This Week:
- Pamela Adlon's genius soothes me.
- The Dixie Chicks are finally back.
- I can't with rich people.
- Love Is Blind has broken me.
- The tweet that is me.
Better Things Is the Loveliest Show on TV
Sam Fox likes it when it rains in Los Angeles. It takes not even 10 seconds for you to pivot from assuming she's a psychopath for this to totally, truly getting it.
It's raining throughout many of the first few episodes of the new season of Better Things, the FX gem created by, directed by, and starring Pamela Adlon and which launched its fourth season this week. Spend some time with Adlon's Sam, her three daughters, her mother, and her constellation of L.A. friends-turned-family, and you're on board with this rain thing. It's cozy, warm, mysterious, romantic, and somehow inviting.
Even the errant leaks in the house aren't a nag, but a reminder: There is rain, metaphorical or otherwise, in life, so why be pissed about it? Why not appreciate it for the ways in which it's changed things up, maybe even made them pleasant in a new way? (That said, I'm going to be in Los Angeles later this month and if it rains while I'm there I swear to God…)
Better Things is a lovely show. It's been a lovely show since its start, through a scrutinized transition once it parted ways with co-creator and Adlon's former creative partner, Louis C.K., and now that, in season four, we're hip to its pleasure: A lot of profound nothingness.
The hard sell on Better Things has always been that it's impossible to sell Better Things. There's the nothingness of it all. Episode descriptions say things like, "Sam picks up the girls from a trip," or "Sam takes Duke to ballet and Frankie to Pinkberry," referencing two of Sam's aforementioned girls. Often those aren't even the most monumental plot events of the given episodes, because there's nothing particularly monumental happening in most episodes.
It's a show that celebrates the mundanity of life. It's so familiar, even when it's not—I am not, in fact, a single mother of three navigating parenting and my Hollywood career as an actress—in ways that feel epic, even while showing slices of life that are so small.
I sound ridiculous, I know, like they gave Marianne Williamson a TV Guide column or something. But the show, in its meticulous simplicity, is truly special.
There are some shows that make you just want to open a sleeve of Ritz crackers and enter a trance state of blissful enchantment, whisked off to this warm world so enthralling that when you look over and see that, whoops, not only is the entire sleeve of Ritz gone but so is that wedge of cheese you took out, you don't care. The calories don't count, because they were anything but empty.
(That this is my philosophy and it also happens to be my job to watch television which may or may not have something to do with the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon of none of the dress shirts in my closet buttoning anymore. Who can say.)
No show on TV is a better Ritz show than Better Things. It also happens to be a powerful tonic to settle souls that have been soured by the message sent to the universe/country/Democratic party/stubborn culture of institutional misogyny by Elizabeth Warren being forced out of the primary race.
It passes the two most important tests of any TV show I would endorse: Does Molly Shannon show up, and will I at some point be so overcome with emotion I startle myself with a yelp I didn't know was coming while very heavily crying—preferably over a gay wedding? (Mark your calendars for April 2nd, when episode six, "New Orleans," airs.)
It's rare for there to be a show where feeling isn't manufactured, yet is still palpable. It just exists.
It's in the intimacy of Sam's relationships. It's the amount of love in every frame. It's the way she embraces strangers, these fleeting connections that she doesn't like lasso into lifelong friendships, but appreciates and assesses for the ways in which they enrich her life—transiently or compoundly—and then moves on. It's the two minutes of Sam and her daughter calling each other a cunt that is somehow oh-so wholesome, and extremely gratifying.
The show is a reminder that being a family means the people around you make your life a constant living hell, but you don't really even notice the irritation. You move on to the next moment, the next day, never once thinking that these people are something to be weathered or dealt with. And maybe it rains.
Do We Even Deserve the Dixie Chicks?
When we talk about "cancel culture"—which we've done insufferably, constantly, and in circles over the last few years—we're really discussing nothing. We're debating a fallacy, a figment, a meaningless buzzword that purely exists as a piston in the think-piece engine.
Nobody we're talking about has ever been canceled. They've been criticized and called out, and sometimes professionally punished for something that some might think has been blown out of proportion or unfairly policed. But nobody's been canceled, at least not in the way we talk about it now.
The only entertainers who have ever truly been canceled are the Dixie Chicks.
The trio, single-handedly responsible for me realizing that country music wasn't all heinous, were among the biggest music acts in the world in 2003 when, at a London show, lead singer Natalie Maines denounced the Iraq War and said the group was ashamed that President George W. Bush was from Texas. Proving my inclination that country music fans at the time were pea-brained imbeciles largely out of their boot-scootin' damned minds, these people flipped the hell out.
They burned, trashed, and steamrolled over the band's CDs. Their music was blacklisted from country radio. Sentient goatee in a stetson hat, Toby Keith, started performing in front of a photoshopped picture of Maines cuddling with Saddam Hussein. Three women expressed a—turns out pretty valid!—public opinion, and these people stopped singing "Friends in Low Places" karaoke for five minutes just to go absolutely apeshit on them.
You know how people talk about how Google Images pretty much exists because of J. Lo's green Versace Grammys dress and YouTube basically came out of people desperate to see Janet Jackson's nip slip at the Super Bowl? Well internet mob culture essentially exists because people wanted to tar and feather the Dixie Chicks.
They are, to this day, the only celebrities who have ever been canceled for their opinion, a reality so haunting that Taylor Swift cited it as the reason she was too afraid to come forward with her own political thoughts and endorsements. (Though now what's the reason for your Democratic primary silence, Miss Americana, hmmmm?)
They released the 2006 album Taking the Long Way and the documentary Shut Up and Sing in response to the experience. Their Grammy Awards performance of "Not Ready That Nice" that year was one of the most powerful musical moments I can remember, even trumping my fire-throated belting of the song in my Toyota Corolla driving home one night from the seafood restaurant where I worked summers in college after yet another fight with that trash nightmare of a bully waitress, Amy.
ANYWAY! The reason for recounting all this is the glorious occasion of the group's first new music in 14 years, the new single "Gaslighter" off of their upcoming album of the same name. It is so good. It is as if the spirit of me sitting on my couch watching a YouTube video and screaming "Yaasss!" at the topic of my lungs was an actual song. (Have I painted a clear enough picture of how I first watched this music video?)
The title is pointed, a reference to another buzzword of the moment—only, unlike "cancel culture," this one is very real. "Gaslighting" is a popular way of referring to a practice employed by people in power positions who manipulate someone into questioning their sanity or believing things that aren't true, i.e. the viral essay, "Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America."
"Gaslighter" isn't explicitly political, outside of the suggestion of its title and its message of militant women seizing revenge against the shitty men who have it coming to them—which is to say it is entirely political. Listen more closely to the lyrics, and it also becomes clear how personally inspired the song is by Maines' tumultuous divorce from ex-husband, actor Adrian Pasdar.
This is a lot of think-piecing to say that the song is effing good and the line "You made your bed, and then your bed caught fire" deserves a Pulitzer.
There is a New York Times article that came out this week detailing how (incredibly rich) investors and clients of facial recognition start-up Clearview use the app and it's technology. Would you BELIEVE that it is to creepily spy on people in public?
Here is the story's lede:
One Tuesday night in October 2018, John Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes grocery store chain, was having dinner at Cipriani, an upscale Italian restaurant in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood, when his daughter, Andrea, walked in. She was on a date with a man Mr. Catsimatidis didn't recognize. After the couple sat down at another table, Mr. Catsimatidis asked a waiter to go over and take a photo.
Mr. Catsimatidis then uploaded the picture to a facial recognition app, Clearview AI, on his phone. The start-up behind the app has a database of billions of photos, scraped from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Within seconds, Mr. Catsimatidis was viewing a collection of photos of the mystery man, along with the web addresses where they appeared: His daughter's date was a venture capitalist from San Francisco.
If I was allowed to touch my face, I'd be face-palming my forehead. I have nothing to say. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, RICH PEOPLE??? OK, now I have nothing more to say.
Love Is Blind Has Broken Me
It cannot be stressed enough that this show is very bad. It is horrifically produced, unforgivably paced, preposterous in concept, and cast with people who couldn't more glaringly be performing for the cameras. And yet I couldn't stop watching it. I wrote many words about why that was earlier this week—give daddy his page views—ahead of the reunion special that debuted on Thursday.
I know everyone has their favorites and villains and whatever; the show is too terrible for me to really want to debate who is which. But the fact of the matter is that, especially after this reunion, I can't stop thinking about Jessica. I think I love her and I am terrified about what that says about me.
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