Media Report

Pennyworth, Queen Sugar, and more!

Books:

Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win by Jo Piazza

This is a contemporary American fiction book about a rich Silicon Valley executive who decides to move her family back to the small Pennsylvania town she grew up in in order to run for Senate. The writing is pretty fun and it seems pretty accurate to the way campaigns are run with social media which also made the book a bit more interesting and entertaining. I think someone bought this book to be a movie, though I can’t imagine what that movie would be as the plot, which is essentially about how the campaign affects lead’s somewhat rocky marriage, is definitely enough for a book but is much too thin for a film. The story whizzes by and I’d put it in the category of classy airplane read.

The Eighth Detective by Alex Pavesi

You know what's worse than one bad mystery? Eight of them! The central notion of this, I don’t know, novel-length construct, is an editor who's publishing an author's short mystery stories from years ago in which the author posited rules about mystery fiction and then wrote 7 short stories demonstrating such rules. The rules are things like "there's always a murderer and a victim” (I just… I can’t even). Okay so the idea is that each of the 7 short stories is supposed to integrate into the eighth short story, also a mystery, in which the editor is unraveling clues about some other murder event involving the author based on minor inconsistencies within the stories. In addition to the mystery “theses” being idiotic, the stories themselves were just crazy dull. I mean, if you're going to write essentially 8 interlinked short murder stories, they better be good individually and the interlinking better be clever. Imagine my pause and huge sigh of “unfortunately that didn’t happen” here then skip if this one wound up on your list somehow.

TV/Streaming:

The Great Pottery Throwdown (Season 4):

I love a reality competition show and if you haven't seen this one and you like seeing and judging peoples' creations, you'll certainly enjoy it. I view myself as something of an expert on pottery because I took pass/fail ceramics class sophomore year, which I almost actually failed because I spent so much of it trying to throw a bong - but in pieces so the teacher wouldn't know what I was up to (spoiler alert: she knew) - so perhaps as a - can we call me a professional? - I'm biased, but I think it's pretty cool to see people sculpting stuff in clay. In fact there've been a few mugs and bowls along the way on this series that I kind of wanted to get my greasy mitts on. Oh and the challenges aren’t easy - the contestants have to do things like sculpt a working toilet from scratch or make entire miniature chess sets. Plus the main judge can get so moved just by feeling the weight of a piece of ceramics that he chokes up and loses the ability to speak, which is delightful! Note that this show is of the soothing Brit-paced variety and not the frenetic OTT American style in case you have a preference.

Queen Sugar (Season 5):

While my detractors may view the following as a <cough> rant, I prefer to view it more in the context of the Greeks as one day you may look back on this prophecy and pray that the Hollywooders had heeded CJanissandra’s warning! <THUNDER> I have seen the immediate viewing future and woe betide us all it looks a lot like Queen Sugar S5…

Okay, so you know that thing the eleven people who are still watching the Oscars hate most about the Oscars, i.e. where the award recipients use their 90 seconds of thank-you time for a bunch of socio-political grandstanding? Well imagine that but, instead of 90 seconds with an orchestra mercifully cutting it off, as a season-long nonstop show-killing polemic about the current social state of America that, to make it all so much worse, only regurgitates everything we already know - because even those who don’t agree with it also know it - jammed into the mouths of the characters at the expense of plot, said characters, and frankly all the hard work the writers have done to date to build engaging and thought-provoking storylines that span multiple seasons.

Here’s what’s I mean. Let’s say someone high up on, say, the Queen Sugar team wants to talk about how COVID is affecting low-income Americans. Well, says someone, I have an idea - how about we derail one of the lead character’s storylines so he can randomly get a job at a nursing home for like an episode so America can see! Same someone wants to talk about George Floyd? Let's have all our characters literally do that - they can spew writer opinion about George Floyd for 42 minutes and maybe even send one of the characters to a George Floyd rally! Do either of those sound like anything you or, say, anyone would ever want to watch? Look, showrunners, I know COVID has caused production issues around schedules and limiting the number of people in scenes, but - and this is the job right? - you still need to figure out how to tell a compelling story despite those issues, i.e. COVID restrictions don’t obviate you of the need to entertain.

And if you want to integrate current social issues into your show, DO IT WITHIN THE ESTABLISHED CONTEXT OF YOUR SHOW ALL CAPS. Like if you’re Queen Sugar and you want to discuss police brutality, you already have: (a) a plot from a few seasons ago in which one of the Black leads was brutalized by the police which then engendered a profound shift for the character and (b) a different Black lead who's actually engaged to a former White cop!! Surely, writers, instead of sapping your show of all character and plot and lecturing us until we’ve lost the will to do anything other than press “stop” as we slide into unconsciousness, you could have instead set up a season-long story arc/juicy character collision, just like you’ve done in the past, between the two stories you'd already established that also maybe would’ve shown us all something about the topic we couldn't read in the headlines and make us profoundly feel it in a way that good TV can and news often can't.

Cue the thunder again, because I've noticed other shows doing this exact same thing - becoming entirely about social issues at the expense of the show itself - and am dreading these upcoming TV/streaming seasons as a result. The problem is not with raising social issues on shows - this Janice is very pro Hollywood moving the needle (dial?) forward (is that the direction a needle/dial goes?) - but rather about how they’re raised, because IJHO (another a, b list coming): (a), no one's listening to your points if they're bored into the soundest sleep they've had since being in utero and (b) maybe I, the audience, the Janice am turning on my TV/tablet/laptop/phone to be ENTERTAINED!

So Queen Sugar, I like you - you have been, for S1-S4, surprisingly involving in that you’ve managed to talk about race, inequality, and America in ways that have been interesting and woven into compelling story arcs, thus I'm going to pretend this season didn't exist. But fair warning, Queen Sugar: if this shit continues, I'm out! So there!

Pennyworth (Season 1):

This series, set in a '60s mod version of a Gothamized London, is the backstory of Batman's butler Alfred and is WAY better than that description sounds. It’s not a superhero show but rather a crime/gangster show about low level criminals colliding with a rising fascist party and trying to stop them from taking over the entire country. It's fun, the writing is clever, the characters are good, and the plot twists are pretty good as well. No complaints here; because I have zero interest in Batman, I was pretty sure I’d watch half an episode then DNF but wound up watching the whole season and am looking forward to the second. The hyper-stylized tone is pretty love it or hate it so you’ll know within an episode whether or not it’s to your taste, but, if it is, you’ve got a solid season of fun ahead.

Movies:

Vanished - this is a mind-blowingly dumb pitch-perfect-watching-while-mocking thriller about a girl who goes missing while on vacation and the efforts to find her by her parents, played by the reliably forgettable Thomas Jane and the equally reliably scenery-gnawing, shrill, and completely insane Anne Heche (and if you haven’t listened to the audiobook of her coup de memoire Call Me Crazy - which starts off with her stating that for her whole life she thought she was crazy and, by the end, you realize she’s still crazy but has finally realized it’s inappropriate to tell people she’s Jesus - do yourself a favor and enter pure audiobook HEAVEN!). I can’t imagine making it through this movie on my own but I can attest that it’s a super fun group watch because basically everyone this Janice saw it with was making fun of it the whole time which made it all deeply pleasurable, up to and including the completely idiotic final twist.

Bullhead - this is an incredibly, and per uzh to Janice, incomprehensibly well-reviewed crime movie about the Belgian cow hormone mafia (don't ask) and a damaged (read: it involves his balls) farmer and, honestly, I have no idea what the movie was about but apparently whatever it was was ripped from the Belgian headlines. While I’d like to say that I took a hit for y’all and finished it so you don’t have to, the reality is I was beginning to feel like my media existence was nothing more than some genre-laden trash wallow and I thought, for the sake of my self-esteem, that I needed to class it up a bit with some highbrow foreign viewing. Turns out I don’t - back to the trash it is!