Quarantine streaming has been a weird dance. Yes, we have more time. But Twitter, a pandemic, and underlying anxieties about what the future holds can do a number on the brain. This is my attempt to write about what we’ve watched in our time since It All Began.
Devs (FX)
Ex Machine and Annihilation – both also written and directed by Alex Garland – are two modern sci-fi classics that have stuck with me since first viewing. Throw in Nick Offerman – the spirit animal I wish to claim, the man I desire to be – and you could not possibly get me any more excited about a new show. For nearly a good 9 of the 10 episodes, I was all-in. The characters felt removed with a purpose. It embodied the filmmaking eye Garland had perfected since Ex Machina – evocative music with tranquil camerawork and shiny objects clashing with the sprawl of nature. Even as it moved slowly through its story, I held my trust it would stick the landing.
The problem with putting so much weight on an answer that comes in the final episode is that it runs into the same problem the LOST finale did: how can you tie up so many different strands of ideas in an emotional, evocative way? Devs is a fertile playground for Garland to touch on things that clearly compel him. But as they funnel towards the final episodes, I…I don’t know. Something seemed amiss. It didn’t land for me. It felt almost like Garland himself realized the explanation couldn’t support the weight of what he had built, so he added layers that only confused the ending rather than deepened them. It may just be me (it probably is!). It may also just be a rare, gorgeous misfire from one of our best cinematic storytellers.
GLOW (Netflix)
The word thing about our age of binging shows is that you’re sometimes recommended something on the promise it gets better. “It will pick up by the third season!” they say. I know this happens with shows – I distinctly remember how one of my favorites, Parks and Rec, didn’t click in place until the second season. But the result is that you can sometimes feel like you’re given homework. And as a writer who hears every other day how “you need to grab the readers by the first page!” – it can be hard to dip those toes in the water.
I say all of that because, well, I started watching this show on the promise of how great the 2nd season was supposed to be. The first season started out a bit slow, carefully building its world, but after a couple of episodes, I began to appreciate the difference between vertical and horizontal storytelling. Horizontal storytelling is what we often think we want from our shows – a continually moving, ever-forward plot. Cause and effect. One thing after another. But vertical storytelling makes it look like the story isn’t progressing when, in fact, it’s going deeper and deeper into the characters. We see this a lot with “bottle episodes” that shows may have. Or where unusual character matchups are created to bring out new colors in them. When the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling are stuck in a shitty hotel, wondering if this show they’ve got themselves into is ever going to see the light of day, GLOW starts to pick up steam. It builds its characters. It strengthens its conflicts and contrasts. And then by the tail-end of the season, it starts running with the confidence of knowing what it is and wants to be.
That only further continued in Season 2, where it grapples with a #MeToo situation that nearly tears the team apart before they slowly build each other back up again. And Season 3 does some really interesting things when the team moves to Las Vegas, combining its vertical and horizontal storytelling in interesting, emotional ways. It just so happened that we watched the final Lynn Shelton-directed episode, “A Very Merry Christmas”, the day after she died. I could see her fingerprints all over it, most especially in the love you can see she has for her actors and the difficult conversations they still need to have. This episode made me cry more than once and it hit me just how much I had grown to know and enjoy such a wide spectrum of characters over 3 seasons.
Never Have I Ever (Netflix)
I wasn’t crazy about the first episode. It felt too busy, too clever, too…a lot of things. But here’s the thing: it also rather deftly set up every conflict – between friendships, parents, cliches, and the overlying trauma story – all with a John McEnroe narration that, baffling at first, made total, perfect sense by the end. Too many shows love to hint at what’s to come without ever revealing anything. They prize mystery over clarity. It may be enough to draw a viewer in, but what makes you emotionally invested in what’s to come is a clear sense of everyone’s relationship to each other. It’s a large cast with a lot of dynamics. Never once did I misunderstood how they related to each other. And because of that, seeing characters start to collide with each other only further increased the investment.
And there is so much to say about this show. That it 110% feels like Mindy Kaling’s brain injected into a high school teen comedy. That it’s the most diverse show I’ve seen. That it’s empathetic towards all of its characters in a way that feels like a combination of the best of James L. Brooks and any of Michael Schur’s TV series (some of which Mindy has written on). What takes this show up several notches is the overarching thematic work done with Devi’s recently passed father. We get caught up in the hilarious character interactions and then bam: we’re reminded why Devi is emotionally stuck where she is and what she needs to do to work past it. By the end, when it all comes together and Devi and her family can have a cathartic moment? My wife and I were crying just as much as the people onscreen.
Atlanta (Hulu)
As I was nearing the end of Atlanta, grappling with all the storylines and cultural observations this brilliant show had weaved together, I was also working on my own feature script. Atlanta motivated and crippled me in equal measure. I made me want to create and yet presented a level of clearance I wasn’t sure I could even approximate. On one afternoon walk as I eyed traffic and scrolled through Twitter, I stumbled upon some screenwriting wisdom from a professional script reader. He said to be wary of I or T pages in your script. All of a sudden, everything I loved about Atlanta crystallized. You see, a script that looks like a towering I or T of text means it’s nonstop dialogue with very little action written in.
In other words: your characters are doing a lot of talking and not a lot of moving. This creates a long, tall pillar of centralized text making it look like one giant I. And before you start to think about dialogue-heavy movies you love, I’d challenge you to actually read their scripts. There’s a lot more action written into them than you’d expect.
By the time my wife and I funneled towards the end of Season 2 (the last currently available), the masterfulness of the writing became even more evident. This is a show that uses action and movement as well as any out there. Before a character really expresses in words how they feel, you’ve seen several scenes of them sulking or screaming or being dismissed or condescended to. You’ve seen microaggressions and doors slammed in their face. You’ve seen actors that have been trusted, time and time again, to not use their words but instead their face and their body as their sole acting instrument. So when they finally do say how they feel: you see it coming. And the accumulation of emotion you feel for them as it finally lands? It’s brutal. There’s still a part of me that sinks when I think about Earn (Donald Glover) telling Darius (LaKeith Stanfield), “You’re so even keel usually, but my world is falling apart.”
Another example of this is how Al (Brian Tyree Henry) keeps talking about how successful the manager of another peer rapper is. Al especially mentions it to Earn, his current manager, hoping it will light a fire in him. And this goes on and on without every expressly stating the obvious: that Clark County’s manager is largely able to secure all these endorsements, connections, and great gigs for his client because he’s white. It’s not until that same scene in which Earn tells Darius his world is falling apart that Earn finally asks a Hasidic Jew at a passport center (it will make sense when you see it) if his Jewish lawyer friend is better than all the black lawyers. The man’s response lays out what’s been hinted at for nearly two seasons: “No, but he gets the kind of opportunities Black wouldn’t because of systemic racism.”
There is so much you can learn about writing with Atlanta, and I still think, many months later, about how well they set up their core conflict between Earn and Al. Al doesn’t think Earn is getting him enough gigs or enough money. Earn doesn’t think Al is understanding how he has to work his way up to better gigs. It all comes to an explosive head after a gig completely, disastrously falls apart.
The construction of the moment is key: it gives just enough fault on each side of each character for us, the audience, to have an opinion that could go either way. We can see how hard Earn is working to get everyone situated and have a profitable gig, yet we can also see how some of the corners he cut endangered them. We can see how angry Al is with the gig falling apart, but we can also see he’s looking too high while sitting too low and how he completely overlooks how untrustworthy and dangerous his own cousin is. What’s so beautiful and heartbreaking about this is how Earn and Al can’t take it out on each other. It’s why Earn has to pick a very ill-advised fight with Tracy, a man who towers over him and beats him up badly. Earn’s gotta take all of his anger out on Tracy because there’s no way he can stomach doing it to his true cousin Al. The way all this works together and leads up to the final scene of Season 2 is just *chefs kiss*.
Few works of art have taught me as much about writing as this one. And as much as I’m dying for another season, I want them to take their time.
If writer/producer Stephen Glover’s tweet, written in the midst of June’s Black Lives Matter protests is any indication, it’s gonna pack just as much of a vital punch as each season before.
Ramy (Hulu)
There are two unmistakable influences on Ramy: Alan Yang and Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, and Donald and Stephen Glover’s Atlanta. All three shows examine the microcosms of their characters in their own unique ways, with Master of None showing what it’s like to be Indian and Asian in 21st century New York, Atlanta what it’s like to be Black and in the juxtaposition of Atlanta proper and the Deep South of white America, and Ramy with the ongoing battles of being a New Jersey Muslim in this day and age.
Ramy also shares a heavy similarity with them in the way it surrounds its core with delightful supporting characters that challenge and support the main character. We get to see such a spectrum of the Muslim experience throughout, in ways both expected and unexpected (such as an entire Season 2 episode involving expensive cars, an expansive estate, and an always clothed porn star – you will not see any of it coming). Very few shows gave me as much to think about. And Ramy, like its spiritual predecessors, is truly a testament to how the more specific the storytelling gets, the more universal and relatable the characters are. I could see a little of myself in each episode. One of the most entertaining mirrors around.
What We Do in the Shadows (Hulu) –
When I first heard they were making a TV series out of Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s 2014 mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, I was unsure just how much more they could get out of the premise. What I should have remembered is that Taika has made a name for himself making terrible-sounding ideas work beautifully (Thor 3, Jojo Rabbit).
This is a masterfully-written show delivered by a great bunch of comedic actors in Kayvan Novak (Nandor the Relentless), Matt Berry (Laszlo Cravensworth), Natasia Demetriou (Nadja), Harvey Guillén (Guillermo), and Mark Proksch (Colin Robinson aka the energy vampire). It’s pretty amazing just how many wrinkles the cast and writers are able to mine out of the premise, which sees vampires of different types and time periods trying to make a living in Staten Island, New Jersey. Sometimes you get simple, yet delightful ideas like Nandor getting a ‘mail daemon’ email and being convinced he’s been sent a curse he must send to 15 other people, and other times you get to meet a Vampire Council made up of Tilda Swinton, Evan Rachel Wood, Wesley Snipes, and Pee-Wee Herman.
The best sitcoms are the ones that are effectively a group of people you want to hang out with (at least figuratively) and What We Do in the Shadows in its two seasons has shown just what delightful, entertaining company they are. I already miss them.
