TV Casualty: Too Many Shows

There's too many shows.

Us humans disagree on a lot of things, but we can definitely all 100% agree on one thing: this is the Golden Age of Content. There is Content coming out the wazoo of every network and website in the world. (I was recently watching the DISCOVERY CHANNEL's Manhunt: Unabomber miniseries and constantly muttering, "How is this so good?!") Pretty much every single show everywhere is perfectly professional, competent, and well-written. An embarrassment of riches.

It's annoying.

As a kid (BACK IN MY DAY), we had little nuggets of quality entertainment here and there and we grabbed them and embraced them and watched them over and over and over.

Now? Everything's amazing. I'll never see it all. I almost never watch things twice (Exception: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency). And I have to multitask to get everything done in my life that I need to get done, so I often can't pay proper attention to all this quality Content.

Good problem to have, since there's a lot of stuff afoot in the world at the moment that's not so amazing and uplifting and overwhelmingly high-quality.

So let's celebrate distraction. I am jumping up and down with enthusiasm for these:

American Vandal, season 1 (I laughed so hard at a bit on episode four that I started having trouble breathing. Was just writhing around in hysterics for a good ten minutes.)

Channel Zero: No End House (This show gets under my skin like no other. Season one - Crystal Cove - was also amazeballs.)

Man Seeking Woman, season 3 (Season 1 and 2 had some superb episodes, but were a bit too guttery overall. This season is perfect.)

Black Mirror, season 4 (A couple mehs, but mostly EGADS!)

Manhunt: Unabomber (Seriously, since when has the DISCOVERY CHANNEL been making such high-quality prestige scripted television?!)

The Toys That Made Us (So ridiculously funny and compelling. Full of heart, too.)

Fargo, season 3 (Every season is a near-perfect crime drama, with random creative flights of fancy like animated, alien, or fantasy scenes, deliciously unpredictable.)

And these are perfectly fine:

Dope, season 1

Neon Joe Werewolf Hunter, season 2

Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell, season 3

Mr. Pickles, season 2

Monsters, season 1-3

Inside No. 9, season 2

Celebrity Scandals, season 1-2

Wormwood

Mob City

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, season 2

Dark, season 1

Jean-Claude Van Johnson, season 1

The Crown, season 2

The Shield

The Punisher, season 1

Future Man, season 1

American Horror Story: Cult

The Walking Dead, season 8 (I mean, it sucks like it always does, but it has reliable good moments.)

The Americans, season 5

Schitt’s Creek, season 3

Stranger Things, season 2

The House (Hulu series)

House of Cards, season 5

Mindhunter, season 1

The Librarians (TNT series)

Big Mouth, season 1

The Flash, season 2 and 3

Arrow, season 4 and 5

Supergirl, season 2

Cheers

9-1-1

Manhunt: Unabomber, season 1

X-Files, season 11

Baskets, season 2

Poirot (BBC)

Comedians in Car Getting Coffee

Grimm, season 6

These I ditched after one episode because blah:

Frontier

Shut Eye

Babylon Five

Outlander

Runaways (Hey Marvel: That's enough superhero shows for now, please and thank you. I think you got it covered between Legion, Daredevil, The Punisher, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, The Defenders, Luke Cage, Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter, Cloak and Dagger, The Gifted, Inhumans, Powers, New Warriors, and the infinite number of ANIMATED Marvel shows. Maybe let the golden goose take a little break from the egg-laying.)

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Episodes

Grace and Frankie

Love

Scream, season 2 (Made me wonder why I bothered with the first season. Also made me miss Scream Queens. Is that show ever coming back?)

Taboo

-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

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I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And my Phony books are on Amazon here and my "legitimate" books are on Amazon here. Probably some other places, too.

Movie Lengths: A Treatise

Sometimes it feels like every feature-length movie should be a short.

I rarely see a movie that couldn't be more effectively conveyed in 10-20 minutes.

But I've been watching a lot of horror lately (thanks, Shudder!) so it could just be that the genre's cinematic tricks and tropes are starting to wear thin.

Hmm... nope. The problem really is that most movies are just feature-length because that's the most marketable motion picture format. People only produce shorts to prove their writing/visual chops.

Same thing with short stories. Box office poison, they are. Everyone just wants novels. There's pretty much no market for short stories. Used to be. (Used to be a market for short films, too. They played before or in-between movies screening in theaters up until the 1960s.)

Prime example: I liked Girl With All the Gifts (despite the WTF-for-WTF's-sake ending). But like every horror movie I see these days, the middle of the film terminally bogged. 45 minutes could have disappeared there and it wouldn't have changed the narrative one bit.

I remember hearing that (long before his other horrific deeds came to light) Harvey Weinstein was notorious for cutting his company's movies down mercilessly (even The Postman, Pulp Fiction, and big hits like that). Directors were mucho upset by that, as was I. 

But I totally get it now. There's a WHOLE LOTTA filler in movies that simply doesn't need to be there. And I've been watching a lot of stuff on Shudder lately that's filler-tastic (Solo, Blind Sun, Can't Take It Back, Sweet Sweet Lonely Girl, It Stains the Sand Red, Last Girl Standing, Sam Was Here,  shows like Jordskott Beyond These Walls, Black Lake, etc.).

That's another reason I really like the horror shorts on Shudder. Like The Puppet Man. Now that thing had no plot, just flashy Argento-ish lighting. But at 10 minutes, it didn't overstay it welcome. I would have hated it if they stretched that non-premise to feature length, but they nailed it in 10 minutes. I never once checked my phone or started multitasking. That's a high compliment.

If only more horror productions held our attention spans in such high esteem!


-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

* * *

I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And my Phony books are on Amazon here and my "legitimate" books are on Amazon here. Probably some other places, too.