Books:
The Expanse Series by James S.A. Corey
This is a spectacularly great SF mega-series that absolutely unconditionally was not remotely that at the beginning. There are nine books in this series, each building on and growing the ones prior, and the early books were flat-out bad to mediocre. They weren't bad because the writing was bad - to the contrary the writing is actually pretty good across the whole series with clearly drawn characters and a fair amount of dry humor - but because the plots were so pedestrian and the world so simplistic, though that definitely changes for the better as the series continues. The essence of the series is the discovery of an alien artifact and how that discovery and what stems from it (vague to avoid spoilering here) transforms the human universe. The story plays out in multiple prongs but has a core cast of characters across all the books plus other characters, some of whom feature for a few books, some for just one, some who are in the background then become main characters later, etc. as a means of examining the changes wrought by the discovery in terms of politics, the military, a rebellious underground, and the people on the inside as they try to understand what's really going on and attempt to stop it (or not as the case may be as the books don't limit POV to any one side of any conflict really). I know this is all very vague and I can't say even top-level plot spoilers would ruin these books since it's not those sorts of reveals that ultimately drive this series, but rather character choices. What makes the books work in their entirety is that the author has such a grip on the people and rules and universe and clearly takes a lot of pleasure in sticking his characters in thorny moral and relationship situations and letting those play out that it makes all the underlying SF stuff feel really grounded in comprehensible human emotions. Plus every book leads up to some mega-battle or something like that meaning they end somewhere with a bang that sets up the next one in the series. I'm not sure why the first few books didn't do it for me - to be clear they weren't so awful that I DNF'ed the series though they were bad enough that I thought about it - but I think in some way it's because the characters were much flatter and really books one and two had almost the exact same plot so, like, yeah I didn’t have a ton of confidence in the writer. But once it all gets going and the author settles into his groove, the books are really very entertaining and, honestly, kudos because sustaining and building so many characters and so much plot without ever letting it spiral out of control and keeping it all coherent enough to come together and pay off in the finale is a real feat IJHO. It's big, fun space opera and if that sort of thing is up your alley and you haven't read these, I'd so go for it and if you're like me and don't love the first few I can assure you they absolutely get better.
TV/Streaming:
Rock the Block (Season 2):
As with the entirety of the HGTV familia, this competition reality show is insanely fake with HGTV-standard quadruple-Stepford-level cheeriness yet, because it's a design competition, is watchable nonetheless. The basic premise of the show is 8 HGTV hosts (or so I inferred as I had no idea who any of them were except the guy who was Oprah's designer which I only know because he was caught in that terrible Thai tsunami and almost died (I believe his partner at the time actually did die) and I happened to watch his Oprah interview right after) are split into 4 teams and they're each given an identical cookie-cutter house and a $250k budget and, at the end, an appraiser and realtor do a walkthrough and the house with the highest appraised value wins, the prize being the design teams' name on a street sign, and to hear the designers discuss it, getting your name on some dead end in a Georgia housing development IS UNBELIEVABLY EXCITING. Everyone on the show talks in all-caps nonstop about all levels of minutiae like the radical choice to PAINT THE ENTRYWAY BLACK. Or create a nook in the living room USING ONLY PLANTS. I guess what makes it vaguely interesting - and please note the "vaguely" and “guess” parts because much of the show is just hyper-happy happy HAPPY camera-spewing by the designers - is that there's a tug-of-war between design and appraisal that at least elicited a huh from moi once or twice. Like in each challenge, which were all around increasing home value, will a buyer be more drawn to a practical but expensive reconfiguration or a better looking design? See the "vaguely" here? This is 100% background noise because other than glancing up for the last few minutes to see how it all turned out, it's mostly filler and fake conflicts. Plus they show the rooms realtor-staged, which really makes you wonder how valuable anything the designers added really is, like absent the furniture what did they really do other than put up that wall, those beams, and paint those built-ins? Okay, I feel as if I've now officially devoted about quintuple the space to this show than it deserves and even that's a stretch. If you like design competition shows and can suffer through the HGTV tonal irritations, this one's okay and is at least only 6 episodes and is marginally less shouty than others I've seen so there's THAT!
Succession (Season 2):
I am so glad I overcame my initial resistance to this show because this second season was even more fun than the first. For those who don't know: this a quip-a-minute/fuck-a-second rat-a-tat dialogue show about a megawealthy and hyper-competitive family and their machinations around the family media business. I'd say this season ramped up the plotting a bit in that, without spoilering, there are problems with shareholders plus the three children are, in their own ways, making moves to be appointed CEO by their patriarch/father. This season is much more focused on the business machinations - the company is under attack from numerous sides (mostly due to problems created by the family itself) - and the sibling interplay, in which power fluctuates wildly and it's not really clear who, if anyone, is going to come out on top, makes for a lot more power plays than season 1. I'm not talking plot specifics at all; there's no point, not really for spoiler reasons exactly (I mean, sure, there's definite spoiler potential especially towards the final episodes of the season) but because the pleasure of this show is that you're basically watching middle/high-schooler mentalities trapped in adult bodies and with all the money on the planet to play out their insecurities. This is the fun of it. Everyone has a highly underdeveloped, paranoid mentality with little to no therapy which means all relationships ultimately degenerate into a semblance of the squabbles, resentments, and petty revenges of teenagers. The other thing this season does really well is kind of separate, in a way season 1 didn't, the characters by their preferred manipulation method, i.e. lying-with-a-smile vs acting accommodating then not actually being accommodating vs acting helpless vs acting like an idiot vs straight-up aggression. It becomes a bit like a very entertaining psychology experiment in that sense in which you, the viewer, get to the witness the various advantages and disadvantages of these equally various strategies all in the context of people who absolutely don't trust each other (and with good reason) yet sort of want to trust each other combined with knowing the other person wants to trust and be trusted all being part of the manipulation. If that plus lots of glitzy locations and, as mentioned, an endless of stream of fucks sounds entertaining to you, and you still haven't tried this show, go watch season 1 (you definitely have to watch in order) because I can assure you that, if you like that one, this one's even better.
Movies:
Avengers: Endgame (Marvel Universe #22) - In the long and storied history of my media consumption, I'm hard pressed to think of a film that moved me more than this one did to sleep. I was moved to sleep by its utterly incomprehensible plot, by its quote unquote characters who seemed thrilled to spend hours on end with each other discussing said incomprehensible plot, by action sequences distinguishable from each other, if at all, because the shade of purple one character shot out of his/her/their hand was marginally pinker than the violet spewing from some other character’s limbs. But its most moving characteristic, the one that elevates this above all others in terms of ensuring my transition directly from total alertness to a mid-viewing nap, was its almost mind-bogglingly dull combination of chin-wiggling about plot followed by an action sequence on seemingly endless repeat. There reached a point where I had heard so many different people in more or less the same-looking costumes blither on about plot points I couldn't begin to understand followed by some crunchy punching (my new band name) and lots of purple lights being splattered at everyone that I felt I was trapped in some kind of freshman year film class final exam where each student was tasked to write a scene in which random people discussed random things before randomly attacking other people then someone glued all those scenes together, cleaned up the VFX, slapped a score on it, and released its for its full 10 hour running time and called it a movie. The only thing interrupting my sound sleep was the impending dread that, if I was going to write this review without DNF'ing, I'd actually have to WAKE UP AND KEEP WATCHING WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
When we last left our Avengers... well I don't know, things were dire, bad Josh Brolin had a bunch of stones that allowed him to live his dream of wiping out half the population of the Universe and the Avengers were bummed that they'd turned out to be so useless. Then after 200 hours of watching out-powered superheroes mope around because they’re, as mentioned, useless, out of nowhen/where, Ant-Man shows up and explains everything that happened in the prior movie can be undone via time travel which subsequently engenders a deeply confusing/eternal discussion about the nature of time travel followed by 20 hours of everyone rounding up all the sad Avengers and convincing them there's hope. I would very very very much like to tell you I understood anything that happened from this point forward, but apparently time travel, remembering prior movies, and caring about any of it all is a superpower this Janice can only one non-quantum-traveling-back-then-forwards-through-time-with-rules-of-hazy-definition-at-best-most-taken-from-the-ultimate-time-travel-bible-aka-Back-to-the-Future day hope to possess. While my future/past self may have all the answers then/then, me now (meaning then when I watched it (wait, is Media Report itself the product of time travel!??!)) felt more like Malcolm McDowell at the end of A Clockwork Orange only instead of - spoiler alert! - my eyes being pinned open, they drifted continuously closed and I think this is what happened: various Avengers follow Ant-Man's time travel advice - that quantum realm, noted frequently enough for its lethality in prior films to penetrate my REM sleep sure became a lot less lethal as these movies have progressed btw - and go back to various different points in time in order to collect big colored stones and put them in a gauntlet and keep Josh Brolin from getting them to begin with. This involves them all going back to long-forgotten previous films but from a different POV and making no doubt hilarious and incisive quips to those with Marvel PhDs.
After what felt like a year of being visually waterboarded - I'll tell you anything just make it stop! - it will come as no surprise that the collected Avengers and their assorted hangers-on manage to get what they need though not without Josh Brolin figuring out their plan and squirting some time-traveled poopy all over their stone-collecting party. It all goes down in the very strange way of these films in which there's this unbelievable tech and super massive spaceships and insanely armored military and whatnot yet somehow none of that matters and it’s all down to hand to hand combat with various people shooting sparkly things out of their hands or, at at least one point (and I’m pretty sure I didn’t dream this), a big ant punching a giant turtle.
In any event, all the punching, stone collecting, and time travel results in some self-sacrifice for the greater good on the part of some of the Avengers and while I won't go into specifics due to spoiler reasons (I guess) it will come as no surprise that the only people willing to pay the ultimate price in order to save humanity despite the horrific cost to themselves... were White.
Does any of the above count as a plot description? Honestly I hope everyone is really impressed that I managed to pull even that much out of the movie as watching it felt like I was stuck in a physics lecture witnessing a fellow student haltingly present their step-by-step formula for solving a langragian midterm test problem about the angle at which a person eating a hot dog while standing on a medicine ball tied to a pendulum will fall off and slide to the ground and perhaps in some ways, or at least in the sliding the to ground way, that person was me.