It’s still an overstuffed show, but in building up the relationships audiences truly care about, season 3’s existential musings become time well spent.
Category: TV series
True crime is not something to be toyed with, and The Staircase, for all the beautiful work put into it, toys with viewers instead of finding the salient truths about the case.
We will remember damage, to mangle a repeated line from the show. It’s cathartic to imagine what we will do with it.
It’s the glorious little moments that bring me the greatest delight, so, I give you a list of my favorite TV moments of 2021.
The show itself is decidedly not about glory, instead twisting itself into a pitch black comedic nightmare where every garish color and perfected pose covers a wellspring of pain and anger.
Betty is a disrupter. A disrupter of expectations, of stereotypes, of procedure. It says forget six seasons and a movie, we’re going to make a movie and then some television. It says forget your straight, white, male world, we’re going to follow a bunch of young women, some queer and not all white. It says forget plot, just vibe.
Moving forward, the deficiencies of this season should help answer its central question. How does one rewrite history through television, or perhaps more accurately, why? The first season’s screwy, boisterous energy provides a perfect answer: we rewrite as an act of compassion and hope.
No, Euphoria is not reality, but that’s not what television is here for, is it? At its best it does what every quality story strives to do: to tell a truth in a way that people will pay attention to, often in a heightened, flashy way, and sometimes with copious amounts of drugs and sex.
This is as much a meditation on the lasting effect of these people as it is a tale of their accomplishments and failures, so no, you shouldn’t really be looking at any of this as reality.
As much as I enjoy the hangout vibes, you do leave I Am Not Okay with This wanting just a bit more. A bit more answers, a bit more definition, a bit more time. I suppose that’s a great setup for more seasons, but with so many compelling things packed into this nimble offering, it’s a shame to have to qualify my enthusiasm. Hopefully more seasons come, ones that will fill out and pin down this world I desperately want to know all about.
Emily Wheeler Movie Ops 