THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup October 2022

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

I don’t have time to do full conversations on everything I’m watching but here are some stray thoughts on everything I’ve watched in the last month. I’ve also been requested to include content warnings for shows that need them, so you can see those beneath each title!

I put out 2 videos this month, so this is going to be fewer shows than usual—but I’m going to go deeper on them! Lucky you!

House of the Dragon (Season 1) — HBO
CW: Graphic Violence, nudity, misogyny

The show feels very much like seasons 6 & 7 of Game of Thrones, which is both a complement and a criticism. I’ve long felt that Game of Thrones jumped the shark at the Battle of the Bastards. There were definitely great episodes (and especially scenes) afterwards, but that is when the show leaned fully into spectacle over story and character. The biggest criticism I have about House of the Dragon is its lack of character diversity, not so much in terms of representation but in terms of philosophy.

At it’s best Game of Thrones, featured a wide array of characters in the way they approached life and the titular game of thrones. You had the Starks who clung to honor and morality, of course, but even among the intelligent characters who were savvy enough to play the game, there was a good amount of variance. Tyrion was trying to prove himself to his father and siblings, Varys tried to act in the best interest of the realm, and Bronn just tried to stay alive in this messed up world.

Everyone on House of the Dragon is, more-or-less, doing their best Cersei impression. They’re all trying to stab each other in the back purely for the sake of grabbing power. Everyone’s motivation is pretty plainly simple ambition. Some of this is due to the timeskipping, which subs out actors and asks us to transplant our relationship with a character to this new person. There are success stories here, no doubt (Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke as Rhaenyra and Alicent respectively pull this off very well), but many of the children feel like a rotating cast of nameless princes we don’t really know, despite being central figures in the plot.

Viserys was a major outlier and breath of fresh air here—and apparently where they spent 100% of their time and planning when it came to selling the time jumps—but seeing as he won’t be in the second season, this seems like a problem going forward.

Time is usually the best antidote for this kind of thing. Spending more time with actors and characters tends to naturally let them breathe, but it’s something to keep an eye on, especially since it was one of the many things that failed at the end of Game of Thrones.

Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power (Season 1) — Amazon Prime
CW: Fantasy Violence

There’s been a lot of laughing at Rings of Power online. It seems to be considered a failure, and audiences seem much lower on it than critics. But, as a critic, let me defend this show. Was it a rollercoaster with huge complicated plot twists and shocking betrayals? No. But neither was Lord of the Rings. I don’t think that reveal was meant to be some kind of game changing shocker. I’ve long argued that this show is all about world-building, especially over plot. We all know where the plot is heading, because Lord of the Rings is a pretty conventional fantasy story, and because this is a prequel. Instead the show is much more interested in breathing life into this world, and transporting you there. In that regard, I think this show was a huge success. The world was rich in visuals and sound and I really appreciated the perspective of Adar, adding a great deal of nuance to the orcs and making them more than faceless Evil™ enemies to be mowed down.

Where I do think that it fell a little short was its lack of character building. The standouts from the season were Galadriel, Elrond, Duren and Nori—two of which are pre-existing characters we had a relationship with from the films. There were certainly a lot of other characters, but the show definitely has work to do in terms of fleshing them out and giving them a personal purpose instead of just serving as plot devices.

The Midnight Club (Season 1) — Netflix
CW: Horror gore, lots of discussions of death, self-harm

In my Flanaganabonanza video I didn’t talk much about The Midnight Club, for a few reasons. First, Flanagan seemed less personally responsible for the series. He didn’t direct or edit as many episodes as in his previous three series, and he was a co-writer on every episode (which, for Executive Producers, can mean very little). Second, I was much more disappointed in the series than I have been in his others. The groundwork was really promising: a kind of literal Death of Childhood coming of age story set in a hospice for terminally ill teenagers. Most of the show that grappled with that context really worked for me.

But the format of the show also meant that about half of every episode would be dedicated to dramatizations of the scary stories the teenagers told each other. This was annoying because of its rapidly changing tone, but also because it was very difficult to understand how much we were supposed to read into these as backstories for individual characters and they often felt much more half-baked than the central story. This makes sense in-universe since the kids aren’t exactly genius storytellers, but it also didn’t make them consistently enjoyable.

The Mole (Season 1) — Netflix
CW: Trash

A reboot of the early 2000s reality TV series, The Mole has a bunch of contestants complete challenges together to build up a pot of money. The catch is that one of the players is “the mole,” working with the producers to try to sabotage the others and limit the amount of money added to the pot. The way you stay on the show is by having the most correct answers to the quiz about who the mole is. So it behooves you to make sure that everyone else thinks you’re the mole. That way, they’ll be wrong on the quiz and leave the show. However, the best way to make people think you are the mole is by sabotaging the team yourself.

It’s a very strange combination of conflicting incentives that essentially makes all of the characters do the work for the mole themselves. All I could think of while watching the show was Michel Foucault’s panopticon and how the weird incentives of the show had players essentially policing themselves.