Chaos Curated - May Pop Culture Review

A Round-Up of Everything I've Consumed Lately that ISN'T a 90-Minute Movie

I’m back with another chaotic pop-culture round-up no one asked for. I wasn’t totally happy with the format last time, so I’m mixing it up. I guess that’s the beauty of Substack and all of us “amateur” writers. Bless this mess.

Television

The book for my last book club gathering was so horrendous (more on that to come) that the conversation kept drifting toward television. It seemed many of us agreed that television is still our number one type of content consumed, the hours piling up more than any other medium combined. We discussed how television allows us to get intimately involved with characters and plots in manageable bite-sized segments. It permits us to take a break and pace ourselves in ways that movies don’t. An example was Netflix’s latest miniseries, The Four Seasons. My god, I love a miniseries. An adaptation of Alan Alda’s 1981 film of the same name (also now available on Netflix), the show follows the interwoven lives of 6 friends paired off into 3 couples. It is the sort of “white nonsense” (as my friend Mel at book club suggested it may be) you’re expecting. But it’s equal parts warm and challenging, with standout performances from Colman Domingo (Sing Sing, Fear the Walking Dead) and Kerri Kenney-Silver (Reno 911). It was a nice change of pace from my usual television fodder that gives me a heightened heart rate and anxiety.

Speaking of, Last of Us is back with a shocking episode two for anyone who hasn’t played the sequel video game. I was one of those people, and I struggled to watch again after such a dramatic blow. I had to take a two-week break to get my head on straight. Sometimes the death of a fictional character and their suffering can really get to me. Which might be why I’m struggling with this season of Hacks as well. I need the girls to get it together soon. I know the premise is all about their complicated relationship, but come on, Deborah and Ava are better than these petty games. At the time of my writing this, I am two episodes behind, but I hear good things are happening. I will lock in and continue on this journey this weekend. Mostly because Hacks has some of the greatest, if not best, comedic writing on TV at the moment, and I will take the emotional beating just for that. Plus, Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder are literal queens that I will worship until my last days.

Also in the world of comedy is The Residence, starring Uzo Aduba as a talented, dedicated, and off-center detective solving a murder at the White House. I had so much fun with this show and binged the hell out of it, which I don’t do often. It is witty and fun and created by the head writer of Scandal (which I never got around to, but I know plenty of you have). Mysteries have a special place in my heart because I grew up watching Poirot on A&E with my mom. The Residence keeps enough of the traditional “whodunnit” structure with some refreshing and contemporary touches that update it for today’s world. Speaking of solving crimes, I also tried BritBox’s adaptation of Towards Zero. Typically, I love what BritBox puts out, and it’s a love of mine (see above reasons), but Towards Zero left me wanting more. The cast was beautiful, but dull, making Christie’s typically strong writing feel weak and ineffectual. BritBox is going to continue adapting these stories, so let’s hope the next one is a bit stronger.

With all these murder mysteries, I only watched two crime documentaries, which might be a record for me. The superior of the two was definitely Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer, which uses one of my favorite true crime books of the past as a basis for their research (Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker). Since the release of Kolker’s book, a suspect has been apprehended and he’s currently in pre-trial. The murders are chilling, but what is perhaps even more chilling is the lack of care and attention of the Suffolk County Police Department. This case could have been solved years ago had it not been for bureaucratic hubris and rampant corruption. A Deadly American Marriage is less compelling as a documentary, but the case is no less heartbreaking for the children involved. I found this one to be a little sensationalist in ways, and the lack of focus on evidence tiring.

Reality Television

Speaking of lack of focus, what the hell is Love Hotel on Peacock? I couldn’t get through the first episode. For those not in the know (and I am so jealous of you), Love Hotel is a new dating reality show for Real Housewives. This season stars Shannon Storms Beador (RHOC), Gizelle Bryant (RHOP), Ashley Darby (RHOP), and Luann de Lesseps (RHONY) as they hang out at a luxury hotel with host Joel Kim Booster (Loot), looking for love. I don’t know if it’s the setting, the men, or that these women don’t have any chemistry with one another, but I was bored in an instant. I don’t need this in my life, especially when season two of The Valley exists. You have to be a real reality TV junkie to even understand why this show exists (it’s a spin-off of Vanderpump Rules which is a spin-off from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills so…) These people are MESSY with a capital M. They understand while we’re all here and they serve. I was hoping Cheats would serve some similar mess too, but like Love Hotel, I didn’t make it through episode one and was bored out of my mind. I’m willing to give this one a chance during my next hangover.

Battle Camp really surprised me! Netflix has created quite a stable of reality stars to choose from for every new show they invent. Rather than try to get us involved with all new strangers (perhaps why I struggled with Cheats), Battle Camp invites reality stars from a disparate range of shows to get together at a summer camp and compete for $250,000. Not only do they get the cast right, but the formula of the game is superb. Gameplay is just as important as the cast in this case, and whoever dreamed this up nailed it. The game is equal parts skill and chance. You really never know what’s going to happen or who is going to show up. Highly recommend if you’re looking for candy for your brain.

That leaves me with television’s most iconic dating show at the moment, Love on the Spectrum. I can barely find the words for how much I love and adore this show. I laugh, I cry, I cheer. The amount of emotion this program drives out of me is more than most of the movies I’ve watched this year. It makes me believe in humankind. It makes me want to be more true to myself. It’s really special, and I urge you to give it a shot.

Movies

It’s been a remarkably slow season for movies and me. Like I said at the opening of this, I’ve been crushing television as if that was my job, and watching 90-minute movies was not. (It’s also not my job, but the joke worked.) The best of the best is obviously Sinners, which has captivated us all with its incredible music, storytelling, and performances. I had so much fun seeing this one in a packed theater. The energy was electric, and we were all there to have fun. A few well-timed “Don’t go in there!” and collective screams heightened the experience. Sinners will go down as a horror great. Ryan Coogler continues to soar. I also watched a less impactful vampire flick known as Daybreakers, but I won’t go much further here as I’ll be writing about it in my next post.

When I wasn’t ranking vampire movies, I was watching A Woman of Affairs and then talking about it with

Jonathan Ytreberg

over at The Oscar Project. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to get into the details, but overall, I was pleasantly surprised with the film, and I’m grateful Jonathan asked me to watch it. I wanted to be equally surprised with Invitation to Murder on Amazon, but was instead correct in thinking it wouldn’t be very good. It stars Mischa Barton of The OC fame, and I am always going to root for her. But the plot was weak and too convenient. (Making your killer the first person to ever have in-home video recording is a cop-out.) But she does her best with what’s there, I suppose.

I also finally watched Waiting for Guffman for the first time. I know that seems wildly absurd given how much I love and adore Best in Show (Christopher Guest’s best in my opinion), but it’s been a glaring gap in my viewing rolodex. It was light and fun, and the cast, unbeatable.

Books

I’ve set the personal goal to read 50 books this year, and so I’ve been cruising through a ton at a time. I’ve read 9 books since my last round-up. Some were very, very good, and unputdownable like A Very Bad Thing, The Keeper of Happy Endings, and The Wildest Sun. Others were excellent pieces of writing that challenged me, like The Blunderer, The Wager, and The Voices of Adriana. And others were bad… namely The Measure, which I read for book club. I also read one weird outlier called Patricia Wants to Cuddle, which gets points for being totally original.

J.T. Ellison’s A Very Bad Thing kept me on my toes until the very end with fresh surprises and a complex cast of characters moving the plot along. A famous author dies the night of one of her readings, unraveling a web of lies and secrets that her daughter and a group of (seeming) strangers are caught up in. A compelling read and probably my favorite of the bunch. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have The Measure, which frustrated each and every member of my book club. The conceit is okay - one morning, everyone in the world receives a box with a string in it that measures the length of their life - but it is quickly overworked. The book would be well-suited for a high school ethics class (derogatory). In between these two, somewhere, is The Wager, a story about an infamous mutiny that occurred after a shipwreck. This is way outside my usual reading material, so I had to push myself to finish it. In the end, I’m glad I did. It’s interesting and compelling, albeit just a touch dry. I’m sure this will be adapted into a mini-series in no time.

Music

Cautious Clay released his third album this week, The Hours: Morning. The album explores the hours between 5am-12pm, with each hour getting its own song. It was just released, so I don’t have any favorites yet, but it is dreamy and meditative and feels like a book of poetry to me.

My brother sent me this insane folky, country song by The Brudi Brothers called Me More Cowboy Than You. It’s so fucking catchy and I’ve been listening to it non-stop for a week.

Podcasts

Only one new one in the mix this month! I’m just about finished with Dark Valley. An Audio Chuck-produced podcast that digs into the Connecticut River Valley Killer, or Valley Killer, for short. This is a serial killer who was active in the area I grew up in, stopping just a year after I was born. He has never been caught. There is a lot of speculation as to why he stopped, but one such theory is that it is because his last victim, Jane Boroski, survived. She was stabbed 27 times while seven months pregnant. Jane co-hosts the podcast with investigative reporter Jennifer Amell. It’s definitely not a light listen, but an important one.

---

Thanks for joining me for this month’s pop culture round-up! Did you like the new format? Let me know!