Friday Feelings and Distractions
Things I'm trying to think about in advance of Super Bowl Sunday
As most of the world knows, this Sunday is not just any Sunday, it’s Super Bowl Sunday. And my beloved 49ers are in the game, so I’m essentially just a large ball of stress, wondering about whether Christian McCaffrey will be able to expose the soft rushing defense of the Chiefs, or whether instead Chris Jones will remind me of 2019 in too many painful ways. And so, so much more.
So instead, I’m writing about things I’m reading or watching that aren’t YouTube press conferences by Kyle Shanahan, Brock Purdy and such.
There is far, far too much content out there right now - and I’m not breaking new ground by saying this. It’s hard to keep up with everything out there, and nobody should really try. I have heard good things about Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the TV reboot of the Brangelina movie that was way more fun than I expected it to be. We haven’t gotten there quite yet.
Instead, here are a few shows we are watching.
True Detective: Night Country. This is the fourth installment of this limited series, where they focus on completely different cases in different areas - but they are tied together, often VERY loosely, but some occult/supernatural elements. This season we are in Alaska, with Jodie Foster starring as the local police chief in the small town of Ennis, and Kali Reis as someone she’s working with again after demoting her to State Trooper for reasons pertaining to a prior case. Reis is a really interesting actress, and Foster is great - as is John Hawkes as another policemen in her office going through his own stuff. But after four episodes, I’m really starting to wonder how much “there” is there. I like how it’s permanently dark outside in the sense that it’s disarming and weird (as it must be for the locals), and I’m certainly here for the weirdness of it all, but … I’m hoping there’s more resolution to this case than it seems right now.
The Fall of the House of Usher. This is one I thought I’d watch by myself - Mike Flanagan, the writer and director, previously did Midnight Mass which I loved but it’s billed as a horror show, something my wife isn’t all that into. I have yet to see his first Netflix work like this, The Haunting of Hill House, but I hear great things. And “Usher” is … man, it’s wild. The tone is great - spooky but funny, creepy and shocking - and so far, we are both very, very in. That said, it’s GORY as hell, at least most specifically in the second episode (we are only three or four in so far) but somehow the tone is covering for that with us. Each episode is named after a different Edgar Allen Poe story, but it’s a modern tale and one that I’m increasingly interested in. (There’s also a lot of the same actors from Midnight Mass, and I don’t know why but I sort of like when directors consistently go back to the same group of actors.)
You may have noticed a certain theme with these two, both of which delve into the horror way more than many other popular shows and certainly ones we watch. This is not intentional, but here we are.
Monsieur Spade. We were big fans of the HBO - sorry, Max - show “Perry Mason,” which was not re-upped after its second season. This isn’t the same thing but it is a hardboiled detective show - this one following the character of Sam Spade, twenty years after he disappeared from Los Angeles. We find him in rural France. Spade is played by Clive Owen, an actor I feel like I’ve never seen quite enough from. We’ve just seen the first episode (we were looking for something a bit more family friendly as our kid made cookies in the kitchen) and while about halfway through that episode, I had concerns that quite literally nothing had happened, they had me by the end. I’m interested to see where this goes.
In order to not make this completely about TV shows, I’ll add in another podcast I just stumbled upon, yet another from The Ringer, called “60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s.” This is definitely for a group of people about 10-15 years younger than me (I’m an 80s kid), but I certainly listened to a lot of the music discussed. I’m not 100% sold on the host - he seems a bit too impressed with himself and he’s clearly reading a script he wrote instead of just talking - but I did listen to the Liz Phair episode, about the song “F*ck and Run” from her amazing album, “Exile In Guyville.”
It got me going back and listening to more Liz Phair, certainly not a bad outcome.
It’s odd because whenever I listen to a Ringer podcast, some of the commercials are voiced by Bill Simmons who runs the company (titularly, as Spotify owns it outright now) and of course was one of the pioneers in mass podcasts and hired a lot of great talent. I don’t know why, but as someone who WAS a huge fan of his (read all his columns, bought his books, was eager to hear him in person at the Sloan Sports Conference), he’s so goddamn smarmy and arrogant, I can’t handle it. (His recent Amazon ad talking about how he’s finally the guy cracking all the jokes at his holiday parties made me want to smack him, but perhaps that’s just me.) The way many of the Ringer staff talk about Simmons on their own podcasts suggests they are all VERY big fans of his, and maybe that’s a cause or an effect, but just the way they talk about “Bill” feels just icky to me.
That said, the podcast seems fun and I’m gonna listen to more episodes.
What are you listening to or watching?