1 year ago
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I’m not sure if I am even legally allowed to say this while covering for a light and breezy weekly culture newsletter, but: O, am I tired of culture! There’s just too much of it, from too many angles, all of the time. If there isn’t a new TV show dropping on one of the countless ‘pluffixed’ platforms Gwilym wrote about last week, then there’s a must-see film in cinemas, or a two-hour podcast I have to listen to entirely then have an opinion on. This is how culturally saturated I am: it wasn’t until the second draft of this paragraph that I even remembered the concept of music. Albums! Songs! Dance trends! It’s exhausting! No wonder the Grammy committee heard 50 seconds of a Harry Styles song on TikTok and just went: “You know what? Give him album of the year.”
A new trick I have pioneered, then, is consuming outside of the hype cycle. I mainly do this with TV but you can do it with whatever, really. Recently – as in, over the long dying weeks of Dry January – I slowly meandered through three of last year’s biggest and most talked-about TV series, cut shorn of the context of time-sensitive hype: Severance, Bad Sisters, and the last two half-series of Better Call Saul. I also watched the entirety of Euphoria at a time when no one was tweeting about it or doing memes about it on Instagram, which was its own interesting personal experiment – it turns out I have already seen every single frame of Euphoria in a screenshot, but I have never seen them joined together and sped up in what the industry calls “footage”.
This experiment was fantastic for two distinct reasons. One, I did not have to live by anyone else’s cultural schedule. I simply don’t know how people find the time to not only breathlessly consume as much culture as they do but then have either a dizzyingly wrong take about what they’ve just seen or a burning need to talk about a finale in a way that spoils it for anyone else. With season two of The White Lotus, for example, I slowly noticed as the discourse around it escalated to the extent that it had become the talked-about show, meaning I had to watch the finale the absolute second it dropped on Sky before it got spoiled for me by somebody else. I’m glad that episode tied up a lot of lazy loose ends (it wasn’t as good as season one, was it? We all have had enough time and space to get to that conclusion, yeah?) but as soon as I looked at Instagram after the credits rolled, boom: there was a glossy, breathless spoiler waiting for me, a simple square Instagram post that would have ruined the show for me if I hadn’t raced to see the ending.
Two, I had space to form my own opinions. I think it’s easy to get carried away when one show ascends to the status of the culture-dominating conversation for the few weeks that it’s on, and you find yourself projecting quality on to something where you don’t necessarily see it because there must be some reason these people are talking about it so much, right? (Or at least I do, anyway.) This didn’t happen when I watched the last few episodes of Better Call Saul without the fever-pitched hype around it (the last episodes of the show were fantastic, but did not in any way justify the endless 55 hours of of TV that came before it, or the sheer number of times I had to see Mike very slowly enact a plan. If I expressed this opinion while weekly episodes were dropping there would have been a movement to have me put in the Tower of London). Nor did it happen when viewing Bad Sisters away from the anticipation of a weekly drop (it was interesting, with good performances, but tell me: can you remember anything about it?). Severance, though, you were all right about. I’ll accept that one, at least.
I am duty-bound by the format of this newsletter to now recommend you five must-consume cultural artefacts that drop around this week – which I will, but my true advice is that you should go back and watch something you missed from 2021, and see how much you enjoy it.
Take Five
Each week we run down the five essential pieces of pop-culture we’re watching, reading and listening to
ALBUM – Caroline Polachek, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You Want more? It’s a shame everyone stopped talking about Moby once he got that memoir out of his system then had the big “ANIMAL RIGHTS” tattoos done down each arm, because he’s still out there, Mobying around. Ambient 23 dropped at the start of the year and is a perfect two-hour moment of calm. PODCAST – Podcrushed Want more? The last sentence I just wrote made me spiral into quite a dark place re: my own career. You only get one podcast recommendation this week. THROWBACK – Atlanta Want more? If we’re catching up on underappreciated comedy series, Players on Paramount+ – a mockumentary about elite gamers from the same team that did American Vandal – is an absolute gem. FILM – Marcel the Shell with Shoes On Want more? Apple+ release Sharper, which already has critics using words like “delectable”, on 17 February. John Lithgow, Julianne Moore and Sebastian Stan star in a film about old money New York wealth and double – then triple – crossing that is … don’t make me say it. Don’t make me say it! TV – The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate Want more? The year is 2010. You’ve just etc etc etc etc. Now open your eyes. A third season of Party Down is about to drop on Paramount+.
Dropping a frenzied album about desire on Valentine’s Day is such a chic move, and likely just what you might expect from “pop girlie who howls” Caroline Polachek (above). The third song, Bunny is a Rider, is possibly history’s most perfect song to stomp around the city to in front of a gauzy sunset, while sporting a leather jacket and vape.
Interesting new pivot in celebrity podcasting this week, where Penn Badgley turns over an episode of his series Podcrushed (normally: him and his two co-hosts reading out reader-submitted stories written in middle school) to discuss the latest season of his hit Netflix show, You. It works well: disarming familiarity with his co-hosts means he spills behind-the-scenes details you wouldn’t normally get with a fawning journalistic interrogator, and the episode fits neatly into the relatively new genre of actors from successful series producing audio companion guides long after the fact (see: Talking Sopranos, Office Ladies, and Welcome to Our Show). Soon we won’t need traditional media. Actors will do it all for us.
Alright, I’m inverting the form. The final season of Atlanta (Disney+ in the UK; Hulu in the US) dropped towards the end of last year and didn’t receive enough attention, because for my money it’s one of the finest shows ever made. Season four – filmed at the same time as the perfect, woozy, magical-realism-and-cultural-temperature-taking of season three – maintains that high, short-stories-as-TV-episodes form and caps it all off with one of TV’s finest interpretive open endings. Sure, you could watch “The Piano on Channel 4”. But you could also turn over and watch something actually good.
The year is 2010. It took you 20 minutes to decide whether to wear your American Apparel zip-thru hoodie or your American Apparel jersey cardigan, but you got here in the end. On a laptop the same depth and weight as a coffee table, a friend of yours is showing you an endless playlist of Vimeo shorts called Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Snap your eyes open. It’s 2023. A24 have made a feature-length mockumentary about Marcel (in UK cinemas now). It’s heartfelt and tender and far better than you can possibly imagine. Your youth has escaped you forever, though.
If we’re all going to be forced to have an opinion about a mixed martial artist who has too many cars, it may as well be an informed one: this Vice/BBC documentary (available on BBC Three in the UK from next Tuesday, and via Vice internationally) goes right inside the heart of his compound in Romania. One day we’re all going to wake up and Andrew Tate just won’t be a thing any more, which is something nice to hold on to. Until then!Read On
RIP Trugoy the Dove. Alexis Petridis’s piece pinpoints exactly what made De La Soul’s 3 Feet High And Rising feel so completely new and special.
I am excited to see both how this impacts the world of criticism and also how Netflix decide to interpret it in the inevitable dramatic mini-series, but: “Choreographer Smears Dog Feces on Critic After Negative Review”.
A brief peek inside a fascinating modern quandary: what does Adidas do with all the surplus unsold Yeezys it has now its cut ties with Kanye West? Yeezys have gone from the hottest shoe on the planet to PR nightmare to potential ecological disaster in record time.
This absolute killshot of an album review, for Måneskin’s Rush, is a perfect example of how to convey disdain and negativity with the amount of control that keeps it funny and interesting without ever veering into going “too far”. One can only assume, of course, that Jeremy D. Larson’s poo is in the post.
You be the Guide
Last week Gwilym asked for your favourite movie stunts. Here are some of your most daredevil picks.
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“The truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The scene uses a plethora of stuntmen, some doubling as Nazis, some as truck drivers. Terry Leonard (as Indy) gets launched through the windscreen, manages to hold on to the front grill, scrambles under the moving truck, gets out the back using his whip as a tow-cable, climbs around the side and back into the cab to beat the hell out of the driver and throw him out of the truck. Breathless stuff.” – Marc Lawrie
“Not sure if it really counts as a stunt (some CGI?) but for me it’s gotta be Thelma and Louise in that car at the end. Probably the same for a lot of women of a certain age!” – Tracy Starr
“I’m a big fan of Vic Armstrong’s collaboration with Harrison Ford on the first three Indiana Jones films – especially the tank sequence in The Last Crusade. The combination of the skill of the stuntman and the dishevelled features of Ford in close-up make for a wince-inducingly crunchy encounter between Indy and a canyon wall. The whole sequence is leavened by terrific moments of humour and ingenuity.” – Richard Hamilton
Get involved
I’ve been thinking recently about films that had perfect casts but still weren’t actually very good – two of my favourite books, Inherent Vice and The Sisters Brothers, suffered from this weird curse. Would be interested to hear of any more.
Let Gwilym know your choices by replying to this email or contacting him on gwilym.mumford@theguardian.com
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