#my envision of bojack as a human

[somuchforstsg]

this is bojack by the way. horseman, obviously.

[boobtubedude]

My Top 10 Shows Of 2017

Hi. Here’s a top ten list. People like these, right? 

Close But Not Quite: GLOW, Speechless, Insecure, One Day At A Time, Brooklyn Nine-Nine 

So what’s 2017 been about? Not about TV, really. Not for me. Hasn’t been the focus. It’s been there, like it always has, but not in the same what. What was an omnipresent obsession turned into something else. It didn’t go away, but it transformed, mutated, evolved, got pushed to the back. But what stuck really stuck, not really programs but lifelines, ways to make sense of senselessness, to realize there was a point to all of this. I didn’t watch nearly as much TV as I had in recent years, but taking a step back meant everything had to count. It had to mean something. It couldn’t be a way to pass the time but a way to define how I should spend it.

10) Wynonna Earp

It was a year in which listening meant more than speaking, when shutting the fuck up was more valuable than trying to articulate anything. Mansplaining my way through this calendar year, whether consciously or inadvertently, would have been the bad way to go. So it was more about looking for blind spots, having them displayed in ways that made me rethink what it meant to be not just a critic but a citizen. Being the former without the latter just means you’re an outsider observer rather than an active participant. Supporting voices that had been screaming to be heard was more important than sharing my own. Even a list like this is probably bullshit, but that’s why I’m not really talking about the shows at all.

9) Jane The Virgin

The shows are important, obviously. They are more than just TV shows but reflections of what’s possible. You can judge shows by how closely they reflect reality and how close they envision how life SHOULD IN FACT BE. I’m not sure there’s a right or wrong way to approach the medium. I do know that shows that simply state how futile it is to do anything other than what’s in one’s own self-interest are lazy and terrible and fairly close to immoral in this stage in history. We all know that life sucks. We won’t need a show to only remind us of that. We need shows that remind us that there’s light in the darkness, that there are options, that happiness is a possibility even when we can’t see it for ourselves.

8) Chris Gethard: Career Suicide

We need to know that other people feel as terribly as we do, and that doesn’t make it freaks but rather makes us human. The idea that we have to hide those kinds of thoughts and vulnerabilities for fear of shame or ridicule cripples us more than we know, and I know this because I’m only this year realizing how long I’ve been this miserable. I chalked it up to “normal” Irish-Catholic upbringing, something that was not worthy of even discussing because relative to so many it’s so fine that it’s not worth even mentioning. And while there are obviously a lot of degrees to this, I chose to just suck it all in for the first 40+ years of my life rather than even contemplate the fact that my left foot taps incessantly for almost every moment of every day I’m awake. I’m constantly aware of how anxiety-ridden and unhappy I am. The very idea of having to go out to meet people at an event I agreed to go to stresses me out, even while being at home all the time makes me wonder why I have so few friends. I can intellectually rationalize the insanity of that contradiction, but I live it all the same. The best stuff on TV doesn’t offer a solution to any of that, but lets me know I’m not alone.

7) American Vandal 

We get stuck in routines. We get defined by what others think of us, which in turn reinforces actions that fit that description. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convince strangers online that I’m a certain type of person, and that has calcified around someone I’d both like to be and mostly hate. All writing is performative to some extent, and it doesn’t matter if I do it in 140 characters or 5,000 words, it’s all a performance to some extent. You don’t see the crusty-eyed, hairy, smelly weirdo that’s typing any of this on his phone or his laptop. You don’t know me, because I don’t want you to, even though some part of me absolutely positively wishes you did. If you ever wondered if it’s exhausting being a narcissist with crippling low-self esteem, let me tell you: It is. 

6) Twin Peaks: The Return

Nothing about this year makes any sense, which means that absurdity often reveals more than “real” life ever could. I’m a lapsed Catholic, so the idea of a God watching over everything seems peculiar, but I’ve never lost faith in the idea that there’s more than just the stuff that happens before we shuffle off our mortal coil. We’re connected to something, whatever it is, because without that connection we’re truly in an abyss. People that do the right thing should be judged differently than those that don’t, and I like the idea that the cosmos has some way of addressing that. Whether that’s through mathematics or morality, I can’t say. But we all sense there’s senselessness just around the corner, and even while that’s mighty tempting at times, there’s a fundamental need for order at the heart of existence that transcends mortgages, commuting to work, and the busyness of everyday life. That meaning is reflected on the inside of our eyelids, played across a screen that becomes impossibly vast once we go to sleep. It’s hard to literally interpret, but it’s there all the same.

5) The Good Place 

Actions have consequences. As they should. The rising fear in 2017 centered around the idea that causality had been flung into space, a vestigial element of a life that no longer existed. Actions that once had consequences no longer seemed to have any, and the entire agreement between earthly citizen had seemingly been eradicated by those for who shame had been surgically removed. We all knew things were bad, but there seemed to be no mechanism by which to compel those that didn’t feel like abiding by the normal rules of nature to do so. Once that reality set in, nothing felt real, and action after action buried the actions before those. What was strange was how…familiar everything felt, even while nothing was the same. The post-apocalyptic fantasies gave way to benign realities: We still did more or less the same things while also feeling like it mattered less than ever before, or that by doing the same thing we were perpetuating the problem. Hashtags only get you so far. Many of us marched in January but were exhausted by June. We might as well have been arguing with the tides.

4) Review 

What’s fascinating about making a bad decision, or indulging in a dark thought, can perpetuate itself and create its own logic loop from which it’s nearly impossible to escape. So people double down on a bad decision rather than admit it was one, and before long you’re so far down the wrong path that finding your way back to the main road is impossible. Mounting evidence of error yields entrenchment, resistance, and a further erosion of trust in anyone else that doesn’t march in lockstep with your worldview. At some point, objectivity turns into a quaint idea, and you can go insane so slowly that you don’t realize that you’ve been scrolling through tweets for the last ninety minutes because the onslaught of bullshit isn’t stopping but in fact picking up speed. There’s a self-perpetuating cycle with enough power to light up the entire United States but instead might just engulf it in flames. Driving off the cliff becomes preferable to looking in the rearview mirror at all you’ve lost on the way to the precipice. We’re ultimately and irrevocably alone in the bubble we’ve built for ourselves.

3) Better Things

That’s not true, but that’s how it felt for a lot of the year for many of us. I have the lottery ticket of life as a straight white American male, and if I felt this bad this year, I can’t begin to imagine a tenth of a tenth of what it was like for anyone else. That doesn’t mean I don’t have sympathy, but I can’t pretend to have empathy in a way that’s meaningful for anyone but myself to hear. The world is profoundly different than in was in 2016, but much of that change doesn’t come from something suddenly introduced so much as suddenly pushed into discussion. These aspects of life have always been here, and while it shouldn’t be a surprise to so many to hear them uttered, it is all the same. In that dissonance is opportunity: opportunity for those able to articulate what’s been under an unfortunate cloud for so long to speak out loud in voices both defiant but also hopeful. These are voices that show both an ugly truth but also a better way. These are voices that, now introduced, cannot and should never be silenced again. 

2) BoJack Horseman

Instagram is a fairly new app, but the idea of papering over one’s less-than-ideal qualities has been around for, well, forever. We collectively decide we’re not going to talk about it, and we bottle it up, and then we slowly go bald and fat. Or so I hear. I wouldn’t know anything about that, with my luscious locks and 30’’ waistline. 2017 was, for me, a year in which I realized just how corrosive that rot was within myself, how much I was talking about everything other than what was on my mind, with TV a great way to talk about “important” things without having to deal with my own shit. “Of course everyone knows I’m writing about me,” I’d tell myself, usually after a few drinks, and yet I doubt anyone knew or anyone even cared to consider that option. I speak to 28,000 strangers a day on Twitter and have maybe three friends in my life. My family and I love each other and also are the primary sources of our respective problems. I have a wife that used to see me at my best and now usually sees me at my most exhausted. I didn’t see any of this as a problem because I thought I was too privileged to have problems. That doesn’t mean my problems are equal or more or less than anyone else’s. I’m not trying to lump myself in with anyone or anything. I’m just here and realizing how miserable here is and realizing it’s OK to admit that it’s not OK. I don’t know what the fuck to do with this information a month after my forty-second birthday, but it’s still something akin to a breakthrough for someone that’s really good at analyzing theme in narrative television and absolutely awful at looking at the themes that consistently undermine my attempts at anything approximating consistent happiness.

1) The Leftovers

Recently I came across a bunch of handwritten report cards from my high school that my folks saved for me. Each one said something along the lines of, “I don’t know how Ryan does all the things he does and still excels.” These were wonderful things to right and absolutely cursed me to viewing any moment of inactivity as a wasted moment on the path to death. If I wasn’t being productive in some capacity, I was throwing away a chance to maximize my life, as if life was something to be conquered rather than experienced. That message carried through into college, and into my 20s, and once writing about TV became a possibility, drove me through a decade in which I worked on average about 10-14 hours a day. When I took vacations from my day job, I took the opportunity to just do more writing, watch more screeners, do more podcasts. I was here, but I wasn’t here. Not in a meaningful way. I was an outline more than a fully fleshed-out figure. Recently, I’ve been using my weekends to do anything other than something productive. Stepping off the treadmill is antithetical to my nature, and something that I’m admittedly not comfortable doing. I spent so much time wondering what people I’ve never met thought of my writing and almost no time wondering how it’s been a year since I’ve seen cousins that live ten miles away. Television taught me a lot for the past decade, and introduced me to a host of super smart people that did more for me than they’ll ever know. But looking at that screen (and the second screen, for that matter) for this long has come at a cost: It took way too long to see it, but it’s maybe not too late to do something about it.  These shows all helped me get to this place in my life, which is why they are my top ten shows of the year.