Note: in television, bottle episodes are designed to be produced as cheaply as possible. The cast shrinks. There’s usually minimal use of sets (if only one). Supposedly their name came from the old Star Trek series, in which they’d keep the crew on the set of the Enterprise, a “ship-in-the-bottle” episode. Here, I’m just making a bad pun in which I’ll focus on an episode of a show I’d like to dig a little deeper into.

Ramy Youssef’s self-titled Ramy series throws so much food for thought at the viewer each episode that it’s a small miracle it never becomes too much. If anything, it makes the show highly addictive. After you get through the first episode or two, which feel very much like Youssef’s stand-up comedy written in episode form, you get a fascinating examination of what it’s like to be a Muslim in modern-day New Jersey. Youssef and his team make sure to expose us to just about every conflict that resides in bringing such a traditional, long-standing religion into a world that seems to fight against everything about it. The struggle of finding the right kind of food. The struggle of meeting the right partners. The struggle of overbearing parents who don’t quite understand how the generations change. It’s an ongoing battle of trying to find the line between respecting the heritage and finding your own way. It’s a battle many of us recognize, only just wrapped in details we may find unique. 

While Ramy feels like a spiritual cousin to Atlanta, it finds a lot of mileage in centering Ramy’s actual spiritual struggle. He truly wants to be a good Muslim. But the world offers too many temptations and messages that run against it. It’s constant fighting against the grain that Ramy sees both as noble and exhausting at once. This spiritual battle goes up another notch in the second season when Ramy seeks the guidance of Sheikh Ali Malik (a fantastic Mahershala Ali) at a Sufi mosque. Early on in the season, Ramy gravitates towards a young, homeless veteran who’s looking for direction. As much in self-interest as in wanting to do good, Ramy brings the young man to the Sheikh, ignoring all the comments the man has made about his experience in the military. When the truth explodes to the forefront and the situation goes south, leading to a hospital and later jail time, Ramy and the Sheikh must go on a seemingly fruitless endeavor to find the troubled man’s dog. 

Fast forward to an unbelievably cold Jersey night. No clues are coming up. They’re wandering in more remote places of impending danger. And yet the Sheikh still wants to do a traditional Muslim prayer. Ramy keeps making excuses for why they can’t do it, just another complaint in a long line of them, a steady stream the Sheikh has fought to ignore. Finally, he hits Ramy with some truth: 

“You look at everything as a blessing or a curse, Ramy. The truth is, everything is both. We have to see the blessings in the curses and be wary of the curses in the blessings. Both are from God. Both are an opportunity.”

I saw this episode back in March. Ever since, I’ve thought about this line at least once a day. It reminded me of something a wise friend of mine told me in a time of many, many changes: that every change, even the good ones, has a grieving process. When you gain something, you lose something as well. When you move to a new city, you gain opportunities and yet grieve not being able to see friends and familiar haunts so easily. When you buy a new house, you build a home together and yet grieve the loss of some spatial flexibility (not to mention the reality of a mortgage). When you get married, you celebrate the best decision you ever made while also grieving some loss of independence. 

But the beauty of what the Sheikh says is that it’s important to look at it from the other direction, too. For everything that seems like a curse, it’s important to find the possible blessing, the silver lining. “What if this search for Boomer isn’t the burden you think it is?” he asks Ramy.  “What if it’s a chance? A chance to take responsibility for your actions instead of making excuses. “

There is frequent discussion throughout Ramy of what is and isn’t haram, which is an Islamic reference to anything that is forbidden by Allah or the five Islamic commandments. With the dog search providing Ramy with such a surplus of intimate time spent with the Sheikh, he brings up haram again. The rules seem too flexible. He seeks a definitive answer. 

“Nothing in and of itself is haram,” the Sheikh says. “It’s a matter of how we choose to engage with it. Alcohol, for example, isn’t haram. Drinking it is. The rules are very important in our faith. Not for the reasons you might think. I was confused about this once, too. By the grace of Allah, I found my teacher.”

He then launches into another lesson that still has its roots deep within my brain:

 “ She taught me that Islam was like an orange. There’s an outer part and an inner part. If someone only got the rules and rituals, they might think Islam was tough and bitter like the outside of an orange. But there’s an inside, a juicy flesh, the divine intimacy, the spiritual experience. The rind without the flesh is bitter and useless. The flesh without the rind would quickly rot. The outer Sharia protects the inner spirituality. And the inner spirituality gives the outer Sharia its purpose and meaning. My teacher helped me understand that I needed both.”

In the time of quarantine, these two lessons have stuck with me. What may have seemed initially like a curse – being stuck at home and unable to see so many people the way we used to – has been a blessing of sorts in getting back the time we lost to traffic, to partaking in projects long sidelined, to reducing the clutter to make way for the meaningful. But the orange analogy has been just as helpful to remember in the struggle of figuring out how to live a life of meaning when there is a limit to where we can go. It’s far too easy to collapse into a cycle of work, rest, and passivity. But it’s also important not to be so strict with rules and guidelines that we cannot find the time and space to truly relax or do deep work. There’s a balance that must be struck for us to feel centered. 

Eventually, they find the dog. But the audience discovers something better: beautiful, relatable lessons delivered by one of the best actors in the game.

Back in June, NBC Universal announced they would be yanking all nine seasons of The Office back from Netflix, streaming it on their own platform in 2021. On the surface, this would seem business as usual. But coming off the heels of Netflix losing all ten seasons of Friends to Warner Media in 2020, it stung further. And showing that all bad things come in threes, a list popped up online of the Top 10 Most-Watched Shows on Netflix. Guess which two shows are in that Top 10? And guess just how many shows of the 10 are actually, 100% owned by Netflix?

Only two: Stranger Things (25 eps) and Orange Is the New Black (91 eps). Also worth noting: OITNB just wrapped up its series finale and Stranger Things only has one more season left. While The Office (201 eps) and Friends (236 eps) have long wrapped up their series, they boast significantly more episodes, content, reruns, merchandise, nostalgia, everything. In fact, Sonny Bunch of the Washington Post theorizes that the endless push for new content – both in streaming shows and content written about these streaming shows – has killed the rerun, which has created a serious barrier for today’s generation in developing cultural knowledge.

All 8 of the non-Netflix shows first aired on network television. Which means they all had one-episode-a-week seasons. And guess what? People were okay with that! In fact, you could argue that they were okay with that for many, many years. That allowed some time to breathe between episodes, to talk about them at work and at home. And then, even better, there were so many made they could be pumped into syndication aka That Thing That Was Awfully Like Streaming Before Streaming Existed. Which led to reruns. Which led to DVD sets. Which led to such a wide audience having a chance to finally memorize all those great Friends one-liners.

But here’s the thing. If I’m Netflix and I see that my two biggest shows are Stranger Things and Orange Is the New Black, I should be disheartened by one thing: the short shelf life of conversation they create.

When Season 3 of Stranger Things, the biggest and most expensive of seasons yet, hit Netflix, the conversation seemed to last, at best, a week. Every entertainment site wrote tons of think pieces and hot takes and truly pumped out the content. And then it was over and on to the next thing. Same with Orange Is the New Black.

It feels an awful lot like that parent who ran all over town and spent a shit-ton of money – way, way more than they felt comfortable with – to put on a big birthday party for each of their two kids, making them a couple of weeks apart – just to be safe and save the confusion/exhaustion – and then was horribly disappointed to see how little it registered with them. The kids ate the cake, they ran around, they tore open the presents, and then all the friends went home for a nap and that was that. Weeks worth of sweat swallowed by a couple, soon-to-be-forgotten hours. Did that feel worth it?

Here’s what HBO seems to understand better than any other streaming service (even if it seems almost by accident). They’re still beholden to the old format for new shows, perhaps out of loyalty to its longtime cable TV customers. They only pump out one episode of their new shows at a time. And guess what happens? People talk about them allllllll week long.

Euphoria debuted over a month ago, and people are still writing quite a bit about it. Big Little Lies came out the week before and continues to bring lots of chatter, even if it seems to be as much about the drama behind the camera as in front of it. That week gap allows sites like The Ringer and Vulture and numerous other podcasts to create entire episodes and articles of content around one episode at a time.

But when you throw it all out there at once? You risk making your viewers like those overwhelmed kids at the birthday party. They’ll make the most of it for two hours and then they’ll pass out at home and move on to the next thing. You’re conditioning them to make it all ephemeral. Netflix and other streamers have conditioned its audience to (often wrongly) believe physical media (DVDs and Blu-Rays) versions of their content don’t exist. Which only lends itself further to a reduced cultural cachet.

So Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and surely Disney+: just a tip. Experiment with releasing a new episode at a time. Find ways to get people chatting about it. Remind people of the Blu-Rays. Stretch out that conversation. You’re gonna need an awful lot of conversation to replace all the shows leaving you in the next year or two as the Streaming Wars heat up. And you’re gonna need a lot more chatter if you want to keep those investors happy.

So. Be a bit more like HBO, yo.

At this current point in our cultural history, there are so many choices.

What was once the album has been broken into singles, spread across the Spotifyverse, landing into algorithmic mixes of various styles and moods.

What was once a movie release year has been expanded across streaming platforms, into days, weeks, months, seasons, and in such volume as to be a geyser of which no one can figure out how to approach.

What was once a TV season has been dislodged into an alternate reality in which time is nonlinear and fluid. Entire seasons can be ignored and caught up with years later, with several seasons consumed in a lazy weekend. There is no urgency except to be the first to say something. What was once the talk of the year has become the Talk of A Couple Days. From there, it’s a years-long stream of intermittent conversation you have to seek out to participate in.

What was once books and magazines has exploded into rabbit holes borne by Kindles and the Internet alike, deep dives of articles, e-books, and clickbait, with barely the chance to come up for air. There is so much to read and so much need for content that I cannot tell who is more distracted and starved: the writer or the reader.

I have no issue with the vastness of our choices. What I do take issue with, however, is our disappearing conversation. We are just so quick to move on from one thing to another. Sometimes by choice. Sometimes by autoplay. Sometimes because we feel we have to keep up with whatever we think we need to keep up with.

What we have gained in access, we have lost in community. Conversations with friends about culture are very rarely about a thing shared, but rather an exchange of the various things we’ve watched, seen, or heard. And when we’re finally hitting upon a commonality in the discourse? It’s like a bolt of lightning. NOW we can be electrified by our similarity or difference of opinion. Now we can be reminded we’re not alone, and that we did not witness this incredible or terrible cultural entity in a vacuum.

The universe is expanding. It feels like we’re all in orbit, missing things the first time and coming back around to catch them. But that orbit checkpoint may be 3 days, 3 weeks, or 3 years down the road. And considering the vastness of the cultural universe, who knows who else will meet us there?

This is very likely why I have flocked to Twitter in recent weeks. I never post anything, but I frequently check in with my favorite Tweeters. I thoroughly enjoy the amount of damn good jokes and interesting insight that can be found through a casual scroll, but what I really seek is something far simpler: someone talking about the same thing that I’m witnessing or thinking about.

Someone talking about the general problematicness of THE GREEN BOOK. Someone talking about Jussie Smollett. Someone talking about LeBron’s Baby Lakers again shitting the bed after a nice win a couple days before.

Tonight, the Oscars will likely be what they’ve always been: an overlong ceremony with slack and speed, with people told to hurry up as they luxuriate in their achievement, and several presenting pairs that force an eyebrow or two to be raised. I don’t expect my favorites to win; they rarely do. But I will be watching, and I will be looking to Twitter. I will briefly partake in that most nostalgic feeling of all: that we’re all partaking in the same thing.

In 1998, being a nerd had nothing to do with the internet. Months before Google first made landfall, I caught my whiffs of nerdery within other analog searches. I ambled up and down library aisles, spilled my cereal milk over Sports Illustrated profiles, and thumbed through the daily newspaper. I squinted at everything, both out of curiosity and an undiagnosed glasses prescription. 

My first memories of soccer were of ineptitude. Of running up and down the field in the wrong direction. Of not knowing how to pull off the sweet moves my friends did. But three years into my withering Rec League soccer career, the nerd inside me thirsted for more. With the World Cup coming – the first that I truly understood the magnitude and complexity of – I had to know it all. I looked through magazines, books, and the deep pockets of strip malls to find trading cards for players in now-defunct soccer leagues.

I had to play, think, and read it.

The 1998 World Cup not only represented the first (and only) time I ever taped a full-length soccer game with an actual VHS, but it encapsulated a period of time in which I became somewhat obsessed with learning about soccer players around the world. I knew about Carlos Valderamma from Colombia and Juergen Klinnsman from Germany (I even dressed as them for consecutive Halloweens – and, of course, no one knew who I was). I knew nearly the entire starting 11 for Brazil. I knew an awful lot more about soccer around the world than you would ever expect from a dorky deaf 4th grade kid in Spokane, Washington.

But England’s Premier League soccer eluded me. I didn’t understand all the terms – transfer fees, multiple league titles, the cheeky way the British love to talk about their footy stars. I just knew one name and one name only: Manchester United. For some reason, it felt easy to remember. It felt majestic. It felt like something akin to royalty. Even as my attention swerved to other sports over the years, I always knew Man United had quite a hold around the world, if only as one of the the most valuable sports teams on the planet.

In the summer of 2017, I went on a solo two-week trip to Europe. I had two main objectives: to see Ireland, a country I had long salivated to see, and to visit my cousin and her husband in Manchester. After eight days of awesome, exhilarating, exceedingly dumb adventures involving over 70 miles of walking across Ireland, Amsterdam, Paris, and London, I found myself in one place for 5 days: good ol’ Manchester proper.

While touring my cousin’s apartment that first morning, she pointed out to me that just a mere mile or two thataway stood Etihad Stadium, the home of Manchester City’s soccer team. I thought it was cool. But it didn’t even register. Of course they would be rivals with Manchester United, but I only read about one Manchester team that summer of 1998 and the many years after, and it certainly was not Manchester City.

My third day in Manchester, I had a small request: to see the outskirts of Old Trafford, aka Manchester’s home stadium since 1910. Riding the bus over, I could identify the gaudy behemoth from a mile away. Of course that was the home of Manchester United. It had to announce itself.

Even the nearby mall in Old Trafford felt like it had been born out of United’s hold over the town: fake ostentation, a pining for money and attention alike. It felt like stumbling into a British imitation of Las Vegas, of American excess, where even the designers smirked as they dashed out their blueprints. Inside, past the glossy gold railings, was a food court that closely imitated a cruise ship. It was excess packaged inside the place where excess lives: the bustling, teeming shopping mall.

Fast forward to Labor Day Weekend 2018. I’m home alone for the weekend with my girlfriend’s cat. The possibilities are endless for what we can do (well, at least for me – that cat ain’t leaving the house for nobody). Instead, we stay inside thanks to an article I read on The Ringer about what I would spend all weekend watching: Amazon Prime’s All or Nothing series on Manchester City’s record-breaking 2017-18 season.

Very quickly, a few things became clear as I raced through each episode:

1. I was in love with Manchester City.
2. I found Manchester United detestable and expendable.
3. I loved every single player, coach, and crew member of this City team.
4. I was in love with Manchester City. Did I mention that?

City’s coach, Pep Guardiola, is the kind of coach you always want to have. He’s demanding of his players, but he’s also highly personable. They know he cares. They know he has their back. They know he’s capable of celebrating a joyous moment after the final whistle blows. He’s the kind of coach a young soccer player dreams of playing for and an old veteran finds comfort in working alongside. This becomes especially apparent as the series gives us glimpses of the Premier League’s other, far less charismatic coaches (although Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp has his moments).

The style of soccer they play closely resembled the style my own soccer teams wanted to play, except these were world-class athletes with impeccable execution and delightful personalities.

Sometimes all it takes is a chance to get to know someone, and then they can turn you away from anything.

I wrote about this same feeling with the San Antonio Spurs in 2014. I spent most of my life hating them for their success. I wanted them to lose to my boy LeBron’s Miami Heat. But when I saw the way they played, the constant, excitable whirring of their offense and the tough-mindedness of their defense, I couldn’t help but be smitten. And when I gave myself a chance to like them, I only loved them more. Whatever hatred I ever had towards a highly successful organization as them immediately melted away.

Some people call this being a bandwagon fan. I call this falling in love.

I didn’t fall in love with the 2014 Spurs because they won. I fell in love with the way they won, they way they approached their lives on and off the court. The same can be said for City. It would be so easy to label me a bandwagon fan after their incredible 2017-18 season, in which they broke multiple records and only seem to be gathering even more momentum so young in this current 2018-19 season.

But I love the way they play. I love their players. I love how they work together and how they defend each other. Not every successful team is like this. In fact, most aren’t. City is something special, and we will likely look back on this iteration years from now as some kind of lightning that was captured in a bottle.

So perhaps it’s fitting the City logo is of a sailing ship. Ships typically achieve one of three destinies: they either sink, are torn apart for scraps, or are placed in a glass bottle to be preserved for the many years to follow.

This is a team born to be placed upon the shelf of history. I will enjoy as much of it as I can before it’s bottled up for good.