to stick it to… the seemingly extinct Dharma Initiative? It’s unclear. But the group, particularly Eko, has now committed to pushing the button. They’ve started taking shifts, they’ve built a routine around it. “Live Together, Die Alone Part 2” is all about John and Eko’s battle over the button- and the looming question of it it's real.

As much as John’s behavior bothers me here, I absolutely love that we get a concrete answer to if the button is real- and we wouldn’t have had they never stopped pushing it. In “Live Together, Die Alone Part 2”, John barricades himself in the room with the button, bringing impenetrable walls down around him to ensure no one stops him from letting the timer run out. Eko, determined to push the button, gets more dynamite from The Black Rock (this becomes a common errand) to blow the doors open. He detonates the dynamite as the timer counts down, but it doesn’t have the desired effect and he doesn’t make it to the button.

The hatch starts to shake, metal flies across the room as electromagnetic energy escalates. They didn’t push the button, and something happened. The exact something that Desmond predicted. Now poring over the reports Eko brought back from the Pearl, Desmond frantically realizes that the one time he ever failed to push the button was the same day Oceanic 815 crashed on the island. While we’re warned throughout this show not to mistake coincidence for fate, everything happening in this moment confirms: not pushing the button crashed their plane. The button is real.

Desmond, who has a fail-safe key from his old Dharma companion, crawls through some tunnels to turn it, a self-sacrificing mission that sends the full release of electromagnetic energy inwards. The impact reverberates throughout the island, but only the hatch implodes. The presence of electromagnetism on the island and Desmond’s fateful missing of the button/inadvertent crashing of the plane will continue to be a driving force of Lost’s action, but this is the end of the hatch as we know it.

And perhaps most interestingly of all, no one really cares. The hatch had a shower, a washer/dryer, and multiple beds, all of which seemed to be rarely used. In fact, it seems that many of the survivors of Oceanic 815 never even went in it. The food stockpile Desmond was living off of was freely distributed to the camp with no attempt to ration it. No one bemoans returning to sleeping on a tarp and doing laundry in the waterfall. This attitude is telling. As much as some characters are adamant about getting off the island, the happenings here are much more significant than mere survival, and on some level, everybody knows that.

I love all of Lost, but the story of the hatch is easily the most compelling, and the ideas batted around in season two hold many of the show’s key takeaways, which are revealed more bluntly in season six.

On that note, I wish I had more to say about the show’s ultimate conclusion. I liked it!

I was compelled to watch this show because I found all the discourse surrounding the series’ controversial ending so interesting, but as I was promised by a friend, I found it emotionally fulfilling and sound. The finale is comparable to those of Six Feet Under, The Leftovers, and The Good Place, which is great company to be in, but I do think those other shows’ conclusions are a little stronger.

However, I think that has more to do with Lost’s middle than it does its end. Lost never lost me (haha), but I’ll admit the end of season four and beginning of season five was a little manic. For the show’s ultimate message to be something so ancient, spiritual, and utterly simple, they sure spent a lot of time filling my head with quantum physics and generations worth of interpersonal alliances and rivalries. I was still working out what exactly Ben Linus and Charles Widmore were fighting about when the show told me that they don’t really matter at all.

I love Lost’s finale more and more the longer I sit with it, but in the moment my head was so cluttered with timelines and science and the momentum of the mission in the that it was hard to really feel the full extent of its serenity. I’ll defend it vigorously today, but I wasn’t as stunned, mouth open while the credits rolled as I was with Six Feet Under, The Leftovers, and The Good Place.

All this to say, talk to me about Lost! I think it’s the most interesting thing in the world at the moment.

[casey-watches-tv]

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: Is Katniss Lucy Gray's Granddaughter?

The Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is chock full of easter eggs and homages to the original trilogy. So much so that many folks are wondering if the District 12 survivor from years past has any relation to the Girl on Fire.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes follows young performer Lucy Gray Baird as she is reaped for the 10th annual Hunger Games, becoming the female tribute from District 12. Her path crosses with the ambitious yet penniless teenaged Coriolanus Snow, whose curriculum at the Capitol’s Academy causes him to take a vested interest in Lucy Gray’s performance in the Games.

Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Image courtesy of IMDb.

Similar in some ways, but different in even more, Katniss Everdeen and Lucy Gray Baird both played to their strengths to survive the brutal Hunger Games. Here are the reasons some people got the idea that these two protagonists could be related.

The Timeline Checks Out

In The Hunger Games trilogy, the white-haired President Snow has a granddaughter just a couple years younger than Katniss and her sister Prim. Given that his younger self was two years older than Lucy Gray, it’s perfectly feasible that Katniss and Prim could be her descendants.

“The Hanging Tree”

Now, Lucy Gray isn’t the only one who knew this song- certainly not after performing it for a vivacious crowd of dancers at a District 12 pub. But Katniss is no performer. She gritted her teeth through any performative act she had to take to ensure her own survival, yet “The Hanging Tree” is a song she occasionally sang willingly, one she found peaceful. It must have had a special place in her heart to bring her that comfort. And why might that be? 

Jennifer Lawrence and Amandla Stenberg in The Hunger Games. Image courtesy of IMDb.

Their Strategies in the Games

Lucy Gray and Katniss handled the Games- and the mind games leading up to the Games- very differently. Yet at their core, they played the same way. Both girls played smart, rather than violent; they both waited out the initial bloodbath and took as little life as was possible, given the circumstances. When finally forced to play their hand, Lucy Gray and Katniss both did the wholly unexpected, somehow finding a third option for themselves besides kill or be killed. Their strength in not succumbing to the animal-like behavior that the Capitol so eagerly wanted to televise is an outlier that draws a connection between the two of them.

Rachel Zegler in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Image courtesy of IMDb.

Katniss

Lucy Gray had a fondness for Katniss- the plant. It’s a swamp potato that the Covey would eat on their travels. Not everyone called the plant Katniss, but Lucy Gray liked to. Did she like it enough for a child of hers to pass the name along in her honor?

Despite all these easter eggs in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes that can’t help but draw the mind to Katniss Everdeen, no relation between the two District 12 victors is ever confirmed. A strong argument can be made for one, but there are also some reasons this theory is just that- a theory.

The Covey

 Lucy Gray Baird is a member of the Covey, a traveling performance troupe that happened to be settled in District 12 at the time of the 10th annual Hunger Games. Her Covey identity is so important to her that she is reluctant to call herself a resident of District 12, despite being reaped as the district’s female tribute. Yet, there is no mention of the Covey in The Hunger Games. The group is a new addition to The Hunger Games world with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. If Katniss was related to Lucy Gray, they would only be two generations removed, and Lucy Gray’s Covey identity would likely play a role in Katniss’s sense of self as well. The complete absence of the Covey in Katniss’s story casts some doubt on the possibility of a connection between the two girls.

Rachel Zegler in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Image courtesy of IMDb.

District 12 

The Covey complicates things even further. Given that they are a traveling group, to the extent that Lucy Gray refused to call District 12 home, it seems unlikely that she spent the rest of her life there. When you add in the fact that, at the end of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, she and Coriolanus had set out to leave the districts and never return, the thought of her establishing a family in District 12 feels even more far-fetched. The prequel ends on an ambiguous note, with Lucy Gray deliberately losing Coriolanus in the forest, so it’s hard to say if she ever saw 12 again, much less made meaningful connections there.

Radically Different Personalities

 Lucy Gray’s reaping consisted of her dropping a snake down another girl’s dress and then bursting into song. Katniss’s reaping found her intensely and tearfully volunteering in her sister’s place. The contrast between Lucy Gray’s levity and Katniss’s seriousness is a constant in their personalities. Lucy Gray, a performer for a living and a performer for survival, won Capitol hearts with her charm and voice. Katniss, on the other hand, had to be begged to grin and bear it, to give a single twirl, to save not just herself but Peeta- whose affability was an essential counterpart to her stone-faced persona. If the two girls are related, a similar demeanor is not one of the clues.

Jennifer Lawrence and Stanley Tucci in The Hunger Games. Image courtesy of IMDb.

Ultimately, though, we’ll never know for sure. It’s possible that The Ballad of Songbirds and Snake’s homages to Katniss served more as an explanation as to why the Girl on Fire bothered President Snow so much. Maybe she just got under his skin because she reminded him a little too much of the girl who bested him and broke his heart all those years ago- related or not.

What's your gut telling you? Do you think these two share blood? Or just that powerful fighting spirit?