'An anxious geriatric millennial with no motivation, what should I watch?'
Shows to relax into when you're feeling existential restlessness.
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Dear TV Scholar,
I’m a “geriatric millennial” and I think I’ve officially hit my mid-life crisis. I love my life, but I am also both so tired and so restless. I want to see the world, but I also have crippling anxiety.
I want to have bucket list experiences, but I have no activation energy to get my body in shape. What show will help me find the motivation to do things, see things, while I still can? But will also help me laugh at myself when I can’t seem to get moving?
I love hidden treasures, something that might make me laugh in surprising ways. I love everything from “appointment television” to reality garbage. I just am not in the mood for anything dry or that takes time to get invested.
Please, TV Scholar, tell me there is hope.
-Desperate Housecat
Dear Desperate Housecat,
What are the markers of a life well-lived? My journals are filled with pages trying to get to the bottom of that for myself. I’m turning 30 in two months, and I’m also riddled with anxieties about time passing by. Did I “do” my 20s right? My Serializd app says I’ve spent a full year’s worth of time watching television. Should I have been, I don’t know, in club bathrooms snorting coke? Jumping out of airplanes? Camping in the wilderness? Should I have spontaneously moved to Berlin? Should I have stayed in grad school? Should I be dedicating my life to stopping climate change? At a certain point, it all gets a bit overwhelming. I don’t know if any of those things would have actually rooted myself firmer into who I am. But I know, like you, that I love my life the way it is, imperfections and all. I feel grateful about what I have and what I’ve experienced. I think that’s important.
Over the last year, I threw it all to the wall like the writer’s room of The Morning Show. I quit my job and tried freelancing full-time; I applied to grad schools again; I wrote more than I ever have; I tried to embrace being single in new ways. Very little was as successful as I had imagined it would be in my head, and nothing propelled me into the magical plot climax where everything clicked and suddenly I’m the after picture of a Devil Wears Prada makeover. What it did remind me is that life is really fucking hard! We live in extremely precarious times. There are genocidal wars. The only stable careers left are like…healthcare.
So instead of spiralling into a restless anxiety about all the things I should be doing, or getting too hard on myself for not traveling to twelve countries in a three week period or whatever people on Instagram seem to be doing at that one point every summer, I recommend meditating to The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House.
The charming Netflix series is written and directed by auteur Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda. The show is low on conflict and high in sensual pleasures as it relates to food, giving me all those Better Things feels (the cooking scenes, specifically). Two teens, Sumire and Kiyo, move into a house to train in the art of the geiko, a contemporary geisha. Sumire is a natural, and Kiyo is clumsy and unfocused. But before Kiyo is kicked out, she begins cooking for the household and, upon realizing she is naturally gifted in this artform, is hired to be their chef.
Watching the delicate cooking scenes and what it means to share food reminds me of the simple pleasures that outweigh anything I could ever accomplish from a bucket list. Somehow, everything is okay over a warm meal with good company. The Makanai perfectly captures that sense of gratitude and calm.
I get inspired to pursue my ambitions when I’m most relaxed—I need to exhale before I can consider adding more to my plate, or my anxiety will just keep skyrocketing and I will never have the energy or the courage to move forward. It’s not the flashiest recommendation, but if you allow yourself to soften into this world, it will surprise you.
Desperate Housecat, I can’t cure you of your anxiety. I can’t tell you which international trip will satisfy your craving to see the world. But I can tell you, while you figure things out, that there is a lot of worthwhile television that may just inspire further reflection, and hopefully comfort you for at least an episode’s worth of time.
Unlike film, we get to hang out in worlds much longer on television. Nine episodes with the maiko house, 11 episodes with a British actress whose nudes get leaked on I Hate Suzie, 75 episodes with KGB spies in The Americans, 331 episodes in a bustling emergency room on ER. I look back on what I’ve watched and realize I’ve lived more lives than I can count. Many of the things on my bucket list I’ve experienced by proxy through the characters I’ve watched (I grew up thinking I would become a doctor; I’ve watched enough medical shows to feel satisfied not needing to pursue that path).
On the lighter side of things, try This Close, a hidden treasure comedy series on AMC+/Sundance Now that explores a friendship between two Deaf twenty-somethings played by Joshua Feldman and Shoshannah Stern, who also write and create the show together. It aired for two seasons and remains one of the few series with Deaf protagonists (one who is also queer). It’s immediately visually captivating—the first season is directed by Andrew Ahn (Fire Island).
There’s a boatload of other shows like This Close about millennials trying to figure out their lives. Hacks comes to mind, with the brilliant foil exposing Ava’s (Hannah Einbinder) life choices to Deborah’s (Jean Smart) critical gaze, and vice versa. There’s Good Trouble, a reliable dramedy about a coterie of zillennials living in downtown L.A., each with their own distinct storylines and relationships outside of their shared living space. There’s the British leg of this journey via Fleabag, Back to Life, This Way Up, and Dreaming Whilst Black.
I particularly like Harlem, a comedic new take on Sex and the City about four Black women’s lives in New York. And there might be something to glean from Tiny Beautiful Things, the Kathryn Hahn-led series in which she plays Cheryl Strayed when the author wrote the “Dear Sugar” column, quite literally providing advice for the myriads of ways one should live their lives.
You should definitely watch Slip, though. Mae (Zoe Lister-Jones, who also writes every episode) is uninspired by the humdrum of her every day life and her relationship has plateaued. On a brief tryst with a new man she meets through work, an orgasm finds her transported into a parallel universe where she’s married to a celebrity. Through every orgasm that follows, she “slips” from one universe to the next, getting increasingly lost in the myriad of lives and paths her life could have taken. It’s a brilliant existential exploration and a meditation on where the grass is always greener.
But I don’t know if where you’re at, or where I’m at for that matter, is necessarily a bad thing. I think it’s all par for the course in figuring out what we really want out of our short time on this earth. Life is delicate and brief. I believe existential anxiety and wanting to “see the world” and move out of our comfort zones are natural responses to how stifling adulthood can be, and signifies a desire to move closer to ourselves. Just don’t forget to rest and give yourself a break. There is still hope! And watching some TV always helps.
Further Reading
I interviewed Carrie Preston who has played Elsbeth Tascioni for fourteen years since The Good Wife. Her new spin-off started airing this week on CBS and it’s quirky and funny but very police procedural, if that’s your cup of tea.
Azula was brought on a season earlier in the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action Netflix adaptation. I’ll review the show in my round-up on the 15th because I have some thoughts—but I interviewed Elizabeth Yu who is definitely one to watch since her debut in May December.
True Detective: Night Country was fantastic and I hope Nic Pizzolatto gets fired from HBO for being unprofessional and rude. I asked Kali Reis some etiquette questions for The Cut and she had some great responses.
The TV Scholar Awards are now on IMDb?! A mysterious netizen added a few categories to IMDb and I was able to figure out how to add the rest. The awards now show up on actor and show profiles on IMBd, alongside Emmys and Oscars. Pretty damn exciting. I can now say I’m the only one who nominated The Shrink Next Door for anything (Kathryn Hahn, obviously).
This was such a beautiful response! Amazing recs and also some very comforting and validating advice for existential malaise. Can’t wait to watch Slip which I’ve never heard of before!
Here for there Better Things mention. I loved the world they built in Pamela's home: the art, the kitchen, THE COOKING. Swoon!