THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup July 2024

“What are you watching?” is pretty much the automatic question I get when I tell people what I do for a living.

With the stress of the last two months I haven’t gotten to watch as much TV as usual, but I do have some thoughts on some shows! I’ve also included content warnings for shows that need them, so you can see those beneath each title! These are in alphabetical order this time!

Presumed Innocent (Season 1) — AppleTV+
CW: violence

Funniest show of the year, hands down. This miniseries follows Jake Gyllenhaal’s character—a Chicago District Attorney—who is accused of murdering his fellow DA. I know what you’re thinking, doesn’t sound that funny. But after having done a deep dive on how prosecutors work over the past few months, it’s hard to view it any other way. First of all, you’ve got no fewer than 4 black women (100% of the black women in the show) going out of their way to support a prosecutor in Chicago. There’s a judge, a detective, one of his defense attorneys, and even his wife—who even tells him in a throwaway scene that she’s concerned he forgets that their children are black.

Secondly, so many of the scenes play out like sketches from I Think You Should Leave, notably a couples therapy scene from the second or third episode where Gynllenhaal says, concerning the affair he had with the victim, “IM NOT A LIAR—okay I lied about that—BUT ONLY THAT!” Then later when asked why he’s so sure they’re going to charge him he says something along the lines of “oh they’re gonna charge me. They have my computer and it’s definitely going to look like I was stalking her because I sent her like 30 unanswered texts the day she died and was tracking her location.” The show has the most absurd premise and wants to be taken so seriously that I can’t help but laugh at it. 10/10, no notes.

The Boys (Season 4) — Amazon
CW: graphic violence, nudity, creeping quickly approaching fascism

*SPOILERS*

Oh boy. I have thoughts about this season, and the finale in particular. Last month I was hopeful, not so much this time. Skip ahead if you don’t want spoilers.

First things first, weak season. Whether that weakness is a symptom of reality having come too close to satire that it’s not funny anymore or because the show has lost a step is up for debate. I’d argue the latter though. While the show has always been interested in what can only be described as shock-jock aesthetics when it comes to violence and sex, this season felt especially egregious and cruel with little actual payoff. We had our main character Hughie get repeatedly raped in the episode after his dad died for jokes and then later was shamed and humiliated for being raped by a shapeshifter pretending to be his girlfriend. In general, the has really developed quite the pattern of treating any kind of kink or outside-the-norm sexual tastes as evidence of moral degeneracy, compared to the vanilla tastes of the good guys (for example, Hughie likes a little buttstuff when he’s with the shapeshifter, which was out of the ordinary for him). It’s just a gross kind of thinking that has historically led to the demonization of people outside the cishet sexual norm, often LGBTQ people.

Secondly, I did not care for the Sister Sage character. She is the “smartest person in the world” and is working with Homelander, despite the fact that he will obviously turn on her at some point since she’s a black woman and he’s a checks notes fascist. One of two things must be true of her character. Either she is working on taking him down from the inside, or the show is implying that the “smartest” approach to the circumstances of The Boys is to partake in fascism. I have issues with both options. In the former, the show adopts a kind of weird deus ex machina mechanism, where anything that happens is part of Sage’s 86-dimensional chess plan, only to be revealed to us at the last possible minute. It also assumes that the only way to stop Homelander is to…allow him to gain control of the country? I don’t know, seems like there must be a better way.

In the latter option, I just don’t think that “the smartest person in the world” would support someone who so obviously will betray her at the first possible chance. That doesn’t seem smart. And I take issue with the idea that self-interested nihilism being portrayed as the smart choice.

Finally, remember when The Boys was a satire of Disney’s MCU? Remember all those scenes about the bs movies they were peddling? Remember all the commentary about corporate slop and endless spinoffs? Well now that’s The Boys. They’ve announced a second spinoff series for the franchise, and even had an unironic mid-credits cutscene teasing the return of a character for the final season. I guess you really do die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.

House of the Dragon (Season 2) — HBO
CW: violence, nudity

This show has been better than I remember the first season being. Part of that might be due to the long layoff, and just further distance between us and the debacle that was season 8 of Game of Thrones. But I also think that this season has just provided us with some decent characters and a set of politics that makes sense. Much less of this season has revolved around the hypocrisy of Criston Cole (thank god), and instead around the decision making process that Rhaenyra has to go through in order to raise an army to back her claim to the throne. I don’t think the series is particularly groundbreaking, but I enjoy the dragons!