My Week In Media August 30 – September 5
This (hopefully weekly) free content feature is (will be) an accounting of what I watched, read, heard, and played over the course of the previous week. Since I didn’t get the idea to do this until later in the week last week I didn’t journal everything I saw, so I have to go off of memory.
You might be thinking, “but how can you not remember everything you…” Well, you sweet summer child you’ll see based on volume.
Biggest Impression of the Week:
We’ll see if this catches on for me as a feature within the feature, but I thought I’d start with the piece of art I engaged with that had the biggest splash with me.
The Operators by Michael Hastings (Started back in late July, finished late August)
I picked this book up on my Kindle about half a year ago after I finally got around to watching the Netflix original movie, War Machine. The movie is a looser, sillier telling of Michael Hastings’s experiences being embedded with Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff following the General’s promotion to running the war in Afghanistan in 2010.
I started reading the book coincidentally (or as coincidentally as any piece of art about a contemporary twenty year long war can be) with current events as they unfolded over the last month. I started reading it mainly because I wanted something to read while waiting for a book I’m looking forward to coming out later this September… and also because of my abiding interest in war, both as glorious myth and as ignominious reality.
Michael Hastings, who died in 2013, was a Rolling Stone journalist who, much like William Miller in Almost Famous (a comparison made by Hastings in the pages of his book) found himself caught up hanging out with the guys, especially as they got stuck in Europe during the big Iceland volcano explosion.
Runaway General, the article that Hastings wrote and that Rolling Stone published with due diligence, led to McChrystal being immediately fired due to his and his staff’s various damning quotes on any number of subjects. Content from the article illuminated quotes from senior military members that could be described as insubordinate at best, referred to the French as “fucking gay” (an investigation led to the conclusion that the former Navy Seal who said that mean the French in general…) and included the middle aged and almost respectable version of getting drunk and making an ass out of yourself in public. The story reads like following the hard charging Valhalla decadence of a dad band who need to pick their kids up on Monday morning.
While Hastings’s story of how the article came together is both interesting (Hastings goes into detail about how and why the transition of leadership occurs, and offers a thousand foot view of Afghanistan’s politics and American’s strategic goals) and hilarious in its absurdity and its actual content (the McChrystal entourage refer to themselves as Team America… they are not without irony) it is his ability to capture the story around the events that became his article that make the book both insightful and relevant almost a decade after its publishing.
Conversations with various Afghan people (both local and displaced), boots on the ground service members, state department personnel, personal anecdotes about being a war correspondent, and the biography of the war itself map out what was then a decade long quagmire.
In this, Hastings does an admirable job of exposing the shortcomings in American’s strategic and tactical goals regarding counter-insurgency (COIN) and nation building in both Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to the core of The Operators. The core of the book is a story as old as American military interventionism, it is a book that captures the failures of communication, honesty, respect, and an inflexibility to adjust to the realities of war in both civilian and military command all the way down to the people killing and dying for the orders that put them there, and the incompetence that left them there.
And since I couldn’t fit it in up above, one of McChrystal’s dudes is Michael Flynn! Yes, the same Michael Flynn Trump pardoned after a conviction following admitting to lying to the FBI, features in the article and the book, as does his brother. Every time his name popped up, I thought “The guy that was going to help Turkey kidnap someone”, because Michael Flynn is fucking binkers.
Movies:
-These were all first time viewings for me-
The Way Back: Not the Ben Affleck alcoholic high school basketball coach one, the based on a true story of a band of Polish POWs and Russian dissidents that escaped a Siberian prison camp, and walked to India.
Great cast , strong characterization, you know how it ends based on the description. It’s worth watching if you want to watch a movie that really feels like a movie.
71: A horror thriller about a British soldier who gets separated from his unit in Northern Ireland and has to survive the night while being hunted through the streets by the IRA. It’s a tense, emotionally and physically violent movie, and not a story of bold heroics. It’s not The Raid, or Dredd, both of which touch on the same themes of being outnumbered and isolated, nor is it Die Hard, it is a much more of a horror movie… but not to the degree of Green Room.
The Postman Always Rings Twice: The 1941 one with Lana Turner. A while back I watched the one with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lang and I liked it, I also didn’t realize it was a remake so when this one popped up on HBO MAX I gave it a go. It’s good, it’s tense, everyone gets to really dig into their roles.
It’s based on a novel, and the novel (and the movies) end with a very “crime doesn’t pay” message that reminded me of what little Henry James I’ve managed to read (which isn’t much… not a fan, go back to England Henry!).
Shock Treatment: You can watch this one on YouTube, and nowhere else, and is the story of an actor going undercover in an asylum to try and expose a corrupt therapist played by Lauren Bacall, The DA believes that she is working with a gardener who killed his verbally abusive rich lady boss, and burned a bunch of her money. The DA believes perfidy is afoot because there wasn’t enough ash at the crime scene to account for all of money, so there is a chance the gardener hid a large portion of it for himself.
He believes that if Bacall’s character has come to the same conclusion and that was the only explanation for her assessment and testimony that got the gardener committed to her asylum instead of prison.
This movie feels like a Batman story, with Bacall very much a Batman villain, and the actor very much a Bruce Wayne undercover in Arkham Asylum.
Did I watch a fifth new to me movie? A sixth? I don’t remember…
Television – Broadcast/Weekly:
In the future when I talk about weekly shows it will hopefully be more about the actual episodes, but this week it’s just overviews.
Reservation Dogs (FX, streaming on Hulu): This is currently the best show on TV, and likely the best show of the year. It is a dramedy about four indigenous teens living on a reservation in Oklahoma who are trying to raise money via petty crime so they can move to California while also living with the loss of a shared friend and sibling.
The show tells a bigger story while focusing on smaller vignettes, weaving in magical realism and mythology. The comedy in the show is made up of solid joke structure as well as observation and both breaks the tension and keeps the story moving forward as much as the drama does. Every comedic beat is both funny and sets the table for future moments of the show’s raw humanity.
Things We Do in The Shadows (FX, streaming on Hulu): Season three of the best pure comedy on TV just started, and continues the story of four idiot vampires and their human friend/accidental vampire killing machine and descendent of Victor Van Helsing, as they bumble through eh afterlife and being undead on Stanton Island. The show is an adaptation of the movie of the same name, but has established its own identity, strengths, and mythology.
The show is a joke machine that lets its cast shine, has managed to have some tremendous guest stars and vampire in-jokes, and rewards the viewer for paying attention but doesn’t punish more casual viewers.
Season one, like most comedies, take a little while to find its legs and its pace, but even its worst episode is still good television.
Archer (FX, streaming on Hulu): Season 12 of the vulgar animated spy comedy is under the pall of the passing of Jessica Walter (Lucille Bleuth on Arrested Development), voice of Malory Archer, mother of the main character and head of the on-again-off-again private intelligence agency that forms the workplace/sitcom background for the show.
I am not aware of if Walter finished her dialogue for the season or if the show will address the passing of her character this season, but as she is one of the show’s main characters her passing is every present.
Archer has been a constant that has survived the show creator leaving, three seasons of coma fantasies, and several other seasons of core premise changes, giving it a tumultuous relationship with its fans, but keeping it at least amusing while it continues to perceiver on the air.
In the days of my erstwhile blog I briefly wrote weekly episode recaps for the show, and in doing so found layers of comedic, narrative, and social value at work within the show show’s crass, whip smart absurdity. If I had anything to offer about the show now, it would be proof that comedy is not dying, and that cancel culture is not a real thing.
Archer has been a hard R in terms of language, innuendo, and otherwise offensive vulgarity since its launch, and it has managed to stay as such year after year, while also addressing the need for social change about what is and isn’t funny, and what is and isn’t punching down.
Brooklyn 99 (NBC, Hulu): The final season of Brooklyn 99 has been a trying one.
In the wake of BLM, ACAB, and Jan. 6 it has been a challenge for many people to enjoy a sitcom about likable NYPD goofs fighting crime and being sweet and silly on a weekly basis.
Given the core conceit of Copaganda, the idea that fiction featuring and glorifying the police serves to condition society into thinking that the police are our friends and not a tool of state sponsored violence and systemic oppression, it can feel like deciding to enjoy the final season of the show requires a knowing compromise or dismissal of values and events that have been prominent in many people’s lives over the last year.
Brooklyn 99 has tried to address this in a manner that, while not appealing to abolitionists and other dedicated leftists, is at least self-aware. Discussion about the underlying perspectives of what Brooklyn 99 is trying to say invariably boil down to whether or not police reform is a viable approach, with less to not-at-all radicalized progressives and the show believing that it is.
All of this is to say, thus far the show has been genuinely funny when it has not addressed the larger issues of the American police state, and has been either thought provokingly self aware, or further inoculating the public from the idea that all cops are bad/bastards depending on where you stand on these issues.
Only Murders in the Building (Hulu original):Only Murders in the Building stars and is from the creative minds of Steve Martin and Martin Short, and is about three tenants in a fancy New York apartment building who share a love of a true crime podcast and who are trying to solve a murder (that appears to be a suicide) in their building.
Along with Selena Gomez, who compliments Martin and Short in every way, they try to document their attempts at solving this crime while also addressing their personal failings and pasts they cannot escape.
Their individual need to solve this crimes are varied, but the result is that their antics are character motivated, and not just slapstick schlock.
Television – Streaming:
Living With Yourself (Netflix):Living with Yourself is an 8 episode dramedy about Paul Rudd’s miserable character (akin to his miserable SOB character from Role Models) who goes to a spa that clones you, then kills the original you and buries you in the woods while the happier, more well adjusted clone you takes over your life.
Obviously Original Rudd escaped death, now there are two Rudd’s running around trying to share a life and… exist.
I stumbled across the show because it co-stars Aisling (pronounced Ash-lin) Bea, an Irish comedian/writer/actor who wrote and stared in…
Max’s Under the Radar Recommendation- THIS WAY UP (Hulu)
This Way Up is a BBC dramedy staring Aisling Bea as a woman recovering from a mental breakdown and trying to put her life back together. It could be called the funnier, more down to earth version of Fleabag, but I might be saying that because Fleabag didn’t do much for me whereas I love this show.
This Way Up features a swath of UK acting stalwarts you’ll recognize from Game of Thrones, Rome, and other things depending on your anglophile tendencies. It is a bittersweet show with equally strong comedic and heartbreaking moments, and also Aasif Mandvi! It is a show that is at times cringe-y, occasionally self-indulgent, but is always honest, propulsive, and amusing.
Notable Streaming Re-Watch:
Daredevil Season 2 and the Defenders (Netflix): I rewatched both of these seasons last week (and the week before-ish) because I read a really good Daredevil comic and wanted something to just have on/revisit. Every Netflix Marevl show was 3-5 episodes too long, and pretty early on it became clear they didn’t know what was actually good about their shows.
To prevent this from turning into yet another rehashed long form complaint about the MCU I will say that the shows do a much better job of telling more human and emotionally grounded stories than the movies do.
Closing Thoughts:
Lots of dramedies this last week…
Future Media Categories:
Comics, Video Games, Music, YouTube videos, and possibly Podcasts.
These “Week In Media” pieces will probably not be all-encompassing, because that would be waaaaaaaaay too long. I mean this piece is already almost two thousand words.