How to Watch "Men"

Alex Garland's latest film "Men," is one of those trippy, allegorical thrillers like Charlie Kaufman's "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" or David Lynch's "Mulholland Dr."  Things start out as normal as can be, and by the end realism has gone bye-bye and fever dream surrealism has taken over.  A viewer has to actively interpret what is being presented on the screen, because if you approach it in a straightforward manner, nothing makes sense.  Some viewers love movies like this and others hate them.  I am usually in the former category because I love watching talented directorsgo a little nuts.  

With "Men," Garland is in the same groove as his recent "Annihilation," presenting some striking, often disturbing images of hallucinatory body horror.  His heroine, Harper (Jessie Buckley), is recently widowed and having a holiday in a rented manor house in a remote village.  Immediately, she's put on edge by the property's owner, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), and then there are several more unpleasant incidents involving a naked man who seems to follow her out of the woods, a judgmental local vicar, and a nasty young boy.  All of them appear to have Rory Kinner's face.  As Harper becomes more paranoid, it's clear that her state of mind is being affected by the recent death of her husband James (Paapa Essiedu), which may have been an accident, and may have been a suicide.

There's really not much to the story, just a slow buildup of tensions to a nightmarish finale.  Every review I've read for "Men" points to toxic masculinity as a major theme of the film, though this strikes me as reductive.  All the different male characters who harass and threaten Harper in various ways are part of the same problem, and all essentially facets of the same, oppressive force in her life.  However, this force is comprised of the lingering psychic trauma from her husband's death, her fears about men, and her own guilt and grief for the part she might have played in her own misfortune.  There's some supernatural spookiness involving the appearance of a figure who seems to be patterned off of the mythological Green Man, and a jarring home invasion as part of the climax, but this is not a horror film in the way something like Ari Aster's "Midsommar" is.  Harper is being persecuted by phantoms I was never sure were real, and there's always a strong likelihood that everything we're watching is only taking place in her head.

These wilder events are where the film is worth watching, even if you have no interest in trying to puzzle out the symbolism or the themes.  The visuals are truly gorgeous and weird, and executed with some real skill and auteurist vision.  There's a great jump scare about half an hour into the film, when the stalker first shows up.  It doesn't make any sense in the context of the story because Harper doesn't see him, but the way the scene plays out adds a great jolt of energy to the film, and signals that the crazy is ramping up.  The suspense and action sequences are all orchestrated wonderfully, and the ending confrontation - involving a series of nude men - is truly one of the most awesomely deranged things I've seen in a film in a while.  The fact that it's so beautifully done with seamless effects work really impressed me.  It's one thing to come up with an idea like this, and another thing entirely to commit considerable resources to realizing it.   

I'm not totally satisfied with "Men" as a whole, because its metaphors are too straightforward for my tastes.  The film's parts, however, are very entertaining.  Jessie Buckley has no trouble inhabiting this metaphysically dubious space and showing us how Harper unravels, while Rory Kinnear gets to be menacing in all sorts of different ways.  I wish Garland engaged a little more with his ideas, and dug a bit deeper into Harper's psyche to maybe try and illuminate what the more primal roots of her fears are.  Also, while toxic masculinity is a perfectly good subject, "Men" can't help feeling a little one-sided.  Can you imagine Garland making a companion piece called "Women" with all the genders flipped?  

But then again, as artsy allegorical thrillers go, this one is very good at being entertaining as well as being a hallucinatory mind trip.  And these days, I don't look a gift horse in the mouth. 

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It's a "Kids in the Hall" Hyperfixation

I've found my latest rabbit hole.  

I became a Kids in the Hall fan like so many other Americans of a certain age, by watching the reruns of their show on Comedy Central, which ran it constantly in the '90s and early 2000s.  Eventually, I rented their movie "Brain Candy" and their tour videos, but that was pretty much it for me for over a decade.  I know I watched the miniseries "Death Comes to Town" at some point, but don't recall much about it.  Now it's 2022, and after watching the revival season of "The Kids in the Hall" and their new "Comedy Punks" documentary, I'm nowhere near ready to be done with these guys.

Amazon Prime, AMC+, and various other streaming platforms have all the old episodes.  It turns out that there are a ton I haven't seen - or haven't really seen, because Comedy Central showed heavily edited versions of everything.  I've been slowly making my way through the entire series, while checking out what the Kids have been up to while I haven't been paying attention.  I've liked some of the projects that the individual troupe members have been involved in, like Scott Thompson and Paul Bellini's band "Mouth Congress," and Mark McKinney in the Guy Maddin film "The Saddest Music in the World."  However, I've been mostly fixated on their media appearances related to "The Kids in the Hall," especially interviews and press ephemera.  It turns out that a lot of it is remarkably ephemeral. 

Now, the Kids have been around so long that a lot of their material predates the internet.  Some media, such as a 1994 Conan O'Brien episode featuring both Isabella Rossellini and her double, Dave Foley in drag, is probably gone for good.  What interests me most is the content that was online a few years ago, but has disappeared.  It's stunning how fast things can go.  There's a 2008 "Funny or Die" sketch where Buddy Cole becomes a parent that is no longer anywhere on the site.  Clips of a 2010 episode of E! Online's "The Soup," where four Kids members appear garbed as former child beauty queens (and Mark McKinney is heard offstage), have been linked to from multiple places.  The clips, however, are no longer online.  There are no videos on the E! site from before 2016.   And who knows what happened to all the interviews on the Nerdist Youtube channel after Chris Hardwick got himself cancelled.

A few things are still accessible, like Scott Thompson's appearances on "The Colbert Report" in 2014 and clips of Dave Foley's Canadian sitcom "Spun Out," where the rest of the troupe show up in Goth wear to enforce an old suicide pact.  However, going through the old "Kids in the Hall" fansites and online groups just brings up a ton of dead links.  Social media accounts have been deleted.  Whole websites have died or stopped hosting older content, which means a ton of interviews, promotional material, and the occasional web exclusive are gone with them.  Because it's not physical media, there's no way of hunting any of this down the way I can with the old DVDs and their extras.

I'm not too hung up on the gaps, because of the sheer amount of "Kids in the Hall" material I'm still sifting through.  I mean, the number of Conan O'Brien interviews with Dave Foley that don't involve Isabella Rossellini is not insubstantial. There's literally thirty plus years of material out there, and I've been doing my best to pace myself.  So, I'm going to focus on the series rewatch first, via Amazon Prime because I want another season (please, please, please), and I'm saving Siskel and Ebert's notorious fight over "Brain Candy" for a rainy day.    

And by save, I mean I'm literally downloading the clip from Youtube and holding on to it until I'm ready to watch it.  You can't be too careful these days.

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Who Gets To Exist in Fantasy Media?

I loved reading science-fiction and fantasy novels when I was younger, and almost all the heroes of those books were Caucasian.  I myself am not Caucasian, and didn't mind at all.  I don't remember a time when I wasn't able to mentally put myself into the shoes of someone who didn't look like me for the sake of a good story.  As I got older, however, I learned that other people couldn't get their heads around it.  I read about Ursula LeGuin raging over the book covers of "A Wizard of Earthsea" consistently picturing a pale-skinned Ged instead of a brown-skinned one.  I couldn't find any copy of Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" that showed Hiro Protagonist was a BIPOC lead character.  The problem seemed to be especially prevalent in the fantasy genre.

And now it's 2022, and the latest skirmish in the Culture Wars is over POC characters in fantasy media like "The Rings of Power," "The House of the Dragon," and Disney's live action "The Little Mermaid."  The "The Rings of Power" features POC actors playing elves, dwarves, and harfoots (proto-Hobbits).  "The House of the Dragon" has black actors playing characters from House Velaryon, who share ancestry with the Targaryens, a previously ultra-pale family of despots.  The "previously" is important here, because these new POC characters represent a change from how these franchises have operated with regard to POC representation up until now.  In Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" films, POC actors were limited to playing enemy orcs and barely glimpsed members of foreign armies.  The first "Game of Thrones" series had more prominent POC characters, including Khal Drogo, played by Jason Momoa.  However, they were mostly cordoned off on their own continent, and limited to a single storyline supporting a "white savior" heroine, Daenerys Targaryen.  As for Halle Bailey as the new Ariel, I don't think I need to explain how prevalent the image of the red-haired mermaid has been in pop culture since she made her debut in the 1989 cartoon.  

These complaints are nothing new.  I've been hearing them for at least a decade, since Hollywood realized that POC led media like "Black Panther," "Aquaman," and "Bridgerton" could mean bigger audiences and more lucrative successes.  Whitewashed characters in movies like "The Last Airbender" and "Ghost in the Shell" became a thing of the past.  For the first time, POC actors were being considered for roles they'd never been considered for before, even if the character had previously only been portrayed by white actors.  More POC representation behind the camera has also helped considerably.  As a result, movies like "Prey," with an indigenous lead actress kicking alien butt, are getting made, and Jordan Peele is one of the last auteurs standing, having almost single-handedly kickstarted the recent black horror wave.  Of course, this doesn't mean that the transition hasn't been bumpy, or has sometimes resulted in bad casting choices and bad end product.  You could argue that the pendulum has swung too far, and Hollywood has overcorrected, but the latest controversy says otherwise.

So back to recent fantasy media.  The POC characters in "Rings of Power" and "House of the Dragon" are clearly in the minority on these shows, mostly in supporting roles.  A grand total of one major POV character in "Rings of Power," the elf Arondir, played by Ismael Cruz Cordova, is noticeably darker skinned.  Ariel represents the first live action Disney princess who wasn't explicitly a POC character to begin with, to be played by a POC actress.  Disney has made a dozen of these live action remakes, and this is the first time they've taken this kind of risk.  I'd characterize these changes as hardly being risks at all, compared to the leaps and bounds in representation we've seen in other genres and franchises lately.  Except, of course, there's been the backlash.  The complaints are so rote by this point, all boiling down to taking umbrage with the "agenda" to force a diverse worldview into these fantasy worlds where one didn't exist before.  As if that initial, non-diverse worldview wasn't just as much of a construct - one we treated as a default because we had few options otherwise.

The trumped up outrage is being pushed by a clear minority of fans and the usual bad faith actors, who simply don't like seeing POC characters in contexts where we haven't seen them before. They've been getting a lot of attention, because their arguments are frequently ridiculous, and their vitriol is completely out of proportion.  And frankly, it's all too familiar.  These are the people that the fantasy book publishers were worried about when they kept POC characters off of their book covers.  These are my fellow nerds who never learned how to put themselves in somebody else's shoes for the sake of a good story.  I've tried to engage with some of them, and it's honestly so sad how they can take such small changes as a deeply personal affront.  Any attempts at wider inclusion are seen as exclusion, despite there being plenty of other non-POC characters to follow and root for.  And after having their narrow-mindedness enabled for so long, is that any surprise?      

My takeaway from all this is that we have to work harder at normalizing POC in fantasy stories to fight this kind of mindset.  We need more representation, not less.  I wish "Rings of Power" and "House of the Dragon" had been bolder and committed to more POC representation.  Other fantasy shows have been more gutsy.  I love that "The Sandman'' has half a dozen black actresses playing characters who weren't black women in the source material - including Death, the series' most popular character - and creator Neil Gaiman has been active on Twitter, dressing down any complainers.  There's a new "Interview With the Vampire" series on the horizon, with POC actors playing Louis and Claudia - and it makes perfect sense for the New Orleans setting.  

I write this as someone who is from an East-Asian background, and still doesn't really exist in any of the franchises I've talked about, except on the margins.  Sonoya Mizuno is in "The House of the Dragon," and that's about it.  I'm still putting myself in other people's shoes when I watch these shows, though a wider variety of shoes.  Frankly, I don't understand how you come to the fantasy genre, full of made-up lands and impossible creatures, and not expect to have to do that anyway.  

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"Jerry & Marge" and "Fire Island"

Streaming exclusives are making it a lot harder to keep us with certain films.  Here are some very belated reviews of some recent feel-good movies that I'm lumping together because they both feel like they're destined to be somebody's favorites.  They're both serving audiences that tend to be overlooked, and both very good versions of what they're trying to be.

"Jerry & Marge Go Large," for instance, is a very sweet dramedy starring a pair of actors in their sixties, and feels a lot like one of those working class UK village comedies that were popular in the '90s.  Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening play the Selbees, Jerry and Marge, who live in the fading town of Evart, Michigan.  Recently retired and bored, Jerry stumbles across a lottery game in Massachusetts that has a flaw - if you buy enough tickets at a certain time, the odds shift in the buyer's favor.  This snowballs into the whole town getting behind Jerry's new venture to beat the lottery, and the Selbees discovering a new lease on life.

"Jerry & Marge" has an old fashioned worldview.  It tells the story of wholesome, small town, Middle American ingenuity and perseverance winning out over the faceless system.  This is tremendously appealing wish fulfillment, and thanks to a solid script and a good cast, it never tips into being smarmy or inane.  It's genuinely fun to spend time with Jerry and Marge as they make their monthly trips to Massachusetts to buy ever increasing numbers of lotto tickets.  The supporting cast, including Larry Wilmore and Rainn Wilson, lend some gentle humor.  I appreciate that Jerry is given some depth and time for self-reflection, and while most of the story is a heavily fictionalized account of the real Selbees' lotto streak, it never pushes too far or becomes too flashy.  A villain is concocted - a math whiz from Harvard running a rival lotto group - but the stakes are kept small and reasonable.   

These midbudget films used to be much more common, and it's honestly refreshing to see one that's so content to be exactly what it is.  It wants to give its older audience members some uplift, and to spin a fun modern day fable about some colorful people.  There are no chase scenes, no fights, and barely even any raised voices.  So, for certain audiences, this is going to be a snooze, and for others a delight.  I'm getting older myself, and was happy to see Cranston and Bening playing a pair of very nice people growing closer in their twilight years, and being complete nerds over math.  Not all movies need to be about psychopaths and neurotics, and frankly this was a great palate cleanser for some of the more R-rated media I've been watching lately.

Now "Fire Island" seems at the outset to be very niche.  Joel Kim Booster and Bowen Yang play Noah and Howie, part of a group of gay New York friends who vacation every year on Fire Island,  known for its LGBT enclaves.  Noah is the more social one, and intent on helping the far less experienced Howie find somebody to hook up with.  This puts them in the path of a much more wealthy group of guys, including Charlie (James Scully), who Howie hits it off with.  However, there's also Will (Conrad Ricamora), a stern-faced lawyer who seems intent on keeping the two apart.  Noah is attracted to him, but can't stand his attitude.  And right about now some of you are realizing that "Fire Island" is "Pride and Prejudice" as a modern day, gay, Asian-American rom-com.  And it's a lot of fun.

I have no idea whether "Fire Island" is in any way a true or honest reflection of what the gay Asian-American experience is like, but it comes off as a pretty sincere attempt a better representation.  Directed by Andre Ahn of "Spa Night," and written by Joel Kim Booster, the movie does a good job of translating Austen's concerns over class and wealth to a modern context.  Noah and Howie have no interest in matrimony - Noah is near repulsed by the notion - but they are very self-aware and sensitive when it comes to social standing and privilege.  We watch them roll their eyes at insensitive comments about Asians from clueless white guys, and goggle at Will and Charlie's expensive real estate on the island.  There are a few instances where Noah provides explanations for certain Fire Island events and activities through narration, but not so many that it feels like the movie is aimed at the straights.  

It's also nice to see a LGBT film that has a lot of overt sexuality, though only modest glimpses of any actual coupling.  Casual sex is not demonized in this movie, but presented as a perfectly good option for some of the characters.  This is balanced out by a lot of the film being about friendships and found family.  The lone major female character is Erin (Margaret Cho), who acts as a sort of lesbian den mother to Noah's group.  However there's a wide variety of gay characters of all different colors and races, who express their queerness in different ways.  And the film ultimately hinges on Noah learning to acknowledge that he and Howie, despite having so many of the same cultural signifiers, ultimately have very different experiences being who they are.  And there's no realization more universal than that.   

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The Stars Are Bright in "Gaslit"

If there's any sign that there's no difference between movie and television stars anymore, it's that Julia Roberts and Sean Penn headlined a limited series about the Watergate scandal for Hulu, and it was not a big deal.  "Gaslit" stars Penn and Roberts as John N. Mitchell, former attorney general and the chair of Nixon's reelection campaign, and Mitchell's strong-willed wife Martha.  We also follow John Dean (Dan Stevens), a Nixon administration lawyer who becomes a witness against the president, his girlfriend Mo (Betty Gilpin), and Watergate mastermind G. Gordon Libby (Shea Whigham).  A very long list of interesting character actors are also in the mix as various reporters, law enforcement, and governmental figures.

As someone too young to have been around for the scandal, it was fun to get a play-by-play of the Watergate break-ins, the cover-up, and the subsequent hearings.  While I know the broad outlines of the events, it was good to learn some of the smaller stories about the people who have fallen through the cracks over the years.  We meet Frank Wills (Patrick Walker), the security guard who stumbled across the break-in and wound up revealing the whole plot.  I liked the occasional check-ins with FBI agents Magallanes (Carlos Valdes) and Lano (Chris Messina), who are a pair of wry working stiffs not sure that they're doing much good trying to investigate Nixon's allies.  However, Roberts is clearly the star as Martha, who was a minor celebrity in her day, both celebrated and reviled for telling the truth about what her husband and his colleagues got up to.    

This is a series best enjoyed for its performances.  While "Gaslit" does a good job of showing the seedy political culture that made the scandal possible, it's far more interested in studying the characters it's chosen to single out - the unreliable, unstable Martha, her reluctant husband, the weaselly John Dean, and finally the insane G. Gordon Liddy.  They're all reprehensible people to varying degrees, but in "Gaslit" they're allowed to be very human and occasionally sympathetic.  Roberts has no trouble selling Martha's buzzy socialite, or the troubled woman she is underneath.  Sean Penn, in a fat suit and layers of facial appliances, is unrecognizable but still very effective as Mitchell.  However, Shea Whigham handily steals every scene he is in as Liddy, who he plays as a self-aggrandizing lunatic barely maintaining a guise of sanity.  Whigham is one of those character actors who has been in everything, and with this role I hope he finally breaks out and achieves greater prominence.      

I liked the miniseries overall, but it felt too much like awards bait in a season that has been full of similar prestige projects.  I kept thinking about the last Watergate project I had seen, Spielberg's "The Post," about the news coverage of the scandal.  The two projects are very dissimilar in tone - "Gaslit" is more venal and earthy, with a touch of Southern Gothic.  However, both share a major flaw in that they are both operating in the absence of Richard Nixon, whose shadow may loom large over the events, but he isn't actually a character in either story.  This leaves a vacuum where a much stronger villain ought to be.  In "Gaslit," the Mitchells, John Dean, and Liddy all intersect but barely seem to affect one another.  Giving all of them a common enemy to tie the series together would have been a big help.

I can't help wondering what "Gaslit" would have looked like as a prestige picture with the same cast.  I imagine it would have probably jettisoned most of John Dean's storyline and some of the more minor characters, which would have been a shame.  However, keeping the focus on the Mitchells would have probably made for a tighter and more focused, more effective piece of media.  As with an awful lot of recent miniseries, more is not always better.  At eight episodes, "Gaslit" isn't too egregious about its extra screen time, but it is harder to track various characters' arcs and relationships as they're spread out over more episodes.  

With a topic as complicated and many-faceted as Watergate, there's necessarily a lot of time spent on covering many different angles.  However, I was disappointed to find that there's relatively little time spent on the actual gaslighting of Martha Mitchell, and the other storylines often served to distract from her plight. 

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So Much for Rebound Summer

I figured that while I was doing a summer box office wrap-up, I might as well check back in with my Summer Movie Wager results.  Despite there being a very small number of contenders this year, I wound up with my worst score in ages.  Here's how the summer actually went:

1. Top Gun: Maverick

2. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

3. Jurassic World: Dominion

4. Minions: The Rise of Gru

5. Thor: Love and Thunder

6. Elvis

7. Nope

8. Lightyear

9. The Black Phone

10. Bullet Train

And here are my predictions from back in April:

1. Thor: Love and Thunder

2. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (10 pts)

3. Top Gun: Maverick (5 pt)

4. Lightyear

5. DC League of Super Pets

6. Jurassic World: Dominion

7. Minions: The Rise of Gru

8. The Black Phone (7 pt)

9. Nope (5 pt)

10. Bullet Train (13 pt)

My biggest missteps were clearly being too optimistic on "Love and Thunder," "Lightyear," and "Super Pets," while misjudging the charms of "Elvis," "Maverick," and the "Minions."

Boy, did I not see "Maverick" coming.  The success of the Tom Cruise movie has set a heap of new records, and managed the unprecedented feat of winning the box office on both Memorial Day and Labor Day weekend this year.  It is a bona fide phenomenon.  Paramount delaying the film for as long as they did paid off in spades, and we can expect that the upcoming "Mission: Impossible" movies will be similarly massive.  

On the other hand, "Maverick" managed that Labor Day win in large part because of how little competition it had.  The summer started off strong, but fizzled out as the weeks went by.  The theaters went as far as to put together a National Cinema Day on September 3rd, with heavily discounted tickets to try and drum up some interest.  September is traditionally a slow month, but this year titles are so scarce that the biggest challenger to "Maverick" was a re-release of "Spider-Man: No Way Home" with added material.   Streaming has clearly taken a toll, with many films that we once would have expected to see in theaters, like the recent Sylvester Stallone film "Samaritan," staying out of theaters.  Only twenty-two films got wide releases this summer, about half the number from 2019.  Domestic grosses, however, were only down by roughly 20%.

Disney titles, in particular, have seen lower grosses.  PIXAR's "Lightyear" was a notable disappointment, after the studio's last three features all went directly to streaming.  There's a theory going around that having new PIXAR movies on Disney+ is creating an expectation that their animated films will always premiere on the service.  The relatively short theatrical window for the MCU films may also be contributing to the slump, though it's worth remembering that the latest "Spider-man" movie wound up being the highest grossing film of 2021.  I think that the recent batch of MCU films just haven't been the climactic crowd-pleasers we've come to expect, but that is a subject for another post.

I'm a little puzzled by "Super Pets" not doing well, since it's essentially "The Secret Life of Pets" with a bunch of superhero references, and is pretty watchable.  However, "Minions" was the big animated hit of the summer, even generating the eye-rolling #Gentleminions Tik-Tok trend.  It's been five years since the last "Despicable Me" film, and I guess this franchise has more goodwill than I thought.    

It's a relief to see that a few non-franchise films made the list.  "Nope," "The Black Phone," and "Bullet Train" are all original genre films that deserve their success.  I imagine that all of them would have been lost in the shuffle in a more competitive year.  "Elvis" genuinely surprised me, but I guess I should've learned by now not to count out Baz Luhrmann and his ability to orchestrate large-scale musical spectacle.  And it's worth noting that "Where the Crawdads Sing" came in at eleven, and the latest "Downton Abbey" movie at thirteen - films that weren't even on my radar. 

Next summer looks much more lively with "Guardians of the Galaxy," "Indiana Jones," "Mission: Impossible,""Transformers," Vin Diesel, and the great "Barbie" vs. "Oppenheimer" showdown incoming.  However, I don't expect my Summer Movie Wager scores will improve much.

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Regime Change at Warner Bros.

I put off writing about the cancellations and reorganizations going on at Warner Bros, because I was having trouble putting it into context.  I don't generally follow the business side of the industry, and these big shifts have a tendency to catch me flatfooted, and the Warner-Discovery merger has been a lot to parse.  The short version of what happened is that in April, AT&T divested their Warner Media subsidiary (formerly Time Warner), and they merged with Discovery Inc, becoming Warner Bros. Discovery.  The new CEO is David Zaslav, who has decided that the company is wildly overspending, and is keen on finding $3 billion in savings.  To do this, he's been busy axing underperforming shows, ending many projects in development, pulling older titles like "Vinyl" from HBO Max to avoid paying residuals, and even canceling the almost finished "Batgirl" movie for a purported tax write-off.  

The creative community, understandably, has been in an uproar.  So far, HBO Max has borne the brunt of the cuts, with a reduction of 14% of the workforce, and many of its originals canceled.  A full merger of the HBO Max and Discovery streaming services is expected in 2023.  International content is being reduced.  The non-scripted unit is being cut entirely in favor of Discovery's existing operations.  Animated and children's programming has been severely curtailed, and was the most affected by HBO Max's content purge.  We haven't seen streaming services remove their original content like this before, and I'm not surprised that there was the most negative reaction over the 200 episodes of Sesame Street that disappeared along with "Infinity Train" and "The Fungies."  Now, for the first time, we're seeing streaming exclusives essentially caught in media limbo - a big step away from the perpetual accessibility that the streaming age was supposed to maintain.      

However, the most concerning result of the merger has only become apparent in the past few weeks, as CNN has noticeably started shifting rightwards, after decades of trying to be the neutral option between FOX News on the right, and MSNBC on the left.  After the messy downfall of CNN+ and Chris Licht replacing Jeff Zucker, we're now seeing an exodus of talent, some concerning new hires, and calls for boycott.  Viewers have noted an uptick in incendiary headlines and fearmongering language more commonly associated with FOX News.  It's not too difficult to see sinister political motives behind all of this, but I think the simpler explanation is that cable news audiences are much older, much more conservative, and if CNN wants to boost its ratings, a shift to the right makes sense for their bottom line.  The implications for the American news media ecosystem are frankly pretty frightening.  

Trying to look at the big picture here, the consolidation of the major streaming services has long been expected as competition has intensified.  Cracks are starting to show as the streaming ceiling has been reached, with Netflix losing subscribers and more bundling deals popping up, like Paramount and Showtime deciding to share an app and maybe merge.  HBO Max has been very well regarded, in terms of content and value, and it's been making steady gains since its launch/rebranding two years ago.  However, there have been some serious missteps along the way, such as the simultaneous theatrical/streaming premiere strategy during the pandemic that made everyone on the theatrical side very unhappy.  This round of cost-cutting was probably overdue.  However, this particular gang of execs is liable to throw the babies out with the bathwater.  

It's particularly distressing because Warner Bros. is one of the biggest, oldest, most storied Hollywood media companies that is still kicking, and home to so much beloved IP.  Most of the worst cuts are currently hitting HBO Max, but inevitably the rest of Warner Media is going to be affected.  The CW saw eight series, including nearly all of its DC superhero shows, canceled back in May.  The Turner networks, TNT and TBS, saw scripted programming development cut.    The removal of so much kids and family content from HBO Max might presage more pain over at Cartoon Network and Warner Animation Group.  I don't think anybody's safe, not even HBO or the theatrical businesses, in the long run.

Things are still very much in the air at the time of writing, especially regarding CNN, and I feel like I've only managed to summarize the very broadest outlines of what's going on.  Expect more in the future, especially in regards to the mess we're in with the DC universe.  That definitely needs its own post.

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Here's To "Leo Grande"

"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" has a fascinating, and very calculated premise.  A sixty-something retired schoolteacher, Nancy (Emma Thompson), has hired a twenty-something sex worker named Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) for a night of intimacy.  Nancy is widowed, has never had an orgasm, and is very, very anxious about the encounter.  Leo is experienced, patient, and very, very mature about the whole situation.  Initially he almost has to act as a therapist, helping to assuage Nancy's worries and get her to accept the idea that what she wants is not wrong, and what she's doing is not evil.      

I found myself thinking about "Mass" quite a bit when I was watching "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande."  The two films have nothing in common when it comes to subject matter, but they both function in a similar way.  The movies are built around emotionally charged conversations about uncomfortable subjects.  "Mass" is about the aftermath of a school shooting.  "Leo Grande" is about sex and sexuality.  Both feel very much like stage plays, taking place largely in a single room with characters who are sometimes a little too convenient in their construction.  Both films' successes rest on the actors' performances.

Emma Thompson has never seemed more vulnerable and sympathetic.  Nancy has decades of shame and guilt and repression to combat.  We learn that she was a religious education teacher who bought in to the culture of sexual prudery that has made her so unhappy.  The first third of the film is the most broadly comedic, as Nancy keeps trying to talk her way out of the hotel room, unleashing torrents of exposition and character details as a defense mechanism.  Thompson is simultaneously hilarious and wonderfully tragic, as Nancy admits to finding her grown children boring, and describing a moribund, tedious sex life.  At one point she declares that hiring Leo has been the only adventurous thing she's ever done in her life, and coming from Thompson it's terribly touching. 

Leo initially seems too perfect, until we gradually learn that his persona is a carefully maintained fiction, and there's much more going on underneath.  McCormack is a relative newcomer, but pairs wonderfully with Thompson.  It's so gratifying to watch their relationship form, and the power dynamics in play.  Leo is incredibly attractive, not only because of his physical attributes, but because he maintains such an unflappable, undemanding presence throughout.  He's so secure in his virility and so perceptive and attentive to Nancy's needs that it's no wonder she finds him so unnerving at first.  Leo is the trickier role because so much of him is fantasy, and his reality is closely guarded - I don't think all the offered pieces quite fit - but McCormack strikes a good balance and has the charisma to pull it off.    

Directed by Sophie Hyde and written by Katy Brand, "Leo Grande" never feels like the COVID project we know it is.  There's such a necessary intimacy to the actors in the frame, and such an appealing frankness to the dialogue.  It always feels like this is a story that could only take place in this specific, narrow set of circumstances, and would be all but impossible outside the confines of a hotel room.  I like the way they treat sex, as something natural and to be celebrated, but also a very private and very personal matter.  There's nudity in the film, including full frontal shots, but we don't get to those until we've fully gotten to know the characters first - particularly Nancy with all her fears and apprehensions about her body.  The camera slowly shows us more and more - not in any salacious way - but mirroring Nancy's own level of comfort. 

It's somehow very strange and yet wonderful that such a minimalist film can feel so novel, particularly in 2022.  None of these issues or viewpoints are new, but there's something about the attitude and the directness of the storytelling that hit a nerve with me.  At the same time, this is ultimately a feel-good film aimed at women of a certain age, one that doesn't ever feel pandering or disingenuous.  "Leo Grande" took me completely by surprise, and at the time of writing, this is my favorite film of the year. 

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My Top Ten Episodes of 2021-2022

I did something stupid this year, which was to try to keep up with television and streaming series as they came out.  I didn't watch everything, but I watched a lot more than normal,  drastically cutting down my consumption of films in the process.  This didn't really help, in a season when there were roughly 60 new scripted series in spring alone, plus 30 returning ones.  Even limiting myself to only the cream of the crop, I didn't get around to shows as buzzed about as "Yellowjackets" or "The Dropout," or the third season of "Atlanta."  

Still, I watched and enjoyed a lot of TV, and I'm at a point where I'm ready to make a Top Ten list.

A quick reminder before we start that I'm a big genre nerd, notoriously bad with comedies, and have a neverending "To Watch" list.  I'm using Emmy rules for cutoff dates, which means that this list covers everything from the summer of 2021 to the spring of 2022.  Again, this is a lot.  Entries are unranked, and I'm limiting myself to one episode per show or miniseries.

Here we go.  I'll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum.

Pachinko, "Chapter 3" - Most people seem to pick "Chapter 4" with Sunja's emotional departure for Japan as a favorite, but I prefer the far more uncertain "Chapter 3," where she and her mother discuss their options while nursing an ailing Isak.  I love the final conversation between Sunja and Isak that decides her fate, as well as the 1980s sequence where Sunja accompanies Solomon to visit the Korean holdout preventing his real estate deal project from completing.

White Lotus, "The Lotus-Eaters" - While Jennifer Coolidge and Murray Bartlett were constantly stealing the show, one of the most interesting characters was Paula, played by Brittany O'Grady.  She's the only one of the guests who isn't white, who sees the privilege that she enjoys the most clearly, and can sympathize with the workers.  However, in this episode, we see her idea of equalizing the playing field is a stupid scheme that backfires spectacularly on everyone - and sets up the big finale.  

Severance, "The We We Are" - One of the tensest episodes of television I've seen in ages sees our characters in unknown territory, trying to piece together how their other halves live.  I was on high alert during the entire thing, watching the clock and urging the characters to move faster before time ran out.  The execution of the cliffhanger moments are perfect, and somehow wildly satisfying despite the uncertain fates of our heroes.  Season two really can't come fast enough.

Station Eleven, "Goodbye My Damaged Home" - I had several good options to choose from for "Station Eleven," but I settled on the episode where we finally find out how Kirsten, Jeevan, and Frank spent their time in quarantine during the pandemic.  There are moments of joy, like Frank spontaneously rapping to A Tribe Called Quest, and moments of heartbreak, like the tragedy we all knew was coming.  I especially love the ending, with Kirsten's elegeic goodbye to someone who was once kind to her.

Better Call Saul, "Plan and Execution" - Please keep in mind that my cutoff date was the end of May, so only the first half of the final season is eligible.  This episode was set up to be all about Jimmy and Kim taking down Howard by sabotaging his settlement talks.  However, Howard turned out to not be the big bad of the episode.  By the end of the episode he's clearly the victim - not just of the actual big bad, but of Jimmy and Kim too.  Patrick Fabian really didn't get enough praise for his work.

Arcane, "The Base Violence Necessary For Change" -  The animation in "Arcane" is beautiful, but what really sets this show apart is its writing.  It draws from Greek tragedy, and takes a macroscopic view of how events unfold.  The best example of this is the end of the show's first "Act," where defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory, and everything goes very wrong.  I love how we see Powder's attack three different times, each time revealing a little more of the awful fallout.

Squid Game, "The Man With the Umbrellas" - It feels like it's been forever, but "Squid Game" was a September release.  I considered the "Gganbu" marbles episode, but I prefer "The Man With the Umbrella," where the show is still setting up how the universe works, and all the characters.  The dalonga game plays out so beautifully, showing the cruel arbitrary nature of who lives and who dies, and gives us important insights into the survival skills of Gi-hun and Sang-woo.  

Ted Lasso, "Man City" - I think I'm in the minority who genuinely enjoyed the second season of "Ted Lasso" as much as the first.  This is the episode where AFC Richmond gets to play in Wembley Stadium, and the show got to shoot there.  However, the real drama takes place off the field, when Jamie Tartt has a confrontation with his father in front of everyone.  It's shamelessly melodramatic, but it works, and I like that it provides some closure to a season one storyline that largely played out in the background.

The Kids in the Hall, "Episode 3" - Segments include "Doomsday DJ," Shakespeare's Bust," and "Ambumblance."  Honestly, I picked this episode because it had the highest concentration of good sketches.  The whole season is remarkably consistent.  "Shakespeare's Bust" is my favorite because it's so profane and gory and silly, while still being as nerdy as anything.  It was one of the best surprises of this year, learning that the Kids in the Hall are still this good and this daring in 2022.    

Stranger Things, "Dear Billy" - Again, only the first part of the season is eligible.  There's nothing new or innovative about any of the elements in play here, and the story is pure pulp, but the execution is so good that I didn't care.  It's Sadie Sink's finest hour, making Max so endearing and vulnerable that we totally buy her fear.  And kudos to Shawn Levy for ramping up to that final escape sequence designed to get the audience on their feet, and shouting at the screen.  

Honorable mentions:

The Beatles: Get Back, "Days 17-22" - I'm not entirely convinced that this should be counted as a television episode, as "Get Back" is clearly a documentary feature that's been carved up into arbitrary segments.  However, the rooftop concert deserves recognition somewhere, so it's going here.

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"The Staircase" Tells Many Stories

The mysterious death of Kathleen Peterson in 2001 spawned a famous documentary series in 2004, called "The Staircase."  It was one of the major pieces of true crime media that spurred the current wave of true crime fascination, and has been subject to a fair amount of scrutiny.  An NBC sitcom, "Trial & Error," even delivered a parody version of it a few years ago.  

"The Staircase" miniseries might be accused of being redundant if it weren't for the show not only dramatizing the Peterson case, but the making of the original "Staircase" documentary along with it.  The show's creator, Antonio Campos, starts from the assumption that there is no definite answer as to what actually happened to Kathleen, played by Toni Colette.  In different episodes he shows Kathleen dying multiple times in accordance with all the different theories - it was an accident, Kathleen was viciously killed by her husband Michael (Colin Firth), Kathleen was the victim of an animal attack, etc.  The story moves ahead in real time after her death, following the investigation and trial of Michael, the struggles of the Peterson children, and the eventual involvement of a troupe of filmmakers from France, including director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade  (Vincent Vermignon) and editor Sophie (Juliette Binoche).  However, as more information is uncovered about Michael, there are many flashbacks to different versions of Kathleen's final days throughout the show.

I'm glad that the show gives Toni Colette plenty to do, playing an imperfect woman trying to cope in a difficult marriage rather than an unfortunate victim.  However, the miniseries is really all about Michael - his relationships to his kids, his seeming inability to tell the whole truth to anybody, and his thirteen year relationship with Sophie - the big, fat part of the story that wasn't examined in that original, much lauded "Staircase" documentary.  It's clear that Campos was motivated to make the miniseries in order to comment on the tactics and biases of documentarians.  They're never shown as particularly unscrupulous, and no one ever comments on the veracity or quality of the documentary itself.  He just shows the often uncomfortable intimacy that the film crew shared with the Petersons, and how Sophie's relationship with Michael deeply affected her life.     

I haven't seen the documentary version of "The Staircase" and didn't follow the case while it was happening, so I'd like to think I came to the miniseries without any major preconceptions about Michael Peterson's guilt or innocence.  It's clear what drew an actor of Colin Firth's stature to the project - Peterson is a fascinating enigma.  He was a man who kept a lot of secrets, and had a lot of ambitions.  He was a questionable partner, father, and human being, but did he really have the motive to kill his wife?  Campos has many different characters grapple with this question over the course of the series - Peterson's sons Clayton (Dan DeHaan) and Todd (Patrick Schwarzenegger), his adopted daughters Margaret (Sophie Turner) and Martha (Odessa Young), his brother Bill (Tim Guinee), his lawyer David Rudolph (Michael Stuhlbarg), and eventually Sophie. 

However, as much as I admire the ideas behind "The Staircase, " and appreciate the quality of all the work that went into it, the miniseries is a pretty tough watch.  With the narrative constantly doubling back on itself, it feels repetitive, and the lack of answers is frustrating.  The momentum from the investigation and court case keep the show interesting in the first half, but this is gone by the second half, and things slow to a slog.  I can't imagine watching the miniseries if you already watched the documentary and knew how all of the legal proceedings were going to turn out.  There are some strong performances from dependable actors, and if you like a good melodrama, this might be worth a look.

It's helpful to compare "The Staircase" to "Landscapers," a British true crime series that came out earlier in the year, and was also about how media narratives affect perceptions of innocence and guilt.  In that case, however, there was never any question as to how the crime was committed and who was guilty.  Rather, "Landscaper" was about how the media framed reality to its own ends.  Here, "The Staircase" is still about the mystery of the Petersons, and ultimately doesn't say much about the involvement of the media.  At most, it suggests that Michael Peterson was able to fool and manipulate the filmmakers to his benefit the same way he did with his family.  

Campos goes more in depth on many details, and brings new information, and new points of view, but I get the sense that this is still, in all the ways that matter, the same story.

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"The Flight Attendant," Year Two

Minor spoilers ahead.

The second season of HBO Max's "The Flight Attendant" isn't as much fun as the first, but it's still a good watch.  Cassie Bowden is keeping busy, juggling her job as a flight attendant, her gigs as a CIA asset, Alcoholics Anonymous, and a new boyfriend, Marco (Santiago Cabrera).  She's doing well enough that she invites Annie and her boyfriend Max (Deniz Akdeniz) to come visit her in Los Angeles.  Unfortunately, a mission goes wrong in Berlin, and Cassie suspects she's being framed for murder.  There are several new characters introduced this season, including Cassie's CIA handler Benjamin (Mo McRae) and his boss Dot (Cheryl Heinz), Cassie's AA sponsor Brenda (Shohreh Aghdashloo), a podcaster friend Jenny (Jessie Ennis), a new flight attendant colleague Grace (Mae Martin), and Cassie's mother Lisa (Sharon Stone).    

I like shows that are fast paced and offer lots going on all at once, so "The Flight Attendant" is a great time for me.  Over eight episodes, Cassie is constantly bouncing between one crisis and another, only occasionally having enough time to pause and address the deeper, darker personal issues that she's still struggling with.  The gimmick of her occasionally retreating into her mind, represented by a physical room, comes back.  This time, however, the space is populated by other versions of Cassie herself - the party girl Cassie, the responsible Cassie she wants to be, and Cassie as a little girl.  This allows her internal fights with her own nature to be dramatized with more oomph.  Despite the progress she's made, Cassie is still an alcoholic, and a large chunk of this season focuses on her bumpy recovery amidst all the chaos.     

I like that the show isn't so narrowly focused on Cassie this year.  Annie and Max are a fun, neurotic couple who take over part of the investigation.  Then there's Megan, who has been a fugitive since getting mixed up with the North Koreans last year.  Cassie gets roped into helping her as well.  The central mystery is honestly one of the least interesting things about this season, because the stakes are fairly muddled and it's hard to keep up with the convoluted logic of all the players.  It takes some effort to keep pace with Cassie's wild ride, and all the relationships and storylines she gets tangled up in.  Of course, not all of them get the required attention.  In one episode Cassie goes to Reykjavik to find Megan, and has a brief adventure with Margaret Cho and Michelle Gomez, who both promptly disappear for the rest of the series.  Poor Santiago Cabrera is kept around for ages as a red herring, but gets almost nothing to do.

The show is designed so that there's no time to get bored, but as a result little feels substantive.  The one exception is the material dealing with Cassie's recovery and experience in AA.  She's shed the party girl image and has embraced a recovery narrative, but this is only a front.  She still lies to everybody, including herself, and self-sabotages regularly.  Coming to realize and accept her bad qualities becomes Cassie's character arc this year, and it's a good one.  Still, depending on your mileage, you may find Cassie infuriating as a heroine, because she's one of those television creatures who gets away with everything.  And being self-aware that she's terrible doesn't mean she isn't still terrible for most of the season.  

Still, for causal viewing "Flight Attendant" is hard to beat.  It's light and funny and consistently exciting.  Cuoco's never had a role more suited to her talents.   There's not as much glamorous jet-setting as last season, and Cassie is only involved with one handsome man, but the thrills are still pretty thrilling, and the characters are a little warmer and more lovable. Annie and Max's relationship troubles are an especially good source of amusement this year, and if Kelly Cuoco doesn't want to come back for a third season, I want these two to get a detective agency spinoff.  

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My Favorite Frederick Wiseman Movie

Frederick Wiseman has been making his documentaries about American institutions for decades now.  He's made films about hospitals, schools, museums, courts, social services, a boxing gym, a racetrack, and once the New York neighborhood of Jackson Heights.   Some have been frightening, some mundane, and all of them thought-provoking.  Because of his fly-on-the-wall style and naturalistic pacing, his films are highly immersive.  However, Wiseman insists they are meant to be subjective rather than objective, capturing an experience that is not free from bias, often with narratives that are very pointed in their messaging.    

Initially, I intended to write this post about "Welfare" or "Juvenile Court," provocative early films showing the dysfunction of our governmental systems, and the plight of the people dependent on them.  These features are very powerful and influential, but as a viewer I don't enjoy watching them very much.  I tend to like Wiseman's more recent films more.  As his stature has grown and his projects have gotten longer, and longer, they've become less like investigative journalism and more concerned with capturing the daily rhythms of a particular place.  They fit right into the "slow cinema" aesthetic, and as much as I might grumble about their multi-hour length, I've enjoyed the relaxing, undemanding experience of watching Wiseman films like "Ex Libris" and "National Gallery."  I also appreciate that there's really no one but Wiseman who makes documentaries like this - long, slow, absorbing, and almost totally free of commentary.  

"At Berkeley" is 244 minutes long, Wiseman's third longest film.  It profiles an institution that is quite functional, the University of California, at Berkeley, one of the best public universities in the United States.  Wiseman's camera roams all over campus, giving us a macroscopic view of the university.  There are plenty of familiar shots of students walking between classes, attending Cal football games, and enjoying the picturesque campus.  However, the film mostly consists of Wiseman looking in on various classes, lectures, and meetings.  There's a few minutes with former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, now a professor, delivering a lecture on public policy.  There's a segment in a lab with grad students who are busy testing robots and prosthetic limbs.  There's a seminar on Henry David Throreau's "Walden."  There's a glimpse of rehearsals for "Our Town."  No introductions are provided, and no text onscreen clues you in on who anyone is, or what topic you're about to listen to.  However, it's almost impossible not to listen, not to form opinions, and not to learn, just a little.  

We also get to see parts of Berkeley that almost no one does.  Material related to administrators discussing imminent tuition increases and student protests generate the most tension in the film.  "At Berkeley" was filmed during a state fiscal crisis, when UC and CSU funding was cut, leading to budget shortfalls.  This is a looming existential danger that rears its head many times, in many different contexts.   At the same time, it's comforting to see smart people earnestly trying to tackle these problems head-on.  I love the scene with university administrators meeting with the local police to plan out security measures for student unrest, with clear-headed and empathetic discussion of the concerns on all sides.  In the budget meetings, there is spirited debate on how to preserve the university's diversity and accessibility to low-income students.  None of these segments are very long or conclusive, but Wiseman gives them more time to play out than you might think.    

As always, Wiseman leaves viewers to draw their own conclusions about what he has presented.  You could read the film as a chronicle of the university's decline due to the deprioritization of education by the state, or as a triumph as the staff and educators commit to soldiering on regardless.  You could see the efforts of the administration as admirable or cynical as they struggle to preserve the ideals that the university is supposed to embody and promote.  I find it notable that where Weisman chooses to focus his efforts is on maintaining a balance - showing both sciences and humanities, arts and sports, the ideal of what the university should be, and the difficult reality of living up to that ideal.   

What I've Seen - Frederick Wiseman

Titicut Follies (1967)

High School (1968)

Hospital (1970)

Juvenile Court (1973)

Primate (1974)

Welfare (1975)

Blind (1987)

Boxing Gym (2010)

At Berkeley (2013)

National Gallery (2014)

Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017)

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Your 2022 Emmy Nominees

It's that time again.  There's more television and web content being produced than ever, and the Emmys' impossible task of trying to decide the cream of the crop has resulted in a really wild, messy set of nominees this year.  After watching more current television this spring than I ever have in my entire life, and paying for too many streaming subscriptions, I've seen roughly half of the titles in most of the big categories - comedy is my Achilles heel as usual.  This is enough to make me comfortable with offering some thoughts on the nominations - barely informed as they may be.

I take some comfort from knowing that my total failure to keep on top of all the prestige television series that aired in the 2021-2022 eligibility window is shared by the people who actually decide who gets nominated for Emmys.  How else to explain some of these choices?  How are Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh nominated again, for a widely derided final season of "Killing Eve"?  How is it that the only Emmy nomination "Pachinko" received was Main Title Design, while "Squid Game" got fourteen, including Best Drama Series?  There are only two nominees for Variety Sketch Comedy Series, and "The Kids in the Hall" revival still couldn't get in?!  

Emmy inertia means that "SNL's" Bowen Yang and Kate McKinnon, and the cast of "The Morning Show" are taking up space that should probably go to more deserving performers, but there are several first-timers in the acting categories I'm glad to see.  Rhea Seehorn finally has a nomination for playing Kim Wexler in "Better Call Saul."  Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult are both nominated for their battling Russian royals on "The Great." However, it's hard not to focus on the snubs.  "Severance" has seven nods, but Britt Lower was left out.  "Only Murders in the Building" has six, but Selena Gomez was left out.  "Stranger Things" got thirteen nominations, but only in the technical categories.  And I guess we're all just collectively done with "This is Us," aren't we?

Still, this doesn't feel like an egregiously bad or insincere crop of nominees.  I'm sure that there are passionate fans behind every single nomination here.  Looking at the wider trends, I love that the directing nominees are very close to gender parity, and Hiro Murai made out with two nominations, for "Atlanta" and "Station Eleven."  There were a lot of multiple nominees, usually performers like Jason Bateman and Quinta Brunson, who also picked up a nomination for writing or directing.  The networks are still being massively outgunned by cable and streaming, with "Abbott Elementary" and "SNL" really the only major nominees representing broadcast television.  Any foreign language series getting multiple nominations and a Best Drama Series nod is something to be celebrated, so "Squid Game" has my respect.  Also, after the success of "The Mandalorian" and "WandaVision" in previous years, Disney+ is notably absent from the major categories.   

As for the snubs, well, the prestige television avalanche has made it so that it's unreasonable to expect the Emmy voters to have seen everything, and I can't be upset that they're taking their cues from whoever campaigned the hardest.  It's hard to argue that some of my favorites, like "Station Eleven," should have gotten more recognition when I didn't bother to watch "The Dropout," "Maid," or "Pam & Tommy."  Can I really be upset that "Inventing Anna" got awards attention when all that I can accuse it of is a lack of buzz?  At least the Emmys seem less prone to being starstruck than I am, and didn't just hand out nominations to projects like "Gaslit" and "The Offer" because of the actors involved.  Still, I'd like to see the Emmys spread the wealth more in the future.  "Succession" getting nominations for nearly the entire main cast, plus a long list of guest stars just looks lazy.    

The worst snub may be the total lack of acknowledgement of "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande," which probably won't be eligible for Oscars because of its premiere on Hulu.  It didn't make it into the TV Movie category, while the "Chip 'n' Dale" Disney+ reboot and a bunch of other spinoff projects like the "Roy Donovan" movie did.   But I suspect that will be a rant for another day.

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