 with Kevin Fallon Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture.
This Week:
I'm Very Onboard With The Flight Attendant The Flight Attendant begins relatably...ish.
It's that thing most people have experienced at least once or twice or 47 times in our lives, where you have a blissful night out that's so euphoric you keep throwing back another drink, then "just one more," and next thing you know it's morning an you sit awake in a jolt, absolutely confused.
After you gather your bearings, you're either like, "Phew…" because things are fine or, "Yikes..." because you have a sudden flash of what happened. But, you know, at least you didn't wake up next to a man whose throat was slashed while at a hotel in Bangkok.
It is extreme binge season, in every sense of that phrase. It is the holidays! Hello food and booze and seasonal depression dressed up with a bit of pandemic anxiety and doom. It is also peak time for watching endless hours of television. It's starting to get colder. It's dark outside and in our hearts at, like, 4 pm now. Too many idiots couldn't wear a piece of fabric on their faces or skip a party for a few months so now we're all going to be trapped inside again. And so...TV!
Our best friend, television, as if it knew we would need it now more than ever, is rescuing our will to live with a run of buzzy, diverting, and, in almost every case, unexpected new options in the last few weeks. But none has hit the "I don't know if this is good, per se, and I don't really understand what's going on, but I'm really enjoying it anyway" sweet spot more squarely than The Flight Attendant.
Big Bang Theory star—and, whatever you might think of the long-running sitcom-turned-cynic's punching bag, the show's criminally underrated secret weapon—Kaley Cuoco plays the titular flight attendant, who lands herself in the aforementioned mess after consuming a bathtub's worth of vodka on a steamy date with a first-class passenger who hit on her in the air (Michiel Huisman).
She is, understandably, horrified to discover that she had spent the night post-coital next to a man who had been very clearly murdered and is covered in blood, and she has no recollection of what happened. More, there's the rapid realization that it very much looks like she, the person who woke up next to him in the morning, did it.
In a panic, she calls her confused best friend and lawyer, Annie (a perfect Zosia Mamet), and asks a few hysterical questions about Amanda Knox and Thai extradition laws, then cleans up the crime scene and flees. It's 2020, so no one can just wipe up a little blood and sneak out of a dead man's hotel room unnoticed, so of course she lands on the FBI's suspect list immediately.
The series is refreshingly goofy, but colored with a melancholy that makes it richer than purely escapist trash TV. It's about grief, paranoia, alcoholism, self-sabotage, and the delusion that things are OK. It's about announcing things like "what's wrong with being messy?" and desperately hoping someone will validate you. It's somewhat of a ghost romance (???), which is to say it's also kind of trashy and soapy in a silly way, a fragile and sudsy balancing act that Cuoco nails.
Comparisons are inevitable to the other recent twisty murder mystery that tickled the zeigest, HBO's The Undoing. So imagine that series, but if Nicole Kidman had downed nips of Tito's as a coping mechanism instead of going on inexplicable miles-long midnight walks. Oh, and if the show actually knew what it was.
It's a confidence in tone that makes The Flight Attendant work, whereas The Undoing culminated in a social media laughing stock for its ludicrous finale.
Both Cuoco's Cassie and Kidman's Grace are their own gravediggers, making an already compromising situation worse for themselves. But they're also...zombies? This is an inelegant metaphor, but what I'm saying is that they have a tendency to get themselves into more trouble with law enforcement but somehow, in spite of themselves, triumph out.  It takes more than one episode for the series to really take flight, pardon the pun—actually, don't. I stand by it. But it's interesting that HBO Max didn't release the entire season at once. The first three episodes came out last week, with two more that just premiered.
While "bingeing" has become the industry buzzword, the weekly rollout that has proven especially successful in the pandemic in generating slowburn interest—and then keeping it—in series like Amazon's The Boys, Disney+'s The Mandalorian, Hulu's Little Fires Everywhere, Netflix's The Great British Baking Show, and HBO's aforementioned The Undoing.
It's been funny—which in this case is a euphemism for "exasperating"—to see the last weeks of good TV be accessorized by circuitous discourse about what good TV is, or should be.
Is Amazon's transcendent Small Axe a TV series or a movie series? Is The Undoing prestige or trash TV? Is The Crown documentary or fiction? (The extent to which that last one, especially, reeks as if stupidity had been left in a vat of raw meat baking in the sun for three days, is really sending me.)
How Is Saved By the Bell This Funny? Peacock's Saved By the Bell is so much smarter than it has any right to be. It's to the point that about midway through watching the first episode, I wanted to stare into the camera I sometimes like to think is recording my life as a television series, call a timeout, and directly address the audience Zack Morris-style, asking, "Is this for real?"  Like a true American, I spent the week of Thanksgiving just watching endless television, eager to recommend the best of the glut of new options that either came out in the last few weeks or arrived onto my radar. I was not expecting the Saved By the Bell reboot to maybe be the best of them.
There's an undeniable creative virus plaguing Hollywood, mutated by the rise of competing streaming services that's led to an unprecedented spike in reboots, revivals, reimaginations, and other such maladies of originality. For all the attention they receive, good or bad, their half-lives are surprisingly bleak.
Most never live past the initial interest in bringing back the nostalgic property, or are quickly exposed as having little justification for existing past whatever cute gimmicks are written in the first few episodes to explain how and why it's back.
 It's mastered the thing where a reboot like this needs to merely glance at the original work—a wink can be seismic when it comes to nostalgia—before establishing its own identity. The new Saved By the Bell feels fresh and modern. There are levels of metaness when it comes not just to the returning cast members (Mario Lopez, Elizabeth Berkeley, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and Tiffani Amber-Thiessen are all back) but to the ways in which the original SBTB created a mold that the new one sets out to explode.
It's diverse and irreverent. It's shrewd to make Haskiri Velazquez the new Zack Morris, as she's maybe the most watchable of the new leading ladies on 2020 TV. And Josie Totah, playing basically a teenage Jenna Maroney, is a S-T-A-R.  But the most important thing is that the new Saved By the Bell's got jokes. Really great, sharp, pop-culture-layered jokes. 
The Best Performance on TV Right Now Watching I Hate Suzie was like having a nervous breakdown as an appetizer to a panic attack after cringing your way through a near-fatal case of second-hand mortification. The only way to get through it is to watch the entire series in one sitting, which you are somehow physically compelled to do the second you press play. It's like some sort of contract you didn't know you signed, but it's binding.
 It's 2020, so it's not necessarily that that blows things up for her. There are people orbiting her life working intensely to navigate the newly charted waters of revenge porn and privacy attacks, putting the violation in perspective and helping her through it. It's Suzie who can't stop making things worse, putting her foot in her mouth so many times that at one point in the series she literally has to buy more shoes to do it.
Piper is so good at making you squirm that I wonder if people aren't going to realize what a complicated performance she's giving. She's owed accolades. Pop a Xanax, press play, and see for yourself.
How to With John Wilson After everyone I know and respect—including The Daily Beast's own Matt Wilstein—has said, "Hey, you should watch How To With John Wilson, it is truly excellent," I watched How To With John Wilson. It is truly excellent.  Each episode of the short-run HBO docuseries finds Wilson behind the camera examining the mechanisms of a seemingly innocuous New York City-centric thing—why is there so much scaffolding, how do you cover an armchair in plastic—and, at a pace that is soothing and meandering, uncovering something unexpectedly profound about the humanity that pulses at the heart of this city.
The Star of the Week Is That Lunatic Michigan Lady That not even Rudy Giuliani audibly farting during his testimony could eclipse the level of hilarity that came from the Michigan lady who seemed to arrive as Team Trump's "witness" to election fraud straight from mainlining Dollaritas at the local Applebee's speaks to just how insane the whole ordeal was. I will never get enough of watching it, or of comedians like Megan Stalter and Kylie Brakeman parodying her.
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Friday, December 4, 2020
‘The Flight Attendant’ Should Be Your Next TV Infatuation
What it's like inside one of China's detention camps
 THE BIG STORY
In a countryside idyll, China built a detention camp for Muslims. This is what it's like inside.
China's mass internment of Muslims in Xinjiang is so secretive that little is known about any single camp. Now interviews with former detainees have given us an inside look at one of them. This account of Mongolküre camp in China's Xinjiang region provides the most intimate, prisoner's-eye view of a single complex purpose-built to detain and dehumanize the people held inside.
BuzzFeed News talked to three former detainees of the camp, who spoke out about conditions despite the risk to themselves and their families. Their accounts, combined with architectural modeling, have been used to digitally reconstruct the prison.
Each detail, from the narrow walkways to the gridded factory buildings, reveals careful planning in the service of total control. There's no fresh air. Little stimulation. Only confinement, surveillance, and the constant threat of violence.
Earlier in this series: 👉 Ex-prisoners detail the horrors of China's detention camps 👉 Thousands of satellite images reveal a vast, growing infrastructure for long-term detention and incarceration in China  A rendering of the camp at Mongolküre. Alison Killing for BuzzFeed News STAYING ON TOP OF THIS
Rural doctors and nurses are treating COVID patients they know — and watching them die
As the pandemic now devastates rural America and small towns, many of which never took restrictive measures to prevent the spread of the virus during the pandemic's first wave, healthcare workers are watching people they know die. "'It's not fair. I don't want to die,'" a nurse practitioner in Jonesboro, Arkansas, said she was told by a patient she knew for years. "That's a hard thing to hear from someone that you know."
SNAPSHOTS
A tiger nearly bit a volunteer's arm off at Carole Baskin's Big Cat Rescue. The volunteer of five years, Candy Couser, was about to feed a tiger named Kimba when he grabbed her arm, Baskin said in an email to BuzzFeed News.
The busiest hurricane season on record in the Atlantic Ocean produced a whopping 30 named storms. Here are all of them.
For the first time, Twitter put a warning label on a tweet from the head of social media for India's ruling party. He uses the platform to spread rumors and lies. The label might signal Twitter is finally going to apply the same standards to the rest of the world as it does in the US.
THE FIRST TIME AS TRAGEDY, THE SECOND TIME AS FARTS
Rudy Giuliani's latest appearance was quite literally full of hot air
Giuliani's list of shambolic media appearances continues to grow. First it was the press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, then hair dye leaking down his face, and now: a lengthy, wild hearing in Lansing, Michigan, in which not one but two fart sounds could be heard as he spoke.
The hearing he led Wednesday was a bizarre string of testimony with a number of so-called witnesses who made brazen, and at times incoherent, claims of widespread voter fraud in the state that supposedly led to President Donald Trump's election defeat. The claims were baseless, and one of the witnesses delivered testimony that drew comparisons to SNL characters. It's worth a watch. BOOK 'EM, DANNO
Short links, lotsa books
We had a lot of great book coverage this week -- excerpts, author interviews, gift guides -- so here it all is! 👉 Six inspirational passages to read when you're feeling hopeless: An excerpt from Ashly Perez's Read This for Inspiration. 👉 20 photo books that brought us joy in the very exhausting year of 2020 👉 43 books for everyone on your holiday lists 👉 An interview with David Heska Wanbli Weiden, the author of BuzzFeed 👉 Book Club pick Winter Counts, on exploring a Lakota worldview through crime fiction 👉 YA author Aiden Thomas discusses how the bestselling Cemetery Boys wasn't originally supposed to be their debut, and how their identity shaped the story 👉 30+ gifts for anyone who proudly identifies as a bookworm WEEKEND LONGREADS
I'm 33 Years Old. I Got COVID-19 Eight Months Ago. I'm Still Sick. Eight months into the pandemic, at least 270,000 Americans who contracted COVID-19 have died. Millions of others recovered from the disease. And still others, like our reporter Nidhi Prakash, got sick and never got much better. "COVID-19 has forced me to re-evaluate how I think about health, work, vulnerability, and strength," she writes. "And I've wondered whether the pandemic will force our culture at large to make some reevaluations, too."
The 12 Best Episodes Of TV In 2020. From a wedding in Schitt's Creek to an out-of-this-world episode of Lovecraft Country, these are our picks for the best TV show episodes of 2020, and what makes them so special. Wishing you a fulfilling weekend, Brandon P.S. If you like this newsletter, help keep our reporting free for all. Support BuzzFeed News by becoming a member here. (Monthly memberships are available worldwide). 📝 This letter was edited and brought to you by Brandon Hardin and BuzzFeed News. You can always reach us here. BuzzFeed, Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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