#CREATING HORRORS BEYOND OUR COMPREHENSION (baking)

[pigeonneaux]

:^)

IS THAT-

FIL AND ME COOKINGGGGKDNENZNDJKSC JE DEVIENNE FOU

Vraiment oui. moi le jour ou je décide de faire autre chose que des légumes congelés :

[probably-a-va]

“The Stolen Line” an original audio drama about a writer grappling with their self doubts, written and performed by me.

Transcript Below!

Narrator: And so, our hero hefts their sword to the sun, and a million rays of refraction spread across the kingdom breaking the- 

Narrator: Gaah, I can’t read this. Come on, you mean to tell me they wave their sword and it dispels the curse? That’s stupid-

Doubt: We can’t write this, we stole that line.

Author: Sure we can, nobody’ll know, I mean, no one’s actually listened to the show we stole it from.

Doubt: All the more reason to give credit to the original creator and not just fucking steal it!

Author: Look, all art is inherently iterative, we cannot be held accountable for being inspired.

Doubt: But we just took that whole line! There is a difference between inspiration and plagiarism.

Author: Uggh, It’s one measly little line, everything else is different. please, just let us have this. We rarely find the motivation to create anything.

Doubt: We know that, we’re us too, you know.

Doubt:

Doubt: Fine, keep writing.

Narrator: ...That’s stupid. This was supposed to be an epic tragedy, a hopeless journey for an unattainable goal. It’s the beauty of the loss of the story, it would have been told for generations! The problem can’t just be hand waved by a magic sword. No, I think-

Doubt: No. Stop.

Author: What now?

Doubt: This doesn’t actually help, it’s still someone else's writing, we still haven’t created anything!

Author: But we’re changing the context, maybe we could actually make something original if you let us move on.

Doubt: That context is stupid. It’s worse than the original. Why iterate if all your doing is making it worse!

Author: This is exactly what I’m talking about! You can’t let us create. We would have written entire trilogies if you would just shut up.

Doubt: Are you saying I’m wrong? That we aren’t a hack? That we can come up with something original and aren’t just jealous of our favorite writers’ creativity? You're lying to ourselves.

Author: That’s… that’s… that’s reductionist.

Doubt: Really? God, just go back to the plagiarism already.

Narrator: No, I think I’ll change-

Author: Urggh, look… you… I… We can’t make anything like this! We’ll never finish anything if at every turn you point out the flaws. We can never learn to be better if we can never start.

Doubt: Why bother it would never be enough, never be perfect. Just delete the stolen line already and then the document, and go waste our time watching TV or Youtube or scrolling tumblr, consuming other people’s content is the only thing we’ll ever be good at. You know our friend wrote a novel? An entire fucking novel! What have we ever made? A graveyard of documents. The bones of half baked ideas.

Author: I know. But...

Author:

Author: We can’t just let it end there though, can we? It’s hard, but maybe one day…

Author: Who knows what horrors beyond comprehension this not a boy can make?!

Doubt: It will never be enough for the entirety of us.

Author: We... will work with that. We have to.

Doubt: You could just stop. Stop writing. Stop lying to us. Stop trying to make this work. Finish our computer science degree. Get a nice white color job. Maybe a house. A wife. A white-picket fence. A few kids. A normal practical life.

Author: But that would never be enough. I-I don’t want this for money or fame, they would be nice, sure, really nice, I mean, imagine… But that’s not what it’s actually about. It’s about the act of making something, anything. Of turning disparate ideas into one. Of plotting out an idea, a narrative, a theme. I don’t want the line because I think it’s cool or I want to steal the Author’s entire story, but because it touches on concepts that I want to explore in my own way. And that’s what writing, acting, sketching creation is for. The communication of complex thoughts and concepts. There is so much more here than my self-doubts and a stolen line. Yeah, maybe doubt’s useful for critique and refinement, but honestly, the sloppiest act of creation will always be worth more than any critique. So, fuck you. I will steal this line. And I’ll kidnap a hundred lines to keep writing. And I’m going to write this.

Doubt: But-

Author: No. None of that. I’m writing.

Doubt: You’ll never achieve anything of note! You’ll always be a lonely, miserable, worthless smear of inept creation and-

Author: nope. I’m not alone, and I’m gay and stronger than you, so shut up. Shut your face. I am writing.

Narrator: ...I think I’ll change what’s written. I’m far more than the bloody narrator, why shouldn’t I change the story?

Narrator: And so, Our hero hefts their sword to the sun, and a million rays of refraction spread across the kingdom, but all of it’s petrified denizens remain mere statues, they are powerless to save anyone. They slump and stare into the marbled eyes of their only true friend. Their quest has been for not.

[sunshinedreary]

The Peanut Butter Sandwich

Once, in middle school, I saw my father make a peanut butter sandwich and I’ve never forgotten it.

Peanut butter is a critical food in my life, and always has been. I’m fond of saying that if I ever develop a peanut allergy I will be fucked beyond all comprehension because there’s a lot of peanut butter consumption happening here. Whenever I admit this fear, I shine it up with a layer of humor, but I am actually afraid of its potential to materialize. A woman I know and love ate peanut butter often for many years of her life and then stopped eating it for a spell, no reason in particular. When she started eating it again, she realized she had developed a peanut allergy and hasn’t eaten it since but told me with sorrowful eyes and a disappointed mouth that she misses it every day. This tale radiates Edgar Allan Poe levels of foreshadowing and horror for me, despite the fact that it is delivered by a tall slip of a garden-goddess whose short gray hair sparkles and whose eyes shine with love and positivity on the grayest day. I cannot break up with peanut butter; ours is a relationship that has existed for a very long time.

Peanut butter is an Everything Staple for those of us who don’t [YET] have a [MAYBE? JESUS CHRIST, MAYBE?] peanut allergy. Part of why I eat it so much probably stems from the fact that I grew up with a single mother who lived in a constant state of obsession over what she ate, and by extension, what I ate. Before you get mad at her, let me assure you that there was no shaming going on, no judgement. While it was impossible not to personally imprint the world’s view of people who don’t have tiny figures, my mother approached food almost empirically, like she was a food scientist pulling apart the complex chemistry of nourishment to decipher the reasons why things that tasted so good could attach to her thighs and belly and then turn from flesh into an emotional burden of guilt and self-scrutiny. I like to say I am making up for lost time with long-lost food loves from my childhood and the picky first quarter of my life, peanut butter lives in that forbidden pantry for me along with garlic, sour cream, and sugar cereals. Look, I don’t write sonnets and poetic love couplets about garlic as a result of being given a stepfather who loathes its very existence, YOU DO.

Anyway, my mother never made me feel bad about myself and how I looked, she always encouraged and loved me. But her intense focus on the food she ate sort of rubbed off on me and stigmatized certain foods that I ate. Sometimes it was a direct attack: peanut butter was in the cross-hairs, probably because I always wanted it. I’d happily eaten regular Jif during all of my early years and then somewhere around the time I turned eight, she became convinced that peanut butter was going to make us both sick and give us cancer. She’d already had breast cancer, but was understandably concerned about staying in remission, so the conventional wisdom at that time was to worship at the shitty altar of low-fat foods. From that moment on, my life was a guessing game of When Is Peanut Butter Evil And When Is It A Friend? My mother wavered between ostracizing the delicious, sugary, and fatty foods we liked and determinedly choosing the reduced fat EVERYTHING. There was no constant, but certain food items were more demonized than others. To whit, I still feel guilty as a 38-year-old adult looking at sugar cereals in the grocery store. I feel like she knows. And she doesn’t like it.

Reduced fat Jif, by the way, is like a thick, congealed, freakish science experiment that’s gone wrong: the sugar and the peanuts stopped emulsifying at the exact moment when they were destined to be at their most disgusting states, and just before it all hardened up, someone stirred in a healthy dollop of earwax. Sorry for that.

I just want to be clear that regular Jif is excellent (and the only peanut butter to use in baking). I like the Crunchy Jif too, but if we are going with the maximum awesome for crunchy peanut butters, I err on the side of Skippy Extra Crunchy, because: yes. If you want to know about natural peanut butters, I will always pick crunchy natural peanut butter, and it’s got to be Crazy Richard’s or Teddy for me. When they add salt to natural peanut butter, it’s a food crime. Come at me.

You begin to see that my relationship with peanut butter is not unlike a great romance (or a Shakespearean comedy where I am Falstaff, but with peanut butter instead of spirits), fraught with ups and downs. Allow me to complicate it a little more:

Every time I pull out a butter knife and use it to slowly and carefully spread whatever type of peanut butter I happen to want at that moment on whatever type of bread I happen to have at that moment, carefully…out to the edges…I think of my father, not my mother. Why? You want to know why. I just wasted a shitload of your time on a peanut butter soliloquy that orbited my mother’s decades-long audit of a nut butter, not discussing the fact that my dad is an actual asshole who ruined peanut butter sandwiches for me over the course of perhaps 27 years of my life.

Here is the plain truth: for all of my mother’s food obsessions, reduced fat Snackwell cookies one day and Saralee pound cake, Mrs. Richardson’s fudge sauce, and vanilla ice cream the next, the confusion she created only manifested with food items, not with WHO I WAS or WHAT I LOOKED LIKE. My father used food as a weapon to shame me into whatever it was he thought I should be (I still don’t know what that is, by the way). My confusion is compounded because I couldn’t deny my paternal genes if I wanted to: we are all short, thick, and would have made excellent peasants back in the dark ages. What I’m saying none too bluntly is that not a one of us are pulling any awards for shapely figures or gorgeous looks. Middle of the road in all ways physical.

My parents divorced when I was three and my father had custody every other weekend (I was not a fan of this). He eventually remarried, conveniently, the weekend before my mother got remarried, in the same month of the same year. Every other weekend, my father and stepmother would deride and scold me for what I ordered if we went out to dinner; they would stare at every bite I took, and control the food in the house so I never ate without them knowing what and how much. My stepsister was tall and thin, whereas I am rather shaped like a frostycone, so I suspect that she did not have the same rules imposed on her when I was not around. I would ask for snacks and they would say no. They did everything but lock the pantry. We were allowed dinner on Friday night and then one lunch item on Saturday before dinner. I was restricted. My stepsister ate what she wanted, when she wanted, and would quietly slip away from time to time. We know why.

My mother bought me a super heinously ugly sweater at The Gap once when I was in eighth grade. It was thick and bulky, sprinkled with white and green pine trees and white horizontal stripes over a light gray background. If I’m honest, it was not real on-brand for The Gap, I am still shocked to this day that they sold such a shitbird design in their stores, so naturally I hated the shapeless wonder and refused to wear it until my mother guilted me into it (precisely twice). The second time I wore the sweater was the last time. It was a Sunday afternoon and almost time for my father to bring me home, which put me in a good mood. He and I ran into one another in the living room when I came downstairs for a drink of water. He hadn’t seen me yet that day, and I will qualify the WTF-ness of not having seen him all day by telling you that before he got remarried, the public library in town spent more time with me than he did. He and my stepmother did whatever they did downstairs (their bedroom and office were on the first floor) while my stepsister and I watched TV upstairs in her bedroom. My father’s face immediately flashed in anger and he grabbed the sleeve of my sweater, “What is this shit you’re wearing? Why do you always look so bad? Why can’t you ever wear clothes that LOOK GOOD?”

I just stared at him, gobsmacked, feeling much like a tennis ball that just got walloped by a Williams sister. Strangely, the first thing I wanted to say to defend myself was, “She bought it at The Gap, isn’t that good enough for you?”

Yeah kid, the class issues are the real heart of the issue here.

I never ate peanut butter sandwiches at my father’s house, even though they always had Old Pride wheat bread and Jif Creamy peanut butter. I remember because I saw my father make a peanut butter sandwich once. It was Saturday, between lunch and dinner. I was standing in the kitchen and my father pulled out the yellow plastic bag of Old Pride- the nutty wheat smell breezed out, little flecks of grain sewn into a soft pillow ready for its fate as a sandwich. The lid unscrewed from the Jif quietly and that immediate, powerful smell of peanut butter hit my hungry stomach. My father swirled the peanut butter across the bread, an inch thick. It seemed unthinkable to me and my eyes grew wide. An inch thick. Even when peanut butter was not on the bad list at my mother’s house, it was meant to be used sparingly; I never had full autonomy free from guilt when I made my peanut butter sandwiches. An inch thick. I think my father noticed my face because he hastily layered the top piece of bread on his completed sandwich and gave me a look that was half angry, half embarrassed before removing all traces of food and walking down the hall to his office. An inch thick. I will never forget it. I can still see the countertop, the bread, all that peanut butter- not for me. Made by someone who did nothing but diminish me in ways I still can’t reconcile.

I wish I could make a peanut butter sandwich without thinking of him, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying them. Luckily, he is only linked to the creation of the sandwich and not the relishing of its taste, texture, and smell. It’s these weird, nuanced moments that show me where he broke me. But there are strange, funny things I associate with my father as well. He calls long toenails “lunch hooks” and I will never know why, but it makes me laugh. He taught me the ideal way (in my opinion) to eat a muffin: slice it in half horizontally and butter the inside of each half. I still say, “Don’t let it get away from you” about staying on top of tasks and that is purely my father. I’m militant about notifying people when I receive things from them in the mail, because he told me it’s the right thing to do, AND IT IS. When he laughs, it’s rare, but it’s a deep belly laugh, and it’s nice because he only does that when it’s true. My father is not a sympathy laugher, he’s not here to make you feel good about anything. He’s worked hard to educate himself and gain upward mobility in his jobs, but he’s also been an asshole to a lot of people in his personal life. I just know he is not allowed to be an asshole about my motherfucking peanut butter sandwiches anymore.

Update 4/15/20: I haven’t thought about my father while making a peanut butter sandwich since I first wrote this. I’ll take the win.

[operawindow9-blog]

What’s missing from our list of 2018’s best TV?

As we wind down 2018, our best-of coverage continues with the following question:

What’s missing from our list of the year’s best TV?

Kyle Fowle

There’s hardly reason to argue with almost any year-end list these days because of the sheer number of good TV shows out there, but I’m genuinely surprised that HBO’s High Maintenance didn’t make our list. The second season of the HBO run keeps with the anthology-esque spirit of the show, but it goes deeper in ways surprising and touching. So, there’s still the random characters that populate New York and The Guy’s life, but what’s different this time around is a narrative through-line involving The Guy’s ex. That character arc, one of pain and jealousy and moving on, adds so much to a season that’s already achingly honest. Add in the fact that one of the year’s best episodes—“Globo,” reckons with the election of Donald Trump, and the completely indescribable feeling of moving through the world on the morning of November 9, 2016 in a smart, poignant, and stirring way—and you have a season of TV that’s more than worthy of any year-end list.

Myles McNutt

It’s difficult for an established reality show to make it into a best of TV list: Beyond the fact that critical conversation privileges scripted programming, reality shows are built on iteration, and that feels less novel or memorable when we reach the list-making time of year. And I’m part of this problem, because I failed to put CBS’ Survivor on my own list despite the fact that its fall cycle has been absurdly enjoyable for a show in its 37th—not a typo—season. Yes, the David Vs. Goliath theme is profoundly dumb. No, I couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened during the season that aired in the spring, so 2018 wasn’t all great for the series. But something about the alchemy of casting and game-play has created a season with a succession of satisfying twists and turns, reminding us that although we may not instinctively think of it as list worthy, a reality show 18 years into its run can still create some of television’s best drama and comedy. (I’ll never hear the name “Natalie” without laughing now.)

Eric Thurm

Making reality TV really pop is an artform: There are hundreds of hours of interactions to film, comb through, and precisely edit into a narrative that will make sense, delight viewers, and feel just slightly off, like humans hanging out too many years in the future to quite make sense to us. So every year, I become more and more impressed with the reigning queen of the genre: Vanderpump Rules. The sixth season is one of the show’s best; over half a decade in, Vanderpump Rules remains an examination of fame, misfired charisma, and the terrors of tenuous social status that would put any 19th century novel to shame. Whether it’s Jax Taylor maybe falling in love with his reiki master Kelsey while his relationship with Brittany Cartwright festers like an untreated sore, Stassi Schroeder’s then-boyfriend creating a new god tier of social faux pas by grossly hitting on Lisa freaking Vanderpump, or the slow-moving car crash of James Kennedy ignoring the “best friend” he was clearly sleeping with (not that anyone else cared), Vanderpump Rules remains mesmerizing. The cast of past, present, and future SUR employees are stuck with each other forever, and it’s incredible. It’s not about the pasta; it’s about dread.

Clayton Purdom

Aw, come on—am I the only person who thought Maniac was one of the year’s best? Well, apparently. Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 10-parter was far from perfect, but it aimed admirably high, wrangling spy action, elven fantasy, late-capitalist malaise, intense family dynamics, corporate psychotherapy and more into a freewheeling caper across several levels of reality. It also got career-best comedic performances out of Emma Stone and Justin Theroux and a fine, sad-sack turn from Jonah Hill. And Ben Sinclair! Not all of its ideas stuck, but it was messy, smart, and light in a way I’d love to see more sci-fi attempt.

Dennis Perkins

I’ll admit, I was worried going into the new, Mary Berry-less (not to mention Mel- and Sue-less), Great British Baking Show era, but I am pleased as rum baba to say that this enduringly endearing and delightfully stressful baking competition series has marched on just as sweetly. Sure, there’s a lingering bitter aftertaste to the great British baking show schism that led to those departures, but not on the Great British Baking Show itself, which rides remaining judge Paul Hollywood’s gruff charms alongside new judging partner Prue Leith and celebrity goofballs Noel Fielding and Sandi Toksvig without missing a trick. The key ingredient to this series’ success has always been the utterly generous heart that goes into every episode, and Fielding and Toksvig, if anything, seem more emotionally invested in the fates of the contestants they have to expel, one-by-one, from the show’s famous tent. And if Hollywood and Leith continue the necessarily merciless judging of soggy bottoms, overworked and under-proved doughs, and the occasional collapsing confectionary disaster, they, too, provide warmly constructive criticism rather than the traditional reality show scorn. A series—as the departed Berry was wont to say—“cram-jammed” with delights, The Great British Baking Show remains one of the most cozily exciting TV experiences going. [Dennis Perkins]

Alex McLevy

Maybe it’s the curse of distance that comes from being released way back in January, or maybe it’s simply a victim of the era of Too Much TV, but I’m bummed out to find the Steven Soderbergh-helmed Mosaic failed to crack our top 25. The miniseries is everything you could want in superlative television: a sharply nuanced and well-written mystery, performed by a coterie of uniformly strong actors at the top of their game (longtime character actor Devin Ratray deserves to be getting award nominations for his star turn), and an ace director brilliantly shooting and editing the whole thing into an intriguing puzzle? It’s the one thing I have felt comfortable recommending to anyone all year long who’s asked me what great show they should check out, regardless of individual tastes, and sadly, not a single person to date has responded with, “I’ve already seen it.” (Feel free to ignore the accompanying multimedia app as an experimental lark on Soderbergh’s part.) You’d think an HBO series from an Oscar-winning director wouldn’t need underdog-status championing, and yet here we are. Give it a watch if you haven’t yet—and odds are, you haven’t.

Caroline Siede

Come on you guys, Netflix’s Queer Eye gave us two full seasons and a special in 2018, and we couldn’t even give it a spot on our list?! I get that it can be hard to stump for reality TV when there’s so much great scripted stuff out there, but Queer Eye at least deserves a special award for being one of the most unexpected joys of 2018. The new Fab Five offered an updated spin on the early ’00s Bravo original, emphasizing self-empowerment, confidence, and empathy along with styling tips and home makeovers. Karamo used his vague “culture and lifestyle” assignment to deliver some really thoughtful therapy sessions, Tan invented a whole new way to wear shirts, Jonathan established himself as an instant icon, Antoni put avocado on stuff, and Bobby did five times as much work as everyone else while getting barely any credit for it. Whether we were bonding over tear-jerking transformations or mocking Antoni’s complete inability to cook, Queer Eye was the rare cultural unifier based on something lovely and uplifting, rather than dark and depressing. I’m guessing we’re still going to need that in 2019, so it’s a good thing the show has a third season on the way. Until then, I’ll just be rewatching A.J.’s episode on a loop.

Lisa Weidenfeld

I watched and loved a lot of TV this year, but it’s possible Wynonna Earp is the show I looked forward to the most, and also the one I wish I was seeing on more best-of lists this December. It’s a Western, a procedural, a Buffy descendant, a horror comedy, and probably a few other things as well. But mostly it’s fun. Its wildly entertaining third season was the strongest yet, and featured a potato-licking mystery, a Christmas tree topper made out of tampons, and one of TV’s sweetest ongoing romances—the usual stuff of great drama. The show’s mythology keeps expanding into an ever larger battle between forces far more powerful than its scrappy team of heroes, but it’s the writing and character work that make the show shine. Wynonna may be tough and merciless in her pursuit of victory, but it’s her sense of humor that keeps her human and compelling, and the bond between her and sister Waverly has provided a grounding emotional force on a show with an increasingly complex central plot. There just aren’t enough shows on TV that would work a Plan B joke into their heist sequence.

Vikram Murthi

Even correcting for James Franco’s involvement, which might put people off for legitimate reasons, it blows me away that The Deuce didn’t crack AVC’s main list. David Simon and George Pelecanos’ bird’s-eye view of the inception and proliferation of the sex industry in the United States represents some of the most mature, compelling television of the year. Simon’s detail-oriented, process-focused approach comes alive when examining a side of American culture that functions as a metaphor for everything: gentrification, the rise of cultural conservatism, urban renewal, late capitalism, and, most potently, the filmmaking process. This season, Simon and Pelecanos pushed their subjects toward broader freedoms that quickly revealed themselves to be traps in disguise. Not only does all social progress come with a price, but also it’s limited to those pre-approved by those controlling the purse strings. Yet, Simon and Pelecanos never forget that the tapestry of human experience is neither exclusively tragic nor comprehensively optimistic. Some people discover happiness, and others lose their way. Rising and falling in America has always been a permanent state because social environments and political context circumscribe life-or-death choices. It’s been a decade since The Wire ended, but its worldview lives on through Simon’s successive work: everything’s connected, follow the money, and bad institutions fail good people every damn day.

Danette Chavez

Although the show’s title addresses a certain demographic, Dear White People has so much to say beyond calling out the oblivious and privileged. Yes, Justin Simien’s adaptation of his 2014 film of the same name wears its politics on its sleeve, but they’re right next to its heart. The show is much more a winning coming-of-age dramedy than it is a polemic, and even then, it’s still miles ahead of most college-set series in both style and substance. Simien’s created his own visual language to capture both the intimacy of the relationships among the core cast, as well as the microscope they’re under as black students at an Ivy League school. And I really cannot say enough about the dialogue, which crackles and informs. Season one had such a moving coming-out storyline, made all the more so by DeRon Horton’s vulnerable performance; the new season follows Lionel’s adventures in dating and dorm sex, with hilarious and poignant results. Really, the whole cast should be commended, from Logan Browning, who provides a wonderfully complex center as Sam, to Antoinette Robertson, who may have given the series’ best performance in season two’s “Chapter IV.” Dear White People still makes a point of punching up—at racist and sexist institutions, tangible and otherwise—but many of its most extraordinary moments have come from characters like Sam, Gabe (John Patrick Amedori), and Reggie (Marque Richardson) recognizing their personal foibles. Thankfully, Netflix has already renewed Dear White People for a third season, giving you all a chance to get it together.

Gwen Ihnat

The odd Amazon sitcom Forever had a lot to say about the monotony of monogamy and marriage: Can you really stay with someone happily for the rest of your life? (Or afterlife, as the case may be.) With anyone but Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph cast as that main couple, Forever might have slowly slid into bland drudgery. But the two gifted comic actors injected a lot of life into the monogamy question, aided by a spirited supporting cast including Catherine Keener, Julia Ormond, and Noah Robbins. Sure, there are some days when you want to talk to anyone but that person sitting across from you at the breakfast table. But who else would discuss with you, ad nauseam, banal topics like the perfect way to spend a half-hour, or the best way to sit in a chair? The standalone episode “Andre And Sarah” makes achingly clear how much finding (or not finding) that person who makes you shine steers the path your life will eventually take, all in a mere 35 minutes.

Allison Shoemaker

While I’d love to praise one of the many things that aired this year that I’m sure to revisit in future—someone else is going to mention Wanderlust, Salt Fat Acid Heat, and the dazzling Jesus Christ Superstar Live In Concert, right?—I feel compelled to bring up a program I’m almost certain I’ll never watch again. It’s unlikely that when HBO snapped up The Tale at Sundance this year, the network was thinking of the benefits of the pause button. Yet it’s a benefit all the same. The debut narrative feature from documentarian Jennifer Fox follows a fictionalized version of the director (played by Laura Dern) as she re-examines a traumatic childhood experience she’d filed away in her mind as loving and consensual, managing to be both gentle and almost unbearably upsetting all at once. Dern’s simple, seemingly relaxed performance belies the nightmare which fuels it, and that pause button may prove invaluable to some—it certainly was for me. The Tale is a film which seems to demand that you witness, rather than merely watch it. Should you need to walk away for a minute, it’ll keep.

Noel Murray

I know, I know: At least once or twice a year someone tells you about some cool animated series you should be watching, and talks about how trippy and ambitious and strangely deep it is. But guys, trust me: You need to catch up on Cartoon Network’s Summer Camp Island. Only half of season one has aired so far (20 10-minute episodes, mostly non-serialized), with the rest of the first batch reportedly set to debut before the end of the year. It’s a show parents can watch with grade-school-aged kids or on their own—a treat for animation buffs, and for anyone who enjoys a the kind of surrealism that’s more adorable than upsetting. With its snooty teen witches, dorky monsters, and never-ending parade of anthropomorphic clothes, toys, plants, and foodstuffs, Summer Camp Island is like a weird old Disney cartoon crossed with an ’80s teensploitation picture. And it is glorious.

A.A. Dowd

Mike Flanagan is a Stephen King guy. You could guess that from his adaptation of Gerald’s Game and from the news that he’s doing King’s Shining sequel Doctor Sleep next. Or you could just watch his work and marvel at how plainly influenced it is by the author’s, at how well it captures that signature King touch—the division of perspective among multiple characters, the interest in history and trauma, the graceful juggling of timelines. There’s much more King than Shirley Jackson in Flanagan Netflix take on The Haunting Of Hill House. The miniseries didn’t scare me as much as it seemed to scare a lot of my friends and colleagues—while well-executed, its jolts were mostly of the familiar James Wan spirits-slithering-up-walls variety. But I loved the intricacy of the storytelling, the way Flanagan moved fluidly from the childhood scenes to the adulthood ones and back again, mapping the entwined lives of these damaged siblings to suggest the way that our past and present remain in constant conversation. (It’s memories, of course, that are really haunting the Crain family.) In the end, I found Haunting Of Hill House a better, more spiritually faithful adaptation of It than the real one from last year. Guess that makes me a Mike Flanagan guy.

Erik Adams

The contents of The Big List demonstrate that it’s a great time for television comedy of all stripes: Animated, musical, workplace, detail-oriented genre parody, surrealist examination of the agony and ecstasy of existence. And while I would’ve liked to have seen some notice for the humble charms of NBC’s Superstore or a nod to that episode of Joe Pera Talks With You where Joe hears “Baba O’Riley” for the first time, I’m surprised that we didn’t heap more praise on another Michigan-set cable show co-starring Conner O’Malley. Like Myles with Survivor, I’m willing to accept that I’m part of the problem: Detroiters didn’t make my ballot’s final cut, despite all the hearty laughs, shoddily produced TV commercials, and General Getdown dance routines (“He’s a general—he’s the best”) the Comedy Central series gave me this year. Sam Richardson and Tim Robinson’s love letter to their shared hometown will always be powered by the stars’ explosively silly onscreen connection, but season two did some stellar work at fleshing out their characters as individuals, whether it was Sam reuniting with an ex to record a sultry grocery-store jingle or Tim (loudly) grappling with the family legacy of Cramblin Duvet Advertising. If nothing else, these episodes proved that when it comes to comedic news anchors, sometimes the inspiration for Ron Burgundy outstrips the legend himself.

Source: https://tv.avclub.com/what-s-missing-from-our-list-of-2018-s-best-tv-1830979080