My television resolutions
My television resolutions
Happy to announce I will finally, at long last, start watching The Sopranos.
Happy New Year, telephiles.
I watched 137 seasons of television in 2021, beating my previous personal records. It's an imprecise way of keeping track of what I watch, though. In 2020 I watched 15 season of ER, which would equal...100 seasons of an 8-episode, 20-minute dramedy? Someone do the math and get back to me.
In 2021 I had set out to watch older HBO miniseries. I made my way through Angels in America, Olive Kitteridge, Mildred Pierce. I ended up finally watching Veep in its entirety for the first time, too. I think my miniseries goal got derailed by the massive amounts of new television that eventually came out, especially in the back-half of 2021 when productions caught up to earlier COVID delays. But I know that finally watching The Sopranos is crucial if I want any legitimacy in my TV watching and writing. I feel like I’m about to get thrown out of the party every time I mention I haven’t watched, yet.
I’m currently stealing moments away from packing and preparing a move to write this newsletter. Moving reminds me that it’s never portrayed in earnest on TV shows, especially when you choose (i.e., can only afford) to do it all yourself—I’ve spent the better part of the last month sorting, selling, cleaning, and making arrangements. I’m exhausted. Will everything even fit in the UHaul? I don’t think they were moving, but I just remembered that scene in Broad City when Ilana gets stuck to the back of a truck by her belt.
I somehow had time to interview Mackenzie Davis and write about Acapulco for W magazine last month, an opportunity that felt all too surreal as I simultaneously tried to figure out what to do with a box of old, early 2010s Ws from the years I obsessively collected fashion magazines. Moving is really such a liminal space to be in, it’s challenging to feel grounded in any particular way. It made for an odd New Year’s celebration. I couldn’t even properly process the fact that Betty White, a legend in the history of television itself, passed at 99 (are they ever going to remaster Golden Girls in HQ, though?).
For some reason, HBO Max’s Love Life has been the only thing I’ve been binging this week, which I’d say was the most nauseating choice I could make since it aggressively jumps through time—my move started to feel like it’s taking years instead of days. My motivation to watch was fuelled less by Anna Kendrick (although she did a fine job!) and more by the reviews of its second season, and finally being able to enjoy watching Jessica Williams in a full season of television. The show is definitely a reminder that rarely anything stays static except your good old patterns—but maybe once you’re able to see outside of your patterns, those shouldn’t stay static either.
I’m moving to Vancouver for a work-from-home job in healthcare administration, a field I've been working in since dropping out of the PhD. But based on my experience in 2021, it’s become increasingly clear that writing about television full-time is where I want to aim, a goal that feels more realistic the more I write. The question is financial viability, right? And finding a balanced space where I have enough time to read, write, and watch outside of academia, all the while being able to pay my rent in this hellish, contemporary feudal system. A conundrum for anyone in a precarious and/or artistic field.
In 2022, we will likely see the first billion dollar television series, according to The Hollywood Reporter's excellent podcast, TV’s Top 5. The Lord of the Rings, which had to shell out a few hundred million dollars just for the rights to make the series, is set to premiere in 2022 on Prime Video with this very, very expensive price tag. Franchises are also taking off (not all to air this year, but in production): six Game of Thrones spin-offs, eight Star Wars spin-offs, thirteen new Marvel shows, and that’s not including spin-offs for Star Trek, The Walking Dead, and so on. Plus, other shiny new shows on their way: Halo, Inventing Anna, The Gilded Age.
Television is still soaring, take your pick. Franchises want your eyeballs all year long. There will likely be way too much to watch and keep track of, especially since I’ve found international productions have really ramped up in the last two years. It’s harder to keep a finger on the pulse of what’s going on internationally when critics in the west—already overwhelmed—don’t review these shows, too.
I often get messages from folks on Instagram, dripping with guilt, saying something like: “I know you really loved this show, but I just can’t get into it.” Although I can feel very strongly about what I watch (like Yellowjackets, which I predict will become quite the hit for Showtime), I have no stake in what you watch. I’m only here to guide, to steer, to showcase, to spotlight. To push gently toward the newest progressive queer representation, or toward your next comfort binge.
I always say—and I’ll say it again—television chooses you, not the other way around. It’s one of the only spiritually grounded things I believe in. Shows come into my life right when I need them to, and I’m sure they have for you too. It seems an appropriate and zen thing to say about a film, painting, or novel, but rarely applied to television.
A film might cut deeply for an hour and a half, but you’re forced to confront a show again, and again, and again. The emotions you feel from a show live in your body longer than most pieces of art. I’ve been thinking a lot about Sharp Objects since the passing of Québécois director Jean-Marc Vallée (can people stop dying please, thank you), a miniseries that cut so deeply I had to return to it four times, and first watched at a time when I was going through my own challenging, deep depression. If I had ever written that essay about the phenomenology of television in the semester I dropped out of school, I would have explored this further. My library books on phenomenology are still sitting in an office in Toronto, waiting to be returned.
And so my resolutions for 2022 are the following:
- Watch The Sopranos, finally.
- Keep tabs on what academic journals are publishing in TV studies and report my findings here.
- Write at least twice as much about TV as I did in 2021.
- Be more selective with deciding when to stop watching a show when it feels right, instead of finishing it for the sake of completion. The landscape is too competitive! I'm sorry if the Gossip Girl reboot didn't do it for me.
- Find a new juicy binge. I'm thinking either Damages or The Magicians.
- Somehow convince everyone I know to watch Yellowjackets.
- Continue to grow this newsletter/my Instagram/the spaces that mean most to me and continue aiming toward a future where it manifests financial viability.
- Practice more gratitude. I’ll start now: I’m grateful for you. For reading, subscribing, messaging, supporting, watching, cultivating this TV-watching community during a worldwide pandemic with me. Thank you.