There is not a single piece of media that has impacted me more as a person, writer, and television critic than Avatar: The Last Airbender.

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In case you missed it: I wrote about being single and Tracee Ellis Ross’s solo traveling show in my column for The Cut; I interviewed Elle star June Diane Raphael; I curated a Telematrix grid that reminded folks Chloë Sevigny has actually done so much TV; and I interviewed the creator and cast of Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie for Yahoo. I love my job!

So what do New Girl, The Dropout, and Dying for Sex have in common? Well they’re each created by Elizabeth Meriwether, of course. She’ll also be writing the Britney Spears biopic. I think she’s become one of the most must-keep-up-with screenwriters in the industry, which is why I jumped to watch my screeners of her new show Furious, which starts streaming on Monday. I have thoughts. Let’s get into that (and why I have also become an Elsbethaholic lately).

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In Q2, I finally started to feel like a full-time TV critic. Well, more or less. On some weeks, I was writing so much that it was eating into my television-watching time. On others, I relished in quieter days to catch up on invoicing and watch screeners of an upcoming show. I’m still figuring it out, though. The reality of this industry is that…

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I had a realization this morning. Industry is going the way of Halt and Catch Fire. Or even The Wire. It’ll obviously be cemented as what I think is one of the best shows of the 2020s, but might never actually get the recognition it deserves from the Television Academy. And we, as Industry stans, just have to accept that sometimes (…often, actually), good taste is not rewarded or recognized. Who knows why it can’t break through—is it a viewership issue, the fact that it’s a London-based production, made by young people, or that it’s a show that twists, pokes, and prods at respectability politics. It does show a disconnect between the Emmy voters and the Television Critics Association Awards, though, where Industry did extremely well.

As I wore my Industry merch hat around Seattle over a mini vacation weekend, I realized anyone pointing it out and asking me about it had an automatic connection with me, an easy way to distinguish someone who knows good TV. Industry will always smash at the TV Scholar Awards, and that will have to be enough for us! The Wire only ever got two Emmys and they weren’t even from the main categories—and that’s a show cemented in the canon of great television, so don’t worry. History will remember us! Plus, there’s always season five. Maybe we just need to be even louder…

Anyway, I immediately ran to my laptop with my morning coffee and read the nominations closely, let’s get into my 2,000 words worth of thoughts. I’m paywalling this because my thoughts are spicy, but hey, what a wonderful time to decide to subscribe and support my work as a full-time TV critic! I know Substack writers say this all the time in this weird industry landscape but I am 100% serious when I say I would need a day job again if it weren’t for the folks who are paid subscribers to this newsletter.

Drama

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, The Substance, Passages, Die My Love, Queer…MUBI has distributed some of the most interesting and queer-centric arthouse cinema in recent years. You might not realize they actually acquire and stream television, too—some really fascinating selections in a catalogue that I hope continues to grow with niche indie and international programming.

MUBI’s evolution as a streamer hasn’t been without speed bumps—inspiring its new Ethical Funding and Investment Policy and their Artist at Risk fund. It speaks to how they are listening and shifting as an organization, which, to be honest, is more than you can say for most streamers and entertainment companies in this landscape.

With that being said, I’ve collaborated with MUBI to highlight Wasteman, a gritty, dynamic film starring David Jonsson, which begins streaming today, and three promising shows you might as well check out while you’re there. The folks at MUBI have been kind enough to offer a voucher for a 1-month free trial if you’d like to dip in and watch a few things. I’ve been told you don’t need to be a first-time subscriber for it to work. You can activate that here! I’ve just added Lurker, Revenge, Rotting in the Sun, Decision to Leave, and The Kingdom (a Lars von Trier TV show) to my watchlist. Let me know if you have any other suggestions.

My MUBI era! Let’s get into some recommendations.

Wasteman

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been following David Jonsson’s career very closely ever since he played Gus on Industry. I will basically watch anything he’s in—from Alien: Romulus to The Long Walk, and most exciting to us telephiles, his upcoming series Hype that he is creating alongside Baby Reindeer producers. While we wait for that, catch him in Wasteman, which is finally being released on MUBI as of today after having premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

Jonsson stars as Taylor, an introverted inmate in the UK who was sentenced to prison after dealing drugs to teens who overdosed on them. 13 years later, he’s about to get released early when a new chaotic bunkmate moves into his cell, Dee (Tom Blyth). At first, he brings a bit of levity—my favorite scene in the film is a cell rave to a Jamie xx track. As you might imagine, tensions rise between them—to the point where it might actually threaten his release. (For those wondering, nothing gay happens, although I could swear there was a hint of homoeroticism between the two.)

Directed dynamically by Cal McMau and running at a tight 90 minutes, this is one of the more engaging prison dramas I’ve watched—which I have to say, isn’t usually my favourite genre (well, not since Orange Is the New Black, and I did like Frank & Louis out of Sundance).

There’s an interesting mix of cell phone footage edited into Wasteman which keeps things fresh visually, but it’s really the performances that sell it. I can’t overstate how good Jonsson is here, once again, as he gets more and more panicked about his chaotic new roommate. If you’re anything like me, you’ll want to have witnessed this performance before Jonsson becomes the massive star he’s destined to be (in my world, anyway).

The New Years

Claimed as “the most romantic show of the year” by Vogue back in December, The New Years will hit the spot if you enjoyed One Day’s structure. Over ten episodes, we check in with Ana (Iria del Río) and Óscar (Francesco Carril) every New Year’s Eve from 2014 to 2024, as they move through their 30s. The first is, of course, their chance meeting: Ana is a dissatisfied bartender and Óscar is struggling to get over his ex-girlfriend. They sleep together and connect, fall in love, even, but naturally, the relationship escalator hits a few bumps on the way up as they realize they may not be totally in sync.

I’m only part way through the season and I’m going to rapturously watch the rest. I already know a handful of friends who I need to recommend this to immediately; it hits all the romance drama notes but is grounded with a kind of realism that makes it feel, like Taylor Antrim astutely mentions in her Vogue review, novelistic. That arthouse pull to depict life as it is feels not only very aligned with MUBI’s brand of programming, but ends up drawing me into a show in ways One Day didn’t by being so glossy (in classic Netflix fashion). There’s something about those quiet moments in-between dialogue where the show lets you breathe and start projecting your own experience onto it. Not everything needs to be said out loud! Delightful, I can’t wait to finish the season.

Mussolini: Son of a Century

What fascinated me so much about My Brilliant Friend is how post-war Italian politics shaped both the characters and the narrative of the series; the collective frustration of the working class and the push against fascism by the Italian communist movement.

Mussolini: Son of a Century, set a few decades earlier, got on my radar for the same reason. The Italian-language series directed by Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice) landed at the top of TV critic Daniel Fienberg’s top 10 shows of last year, in which he calls it “unsubtle art” and that it borrows “aesthetic devices from opera, German Expressionism and the primordial ooze of early cinema, and fusing it all into a cacophonous piece of horror propaganda.”

I’m playing catch up, but based on the first of eight episodes, I totally agree. This biopic of Benito Mussolini’s founding of the Fasci Italiani in 1919 is doing a lot but in the best possible way. This is no slow period drama. The performances are grand and so is the production design, editing, score, and costume design. Like Roxana Hadadi points out for Vulture, this is a “deliriously experimental series about a monstrous figure, jamming as many moving parts, camera tricks, and maximalist flourishes he can fit into the frame to demonstrate how the Italian dictator was such a magnetic, destructive force.”

Hal & Harper (US Only; on CBC Gem in Canada)

I watched Hal & Harper last year and I still think about it all the time. Up-and-coming writer-director Cooper Raiff is at the helm here, and he stars alongside Lili Reinhart as the titular sibling duo. Their father (Mark Ruffalo) is having a baby with his new girlfriend (Betty Gilpin), after years struggling to embrace a new relationship since the passing of his ex-wife.

The show is steeped in a soft melancholy: The siblings have developed a trauma bond codependence on each other and are navigating dead-end jobs and existentialism in their 20s. We also flash back to their elementary school days, around when their mom passed away—where Raiff and Reinhart play the child versions of their characters (welcome back Pen15!).

Hal & Harper was nominated for two 2025 TV Scholar Awards, including in the Queer Representation Award category. The season opens with Reinhart cheating on her girlfriend, and I found the queer exploration here to be sincere and thoughtful. A negative review pointed out that the amount of plot here should amount to a film rather than a series, but there is something about the languid, dreamlike pace of the series that I found meditative, before it all snaps into focus in the finale—that wouldn’t have been possible as a film.

Head over to MUBI for a free month to check some of these out. I’ve curated a few suggestions on this splash page, too.

Heated Rivalry and Oh, Otto! have a lot in common. They were both made on a shoestring budget, forcing its creative teams to do more with less. They both star handsome, likeable characters who are coming to terms with facets of their identity as queer men. And they both include a lot of gay sex. The difference? Hockey aside, Oh, Otto! isn’t yet available to watch in North America. I’m hoping to help change that.

Created and directed by Stijn Van Kerkhoven, the 7-episode dramedy starts off when Otto (Jonathan Michiels) is unceremoniously dumped by his long-term boyfriend Boris (Gijs De Corte) who returns from a backpacking trip. This was Otto’s first ever relationship, and Boris wants him to go out and evolve as a gay man rather than stay in what he sees as a relationship that isn’t evolving.

Otto, spiralling, leans on his bestie Lente (Jennifer Heylen), who encourages him to process the breakup the old fashioned way: If you can’t get over him, get under someone else. And thus begins Otto’s first journey as a single gay man on Grindr, under his slutty alias, Elio.

Lente doesn’t initially realize she’s created something of a monster—before long, Otto is leaving in the middle of their hangouts to go hook up with a random guy, prioritizing these dates over his friendship. Besides, Lente needs emotional support too! She’s moving to the suburbs with her boyfriend and is feeling some type of way about it. Otto will have to figure it out the hard way, though, as he struggles to keep all the pieces together (don’t even get me started on how bad of a therapist he is).

I found out about Oh, Otto! on gay Twitter, of all places. One of those kismet moments where art comes into your life at the exact time you need it—I, too, had been unceremoniously dumped, and although I was a little less thrilled to be back on Grindr than Otto, I shared in his existential exploration to figure out what it is he really wants, out of his romantic relationships and who he really is outside of the definition of a relationship.

My favorite aspect of the show, though, is Otto’s friendship with Lente, the underrepresented dynamic of the tender friendship between a gay man and his Black girl bestie (thankfully, she’s written to be a full person, too—including a bottleish episode that follows her side of the story). A bonus, but Oh, Otto! is also just beautiful to look at—it has a kind of Euro arthouse indie film look to it, in addition to capturing the queer side of Brussels, a fascinating city where a lot of folks have some level of trilingualism between Dutch, French, and English.

So far, according to what Van Kerkhoven told me over Zoom, Oh, Otto! has not yet been sold to North American markets. It recently received a French dub for streaming in the French parts of Belgium and can be watched on Streamz over there as well as Canal+. I can easily see it on HBO Max, between Heated Rivalry and Looking, with which it shares DNA, alongside Mubi’s television catalogue, or even on Netflix (it reminds me of Anne+, too, which ended up there). The best news out of all of this: Van Kerkhoven and his team are already working on a second season, so there’s more to come.

My hope is by spotlighting it here, I can nudge someone out there to snatch it up for distribution ASAP. It’s rare that television captures the experience of contemporary gay adulthood outside of the coming out experience or major traumas in a way that feels grounded, relatable, funny, and kind of hot at the same time. Below, Van Kerkhoven tells me more about making Oh, Otto! and his hopes for where it could go.

Michel: Can you tell me a bit about what inspired you to make Oh, Otto!?

Stijn: I moved to Brussels when I was 18 and I was actually still in the closet. The city and the people I met in the city really helped me to find my way and to find who should I be in the gay scene but also with myself. It’s a really unique city but it’s also a recognizable story I realized later on, when I was more comfortable with myself, that a lot of people went through the same thing of dating around and hooking up. So I started pitching this series from my experience, but also from the experience of friends and people I met along the way.

I always wanted to make a series that is warm and not necessarily about coming out, but just about life as it is; not making the being gay part problematic, but doing something else with it. Here in Belgium, it hadn’t really been something that had been done before.

Oh, Otto! won for best short series at Canneseries. Since then, it’s available on Streamz and on Canal+ — what have distribution discussions been like for anything in North America?

We are really trying to get it sold. It’s working here in Europe. We have French and Dutch-speaking parts here in Belgium. We have the show dubbed now in French which means we could also sell it in France. So a lot of things are happening around it. I don’t get to know all the details because I’m simply a director, but we’re hoping to make a second season; that would also help to sell it.

I can definitely see it on HBO Max or Mubi here. Maybe in the ecosystem of Heated Rivalry and Proud.

Heated Rivalry did the unimaginable with their series, which is amazing. I hope there’s more to come for shows like that made.

Not that I’ve been yet, but Oh, Otto! captures Brussels really beautifully, from the architecture to the gay scene (that bathhouse episode!). Do you feel the show accurately captured your vision of the city, were there any limitations on locations that you bumped up against?

Brussels is known in Belgium as like, not the best place to be. A lot of people in Belgium don’t like Brussels, and if the city is represented in a show, it’s usually the criminal part, or it’s represented as dirty and unsafe. I’ve been living here for more than 10 years now, and I just love the city. I see it through maybe too much of a romantic lens, but that’s my Brussels. I was so happy to be being able to really push to film here, it’s really not easy compared to Antwerp or Ghent, smaller and more accessible cities. I’m really happy that I could push it through and show people how pretty the city can be, but also the gay part of it. I think in Belgium it’s the only place where we still have that, streets with gay bars and the gay sauna, it’s a big community.

How realistic was too realistic when you were making the show? I noticed Otto doesn’t really talk about being a top or a bottom or PrEP and doxy PEP.

It’s really hard. I wanted to make a show that was centred around being queer, but I wanted as many people as possible to watch it. For a broad audience, if you use too many words that are specific to our community, people get lost. They might think, Oh maybe it’s not for me. It was always a hard balance to find.

For example, in the episode in the hotel when he has his first hookup with this Dutch guy, I actually had him ask Otto: “Did you douche?” And Otto would reply, yes, and he would say me too, implying that they were both vers and were going to have…a lovely night. Then you make the edits and do small screenings to see what resonates and what doesn’t work. Most straight people don’t know what douching is. They think it’s like showering, because here it’s the same word. So they’re like, Why would he ask that? Is he smelly? So it’s those things where it would would have been such a nice way to have this in but you have to cut your darlings. Sometimes I had to not explain, or not use certain words, to make sure everyone feels connected to the story.

That totally makes sense. I also love that Otto has a straight girl bestie, who gets her own piece of the story (played wonderfully by Jennifer Heylen). Having girl besties in your coming-of-age is such a universal gay man experience.

She feels like a safe space! She’s such a fun character to write. I don’t have like, one girl bestie that inspired this character, but she’s based on a few. It’s mostly inspired by the actress herself, Jennifer, she’s amazing. I love her so much, it was my dream to work with her. While we were writing the show I always thought of her, she was the first one I asked, and then even in the casting process I kept pushing, like it has to be her. Every scene she touches becomes better because she’s such a natural, funny, relatable actress and character. It made sense on Otto’s journey to have her as an ally, someone who is like, yes, let’s go, let’s do it, but is also equally clueless in life.

I don’t think she realizes how much of a monster she creates when she encourages him to get on Grindr! I’m curious, how much of yourself is written into Otto?

A lot! I used to be the guy with the stories, you know? I went on a date, and then I would report to my friends how the date went, and it was almost always as unbelievable as the things that Otto goes through. You meet people who are different in life, and even though it was maybe not a successful hookup, they can teach you something about how there are so many different nuances in experiencing your sexuality. So it started with all these things that happened to me, all these people that I met, trying to connect them. Then, obviously, I have been a simp following a boy I liked to parties, kissing with him, but then it turned out to be nothing, and he was a douchebag afterwards about it, and being like, who am I doing this for? You know, am I doing this for myself? Who’s getting happier here? So yeah, I would say about 80% of what happens to Otto also happened to me.

Ugh, relatable. Are there formative works for you in your coming of age that ended up being influential as a filmmaker?

Obviously Looking for me was the show that showed that gay people are people, and that their experiences are valid, and that you can have a life like that. It opened a lot of possibilities in my head. I have the obvious ones too like Stranger by the Lake situations where you watch a film out of curiousity at 16. I was like, what’s happening in this film? And then it definitely meant a lot to how I became who I am.

How did you get into filmmaking in the first place?

I didn’t know filmmaking was a thing until like 14/15 and my niece went to study it. I was like that’s insane, I’m gonna do it. I had very supportive parents, luckily, who were like, okay! I’ve been so lucky, this is my first show that I pitched. Every step that we got further into it, I thought we’re going to hit a wall, and I will have learned something for my next project, but then it got greenlit and we shot it and it happened. I was 28 when we shot it which is pretty young to do your first show. I was very, very happy that I got that opportunity, but it’s because I have amazing producers and people around me with a vision on it too, and that’s part of the deal.

Oh, Otto! has a very specific look that feels arthouse indie film vibes, can you talk a bit about how you landed on the cinematography of it all?

My DOP Kobe Vangronsveld is a good friend of mine, we both live in Brussels. The first part of it was really locations—we cycled through the city almost every day making shot lists. We would pass a café and nice bars and think it out.

Secondly, being on a very, very tight budget. It’s a very cheaply made show. I think you couldn’t make it for less money than we did it. So that meant that anything we did, I didn’t want it to feel cheap. I wanted to go for a look that felt chosen, something that wasn’t accidental. So we did a lot of static shots. I’d rather have less shots that look amazing that we can put our energy into.

I wanted to get it right because it was the first show that was going to be shot in the gay street. For the gay sauna, it’s so pretty in a way, I wanted to show that. But really it was good team work on every part, from finding the locations with the right colours to the costumes that fit it, it’s a lovely puzzle to make.

The lighting in the bathhouse was amazing! My mind obviously goes to Heated Rivalry on doing more with less, too, considering their small budget. Other than it ending up somewhere to watch in North America, what is your vision for the future of the series?

Otto is pretty straight passing, and he has a very narrow idea of what masculinity is and what it should be, and I think that’s something to explore. Even though he had all these dates, I feel like he is not really comfortable with his own self. He wouldn’t get into drag or something, that would be out of his comfort zone. It would be very interesting to see him explore how masculinity is not necessarily this one-size thing.

Also, I think it would be very enlightening, instead of finding sex and short term things, if he found an entourage of queer people to see what community can be. A lot of times when we talk about the gay community, they’re often thinking about partying and sex. I was part of a gay water polo team for a while, and that really opened my mind. These were all very different, open-minded people in a queer team where everyone’s welcome, where it doesn’t matter if you’re skinny or muscled. I think in a community that discriminates as much as our community it’s nice to explore how people can be long-term allies in your life as a group of friends.

I’m so excited to hear Otto might be taking a little break from the hookups and maybe won’t be spiralling as much. I was scared he would eventually stumble on Sniffies or something!

[Laughs]. He can’t! Don’t show him Sniffies!

Before I let you go: What’s your favourite TV-watching snack?

It changes from time to time, right now I’m into honey cherry tomatoes. They’re super, super sweet. I also recently discovered pistachio nuts. These were not in my world, and now I know that they exist, I can eat them forever. It’s getting problematic, actually. It takes time to peel which I love, but it’s not for anything you watch. You can’t watch something in a different language and be peeling all the time.

what are they watching? is an interview series for my newsletter in which I chat with a creative about television itself. Previous interviews include Hasan Piker, Toheeb Jimoh, Janicza Bravo, Chelsea Peretti, and Jeff Hiller.

This time around, I had the pleasure of speaking with Jess McLeod who recently played a pivotal role in The Audacity as tech wiz Harper—a role that has got them upgraded to cast regular for the second season of the silicon valley drama. They also wrote, directed, and starred in She’s Nonbinary, a short film currently making its way through the festival circuit and executive produced by Bob Odenkirk and Jane Schoenbrun.

I like to start these interviews by asking: What are you watching on television lately and enjoying?

I just finished DTF St. Louis for the second time. I think it’s so genius. I’m obsessed with it, it takes up so much space in my brain. I think Steven Conrad is so smart. I’m such a fan of anything that incorporates ASL, so that was a big draw for me too. It’s beautifully shot, and it’s so funny, and doesn’t take itself too seriously, which I really like.

What were your foundational shows, the ones that made an impact on you?

Gilmore Girls definitely is the big one, Totally Spies, Kim Possible. I really truly did spend so much of my teenage life just rewatching Gilmore Girls again and again and again and again. I was obsessed with it. I was an only child, single mom thing. Our dynamic looked very different, but I just love the way it’s written. It’s funny, the dialogue really grabs you, and then I think there’s a romantic thing about a small town, I’m from Victoria. I just saw a lot of myself in it. I also think part of the reason why it took me so long to transition—there’s many reasons—but that show was so big because I really was identifying so much with Rory Gilmore even though a lot of me is very different than Rory Gilmore.

Can you tell me a bit about The Audacity’s casting process? Were they specifically looking for someone non-binary to play Harper?

Great question. The short answer is no, Harper was written as a woman, and Lucky, who is Duncan’s assistant, was actually written as a non-binary person. I only got an audition for Harper, and it was only supposed to be three episodes. I was like okay, whatever, a bunch of tech jargon on this really cool show, great. As we were shooting, they realized that the character would be in many more episodes than they thought, so yeah, they changed the character of Harper to be non-binary for me.

What do you make of Harper and Duncan’s dynamic? It feels like Harper is simultaneously disgusted and in awe of him?

At times they kind of are like, You’re dumb and you’re annoying, and then I think they’re almost inspired by him. He is in many ways everything they’re not. There’s an admiration whether they would admit that or not, especially at his ability to deal with people. He’s very headstrong and he’s a good talker, Harper is not that. Harper is not a good talker, and Harper does not inspire confidence in people, so they look up to him in that way. It is a really interesting dynamic.

I never saw myself in a show like this. It’s been amazing, but I just did not ever foresee that this would be something I would do. My relationship with Billy…we are so different, but we really did get along quite well, we are kind of silly together, that was surprising. I think our dynamic came off on screen in a way that surprised everybody, and so that’s kind of why they’ve made them such a twosome in the first season. Very opposites attract dynamic, I guess.

You’ve been upped to series regular for season two—are you allowed to say if we’ll be getting to know Harper more, especially with what they get up to outside of work?

I think yes. I don’t have the whole season yet, so I can’t say exactly, but I’m already getting to know different sides of them in the first two episodes.

I noticed you weren’t submitted to the Emmys alongside the rest of the cast of the show, was that your decision?

No, not my call. I wasn’t really a big part of the publicity for season one, just because that was…not in my contract. They kept adding me into more episodes, I was truly barely supposed to be in the show. So I think they’re just catching up, but I’m just happy to be there. There’s so many great people in the show who should be recognized for their work, and if that happens for me later, great, but if it doesn’t, also fine!

I also wanted to ask about gendered categories at award shows more generally. What is your perspective on that, how do you decide which category to submit to?

To be honest, I haven’t thought too much about it. The awards that I have been nominated for have all been in femme categories. The whole world of awards is kind of contrived in a way anyway, it’s so subjective, I wouldn’t want non-gendered categories to take away spots or recognition away for people—it’s important that there’s equality in it. We’re probably moving into a place I hope where there’s enough non-binary trans representation that the big committees who are doing these awards will have to start talking about what that means for categorization, but I don’t know enough about the process to weigh in. I’m excited that it’s even a conversation that’s happening.

I feel like we are only scratching the surface on television of representations of gender and queerness. Are there any characters or arcs that come to mind in which you felt you saw yourself or part of yourself represented?

I Saw the TV Glow really captured the experience of what it’s felt like internally for me to transition in a way that I don’t think I could even put into words. That movie really shifted a lot for me. In general, a lot of trans characters that we’re seeing on screen are written by very well-meaning cisgender people…I would be really excited to see, especially in TV, more trans stories being written by people that really understand and know the experience. One of the best things about Audacity and Harper is that that part of their character is not really central, and I don’t think it should be.

It’s nice to just have trans people on screen, whether they’re playing a trans character or not, but just seeing them there. Like Eva Victor being on TV for so many years, just being themself, is really powerful. It’s in some ways an easier bridge for a cisgender person to simply witness a trans person existing, rather than need it to be a commentary on gender and identity. That’s a big thing I like about Harper on the show.

I totally hear you. That’s something I loved from Star Trek: Discovery’s numerous non-binary characters as opposed to like, that “viral” Landman scene, if you saw anything about that…

Yes, and I will neglect to comment on that, but I am right there with you. [Laughs]. Billy actually said this in a way that I was like, Oh my god. He said Duncan has such issues with men and women, so it actually really makes sense that the one person who he ends up aligning with is not part of either camp. It neutralizes him in a way, because he doesn’t know how to project upon them his insecurities about his dad or his wife. So it makes him actually take them in as a person in real time.

That is…fascinating. Wow, Billy Magnussen’s mind! This brings to mind how no one on The Audacity has sex.

I know right! I was expecting there to be much more sexual deviance in the world. There’s quite a lot of sexual harassment in the tech world, especially because it’s just so filled with men, I would be really interested to see a comic spin on that for either Meaghan Rath’s character or my character. I think Meaghan can do literally anything, I would love to see her fuck someone up in a big way should they step to her. But yeah, everyone does feel very asexual in the show.

Is there a character that you’ve played so far that you feel is most aligned with like who you are as Jess?

Honestly, in the things that I’m trying to make as a filmmaker, obviously that’s the answer. Nobody else can write from that experience. If I wasn’t doing that, I might feel a little bit more out in the middle of the ocean, looking around, being like, does anybody understand me? Having the ability to write and direct my own stuff has been huge for me, and I know a lot of my trans friends who are actors are also doing that. We have to tell our own stories to be fully represented.

I know this is a film but since we stan Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in this house, what can you say about your experience working with them on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma? Filmed on Vancouver Island, too!

I know, when I found out that it was shooting on the island I texted my agent immediately, I was like, I will do anything. I didn’t get to work with Gillian, which is devastating, obviously, but I got to work with Hannah who is so awesome and so funny, so down to earth, a really great number one on the call sheet to have. I didn’t have a lot to do in the movie, but when I was there, it was amazing, and I knew a lot of the crew. I truly think Jane Schoenbrun is the voice of our time. I don’t know that there’s anybody else with such a specific view on life and the experience of being a person, who is also so able to communicate that in a visual medium.

If you could be dropped into any television world, which sort of TV world would you drop yourself into?

I would love to do more sci-fi stuff. I feel like non-binary people should be playing every little creature, you know? I just feel like that’s our lane. So yeah, I want to do stuff that’s really weird and off the wall. Maybe I’m wearing some prosthetics and crawling around. Like a Widow’s Bay, or something, get really freaky with it

One last question before I let you go: What’s your favourite TV-watching snack?

This is such a lame and cliché answer, but I really love popcorn. I probably eat popcorn every day. I love a popcorn. I was a big seasoning on my popcorn person, I would have all these little shakers, we haven’t really been back there in a while. As I’m talking about this, I think I need to go back to the store, I need to get creative again.

Need some TV-fuelled advice? Send me a letter and I’ll see how I can help in my advice column.

Okay, so you subscribed to Apple TV because you wanted to see what the Widow’s Bay hype is all about. The season finale airs next week. Then what?

Apple TV has been a fascinating experiment. The company has poured tens of billions into its original programming, which might seem like a lot, but it’s a small drop in the bucket from their perspective. Has any of it been profitable? Is it all for prestige and awards, entertainment for entertainment’s sake? Does it even matter, as long as art keeps getting made?

I’ve done a scan of their programming slate and compiled some useful guides below: My top 15 (don’t worry, Widow’s Bay makes the top five), some honourable mentions, and the shows I wouldn’t particularly recommend. If you’re at a loss for what to watch next, hopefully this helps. Besides, summer is one of my favourite times of the year to catch up on things I might have missed. Let’s get into it.

The top fifteen…

15. Land of Women (2024)

Genre: Fish-out-of-water comedy but also a crime drama somehow.

The gist: After finding out her husband owes some scary people money, Gala (Eva Longoria) makes an escape to her mother’s hometown in Catalonia, Spain. There, she gets involved in the local women-run vineyard co-op and just hopes she’s adequately off the grid. RIP this show which was so fun, queer, and a perfect summer binge.

Is it gay?: 35%

14. For All Mankind (2019–2027)

Genre: Alternate history sci-fi space drama.

The gist: What if Russia got to the moon first, effectively never ending the space race? Great character development in the first few seasons that remind me of Halt and Catch Fire. Edge-of-your-seat space sequences. The show starts slumping from season four onwards though, hence its low placement here.

Is it gay?: 30%

13. Five Days at Memorial (2022)

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This is the first newsletter I’m writing from my new apartment. All of my writing in the last week has been completed in interrupted small pieces: Between building furniture, letting various technicians in and out of my apartment, tackling clutter still half-unpacked from my move, and lots of sweat and tears.

I literally fucking hate moving. My friends are sick of hearing me complain about it so now you have to hear about it too: it is the most destabilizing time, it’s extremely stressful (for me and my cat), and it takes weeks from the “I guess I’ll start packing up boxes” days to the “I am finally done unpacking and back to a rhythm of normalcy” phase. And, yes, it’s harder and more work as a single person.

But things are already feeling better. I downsized to a studio for more flexibility in my budget and my building faces Vancouver’s gorgeous North Shore mountains. At night, I can hear the SkyTrain, what Vancouverites whimsically call the subway, faintly whooshing by. I’m finally starting to feel cozy. I’m catching up on my shows. Eventually, I will respond to all my unanswered text messages.

It’s a relief to move after the Emmy consideration deadline has passed, meaning television is now in its “slowest season.” For the first time since I began writing my Yahoo column 36 weeks ago, I had trouble finding a new show airing on broadcast/cable during this weird stretch of the year. The only thing I could find was a Tom Hanks-produced WWII docu-series airing on the History Channel. Ironically, it seems to be one of my more popular columns. (I’ve stopped reading the comments section because those readers are mean but 300+ comments certainly means someone is reading!).

Don’t worry, there’s still plenty to watch, though.

What should I watch for Pride Month?

Great question! I have some ideas.

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what are they watching? is an interview series for my newsletter in which I chat with a creative about television itself. Previous interviews include Toheeb Jimoh, Janicza Bravo, Chelsea Peretti, and Jeff Hiller.

This time around, I had the unexpected delight of speaking with political commentator and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who was visiting Vancouver to speak at the Web Summit Conference in conversation with Gabor Maté. We talk about his formative TV shows, his thoughts on Taylor Sheridan, and why he thinks Fox News is so obsessed with him.

I like to start off my interviews by asking: What are you watching lately on television?

I’m watching Invincible, that’s pretty much the only thing I’m watching other than Neighbors. I’m trying to catch up, I stopped after season two and then I just started re-watching because it was in the discourse a lot. People were talking about Viltrumites left and right and I was like, you know what, let me give this another shot. For season two, when I saw the different universes, it got me out of it a little bit, but I got back into it and it’s pretty good.

What is your relationship to the medium of TV these days, do you gravitate toward things that are buzzy and that you want to respond to? I know you also watch SNL…

I watch a lot of television, I watch a lot of news. That’s all I do. I am a media critic for political commentary. I read a lot of articles as well, but my relationship is one of trying to understand the 65+ year olds in this country and everywhere, really, because that’s where they get their primary source of news from. So I watch television to understand, like, liberal culture, for example. I always joke and say I watch SNL to understand what liberals are laughing at, and to see what they’re laughing at means I can develop a better understanding of how they see the world. As far as my regular relationship with TV, my consumption is just for entertainment. I shut off my brain. I like to watch TV shows every now and then after an eight-hour work day of live broadcasting.

I’m always surprised by how the 65+ demo still watch broadcast TV procedurals. Do you ever tune into any of those?

I’m very familiar with it. I don’t watch any of it, but I think it’s really interesting because it’s pro cop, but it’s also very woke at the same time. They are personally rewiring the brains of a lot of boomers to be more open-minded to, like, trans people, to understand consent, especially if they had a very different understanding of consent in their upbringing. They talk about concepts such as patriarchy, but also at the same time it’s very, very pro cop. All of those copaganda shows are very interesting. It’s this “blue lives matter,” but also Black Lives Matter, and “all lives matter” narrative that they teach people. They’re like yeah, we’re pro-trans, but also we got to make sure that the police force is heavily armed and they’re doing a great job combating these sorts of heinous crimes, so they have to be well funded. Interesting.

Yeah, totally. I think the writers are trying to straddle that line to make sure they’re appealing to the broadest possible audience, which isn’t necessarily the case for like, Taylor Sheridan. I don’t know if you’ve ever tuned into any of his shows.

Oh yeah, I feel like he’s the king of anti-woke. My dad loves Taylor Sheridan stuff, he watches them religiously. Wait, is it Landman or is it Oilman?

Landman…maybe his worst show IMO. I do find it interesting his Yellowstone shows address Indigenous land sovereignty in a way a lot of shows don’t and have large Indigenous casts, maybe an underrated perspective to his work.

That makes sense, though. That’s like the Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch. He’s unbelievably reactionary except for when it comes to Indigenous rights. That’s a classic old-school American conservative mentality, where on the one hand they’ll be like pro-Iraq War, for example, pro foreign occupation, endless wars, all that stuff, but then there’ll be weirdly sincere about Indigenous land rights every now and then. I think there’s also an element of LARPing a little bit. They will LARP as though they are somewhat Indigenous. They’ll be like, “Oh, I’m like 1/64 Cherokee.” It’s a classic American white guy thing, I think.

That’s so real. I’m curious, what were your foundational shows growing up, what were the shows that shaped you?

Oh god, I watched a lot of TV when I was growing up, and it’s all mostly embarrassing stuff. I watched an ABC show called GRΣΣK, Spike’s Blue Mountain State, and HBO’s Entourage. Those were all TV shows I watched growing up in Turkey, and I was fascinated by it. I was like, wow, Americans love to party, they have such a fun life. This is embarrassing but Californication played a decent role in me wanting to live in California. Now that I actually have the opportunity to live an Entourage life, I never leave my home. [Laughs]. I don’t party, I never leave my home, I don’t want to do any of that stuff. I guess it played a role in getting me there though.

Was there a show you had to watch weekly growing up? Mine was Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was super formative…

I don’t think I had a show that I ever tuned into every week. Because I was in Turkey, I would have to download stuff anyway. I would have to watch stuff illegally. We have a big black market, there were brick and mortar retail stores that would straight up sell stolen or downloaded copies burned into CDs and DVDs. I would just go there and get a bunch of movies and TV shows. I’ve been doing the Netflix method of consumption before Netflix, basically, because I had no other options. Avatar was also another major one too though, Avatar was great.

Pivoting to TV news: Why do you think Fox News is obsessed with you?

My name is Hasan. I’m Muslim. I say “Israel is 1,000 times worse than Hamas.” You know, it’s perfect. In the past, I said “America deserved 9/11.” I have a lot of sound bites that they can use and abuse to make it seem like I do not have the best interest of Americans in mind, to say that I’m a dangerous terrorist. Even if I didn’t say those things, it still wouldn’t matter, they would still find anything else to say that I’m a dangerous terrorist. That’s part of it.

The other part of it is they can’t really talk about any military successes in the Strait of Hormuz. They can’t talk about the wonderful economy. Everything sucks. Trump is not following through on any of his promises, so they have to find new distractions. I think they genuinely believe that attacking me and tying me to the Democratic Party is a successful way to attack the Democratic Party in the midterms. I think genuinely they’re trying to set up for that.

They’re teaching the base who I am, first, from a very negative perspective, so they can just keep hitting that over and over again when the general election comes around, and then they’ll tie me to random candidates that I’m not even associated with in any way, shape, or form, to be like, this is what the Democrats are, you have to vote for us, the Democrats are insane, they’re going to kill all of you, they’re terrorists, that sort of thing. I think that’s what it is. I don’t think it’s going to be successful, necessarily. It wasn’t successful with Zohran, that was Andrew Cuomo’s last ditch effort to attack Zohran Mamdani. So, who knows?

Does it ever take a toll on you emotionally?

No, I’m used to it. I’m a socialist, I’m anti-imperialist, my worldview is unique to many Americans unfortunately, they’ve never gotten this education at all. They don’t see the world from the class perspective at all. And either they’re totally oblivious to this worldview, or they’ve been antagonized towards it, they’ve been taught that it’s bad and it’s wrong and it’s scary. So I understand. I’ve been on the receiving end of unlimited attacks, on the internet and always from the right, and now even from the liberals as well. This is a media environment that I basically grew up in. Fox News is just catching up to the right-wing reactionaries on the independent media side that have been doing these kinds of heinous smears for the past decade that I’ve been around, even as a much smaller content creator on The Young Turks. It’s not something that I grew comfortable with, it just is what it is. Cost of doing business.

Well, keep up the good fight. On another note, have you watched Industry?

I have not watched Industry. I heard it’s good, though. I’m friends with Kiernan. She’s in it.

[Michel makes pitch to watch Industry]

Alright, I’ll check it out.

Do you think of Twitch as an extension of television as a medium?

It’s very different, so not really. The differentiating factor in Twitch, as opposed to these other mediums, is the interactivity in real time. It’s very different than any other medium in that regard. No other medium has this level of interactivity, even YouTube. You can write comments and stuff, but there’s no way to change what you are watching as you are watching it. What I do I compare to not even television but Rush Limbaugh, AM radio conservative talk shows, that’s the tradition that I think closely tracks what I do, or what I do closely follows that tradition. Except my politics are good and not bad.

Have you ever thought about pivoting to any kind of acting or doing guest roles in TV?

I can’t act at all. I’m terrible at acting.

Isn’t there a performance element to streaming on Twitch?

Sure, but it doesn’t translate to acting, in my opinion. I just can’t do it. I don’t have enough training in it. If this was a real priority for me, I’m sure I could become semi-competent, maybe at some point, but it’s just not something that I’m interested in at all. I can’t even do voice acting, really. I’ve said no to a bunch of stuff but every now and then a production company that’s a fan or has a producer or director as a fan will ask me to do voice acting, and I always audition for it, and I never get it, so I must be dog shit.

I think that kind of stuff is cool, but it’s not a career thing for me. I’m very happy with where I’m at in my career. I’m very happy, and I don’t really have a lot of time to do anything else, anyway. Maybe as a side quest.

I just have one more question before I let you go. What’s your favorite TV-watching snack?

Ooh, I mean, I eat full meals when I’m watching television. So it’s probably a bucket of teriyaki chicken, or grilled chicken breast with some vegetables on the side, maybe some steamed rice. That’s my go-to TV-watching meal.

As you may have noticed, this newsletter will now be out on Wednesdays! It just sort of dawned on me that no one wants another email on Fridays and this feels like a fun way to mark the halfway point in the week. I’m also trialing a new Q&A format based on questions I get in my DMs in the hopes of covering more ground than just one show in this space.

Here’s what’s on the agenda this week:

• Predictions for the Hacks (HBO Max) finale?

• What did you think of the Rooster (HBO) finale?

• Can you explain the Connor Storrie cameo in For All Mankind (Apple TV)?

• Are you watching Off Campus (Prime Video)?

• Why is Couples Therapy (Showtime/Paramount+) appealing to a single person like me?

• Is Widow’s Bay (Apple TV) the show of the summer?

Let’s get into it (and keep the DMs coming!).

Predictions for the Hacks (HBO Max) finale?

I’ve been telling people I am almost certain Deb will die in the finale. Court is now in session, let me present my evidence:

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what are they watching? is an interview series for my newsletter in which I chat with a television creative about television itself. Previous interviews include Toheeb Jimoh, Janicza Bravo, Chelsea Peretti, and Jeff Hiller.

This time around, I had the pleasure of speaking with actor and writer Ryan Sampson, who has been working steadily in British television since the early 2000s, appearing in everything from Brassic to The Crown and Doctor Who. Most recently, he played Mr. Collins in The Other Bennet Sister. He also creates, writes, and stars in Mr. Bigstuff, which is streaming on Hulu (and has been renewed for a third season).

I like to start these interviews off by asking: What are you watching on television lately and enjoying?

I’ve always got a parallel thing going, a high/low of good TV. I can’t watch modern trash, I find it too abrasive, so I’ve got an ongoing thread of ‘90s home decor TV shows that are my comfort thing. At the moment, I watch a lot of gritty British crime/forensic stuff. I just started The Pitt the other night, I’m not quite sure how I feel about it yet.

Stay on it! The Pitt gets juicier. I want to talk a bit about Mr. Bigstuff, which I’ve been watching. It’s hysterical. You write and create the show—at what point in your career did you feel you wanted your own show?

Oh yeah how does the show translate to an overseas audience? I don’t know how many references might be a bit alien to you. I’ve always felt a bit frustrated by being exclusively an actor—I’m creative, obviously, in that I want to make things. It’s not a new thing to say but you don’t feel you have a great deal of autonomy as an actor. I’ve done a lot of series where it’s very heavily improvised and where your direction of the character is embraced, especially with long-running things as they go on. But I still found it frustrating that I wasn’t directly making things.

I find it odd that a lot of actors don’t do that. I’ve been in TV for fucking decades now, it’s frustrating when you get your scripts and you’re like, I love this but I want to be able to pull this part or do something differently, because I’m reading scripts constantly, so that muscle is really exercised. So I pitched TV shows for 15 years. It speaks to, on the good side, perseverance, but on the bad side, maybe a slightly delusional quality in retrospect.

So yeah, I think I’ve been visioning for ages, and then I decided to do a different approach a bit, and go, What do you actually want? I think there’s a great appetite at the moment for things that are autobiographical, and maybe that will be my next one. But I’m sort of okay with going: I can make something that has my taste within it from the starting point of what you want to do. Funnily enough, it turns out it’s a slightly easier way to access things.

I mean, I feel like creative people need a bit of that delusion to succeed and to create things.

I think so, but I can see the faces of my friends when every time I was like, This one’s gonna go! But I’m really glad it’s gone down very well.

I’m curious, why make television, why was that the medium you felt pulled to create?

That’s a really good question. I think because I was a big TV-watching kid, it was a thing that me and my mum did together. I lost my mum a few years ago and it’s partly woven into the story. I realized really young that this medium is uniquely placed to what we’re all inheriting. Like all kids of the 90s have got a similar ideology in their head from the things that we consumed on a really basic level. Many narratives back then were about like, be your true self and you’ll prevail in the end. And I think that reflects in an entire culture because of how those stories shaped us. I want to be in the privileged position of going, here are my ideas about the world. I’m not banging you over the head with it by making a gritty exposé, but at the same time, you feel like there’s some sense of being able to shape people. So I suppose really it’s being a control freak. The way I feel about people could maybe slightly influence someone somewhere. Sort of amazing.

What are your foundational TV shows from childhood?

British sitcoms, I loved The Vicar of Dibley. Keeping Up Appearances is kind of a brilliant watch. This woman Patricia Routledge, who now I know was a very feisty lesbian in an 80s/90s TV arena which was pretty homophobic. She had a relationship with quite a prominent political figure, but she is the finest character/comic/clown that I can imagine. Her physicality is so specific as this character—she plays this middle class, looking-through-the-curtains-at-what-your-neighbours-are-doing type, kind of obsessed with class and propriety and one-upmanship. It’s an amazing character for me.

On 90s British television there were a lot of these character performances that I found really inspiring. I had like zero friends as a kid, the old gay kid story. I grew up in quite a working class area and I spent loads of time in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, until I could do the exact character to the point where I was losing myself for a moment. I became obsessed with character studies. I definitely wasn’t actually socializing with people. It was a useful supplement.

Fascinating, and very much the roots of your acting career.

Totally. The foundations are there. I spent a lot of time watching people. I remember watching so many playground interactions and trying to work out, in my teenage years, what was happening between people. You turn on a little muscle in your head, but then you can’t turn off, and you become a sort of observer. So fascinating, the quirks of your formative years.

So I know some folks who watch Brassic and love it, and obviously you had your episodes in The Crown, but what has it been like promoting The Other Bennet Sister?

Did you watch it? Full disclosure, I can’t watch anything I’m in. It repulses me, it turns my stomach. I was on a plane recently and my boyfriend was watching it, and I was looking over every now and then. But as soon as I come on screen I just see a baby potato in a wig. It just makes me want to vomit in my mouth. It really fucks you up seeing you on screen all the time, particularly because I play all these like, gross characters. From what I’ve seen, it looks really good, and people are responding to it in a way that is…incredibly surprising. I’m taken aback at what an enormous amount of love and attention there is for Jane Austen stuff, because I’ve never really been an Austen person. There’s a fan base but I didn’t know they were as avid as they are. I’ve always been a Dickens type.

I’d love to ask a bit about your coming out as a queer actor, if you’re comfortable talking about that. You came out publicly in 2019 via social media, what was on your mind at that time? My instinct is that a lot of actors…don’t come out these days, for whatever reason.

Yeah, I think you’re right about the coming out thing. There aren’t that many out actors. Weirdly, from my experience, there aren’t as many gay actors as you’d imagine, not in TV anyway. It’s really strange. I don’t really understand it.

I felt a bit of a duty. And then someone in my Instagram comments was taking the piss out of someone else in a homophobic way. I thought, well, now I have to. If you let that slide, that’s just odd. I would like to imagine that I could be a bit useful, helpful for some kid out there. I grew up in quite a poor area. And if there’s a kid there feeling like they don’t fit in and they’re really weird, wouldn’t it be lovely to think that they go, oh, maybe I’m not that weird.

I imagine a lot of actors hesitate to come out publicly due to fear of being typecast or losing out on opportunities, but you look at your career and how it’s skyrocketed since 2019 and all the things that you’ve achieved, including your own show. Was there a fear that opportunities might not look the same?

Yeah! I don’t know why I really had that feeling because I’m not exactly romantic lead casting, that’s not really what I’ve got a desire to do either. People say it’s a boys club, but I think everything’s traditionally been a boys club. So it’s not like writing TV or TV acting is any different. I think sticking your head above the parapet and being a bit different, that’s not generally/traditionally speaking likely to help you. So it was really worrying, actually.

And yet it all worked out! Well I appreciate your out and proudness and visibility.

Thanks, yeah! I hadn’t really thought about it in great deal until now, to be honest. I forgot how racked with nerves and guilt I was before it happened. I think it did mean a great deal to me at the time, but as soon as the fear proves itself as not being based on anything real, then you sort of forget about it.

How do you feel about TV watching with your partner? How does the TV relationship work?

We watch everything together, and we’ve got that thing of him saying don’t continue to watch this without me. Then sometimes there’s a grey zone and you think you’d stopped watching that thing together, and you continue to watch, and then turns out it wasn't a grey zone for him. We also have a lodger who works in TV so we’re really annoying at shouting out ADR. The real gem is when you can spot that they’ve done a back of head shot and then put in someone’s line that the person is not really saying. So…that’s quite annoying for my boyfriend, and it’s ruining TV for me, really. It takes a really good show now for me to get lost in it.

What’s your favourite TV-watching snack?

I’m a really greedy individual, so it’s more about quantity, to be honest. I need stuff that is relatively healthy so I can eat a stupid amount of it. So ridiculously, it’s crudités and it’s a bit gross, but a lot of salt and vinegar mixed together. Punchy!

I usually paywall these Reflections newsletters, which address something specific on television that I can’t stop thinking about—but here’s a non-paywalled edition, just for fun. Maybe consider upgrading your subscription if you enjoy it! As a full-time TV critic, paid subscriptions allow me to keep doing this work.

I can’t think of a show that is better capturing the contemporary moment of surveillance than The Comeback’s latest third season. At first, I was confused by the new approach: The first two seasons of the show were filmed in a mockumentary format. The year is 2005, a year after Friends airs its finale, and Lisa Kudrow’s first move post-Phoebe is to partner with Sex and the City showrunner Michael Patrick King to make this little but powerful satirical comedy. The first season ends up being a meditation on Kudrow’s experience on Friends, but also on where a 40-year-old actress belongs in Hollywood after her “prime.” It’s easy to see, by the end of the first season, how wide-reaching The Comeback’s aspirations became.

In The Comeback, Valerie Cherish (Kudrow) is a somewhat well-known sitcom actress who’s trying to make her comeback when she gets cast in a new sitcom, Room and Bored, with a cast of young up-and-coming actors. Jane (Laura Silverman) is an aspiring documentarian who directs a film crew to follow Valerie around, documenting her journey. They set up cameras at her house, and what we see is the unedited footage which eventually gets assembled into a very exploitative reality show that ridicules Valerie.

A second season was released ten years later—Valerie’s comeback from her first comeback—in which she stars in a prestigious HBO comedy that is based on her experience on Room and Bored in which she plays herself, from the perspective of one of the sitcom’s writers who tormented Valerie back in the day. Again, Jane returns to film, although this season airs in 2014, far into the cultural explosion of reality television. It’s layers upon layers of self-referential, meta, a tangled web of television satire. As Emily Nussbaum wrote for The New Yorker back in 2014, it’s “a scripted series about a reality series about a reality star making a scripted series about the time she made a reality show about a scripted series. It’s less a hall of mirrors than a kaleidoscope, with each surface reflecting a TV set.”

Through those two seasons, Valerie is constantly pandering to the cameras. The flashes of the “real Valerie” only occur briefly at home and in bed with her husband, when she temporarily forgets there are cameras installed in the bedroom—but those moments are rare and few and far between. Valerie is hyper aware of herself and her image, and most of what she does and says are all under the context of being filmed. She will often say something, then turn to the camera to tell Jane to edit that bit out of the final cut.

This is all blown wide open at the end of the second season, when Valerie leaves the Emmy Awards even if it’s almost certain she’s about to pick up her first award. She rushes to the hospital bed of her beloved gay hair stylist Mickey (Robert Michael Morris, who passed away in 2017). During that scene, for the first time in the series, the camera crew is not with her. Instead, the mockumentary format breaks and we are watching from an omniscient point of view, no shaky handheld camerawork and no Jane lurking in the background. Valerie is quieter, concerned, more human and vulnerable than we’ve seen her before. The moments we see shared between Valerie and Mickey operate outside of the unedited footage; it is off-camera while still being on camera, and extremely effective as a finale.

It’s a perfect case study to place against Erving Goffman’s iconic theories in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), which Sam Fujikawa explores in their 2021 article in Articulāte: “By creating such an explicit dichotomy in portrayal between her performance in front of the cameras and behind them, the series points to an often disregarded component of how we all negotiate performance and the construction of self.”

So when season three was announced to premiere this year, I was so curious about the format in which it would be shot. Would Jane return to pick back up where we left off? Would the entire season occur “off-camera”? Or a new approach altogether?

In the end, Kudrow and King decided on a hybrid of all of the above. Scenes are shot from iPhones, Zoom cameras, podcast recordings, professional cameras and vintage devices. Valerie goes viral, watching writers come after her for executive producing a new sitcom written by AI. A shot from a ceiling camera inside the house transitions into the omniscient camera. It’s a choice that is a remarkable departure from its first two seasons, even annoying some Reddit users, but there’s a lot to read into it—especially when we realize Valerie acts pretty much the same from the omniscient perspective.

In The Comeback’s universe, reality and footage have converged. The line has officially blurred between the performance of the self for a camera and reality itself. Filming ourselves and those around us, with or without their consent, has (annoyingly) become ubiquitous in 2026. What’s the point in even distinguishing these different modes on The Comeback when everything is being filmed at high resolution all the time everywhere around us, regardless of which device is doing the filming? Everything is content and content is everything. If it’s not on your iPhone it’s on CCTV footage, drone cameras, webcams, your Alexa secretly listening in on your conversations, the possibility that at any point, any time, you are being recorded, photographed, captured. Unless you’re escaping into the mountains without any devices, are we truly ever offline? Once again, Kudrow and King are 10 steps ahead.

I am so online, in a way that is mostly necessary for my work, that I have begun losing track of what used to be a more distinct on/offline separation. I might logically and intellectually understand that there is more to what I see online—but when I look at my situationship that dumped me’s Instagram (which I shouldn’t be doing in the first place!) and see him posting away, I emotionally process it as: He’s living happily without me and he doesn’t care that he hurt me. Or when I see the various marriage proposal posts and the endless joy and successes, I completely understand no one is posting about the hard shit, but the convergence of our online and offline lives has led to emotional instincts that somehow overrule a critical gaze. And that’s all not to mention the surveillance capitalism of it all, a whole can of worms, or the fact that young people aren’t dancing at the club because they’re scared of getting recorded. How sad! Truly Michel Foucault’s theories of the panopticon as social control brought to life.

The Comeback’s series finale airs this Sunday and I’m eager to see how it ends, and even more eager to rewatch it in 5 years, realizing it once again found a way to capture our moment brilliantly.

on tvscholar’s nightstand:

• watching: Somehow, I’ve been commissioned by like four publications to write various pieces on Dutton Ranch, which premieres next week. I don’t know how I ended up being the gay go-to Taylor Sheridan critic, especially since I think most of his shows are very bad, but hey, I have rent to pay! I’ll take it. Here’s what else is on the docket now that the broadcast TV season is over (Half Man not included since I’ve watched the whole season already):

• reading: I’ve picked up a bunch of research books recently, but I’m so excited to dig into Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled by Michael Cobb, which has a screen grab from Sex and the City in its introduction.

• listening: As a so sad so sexy truther, I am of course listening to Lykke Li’s new album. I was also at Rochelle Jordan’s recent show in Vancouver, which was unreal (I am always saying, I just need a “Sweet Sensation”). And Kelela is back, which is very important to me.

• eating: I am moving at the end of the month so I’m mostly trying to use up any non-perishables I have around to make my packing process a bit easier…tell me why do I have three boxes of spaghetti for no reason? Come over if you’d like to carb load with me.

• movieing: I went to see Erupcja at the VIFF Centre (I love their festival and their year-long programming!) and realized it’s the fifth Charli XCX film I’ve seen this year. I love supporting my close personal friend.

what are they watching? is an interview series for my newsletter in which I chat with a television creative about television itself. Previous interviews include Toheeb Jimoh, Janicza Bravo, Chelsea Peretti, and Jeff Hiller.

This time around, I had the pleasure of speaking with Christopher Gomez, who has worked in television sound on some of my fav shows like Say Nothing, Only Murders in the Building, and Better Things. Most recently, he was Beef’s supervising sound editor, and I was super curious about not just what that process looks like but how he made anger into a sonic experience for the show.

I like to start off by asking what you’re watching lately that isn’t work-related?

This is always the million dollar question I get from friends! Recently, I’ve been trying to catch up on the last season of Wonder Man. I like to find things that’ll let me decompress at the end of the day. I am a Marvel apologist, I grew up a superhero fan, so it’s fun for me to just watch those and dive back into that break from reality. Also, whatever my wife is watching, I kind of pop in. Lately that has been some of our fallback shows…I think we started rewatching Schitt’s Creek for probably the millionth time.

How did you get into working with sound and dialogue?

I took a long-winded road to get here so I’ll give you the TLDR. I used to work at the railroad for about seven and a half years, my father-in-law worked there. It was a safe failproof job that would always be there for me. After some time I was just kind of like, I don’t know if this is for me, so I decided to go back to school. I really wanted to work in music; sound in movies and television was something I didn’t even know existed. About two years into the program we had post-production sound classes and I was like, What is this? What do you mean I put sounds to picture? I instantly fell in love with it.

We had a course where we had to re-dub an entire scene ourselves, add all the sound effects. I was so mesmerized by the artistic freedom that you get with doing it. There are so many people that work in sound that have these backgrounds in music, I feel like they work very hand in hand, because so much of what we do in sound is very musical, not only in the literal sense that we work with music, but you can treat it almost like musical instruments, everything from the dialogue to the sound effects to the Foley. So it was an easy transition for me, creatively.

When you’re fully immersed in a project, what does a day in the life of a supervising sound editor look like?

Lots of emails and phone calls, which is the unsexy part of it. [Laughs]. Day-to-day operations for me really vary. From the beginning, I’ll get a cut of the project and dive into it with our showrunner, the creatives, picture editors—we go over everything we want to do sonically. Like, what’s the sonic vision? How do we enhance these ideas? Can we make this punch a little bit bigger? Can we make this room feel like there are a lot more people present? Things like that and the overall shape of what we want a project to look like sonically. I take all the information and translate it for a core group of sound editors (dialogue editor, sound effects editor, a Foley team).

What were the conversations around the shape of the sound and the philosophy of Beef’s second season and how did you interpret that in your work?

Being an anthology series, we can’t really go back to the elements that we’ve established. In a continuing show, you’ve established locations and you know what these locations are going to sound like. With Beef, our showrunner Sonny (Lee Sung Jin) pushed us to really think outside the box and not just rely on what we did with season one. The big discussions were around how season two feels a lot more polished in the locations. We’re in the country club, in these really exclusive places, how do we convey that sonically? How do we dial things back, instead of just bombard the audience with just sounds of a bunch of stuff happening? Season two is much more of a slow burn than season one was, how do we do that sonically?

A lot of it was figuring out very methodical placement of sounds to let the audience sink into these performances. It’s just this constant balancing act between what we’re going to build sonically and then letting the music take those moments and back and forth, or letting dialogue take those moments.

Did you run into any sound-related obstacles in Beef’s second season and how did you tackle it?

The drama aspect of Beef is there and easy to grasp onto. I think the hardest part sonically has been to really nail those comedy beats. Sonny has this amazing ability to interject humour into the show. The show can be tense, there’s a lot of anger behind it, but you have to have those moments of relief through it to keep the audience engaged. The bullseye of when to land these comedic moments is so small because you could get it so wrong.

You look at the scene with Carey in the airplane and she has the Shirley Temple and she wipes the toilet seat. It was very easy to take that too far. There were moments during the mix we pushed it a little bit too in the gross, just a little too squishy. It was this great comedic beat of, you’re in this moment with her, and it’s so absurd, you know. But how do we dial back? Carey was phenomenal, she came in and recorded noises and grunts while she was wiping the toilet bowl. So how much of that do we pepper in? Those little moments are always such a unique sonic challenge. How do we land those moments without taking it too far, but also just enough?

That scene was making me gag. Even more than the orange juice for some reason! We all know how nasty those airplane toilets are.

For me it was more visceral. The orange juice is visceral in its own sense but you could feel Ashley is the anchor of it, like her anger was percolating and it just exploded. It’s just the way Lindsay did it, like this is so fucked up that this is what somebody would do, you know.

Are you someone who has pet peeves about sound or ADR in other things you watch?

I’m probably the least critical person of other people’s sound jobs, mainly because I know the behind the scenes of the creative decisions that lead up to that. People might be like, Oh my god, that line of ADR is so obvious. It’s like, yes, but there were a million reasons as to why that ended up that way. I love the process of filmmaking and I love the amount of work that everybody puts into it. And I know that not everything is necessarily a direct person’s fault. It’s a domino effect of this decision led to this decision, and now we ended up here, and now we have to do this. Like, that line of ADR is probably never going to work, and it’s going to be so completely obvious, but we’re going to put it in there and we’ll have to live with it.

You’ve worked on a lot of television, everything from Better Things to Yellowstone to Modern Family and From Scratch. Is there a project that you feel especially attached to when looking back?

It’s so hard! I work so closely with the creators and showrunners, I get to see every project for what they intend. So, you know, it makes me fall in love with it. Orange is the New Black will always sit very fondly in my heart, because it was the final season. I got to know a lot of people on that show and those friendships have continued on to this point in my career. When we see each other it’s always this mini reunion. It was such a family because that show was seven seasons long. Our post-producers that worked on that show we worked with on the first season of Beef, so those relationships continued to this day.

Another one that I would say is Everything Sucks!, I was born in 1985 and the music from that show, I was like…this is my everything, my teenage years of growing up and listening to 90s alternative rock. That show felt like a love letter to people my age, in the same way that there’s so much millennial culture in Beef.

Is there a project that you wish you could have been a part of that comes to mind? You did say you like Marvel…

The comic book nerd side of me would love to be able to play in that sandbox of sounds. I will say, the one show I look back and I’m like, that must have been so much fun to work on, was Broad City. Broad City is one of my favourite comedies of all time. I got into that show because of my wife, she was such a huge fan of it. I would have loved to be in that room with Abbi and Ilana. I would just love to hear the stuff that goes on through their heads when they’re coming up with the ideas for these episodes.

They really did everything and anything on that show, it’s truly a classic. Before I let you go: What’s your favourite TV-watching snack?

Okay, I’m not huge on popcorn. I’ll say that. I like something sweet. So I will either grab a Pop-Tart, maybe some cookies. Or good chocolate candy, that’s prime right there.

📣 Vancouver 📣 I will be moderating a panel discussion following the screening of A Sad and Beautiful World downtown on the evening of Friday May 1, which was Lebanon’s submission to the 2026 Oscars. A portion of ticket sales will go toward mutual aid for those whose lives have been upended by Israel’s invasion and bombardment. I am also told there will be food! Get your tickets here and come hang out with me.

“Do you think Sam Levinson is pissed Margo’s Got Money Troubles is exploring OnlyFans in a more nuanced and interesting way compared to whatever the hell is going on in Euphoria,” a friend DM’d me the other day. I couldn’t stop thinking about the comparison. I do know the wrinkles between my eyebrows have been deepening as I frown aggressively at everything going on related to that in Euphoria while I write my recaps, while Margo’s Got Money Troubles may already be one of the best shows of the year.

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Housekeeping note: There will be no newsletter next week since it’s my birthday on the 16th and I am planning to take it easy and reflect on being 32! So I’ll see you back here on April 24.

I was at dinner the other day, trying a new restaurant in Vancouver, when my friend confronts me: Where the hell are the newsletter roundups?! She and her husband couldn’t decide what to watch the other night and she demanded I revive this series. So let’s make it a quarterly thing! I’ve also been working on creating an Excel database with all of these listed so that you can easily pop in and sort by score/is it gay/etc. I’ll debut that in a few weeks (for paid subscribers only 👀). Let’s get into it.

6. Dreaming Whilst Black, season two (Showtime/Paramount+/BBC)
My score: 64/100

I think it would surprise many people that first of all, this is a dramedy produced by A24, and second, that it streams on Paramount+. I have rarely seen white characters turned into as much of a caricature as they appear here, hilariously playing with a trope typically reserved for people of colour on-screen (at a time when the “best friend of colour in an all-white cast” trope is very much returning in full swing).

Set in London, Kwabena (Adjani Salmon, who created the show) just wants to make his Jamaican immigrant love story movie, but the industry truly has other plans for him. Last season, he left his day job to pursue his art, and this season, he settles for a directing gig on a Bridgerton-esque drama. Although he feels he’s making strides, the industry finds ways to limit his vision: The show can’t have two Black leads, so they have to hire a clickbait Love Island contestant to play a lead, the show pointing out how the attention economy is a predominantly white game.

That said, I feel like Dreaming Whilst Black is missing a key ingredient. Maybe it’s catharsis. Kwabena won’t be vulnerable with his ex-girlfriend on the ways he lied about his real financial situation during their relationship (leading to the break-up), and we never actually see him reaching that level of self-actualization or growth, which is a shame, because I don’t know if the show is coming back for a third season. Regardless, I enjoyed being back in this world.

Is it gay? I cannot believe this show is taking place in the television industry and Kwabena doesn’t have queer people in his life! But alright.

5. The Madison (Paramount+)
My score: 65/100

Don’t get me wrong: Taylor Sheridan gets on my last nerve by how preachy his politics can be. It’s like, we get it, you like the country more than the city! You don’t need to remind us why every two seconds. And don’t get me started on the inevitable pronoun jokes—as someone who has watched a lot of his productions (mostly for work), I can confirm those appear in almost every show.

That being said…I liked The Madison! A lot of Sheridan’s writing can get convoluted between plots that don’t really make sense and he loves the dramaaa so there’s always some kind of murder or conspiracy or whatever. But The Madison felt notably stripped down to just a story about grief and family, really giving Michelle Pfeiffer a chance to rip through this material with a performance that honestly might get her an Emmy nomination. It was directed quite beautifully by Christina Alexandra Voros.

Is it gay? You know, Sheridan does sprinkle lesbians throughout his shows (always as a side character), but nothing queer happening here.

4. Big Mistakes (Netflix)

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Every Monday and Thursday, the first thing I do when I wake up is play Vulture’s Telematrix game. It’s my Wordle, basically. I had the great pleasure of curating my own grid this week, for which I selected six Canadian actors who work quite consistently in the medium. Consider testing your TV knowledge and playing my grid, which is up now until Monday! My score was 2690, try and beat that…

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I don’t make an Instagram grid post for everything I watch. Let me explain my process and why some shows “slip through the cracks.”

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The TV Scholar interview series brings real-life television scholars to my newsletter to discuss their journey to television studies, share nuggets of wisdom from their research, and obviously, chit-chat about television itself.

This time I interviewed Portugal-based psychoanalyst and researcher Lucas Ferraço Nassif, who holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, on his 2025 book Unconscious/Television, and how psychoanalysis can be a helpful lens into understanding television.1

Before we get into it: Which TV shows are you watching and enjoying lately?

The last good stuff that I saw was Industry. 100%, without a doubt the best thing that was on television for a while, because I think we are running in the low tide now. Very bad TV is being broadcasted nowadays and it’s kind of upsetting because it used to be very good like five years ago. I’m also watching animation from Adult Swim like Haha, You Clowns, and a lot of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City because, I mean, it’s the best thing there is? “Fiction” is not doing so well.

What are your foundational TV shows?

From childhood, I would say Japanese animation more than anything else. But the most foundational show would be Six Feet Under. I watched it in the first year of my PhD, so as a scholar. I was already 20-something and it hit hard in a way that I got even like…disturbed mentally in the process of watching it. I could relate to the characters, and I was feeling that too much in a way that didn’t get so well in my system. It’s a great show, I love it.

I haven’t yet lost anyone super close to me but Six Feet Under is one of those shows I know I’ll return to when I want to process grief.

It’s interesting that you mention that…I work here in Lisbon, I’m a psychoanalyst, but I’ve been working inside of academia again after finishing the PhD. I wanted to get away from academia as much as I could after finishing it. But then I started having this connection and relationship with the department of philosophy here at the university, and they have this laboratory on the philosophy of cinema and moving images. One of the researchers there got a grant from the European Union to research film and death. She had this hypothesis that to make philosophy with moving images, so time-based media, we would say it is to learn how to die.

That’s how I came back, through this project. I got a position, but then…I didn’t want to work on the representation of death, I wanted to work on how television in the middle of everyday life can provoke or trigger those feelings or these affections that could somehow be related to something that you cannot represent. So that’s maybe the key figure here—you cannot actually represent death, because we don’t know how to die or what that experience is like. So Six Feet Under touches me a lot, especially with Brenda’s character. Her pathway was so tough. In a way, I couldn’t really metabolize it. It stuck out to me as a Freudian death drive2 or something, but I couldn’t actually understand her. I was kind of addicted to her story in a way that it was so death-driven beyond representation or something. Her character is maybe one of the most important characters that I’ve ever encountered.

Can you tell me a bit about your academic journey: How did you arrive to writing about and researching television?

I wrote my PhD on Chantal Akerman, a very experimental cerebral filmmaker from Belgium. She says something that maybe is the reason I wanted to work with television: We can do experimental cinema, we can be cerebral, but we cannot stay in the conceptual realm the whole time. We have to be grounded by some kind of dramatic interference and narrative, and that’s very important. Her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) follows a woman doing everyday chores for three and a half hours. But in the end of the film, I’m giving you a spoiler, she kills a man. We don’t really understand why, but there is this pop, overdramatic thing. I was interested in the over-the-top, sometimes melodramatic narratives that you could find in television.

I understood that I wanted to research it was because television was in the middle of everything. Television is a narrative that is in the middle of our lives, that most viewers identify with ideologically or moralistically and sometimes say, Oh, this is not good narrative. It is actually very powerful. I think it’s more transgressive than cinema sometimes because it’s in our daily lives.

On that note, I want to read you a quote I loved from a chapter that is a transcript of a talk you gave, and I’m hoping you might expand on it:

“Twin Peaks is a work of art for television, much more than it is for the cinema, it enters our houses, it is made to be watched in the middle of things. This is very subversive…Television is capable of producing something that is maybe much more disruptive than cinema. Television has a body. The TV. The TV set. The box. You can hold it, use your hands to grab it much more than a projection at a cinema theater.”

I was writing this book about television, and then we interviewed this professor from the University of Chicago, Thomas Lamarre. He’s a very special professor, and he accepted our invitation to come here to Lisbon and give a workshop on Japanese animation and Japanese cinema, but with animation and pop culture. He’s the one that made me really see that we don’t have to go inside of the cinema theater to produce subversion. Politically, television is the art that makes us more open to what we don’t take seriously normally, at least as seriously as the cinema. So I was very interested in how pop culture can be considered a “minor art” but be very transgressive, because it’s very pop, because it’s very capitalistic. So I can talk about Twin Peaks, but I can also talk about anime. People might say, oh anime is for young adults, but there’s a bunch of stuff for young adults that’s actually good.

Did you see I Saw the TV Glow? There’s this scene where the main character opens their body, and there’s all of this electromagnetism inside. People can read this scene as, okay, this body was colonized by capitalism and television. But I actually think it’s totally the opposite. This body learned how to live because it was filled by this libidinal television possibility of life. Television was what kept the character alive in the end, it was because of television that this character could produce another psychotic reality or artistic reality that is alive, a form of expression. I love that they learned how to subvert it. It’s not a colonizing capitalism that’s destroyed this person, it’s actually the opposite. I think David Lynch was very aware of this when he made Twin Peaks. If we look at that scene from I Saw The TV Glow of opening and seeing the television inside, and if we also look at the last scene of the second season of Twin Peaks, when Cooper is hitting his head against the mirror….television is a black mirror that we have everywhere. We can, in a way, confront and defeat and see the body that we have inside of ourselves, and maybe know how to harness those, those energies and forces. I don’t know. [Giggles].

Why do you think psychoanalysis is a useful approach to television?

First of all that’s very important in your work, because you are a TV scholar that is looking for fiction and narrative. We can say that maybe The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City isn’t fiction, but of course, it is fiction. There’s beautiful mise-en-scene and editing work that I think Bravo does amazingly. So I think what we can learn about psychoanalysis with television is how we can do narratives, and how can we practice narrativization and building stories.

Psychoanalysis is pretty much telling stories. Going to your analyst and talking about your life, about your family, your psychoanalyst should understand that it needs something more, or something beyond, something beyond your family drama with your mom. Good television provokes this disruption. For instance, in Sex and the City…they don’t have families. Of course, they talk about it, and there’s Miranda’s mother, but we don’t see them. They have New York and sexual operations they’re investing in there. In a way, psychoanalysis as a practice needs to listen to the family plot, but trace a line the whole time trying to explore further, beyond the traumatic experience of childhood. Good TV does that.

Six Feet Under, for example, is very well structured as a family drama. But there’s something else there. There’s something so bizarre and strange in the way that family relates. Even in the first season, when the mother sees the son giving oral sex to his girlfriend…it’s a family drama that is always twisting how we would see family in television. So it kind of folds the family drama within the family compound (the house). It makes over-the-top complexities beyond the family drama, in a way, it explodes.

I think I get it—family life in particular is so rich to explore, on and off the screen. There is kind of a gap in family dramas nowadays, it doesn’t seem to be a sexy genre to explore on television.

In Industry, we have Harper and Yasmin. We have all the family drama from Yasmin, and we have family drama from Harper, but we rarely see anything beyond her brother. I read somewhere that they wanted to cast Jennifer Jason Leigh as her mother but decided not to. It’s so brilliant that they didn’t do it. Harper is a little bit like the Sex and the City characters, she has to be displaced to build something new. And you see that Yasmin is not capable of doing this, and now she’s becoming Ghislaine Maxwell. She’s so fucked up in this family plot that she cannot get rid of. In a way, Harper…she’s doing it. She’s producing another possibility outside of the US, having this new, very bizarre and difficult life in the UK, but she’s doing it with new alliances.

How did you settle on titling your book Unconscious/Television?

I was about to put only Unconscious as a title. As I was developing the proposal for the publishing house, I said, okay, I need a media interface to think that the unconscious could be this media interface as well. So it is to think that television can be also operating as an unconscious, as this infrastructure of our aesthetic body that is actually outside of the body; that you are relating it as an affection, as a haptic, energetic thing.

Can you tell me about selecting your case studies and why you chose to focus on those specific shows?

I have three case studies: Neon Genesis Evangelion, a very famous anime, Twin Peaks, and Netflix’s Devilman Crybaby. Evangelion is a very canonical work from Japanese animation from the 90s and I love it. There was cable in Brazil in the 90s, or more little small antennas that would receive television from several places. There was this channel only from Latin America called Locomotion, a channel for animation. I watched Evangelion there, I was very young, like 10, but it was very foundational. It’s a very neurotic show, because it is a show about the father, the son, the mother, the mother is the robot. Even though Evangelion is so good, the main character is never able to actually get rid of this father-mother-son triangle. I wrote about Asuka, another character in the show, the woman that is able to, in a way, destroy humanity by making an alliance with the villains. That’s my thesis in the chapter.

After Evangelion I thought I should talk about another anime that is a little less neurotic, more psychotic. Devilman Crybaby is a very important manga that was adapted as OVA (Original Video Animation), which was very popular in Japan in the 80s. What Netflix did many years after was make a very good anime adaptation with this, it’s brilliant. In this anime we could really elaborate on this new conceptualization of the unconscious; I write about how demons make fusions to produce weapons against humanity. I could write a lot about this anime.

For Twin Peaks: The Return, and I especially explore the episode of the atomic bomb (episode 8), not only as a representation of the atomic bomb, but also as how David Lynch builds the strategies of Twin Peaks. He’s depicting the radioactivity of the atomic bomb and how it explodes the way that we conceptualize, for instance, even weapons or the universe. So because we are dealing with atomicity, we are dealing also with the way that Lynch structures his narratives. It’s an episode that comes out of nothing. Instead of exploring a character, he goes somewhere else, but it makes a lot of sense. I love it.

Do you have any favorite or seminal texts within psychoanalysis that are relevant to television that you can recommend?

I would say that you have to read the little text from Lacan about the mirror image, The Image of a Voice: The Mirror Stage. It’s a text from ‘49 that Lacan gave as a lecture, and afterwards it was published. Lacan conceptualizes narcissism after Freud. So it is the child looking at their image in the mirror and also being confirmed by the caretaker that this image makes sense; how the child produces the gestalt of the body. So the body, it’s not fragmented anymore. It is one thing, a thing that makes sense. That’s the neurotic narcissism that Lacan explains.

When thinking about narratives on television, it would be a great text, especially if we think that, for instance, a show that used to be good, Black Mirror. If we’re thinking about this mirror image and how the black mirror is also a mirror of a virtuality of something that is about to happen that we don’t yet know. It’s very interesting when we start exploring this notion of the mirror image that Lacan conceptualized. It can be a difficult text, but it’s so short that you can read it more and more, forever.

What is your favorite television-watching snack?

Guacamole and Doritos!

Dear TV Scholar:

I've just accepted I'm experiencing burnout, and have decided to leave London after a beautiful few years and go back home to Scotland. I feel like I'm starting again and feel pretty clueless about where to go next, how to work out what I want, and how to be proud of myself and be the person my loved ones think I am! I realise it's a pretty cliché quarter-life crisis, but part of me also believes I'm the first person ever to go through something like this lol.

-So Long London

Dear So Long London:

You’re not alone. It was 2020 when I realized I was experiencing burnout. I had just started the second semester of my PhD program in Toronto, and a few weeks of enthusiasm quickly waned when I realized I couldn’t stomach writing another fucking academic paper. I used to start the semester feeling refreshed and excited by new material; I would make a list of all of my assignments and flag the readings that seemed most interesting, make study plans with friends, colour-code my calendar. This time around, I could barely stomach looking at a syllabus. I zoned out in class. I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE, my mind screamed. I was not okay, like at all. I was smoking a lot of weed, I had suicidal thoughts. My therapist could only do so much. But one thing I neglected to consider at the time is the context in which my burnout occurred.

It didn’t make sense in the moment, though: I had spent my entire young adulthood strategically planning for a PhD, for a future in academia. I was decently funded, had research opportunities, a great supportive supervisor, but it didn’t matter. When you’re burnt out, you need space and distance. The word itself tells us all we need to know: Burning is an irreversible chemical reaction. You can’t unburn a slice of toast. I took a leave of absence, and a few weeks later, the pandemic hit. I made the split decision to move in with my parents temporarily back in my hometown on the other side of Canada. In the moment, it felt like failure. I didn’t want my family and friends to see me through that lens. The pandemic was a convenient excuse, but I’m almost certain things would have led there regardless (I had already been dreaming of the lush greenery of British Columbia in my very cement life in Toronto).

I ended up getting totally absorbed into ER in those lockdown weeks. Looking back now, I think I was grappling with a sense of purposelessness. I had all of those big existential questions: Who am I without academia? What function do I serve my community? The medical staff on ER know exactly what their purpose is. If you’re watching The Pitt, it evokes a similar feeling: That they are meant to be there, right at that moment, to save that specific patient. I hungered for that feeling, to matter, for my life to feel aligned again.

I ended up signing up for a class on human physiology as a potential prerequisite for nursing, just to try it out. I got a job doing admin work for the public health system. I began grocery shopping weekly, packing lunches, taking the bus to work every day (I was considered an essential worker), answering calls and processing faxes in a windowless room, getting paid every two weeks. Somehow, even though this job wasn’t at all what I envisioned for myself, I started to feel okay again. The structure helped. By the time I got to the series finale of ER, 331 episodes later, I was feeling like myself again. It’s right around that time when I interviewed my first actor and tvscholar really started to take off. Evidently, I did not become a nurse, but I don’t regret exploring it.

I’m vulnerabilitymaxxing here to say: Many, many quarter-life crises have led to a reinvention and a new era. Satya Doyle Byock wrote a really good book about it, by the way. You are currently in the rebuilding phase. It’s time to honour what you’ve really been feeling instead of turning away from it. For me, that’s where the burnout brewed: That deep down knowing that you are not aligned with who you truly want to be. Fuck what anyone else might be thinking, that’s none of your business. What is your business is doing the internal work needed to get back to yourself. As you rebuild that internal okayness, you’ll start trying new things and pursuing opportunities. I’m not religious, but I do think the universe/life finds a way to guide you. Eventually, you’ll wake up, like I do on most days, and realize you made the right choice—especially, as you mention, with a sense of pride over what you actually accomplished in your life there.

By far the best burnout representation I still think about all the time is Enlightened (HBO). I am always surprised by how many people still haven’t seen this gem, which was a collaboration between Mike White (of The White Lotus fame) and Laura Dern (I don’t need to explain who that legend is). The series opens on Amy Jellicoe’s (Dern) worst day. After a massive and very public breakdown at work (a scene that should have won her an Emmy right then and there), she leaves for a wellness retreat in Hawaii, and returns not too long after in a state of enlightenment. She’s ready to make a change in the world! She gets banished to a basement data processing centre but tries to stay present and optimistic through it all, while also wanting to burn everything to the ground. The show is a stark reminder of how shifting your mindset and reframing things can only do so much. Context is important. You can’t change oppressive structures by being more present (I wish). Sometimes, enough is enough. You already know, So Long London, that you’ve hit your capacity (nonetheless, Enlightened would be cathartic and fun to watch). I think there is value in that realization—considering how many of us try to grind it out at the risk of our sanity and health.

In the spirit of starting over, consider watching Somebody Somewhere (HBO). Sam (Bridget Everett) is experiencing more of a mid-life crisis, but she moves back to her hometown after the death of her sister to rebuild, and ends up finding unexpected grace in building community with a gay friend (Jeff Hiller) from high school. It’s one of the softest, most lovable series I’ve ever watched. If you’ve watched it already, watch it again—I took the first season for granted. You might also find some solace in The Dry (Sundance/Britbox/ITVX), in which Shiv (Roisin Gallagher) moves back home to Dublin from London at 35 after losing her job and feeling she didn’t fit into her life there in sobriety. Finally, justice for Too Much! Lena Dunham’s Netflix show is like the more grounded Emily in Paris. Have you ever heard of the saying, wherever you go, there you are? Jessica’s (Meg Stalter) emotional baggage follows her physical one, and it all comes up when she’s in a new relationship with Felix (Will Sharpe), an indie musician. This might be triggering because it’s all London-based, or could be comforting to know you’re not in that world anymore.

My final recommendation would be to watch something that fills your cup, regardless of its themes. Restart Sex and the City for the fourth time (a rewatch always hits for me). Relax into the comfortable rhythms of a procedural (The Good Wife is a game-changer). Click play on something so ridiculous it’ll make you cackle through any lingering regrets or emotions you might be having about starting over (The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City or Search Party). Trust me, as you pick up the pieces of the life you’ve left behind, you'll be okay. TV’s got your back.

Need some TV advice? Send me a letter.

Huge news: I’m bringing back my advice column! Are you going through something and want to know what to watch to help process it all? Fill out this Google Form.

Extra credit: I interviewed Arden Cho for The Cut ahead of the Oscars (she voices Rumi in KPop Demon Hunters). She is absolutely wonderful and gave me lots of dating advice. I also ranked every single one of Nicole Kidman’s TV roles for Harper’s Bazaar, and I have two new column dispatches up for Yahoo because one is a special Disney/Hulu collaborative round-up! Always working hard at the TV recommendations factory.

So, something happened last week that made me, well first of all, rethink everything, but also, sit all weekend writing a long essay.

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