television – Page 6 – PopCult Reviews

PopCult Podcast – Full Time/Yellowjackets

It’s tough for ladies out there. Whether its trying to commute to work in the midst of French transit strikes or handling the trauma of being a cannibal in your formative years, women are being asked to balance a lot.

TV Review – Kevin Can F**k Himself

Kevin Can F**k Himself Season One (AMC)
Written by Valerie Armstrong, Dana Ledoux Miller, Kevin Etten, Craig DiGregorio, Noelle Valdivia, Mel Shimkovitz, Tom Scharpling, Sean Clements, Kate Loveless
Directed by Oz Rodriguez and Anna Dokoza

The television landscape has changed wildly in the last few years. When I was growing up, my television screen was filled with cheery families in sitcoms and silly high-concept procedural dramas, ala The A-Team and Knight Rider. Something shifted in the late 1990s with the arrival of The Sopranos, the idea that television could feature highly dysfunctional people in everyday settings doing terrible things. From there, this would grow into something like Breaking Bad, Weeds, Better Call Saul, and more. Yet sitcoms remained. Everybody Loves Raymond and King of Queens featured the trope of the schlubby idiot husband whose wife tolerates his mediocrity.

TV Review – Deadwood: The Movie

Deadwood: The Movie (2019)
Written by David Milch
Directed by Daniel Minahan

It wasn’t the ending we would have liked, but we never believed there would be an ending. That’s how I feel about Deadwood: The Movie. The original idea was to do a series of made-for-HBO films that brought a satisfying conclusion to the series. Money and life saw to that not happening. The film was made just in the nick of time, I suppose. Shortly before he began work on the movie’s script, series creator & showrunner David Milch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He currently resides in an assisted-living facility as the disease has no cure and weakens a person’s ability to function daily. Milch’s gift to us as he undergoes this tragic transformation is a final glimpse at Deadwood and the characters we grew to love over three seasons. It’s a spotty, often messily structured film, but it is a way to say goodbye.

TV Review – Deadwood Season Three

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Deadwood Season Three (HBO)
Written by David Milch, Ted Mann, Regina Corrado, Alix Lambert, Kem Nunn, Nick Towne, Zack Whedon, W. Earl Brown, and Bernadette McNamara
Directed by Mark Tinker, Dan Attias, Gregg Fienberg, Ed Bianchi, Dan Minahan, Tim Hunter, and Adam Davidson

Ratings are the bane of good art. Because everything that involves money must be quantified into a system that evaluates for profit or potential profit, television executives chose to use viewership numbers to determine whether a piece of art continues. There is some logic behind this, as the production of shows involves a lot of money & resources. The idea is that art exists to be consumed in the instant it is delivered to the public. In the modern world, there is no discovery of something beautiful over time; this society prides itself on fantastic newness. Despite being the fourth highest-rated cable television series of 2006, Deadwood was ultimately canceled upon concluding its third season.

PopCult Podcast – Fast X/Succession & Barry

Whether your family are a quasi-cult of car ninjas, a media empire owning cluster of ghouls, or living in a doublewide on the plains homeschooling via YouTube this episode has what you are looking for.

TV Review – Succession Season Four

Succession Season Four (HBO)
Written by Jesse Armstrong, Tony Roche, Susan Soon He Stanton, Lucy Prebble, Jon Brown, Ted Cohen, Georgia Pritchett, Will Arbery, and Will Tracy
Directed by Mark Mylod, Becky Martin, Lorene Scafaria, Andrij Parekh, Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini

***Lots of spoilers***

In Michael Parenti’s 1993 book Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, the author goes through each stakeholder in bringing the day’s news to the average American. The most powerful in this hierarchy are the owners of the media conglomerates that own the United States’ newspapers & television stations. While written in the late 1980s and updated in the early 1990s, Parenti does not touch on the coming power of the internet, but we can understand that it, too, is folded into the realm of control of the monied classes. The world as we perceive it, taught in American schools and raised on American media, is a fabrication. The ideology behind these things is not a conspiracy where world leaders sit plotting around a table in a secret headquarters kind.

TV Review – Yellowjackets Season One

Yellowjackets Season One (Showtime)
Written by Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, Jonathan Lisco, Sarah L. Thompson, Liz Phang, Ameni Rozsa, Chantelle M. Wells, Katherine Kearns, Cameron Brent Johnson
Directed by Karyn Kusama, Jamie Travis, Eva Sørhaug, Deepa Mehta, Billie Woodruff, Ariel Kleiman, Daisy von Scherler Mayer, and Eduardo Sánchez

Yellowjackets was a show I knew of, a piece of background noise in the seemingly infinite media landfill of our age. What I knew about it before watching the first season is that it was about people getting stuck out in the wilderness. I also knew who some of the actresses in the series were, but beyond that, I couldn’t have told you much. It’s not too odd to know a decent amount about things I don’t watch simply through cultural osmosis. Nevertheless, something about what I had seen of Yellowjackets kept me interested enough to finally sit down and watch the first season. I was met with something I liked but didn’t love, an interesting mix of Desperate Housewives and Lost that intrigues me enough to be up for the second season.

My Favorite TV Series That Remind Me Of I Think You Should Leave

Netflix Presents the Characters
One Season, Eight Episodes

I’ve been surprised that Netflix never followed up on this one. It was an eight-episode anthology series, with each entry spotlighting the particular comedic sensibilities of a performer. Tim Robinson’s episode led to the greenlighting of I Think You Should Leave. It also focused on other great comedy writers/performers like Paul Downs, Kate Berlant, and John Early. Robinson & Early’s episodes are my two favorites out of the batch. Of course, with most shows of this kind, your mileage will vary from episode to episode based on your taste.

TV Review – Lucky Hank Season One

Lucky Hank Season One (AMC)
Written by Paul Lieberstein, Aaron Zelman, Adam Barr, Emma Barrie, Jean Kyoung Frazier, Jasmine Pierce, and Taylor Brogan
Directed by Peter Farrelly, Dan Attias, Jude Weng, and Nicole Holofcener

I went into Lucky Hank with moderately high expectations. I have been a big fan of Bob Odenkirk for decades and loved his time as Jimmy McGill in Better Call Saul. I picked up the novel that the show is based on, Straight Man by Richard Russo, and it has been one of my favorite reads of the year so far. However, when I reached the season finale of Lucky Hank, I had one feeling prominent at the front of my mind: relief that it was over and I was never watching any more of this show. That doesn’t mean the show is horrible, but it does not fit my sensibilities. Instead, we got a single-camera dramedy sitcom hybrid with Lucky Hank, complete with spots where we are intended to laugh with the laugh track absent.

My Favorite TV Season Finales

Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3
“The Best of Both Worlds” Part I (June 18, 1990)
Written by Michael Piller
Directed by Cliff Bole

Once upon a time, television shows in America operated on a seasonal basis. Most new shows would premiere in September and wrap up their seasons in May, paving the way for a summer of reruns. Along the way, there would be mid-season replacements debuting around January, and networks followed this structure year after year. As cable began producing prestige dramas and streaming dominated everything, this cycle ceased. Now season finales can happen anytime in the year based on when you are watching something. I also want to point out that this is a season finale list, not a series finale list. The end of a show’s run is a whole different animal than wrapping up a season. You can bet there will be a list for that sometime.