thoughts on The Affair (spoilers)

 So I watched all five seasons of this show in about a month, and even though I have some mixed feelings about various storylines, even before I was completely finished, I was thinking that I want to go back and rewatch it from the beginning right away and experience it again knowing what's going to happen.  I'm not sure if I've ever felt that way with a show before, especially one like this that is sometimes hard to watch.

Dominic West stars as Noah Solloway, an English teacher and novelist who spends his summers in Montauk, New York with his wife, Helen (Maura Tierney); their four children, Whitney (Julia Goldani Telles), Martin (Jake Siciliano), Trevor (Jason Sand), and Stacey (Leya Catlett/Abigail Dylan Harrison); and his wealthy in-laws, Margaret (Kathleen Chalfant) and Bruce (John Doman).  They seem like a happy family, though Noah's in-laws aren't particularly nice to him; he isn't rich like them, nor is he as successful of a novelist as his father-in-law.  On their way into town the summer our story begins, the Solloways stop for lunch at a restaurant called the Lobster Roll, where Stacey starts to choke on her food; she is saved by a waitress named Alison Lockhart (Ruth Wilson).  Noah and Alison keep crossing paths, develop an attraction to each other, and eventually embark on an affair.  The show shifts back and forth between Noah and Alison's perspectives as they tell their stories to a police detective for reasons that aren't made clear until later; to hear Noah tell it, she practically threw herself at him.  From Alison's point of view, she met Noah at a low point in her life when she was recovering from a personal tragedy and when her own marriage (to Cole Lockhart, played by Joshua Jackson) was in trouble, and Noah made her feel something other than pain for the first time in years.  Eventually, we learn why Noah and Alison are talking to the police; the affair is revealed to/found out by Noah and Alison's spouses; and we move past the affair to its aftermath.  The show expands beyond Noah and Alison's perspectives to include those of Helen, Cole, Whitney, and other characters that we don't meet until later seasons.

One thing that surprised me about this show is how much happens; the affair is revealed before the end of the first season, and Helen kicks Noah out almost immediately.  Still we have more than four seasons of the show to go.  The main thing that I took away is that though a love affair can be all-consuming enough to make you prioritize it above everything else and essentially blow up your life, that doesn't make the relationship forged from it fated or permanent; once it's out in the open, you still have to move on with your day-to-day lives, and those lives don't always fit the way you want them to.  Another major theme is how far-reaching the effects of an affair are; to the two people involved, it feels so private and intimate, yet it affects the lives of so many other people for so many years to come.

I had mixed feelings about the show's treatment of women.  Many times, when a woman who has been through a lot finally finds happiness or learns to stand up for herself, the show, for lack of a better phrase, shits on her.  For example, after Helen and Noah divorce, she falls in love with Vik Ullah (Omar Metwally), a surgeon who operates on Helen and Noah's son, Martin, who is diagnosed with Crohn's disease fairly early in the series.  Though Helen initially holds Vik at arm's length and she never truly seems to get over Noah, they forge a happy life together; he treats her kids well; and they all move to Los Angeles.  No sooner does this happen than Vik is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which he refuses treatment for and ultimately dies from-- though not before Vik, who basically seems to be a nice guy, has a one-night stand with and impregnates his and Helen's twenty-nine year old neighbor, Sierra (Emily Browning), and not before Vik's mother, Priya (Zenobia Shroff), berates Helen every chance she gets, largely simply for being at the tail end of childbearing age, for being divorced, and for already having children of her own.  This continues after Vik's death.  Helen begins dating an actor named Sasha Mann (Claes Bang), and one night Helen refuses Priya's last-minute request to bring Vik and Sierra's baby, Eddie, to meet Priya's brother, who is in town for one night only, and to pretend that the baby is hers.  Helen's refusal seems reasonable; she already has plans, and she doesn't want to lie.  However, Priya shows up at Helen's doorstep to inform her that her own parents and brother disowned her for marrying a Muslim; that this was the first time she was seeing her brother in decades; and that all she wanted was to give him a chance to see his great-nephew without dishonoring her late son's memory.  She tells Helen that Vik was always telling her what a selfless person Helen was, but she obviously had him fooled.  It's like any time Helen starts to be happy or stands up for herself, the show has to beat her down.  

The most egregious example of the show punishing women is, of course, the way Alison's story ends (HUGE SPOILERS AHEAD).  To make a long, complicated story short, after Alison's marriages to both Cole and Noah end, she begins a relationship with a veteran named Ben Cruz (Ramon Rodriguez).  Ben initially holds back from starting a relationship with her, supposedly because he is a recovering alcoholic and he has been advised against dating early in his recovery.  We, the audience, and eventually Alison, learn that the real reason is that he is married.  When Alison confronts him about this, he becomes enraged, calling her a seductress, saying that it is her fault that he has started drinking again, and telling her that he will only leave her alone if she admits that this is all her fault.  She refuses to do so, stating that he is a grown man who is responsible for his own decisions.  We are proud of her for standing up for herself.  Her reward is to be murdered, thrown into the ocean, and have her death ruled as a suicide.  From a storytelling perspective, this has a tragic, "full circle" quality, as the major cause for the tension in Alison and Cole's marriage was the accidental drowning death of their son, Gabriel.  You can't help but wish the show had done better by Alison, though, than to have her head literally bashed in seconds after she finally tells a man to grow up and stop blaming her for his own mistakes and shortcomings.

There is also a "#metoo" storyline that adds to this pattern, and that I had mixed feelings about.  Descent, the fictionalized account that Noah writes about his and Alison's affair, is ultimately made into a movie.  In the lead-up to its release, Vanity Fair publishes an article about Noah in which a former publicist states that he tried to coerce her into sex while they were on a book tour; a former student-teacher states the she did have sex with him when she was working at the same school as him; and a former student states that he verbally abused her in class (an event she chronicled in a book).  We, the audience, saw all of these events happen over the course of the series; none of them seemed particularly significant at the time, and the incidents with the publicist and the student-teacher came across as consensual (though problematic because of the uneven power dynamics at play).  The point seems to be that while each incident individually takes place in the grey area of "problematic, but not necessarily sexual harassment," taken together they show a pattern of disrespect towards women that Noah should be held accountable for.  I was fine with the point they eventually got to, but because it does seem that at least one of the women is lying; because one of the women is depicted as fairly unlikable; and because Helen (at least from Whitney's perspective) makes excuses for Noah, it initially seemed like they were sending a weird message about #metoo as a whole.  They got to a fairly interesting and nuanced discussion of the issue, but they took a weird path there.

I will also say-- and I'm not sure if this was intentional or not-- that I felt an emotional distance from the characters that kept me from being as moved/affected by some of the events as I might expect.  This is a series in which one of the core four characters is freaking murdered unexpectedly, whose murderer is never held accountable, and whose daughter and ex-husbands spend years thinking she committed suicide.  This is a series in which we learn that two of the main characters lost a young son in a drowning accident and that their marriage has never been the same since.  This is a series in which a main character's romantic partner, who is a major part of the show for two seasons, dies of cancer.  I felt bad for these characters insofar in that I felt that these events were unfair, or tragic, or unfortunate.  However, I was not emotionally wrecked in the way that I have been by series such as, say, Parenthood or Six Feet Under.  I wonder if this is because the shifting perspectives lead you not to empathize with any one character, but rather to view the events as studies in how different people perceive/react to upsetting circumstances?  I'm not sure; I was just surprised that I wasn't more emotionally affected by certain events.

The performances are all top-notch, especially Maura Tierney as Helen, who had a fairly thankless role that wound up having a lot of depth.  Again, I think it would be a good show to watch again now that I know what happens so that I wouldn't just be watching to see how the plot unfolds.

thoughts on The Baby-Sitters Club Netflix series (spoilers)

A quick Internet search tells me that the original Baby-Sitters Club book series ran from 1986-2000; I'm guessing that I picked them up in, say, 1988 or 1989, at age nine or ten, and read them until I was maybe fourteen or fifteen.  A quick Internet search also tells me that there was a very short-lived HBO series in 1990; I remember seeing a few episodes and thinking it was fine.  The episodes weren't based on any particular books, but were new stories featuring the Baby-Sitters Club characters.  The Baby-Sitters Club movie came out in 1995, which maybe explains why, while I don't remember it that well, I remember not caring for it; I would have been sixteen then, so I had probably finished reading them relatively recently.  I probably was still familiar enough with the series to be overly critical of any detail that wasn't just so while simultaneously thinking I was too old for it.

Now, in 2020, we get the Baby-Sitters Club Netflix series, a series where individual episodes are based on the actual first eight books in the series, plus there are two episodes that take place at camp, which the baby-sitters attended in a Super Edition.  The Netflix series reminded me of how much the original series always did right, while making some smart updates in the spirit of the original series.  In the original series, the sitters baby-sat for a deaf child and an autistic child at different times.  Some of the sitters' parents were divorced or widowed.  Once character was diabetic.  Two books that I can recall dealt directly with racism.  The girls dealt with real problems and weren't just different from each other in surface-level ways.  Though the books were quick reads-- I would buy mine in a town about an hour away from where I lived and usually read the whole thing on the ride home-- there was much to be admired about the realistic, socially engaged, imperfect baby-sitters.

Since it's 2020, some of the original details about the logistics of the club are brought up as smart throwbacks; when Kristy's (Sophie Grace) mother (Alicia Silverstone) has trouble finding a sitter for Kristy's younger brother, she bemoans the days when you could just call a girl in your neighborhood and she'd actually answer the phone.  Thus, the Baby-Sitters Club is formed with the simple yet brilliant idea that the actual baby-sitters will get together three times a week at a pre-appointed time, and parents will know that they can call during that time to get a sitter.  They use a landline that club Vice-President Claudia Kishi (Momona Tamada) buys online; to get around having to network with adults on social media, they print up old-school fliers.  The ten episodes deal with the girls getting the business off the ground; revealing secrets (Stacey (Shay Rudolph) has diabetes); making new friends (California transplant Dawn Schafer (Xochitl Gomez) joins the club in the fifth episode); experiencing personal milestones (Kristy gets her period; Stacey and Mary Anne (Malia Baker) both have their first kisses); and encountering family issues (Kristy's mother gets remarried; Claudia's grandmother has a stroke).  Along the way, we're reminded what good people the girls always were: Kristy can be controlling, but is an amazing leader and go-getter; Claudia doesn't do well in school, but is artistic and fashionable; Mary Anne is shy, but knows when to stand up for herself and others (as when she advocates for a transgender child in the fourth episode); Stacey is boy-crazy but a math genius; Dawn is free-spirited but knows when to ask for help (as when the scatterbrained mother of a child forgets to tell her that the child's father will be picking him up).  They all show that young girls are complicated, and can do and be more than one thing at once.  As a whole, I loved it.

A few random thoughts:

1) I'd forgotten how weird Kristy's eventual stepsister, Karen Brewer (Sophia Reid-Gantzert) was, thinking her next-door neighbor was a witch but kind of enjoying it. 

2) They did a great job with how they portrayed the adults.  Particular shout-outs to Marc Evan Jackson (Agent Coulson!) as Mary Anne's father, Richard Spier, who is clearly still grieving his late wife and struggling as a single father but not a bad guy, and Mark Feuerstein as Kristy's eventual stepfather Watson Brewer, who is kind of a huge dork and tries too hard, but again: good guy.  No real bad eggs among the baby-sitters and their parents, save for Kristy's (unseen) deadbeat father.

3) The actors playing Claudia and Dawn had some real charisma.  Claudia and Dawn were always among my favorite characters, and Momona Tamada and Xochitl Gomez were great.

4) Reading the books as a child, I always thought Claudia and Stacey were just so cool.  Watching the series as an adult, I stand by that impression.

5) Even though I sometimes was frustrated with things that Kristy did, I liked that the series let her be really awful at times-- being stubbornly unaccepting of Watson for way too long; getting into a fight with her own mother on her mother's wedding day; being pretty awful to Dawn because she's jealous that Mary Anne has made a friend independent of her.  I don't recall many shows where you get to see a teen girl be real petty, stubborn, and jealous, yet you still get to like her at the end of the day.

6) Oh, Stacey.  Openly flirting with Kristy's teen brother and the Sea City lifeguard.  Headed for trouble, that girl.  I do love that Mary Anne kind of had a girl crush on her until they went to Sea City together and then she's like, "Yeah, you're just as much of a dork as the rest of us."

I think that's it! Hope there's a season two!

I finished Riverdale Season Four, and I have some opinions (spoilers)

First of all, may I just say that I really like these kids.  This season wasn't as good as most-- the central mystery was less out-there than we've come to expect from this show-- yet I still have good feelings about the show as a whole because of the cast and characters.  Archie, Jughead, Betty, Veronica-- these are characters that I care about and enjoy watching.  That said, Season Four left me with some questions.

First of all, let's just address that this season had nineteen episodes instead of the usual twenty-two due to Covid-19.  I initially wondered if that meant that they would wrap things up early; it did not.  The season did not have a proper ending at the end of episode nineteen, it just kind of stopped, leaving a lot of loose ends.  That made me think that two things, in particular, would have made more sense and been developed more if we would have gotten the last three episodes.

The first of these two things is the Principal Honey storyline.  At the beginning of Season Four, we are introduced to Riverdale High's new principal, Holden Honey, played by Kerr Smith, AKA Jack McPhee from Dawson's Creek.  Fun fact: Dawson's Creek premiered during my freshman year of college, and the characters started as sophomores in high school, so I always think of the Dawson's Creek actors as being younger than me.  I learned today that Kerr Smith is SEVEN years older than me and therefore pushing fifty.  Lord.

Anyway, I found myself perplexed by Principal Honey throughout the season because, while Principal Honey always has a sour look on his face, talks in a nasty tone of voice, at times seems to take an undue amount of pleasure in getting the better of the gang, and makes some unpopular decisions, for most of the season, he doesn't really do anything THAT bad.  The least bad thing that he does is hire a proper coach for the cheerleading squad instead of letting Cheryl Blossom (Madelaine Petsch) run the show, which really upsets Cheryl a lot, but my reaction was, "You seriously don't have a cheerleading coach?"  Even if they had the type of coach who mainly let the captain run the show and just sort of supervised...they'd have to have one, right?  And the cheer coach that gets hired tells the girls something along the lines of, "I'm going to have you do actual cheers instead of sing and dance to pop songs," which-- yeah.  I enjoy their routines, but their cheerleading squad is very weird, and unlike anything that exists in reality.  That's par for the course on this show, but the point is, I love how when someone tries to make the kids do something totally normal, it's treated as totally out of bounds in this weird world.

Other things that Principal Honey does that don't go over big are cancel the back to school dance and the talent show; in both cases, the kids just move those events off-campus, so big wow.  He gets the back to school party busted, but underage parties that big always get busted, and no one gets arrested or anything, so I didn't hold that against him that bad.  The season, as it stands, culminates in Principal Honey getting fired after carrying out an elaborate scheme to cancel prom.  We are starting to get hints at that point that Principal Honey really isn't that bad, and I assume we would have eventually learned the reason he was so hellbent on there not being a prom and he would have been vindicated, but as it was, that all ends on a weird note.

The other thing that I feel like they either would have gotten back to or it was just stupid and had no point was the Archie/Betty flirtation.  Look.  The series began with Betty (Lili Reinhart) declaring her love for Archie (KJ Apa).  Even though he said he didn't return her feelings, they were obviously always going to go back to that at some point.  However, the way it came about was really stupid and lacked any real tension.  One of the big storylines this season involved Jughead (Cole Sprouse) faking his death, which I didn't buy for one minute and I also didn't see the point of.  Betty, Archie, and Veronica (Camila Mendes) all are in on the faked death plot, and to throw the rest of the town off the scent, Betty and Archie pretend to date in the wake of Jughead's "death." Cheryl and Veronica later ask Betty and Archie, respectively, whether they felt anything while they were pretending.  Both Betty and Archie say that they didn't.  Later, though, Betty and Archie both get in short-lived fights with Jughead and Veronica that basically just amount to frustration, and in the aftermath, Betty and Archie kiss for real and get all What Does It All Mean? about it for a couple of episodes.  Betty eventually decides that it doesn't mean anything except that she and Archie have a past that should stay in the past, and then...nothing happens.  They never confess to Jughead and Veronica.  Jughead and Veronica never find out some other way.  Betty and Archie never kiss again.  I again have to assume that something else was supposed to happen, or that was a whole lot of drama for nothing, which I guess is normal in high school, but still.

I don't really have a lot else to say about the season, other than that they did a great job on the Luke Perry memorial episode that started the season.  They really gave him a proper send-off.  Other than that, the season was lackluster, but still fun.

New Girl Rewatch 2020 Part Two: Nick and Jess (spoilers)

I have more complicated feelings about Nick and Jess's relationship than I do about Schmidt and Cece's.  In fact, by the end of writing this, you will see that I actually have quite a few problems with their relationship dynamic.  The show acknowledges those problems and has them work through them, but I'm just not sure if it's enough.

When they first meet, Jess (Zooey Deschanel) has just gotten out of a long-term relationship with a guy named Spencer (Ian Wolterstorff); their break-up and her need to quickly find a new place to live, in fact, is what prompts her move into the loft with the guys and sets up the whole series.  Nick has just gotten out of a long-term relationship with a woman named Caroline (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), who he will get back together with briefly at the end of the first season.  Neither Nick nor Jess is really looking to date, and dating your roommate isn't ideal, anyway, so they become friends.  It's clear fairly early on that they care a lot about each other-- they both consistently go out of their way to help each other and do nice things for each other-- and that they have a lot of chemistry which, early on, channels itself into heated arguments.  Eventually, however, they dip their toes into dating other people.  Jess dates a music teacher named Paul (Justin Long) and an older, wealthy divorced man named Russell (Dermot Mulroney).  Nick dates a lawyer named Julia (Lizzy Caplan) and a stripper named Angie (Olivia Munn).  None of these relationships last.

The reason that Jess's relationship with Russell doesn't last hints that she would be better off with Nick, but also made me question what she values in a relationship.  Jess becomes friendly with Russell's ex-wife, Ouli (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and the three of them have dinner together one night.  Russell and Ouli get into a heated argument about nothing, really-- the point is just that the two of them really push each other's buttons.  As the two of them argue, Jess looks jealous, almost, and she later laments that she and Russell don't have the same passion for each other.  "Yeah.  They got divorced, though," I think to myself.  Passion and chemistry are important, of course, but being constantly at each other's throats isn't a great thing or sustainable in the long-term, and passion and chemistry all on their own aren't enough to sustain a relationship.  She breaks up with Russell because she feels that there is something missing, and her feelings for Nick are eventually the main cause of her break-up with her next boyfriend, Sam (David Walton).

Even though it's obvious from pretty much the beginning that Nick and Jess are "end game," all of this is a little frustrating to watch as a viewer at least partly because, with a couple of noteworthy exceptions, Jess tends to date really great guys throughout the show, many of whom she could ostensibly be happy with.  I guess that's fairly true to life; yeah, sometimes relationships end because one person cheats or does something really awful, but in my experience, it's more common for them to end (or just not get off the ground in the first place) because one person's heart isn't in it, or one person wants things to move more quickly than the other person is comfortable with, or lack of compatibility, or lack of chemistry, or unresolved feelings for someone else.  That's why relationships are hard; it's not that everything has to be perfect, but a whole lot of things have to be right, and both people have to be okay with the things that aren't right.

That's also why Nick and Jess, when they do inevitably get together, are less fun to watch than Schmidt (Max Greenfield) and Cece (Hannah Simone).  Schmidt is the type of guy who Goes Big, carrying out an elaborate plan to sabotage Cece's wedding to Shivrang (Satya Bhabha); nearly getting kicked out of a first-class airport lounge defending her honor when a wealthy older man suggests an Indecent Proposal scenario; and dropping to one knee and proposing on the spot when she finally admits she loves him at the end of Season Four.  Nick is less comfortable with his emotions, and he never seems to know what he wants.

Further, through much of the series, he doesn't have his life together in ways that would probably have more severe consequences if he didn't have good people in his life looking out for him.  Nick and Jess kiss for the first time in Season Two and date through most of Season Three.  Their inevitable break-up is foreshadowed in a couple of key Season Three episodes, "The Box" and "Thanksgiving III."  In "The Box," Nick, who never has any money, inherits eight thousand dollars from his late father and seems determined to blow through it as quickly as possible.  Jess is concerned about this, and even moreso when she discovers that he has a box full of unpaid bills and traffic tickets in his closet.  He won't hear of using the money to pay those bills, so Jess secretly starts using his money to pay them on his behalf.  When he finds out, he is furious, and it turns into a "Stop trying to change me! You're not perfect, either!" thing where he literally starts throwing her purses out the window.  The whole episode is infuriating; I mean, yeah, you can't really take someone's money secretly even if it's to pay that person's bills for them, but other than that, Nick is OBJECTIVELY in the wrong here.  And even though Nick eventually lets Jess help him set up a checking account, she, sort of throwing him a bone or whatever, goes on a rant in the bank all, "Why do we have to keep our money in banks? Banks are a conspiracy to keep tabs on our money!," which I think we're supposed to think is sweet and a sign that she's willing to compromise in their relationship, but comes across as patronizing, and as enabling genuinely crazypants behavior.

In "Thanksgiving III," Nick decides that the whole gang should go camping for Thanksgiving.  No one really likes the idea, but Jess talks them into it.  Nick is supposed to take charge of the food, but when they get there, they discover that he has packed only beer and intends for them to "live off the land." Again: this is genuinely insane.  Not only does Nick have no idea how to hunt or fish, but I can tell you right now that people who DO know how to hunt and fish take other food with them when they camp.  Also, there is a Bob's Burgers episode with a similar plot, meaning that Nick officially enters cartoon dad territory in this episode, only on Bob's Burgers, Linda and the kids react like normal human beings, tell Bob he's being ridiculous, and hit up some fellow campers for some supplies.  Jess, on the other hand, enables this genuinely insane behavior by insisting everyone else go along with it.  When she discovers that Winston (Lamorne Morris) and Cece plan to go to town to buy food (as any rational people would in this scenario), she goes with them and insists that they only buy things that they ostensibly could have found in the forest.  AND NICK BELIEVES THEM UNTIL HE SEES A STICKER ON AN APPLE, as if forests are just full of all types of fresh fruits and vegetables.  And Jess actually FEELS BAD about lying to him, eats a fish that he reveals that he actually just found, didn't catch fresh or anything, and literally winds up in the hospital.  At this point, we realize that their dynamic has become Jess going along with Nick's ridiculous bullshit in the name of seeming supportive, all the while going behind his back to try to mitigate the damage.  It's not a good dynamic.  At all.

(Side note: this is one of many times throughout the series that I worry that there is something genuinely wrong with Nick.  This is a character who supposedly got into and attended law school, yet sometimes he says and does things that are so stupid or childish or crackpot that I'm convinced that the only reason that he is even still alive is that he's had Schmidt taking care of him for basically their entire adult lives. And this is who we're supposed to want the main character to end up with.)

Because this is, for the most part, a well-written and smart show, eventually Nick and Jess realize that they don't have a healthy dynamic.  He constantly feels like she is trying to change him.  She constantly feels like she is having to nag him just to get him to behave rationally and responsibly.  So they break up, because when you're just friends, it's really not your problem if one of your friends doesn't want to pay his bills, and you can just say no if they invite you on an insane camping trip with no food (although, honestly, the whole gang puts up with more of Nick's dumb crap than they really should).  Nick does some growing up over the next few seasons, eventually (with Schmidt's help) buying a share of the bar he works at and then, later, writing a book that winds up being unexpectedly popular with pre-teen girls, which leads to the creation of a successful young adult series.  When he and Jess eventually do get back together, you at least aren't worried about her...though, to be honest, Nick still seems like a lot of work to be with, and I still found myself wondering if she wouldn't have been better off with basically any one of the perfectly nice guys that she dates over the course of the show.  She gets back together with Sam for awhile.  She has the chance to get back together with Russell.  She always chooses Nick.  I guess the heart wants what it wants.  But, as they say on another very good show, You're the Worst, sometimes the heart is a dumb-dumb.

New Girl Rewatch 2020 Part One: Schmidt and Cece (spoilers)

It's pretty rare for me to watch a show all the way through to it's end, especially if it lasts more than, say, five seasons.  Something usually happens to make the show worse.  Sometimes original characters leave the show, such as on The Office (though I did eventually go back and watch the episodes after Steve Carell left, and some pretty important stuff happens to the other characters and some new characters are introduced that are actually pretty funny).   Sometimes the plot becomes contrived in order to keep the premise intact; I'm thinking of Glee and how the kids continually went back to being outcasts no matter how successful the glee club was, and how Sue Sylvester would continually go back to being an over-the-top villain even after it seemed she had forged a bond with the kids or with Mr. Schuester.  Other times, the plot moves too far from the original premise and basically becomes a completely different show (didn't the last season of Scrubs involve a couple of the main characters teaching in a medical school or something?  I don't know; as I said, I don't usually stick around for stuff like that).  Still OTHER times, shows that occasionally employed slapstick humor start relying on that too much for lack of other ideas (Perfect Strangers, Full House, etc.), or a popular minor character who was funny in small doses becomes the focal point (Urkel on Family Matters).  I've realized that all of the shows that I've mentioned are comedies; perhaps comedic premises are hard to sustain over time, or what's funny for awhile isn't funny forever.

Rewatching New Girl, I would argue that it actually got better as it went along.  In the first few episodes, it seemed like the characters were reduced to their broadest personality traits or character types.  Jess was pretty yet goofy, awkward, and quirky.  Cece was her hot model friend.  Nick was a lazy, angry underachiever.  Winston didn't come in until the second episode, and Schmidt was always kind of his own thing.  Over the show's seven seasons, though, their characters develop beyond broad types; they mature and actually get the things they have been working towards the whole time, both personally and professionally.  It's a delight to watch it happen.  

I was planning to write just ONE blog entry about my thoughts on the rewatch as a whole, but I realized it was going to get really long and take literally hours to write, so I'm going to do this in stages.  Today, I'd like to talk about Schmidt and Cece.

In the first few seasons, Schmidt and Cece's relationship is actually pretty frustrating.  At first, they're hooking up; Schmidt wants more, but Cece acts ashamed of him and you almost feel bad for him.  Then they get together for real, but his insecurities get in the way.  Then he's a jerk and tries to sabotage her other relationships, including her arranged marriage to Shivrang.  Then he finds himself in the awkward position of having the opportunity to date EITHER Cece or his college girlfriend, Elizabeth, and he...doesn't choose.  He dates both and just doesn't tell the other.  It's awful.  But then something really nice and unexpected happens, which is that they develop a real friendship, realize that they are basically each other's favorite people, and they get together for good.  Once they realize they're both all-in, they don't waste time.  They get engaged at the end of Season Four and married at the end of Season Five; she discovers (or rather, everyone accidentally finds out before she does) that she is pregnant at the end of Season Six, and Season Seven flashes forward to the two of them with an adorable three-year-old daughter named Ruth.  

This is maybe the best I've ever seen a show handle the addition of a kid.  Granted, she was only around for a season, but I feel like on a lot of shows either you just don't really see the kid that much, or the kid totally takes over.  In this case, Ruth is worked into the story in a way that makes sense, but doesn't overpower the show.  First of all, Schmidt becomes a stay-at-home dad, which might seem odd given how career-focused his character always was, but actually makes A LOT of sense when you think about it.  He was always the caretaker of the group-- the one whose name was on the lease of the loft; the one who covered the bills if any of the rest of them were short on cash; the one who cleaned and/or made the rest of them clean.  The other roommates call him the "group mom" at one point, and they really do kind of have that dynamic-- they don't always appreciate or even really notice all that he does for them, but things fall apart when he stops.  It TOTALLY makes sense that he would put a ton of effort into throwing a special third birthday party for Ruth, that he would learn to do "special braids" for her, and that he would keep a rigorous schedule for her while still being fun and loving.  Hats off for making this happen on a sitcom without making either Schmidt or Cece the butt of a joke for it; this is just what works for them, and fits with what we know of both of them as characters.

Along those lines, I feel like the show dealt with Cece and Schmidt's transition to married life and parenthood a lot more smoothly than a lot of shows do, and I feel like the way that they did this was by having certain tensions that this causes between them and their friends be present in a realistic way, but not that big of a deal or handled in a heavy-handed way.  There is an episode, for example, where Cece and Schmidt move into their first house; their friends keep busting in on them at inappropriate moments, either for advice or just stumbling in drunkenly.  Both Cece and Schmidt are exasperated by this, but it's framed more as an "oh my God, it's way too easy to break into our house" issue rather than a "we need to sit down and have a Serious Conversation About Boundaries" issue.  Sometimes your circumstances change and your friends don't catch on right away.  It's something to deal with, but doesn't have to be a whole big thing.  I think that's pretty realistic.

Also along those lines, there is a kind of cute tension between Nick and Ruth.  In one episode, Nick gets frustrated because he's trying to get Schmidt's help with a career problem, only Schmidt is exhausted because Ruth isn't sleeping.  Nick says something like, "You always loved helping me fix my life before SHE came along!" Ruth just grins at him and gives him two thumbs up.  Later, Nick tells Ruth something like, "You know, I was your dad's special little girl before you came along."  She just looks at him like, "Okay, you weirdo."  I feel like on a worse show, this would have been the focus of an entire episode that would have ended with the two of them having a big, heartfelt conversation.  Instead, it's just something that's kind of there-- Nick is a little put-out that his friend doesn't have as much time for him anymore now that he has a kid, but it just is what it is.  Part of life, but not that big of a deal.

Basically, even though Cece and Schmidt are ostensibly secondary characters to Nick and Jess, they wind up being the two that you really root for, and once they are on the same page, they're a really great couple.  Their relationship was probably my favorite part of the show.

Let's Talk About Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of '80s and '90s Teen Fiction

I can clearly remember the first piece of tween fiction I ever read, and it was Teacher's Pet, the second book in the Sweet Valley Twins series featuring Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield as sixth-graders.

I remember going to the local public library and asking if they had any Baby-Sitters Club, which I had not read yet, but that I knew that my older cousin read.  They didn't.  My brother pointed out Teacher's Pet to me because the girls were dressed like ballet dancers on the cover. I did not then, nor did I ever, take a ballet class; we lived in the country outside of a town of about 300 people, and there were no dance classes.  However, I knew people who went out of town to take them, and a couple of my cousins took them, so I was interested in the idea of dance classes.  Anyway, so I checked out the book, loved it, and read roughly a zillion more of them in the coming years (most of them had nothing to do with ballet, by the way).  I must have only been ten years old at the time; I remember my mom saying I was only allowed to read Sweet Valley Twins and not Sweet Valley High because she thought Sweet Valley High would be too mature, but eventually (I don't remember how old I was), we were at a bookstore that only had Sweet Valley High and not Sweet Valley Twins, so my mom was like, "Oh, fine, you can have one," and I'm pretty sure in the first one I read, an older guy takes Jessica to a bar and orders her a "boilermaker," which I guess is a shot of whiskey with a beer chaser, so yeah, my mom wasn't wrong about the "too mature" thing.

Regardless, I read both series for years and years, along with The Baby-Sitters Club and some lesser-known middle school series such as The Fabulous Five, Girl Talk, Sleepover Friends, Pen Pals, and eventually, young adult series with slightly older protagonists such as Sunset Island, which featured au pairs working for rich people during the summer between high school and college, and Boyfriends/Girlfriends, later renamed Making Out, my all-time favorite, which featured a group of Maine teens living with the aftermath of a car accident that had left one person dead, one person with amnesia, and one person confessing to a crime he didn't commit.  These books were fun, quick reads with often soap operatic plots, often featuring characters with lives I either related or aspired to.  I still love to read, but I don't know if I've ever had as much fun reading as I did back then, back when there were multiple series I followed with new books that came out literally every month.  There are still boxes of these books in my parents' basement.  My mom always says someday I'm going to have to do something with them.  It would be fun if I had enough bookshelf space to display them all.

It is these books-- both the more popular ones like Sweet Valley High and The Baby-Sitters Club, along with an impressive number of the more obscure ones, even some that I hadn't read-- that Gabrielle Moss chronicles in Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of '80s and '90s Teen Fiction.  Organized by the themes that were persistent in these books such as love, friends, family, etc., Moss explains the phenomenon of teen series fiction of the 80s and 90s, arguing that while some aspects of these books are problematic by today's standards-- they are mostly about middle- or upper-middle-class white girls, for example, alienating a large portion of their potential audience-- they were important in that they were both about and for young women, meaning that publishers acknowledged that girls' day to day lives were worth writing about and that, as an audience, pre-teen and teen girls were worth catering to.

The book even looks like some of the teen fiction from the 80s and 90s, or like a teen magazine from that era, with glossy pages featuring lots of pictures and bright colors.  It is a quick, nostalgic read, providing history and analysis of the books while also revealing some background facts, such as how the Baby-Sitters Club covers were created (fun fact: as a toddler, Kirsten Dunst modeled for Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls). 

Though I caught a couple of weird errors that should have been caught in the editing process, as a whole, the book is a great read for anyone who grew up reading these books.  Two thumbs up!

thoughts on Sex Education (spoilers; frank discussion of scene involving sexual assault)

Asa Butterfield stars as Otis Milburn, a British teen whose mother Jean (Gillian Anderson) is a sex therapist.  Though both single and a virgin at the beginning of the series, he becomes known as “sex kid” at his school and begins, with the help of his classmate Maeve (Emma Mackey) charging his classmates for sex advice.  Over the course of the two seasons, he helps his classmates navigate their relationships while beginning to explore his own.  We also get a look at Jean’s love life as she, after years of eschewing relationships in favor of one night stands (who Otis has gotten used to running into in the bathroom in his mother’s yellow bathrobe), begins an unlikely romance with a plumber named Jakob (Mikael Persbrandt).

I don’t know if teens really are having as much sex as the teens on this show are.  I do know that these particular teens seem incredibly responsible and mature about sex, being vigilant about condom use and seeking help on and working through issues that would make even some adults call it quits.  The relationships—both the teens’ and the adults’—are so real that it is painful to watch at times.  Jean confesses to Jakob that she kissed her ex-husband, and they break up.  When she later asks forgiveness, he tells her that she isn’t ready for the type of intimacy he needs.  She cries as soon as she is out the door.  Your heart breaks for her.  Sometimes, there is drama the likes of which is rarely seen in real life; people make drunken speeches where they tell people what they REALLY think of them and jump onstage during plays to make declarations.  Sometimes it’s too much like real life; sometimes it’s how you wish real life was.  It always is compelling, interesting television where you genuinely feel for most of the characters.

One particularly interesting storyline comes when Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood) experiences a sexual assault on a bus.  A man masturbates and ejaculates on the leg of her jeans; she is upset enough to get off of the bus and walk the rest of the way to school.  She seems flippant about the encounter when she tells her friend Maeve about it, primarily concerned that her jeans might be ruined.  Maeve has to explain to her that what she has experienced was a sexual assault and that she needs to report it to the police.  Though Aimee doesn’t understand the experience as sexual assault and is initially resistant to the idea of reporting it, she is nonetheless traumatized by it, avoiding the bus; thinking that she sees the man everywhere; and finding herself unable to enjoy sex with her boyfriend.  It provides a compelling look at the ways in which women are inclined to brush off such experiences as no big deal even as they have a serious impact on their ability to conduct their daily lives.

As a whole, it is both an entertaining and thought-provoking show.  A third season has been announced for 2021; I don’t think I’m the only one who can’t wait.

thoughts on Miss Americana (spoilers)

It's no secret to anyone who knows me that I'm a huge fan of Taylor Swift, though it took me a little while to come around on her when she first started.  Miss Americana, the recent Netflix documentary, takes us through Swift's career from the beginning, stopping at key moments to dig a little deeper and to get some commentary from Swift.  She says very early on that her guiding principle has always been wanting people to think she is good at what she does.  She is clearly very driven, motivated, talented, and has a support network that was dedicated to helping her develop that talent (her parents moved with her to Nashville when she was young so that she could pursue her music career).  As she has grown older, Swift has seemed to gain some perspective on how fragile basing your life on that guiding principle is.  

Looking back on the incident when Kanye interrupted her VMA acceptance speech, Swift says that when the crowd started booing, she, in the moment, thought that they were booing her.  She says that when your whole "moral code" (she uses that phrase more than once, even though I'm not sure that's what I would call it; I would call it more a sense of self or a personal ethos) is based around wanting people to like you, having a whole roomful of people booing is your worst nightmare.  On the one hand, anyone who is any sort of high achiever and largely bases their worth on achieving their goals can relate, and can think of points where they've been devastated at a failure or perceived failure.  On the other hand, when you're a performer, everything you do is so much more public and so much more closely scrutinized.  You can see where maybe you'd have to get to a point where you rethought how much you needed everyone to like you just to survive.

The film is largely about how Swift has learned to do that.  Two key points that come up are her struggle with disordered eating and her recent decision to become politically active after spending years avoiding talking about her political views.  She says that she has had to learn the hard way that she feels much better and has much more energy in her shows when she isn't starving herself, but that that means having to learn not to care so much when, say, a tabloid reports that she looks pregnant based on an unflattering photo. Politically, she says she was warned from very early on that she didn't want to get "Dixie Chicked" based on the backlash the Dixie Chicks received when lead singer Natalie Maines spoke out against then-president George W. Bush.  We see advisors warning her when she wants to speak out against a Tennessee senatorial candidate who has a record of supporting anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ policies; one even asks her if she would be okay with half as many people coming to her shows.  She says in frustration that it has begun to feel hypocritical to get onstage all, "Happy Pride Month!" if she isn't willing to actually DO anything.  She ultimately does release a statement in support of the candidate of her choice.  She has had to learn to let go of her need to be liked by everyone in order to be healthy and live her values.

What the film is, then, is the story of how a high-achieving young woman who is prone to people-pleasing has established a career and learned to do things more on her own terms.  I thought it explained a lot about her.  It was relatable, yet also shed light on how someone who has achieved that level of success has a different mindset and different priorities than the average person (even the average high-achieving person).