Hey, what are you watching?

When I think of some of the best conversations I’ve ever had, none of them were on Twitter. For that matter, none of them were at film screenings or festivals, either, where I often end up feeling somehow wounded by the abrupt, detached reactions my seatmates blurt out the moment the lights go up. No, the best conversations I’ve had have almost always been in places populated by people who don’t think of movies as business. At bars and dinner parties, at sleepovers and in classrooms, and, believe it or not, in the break room.

People get into film and TV criticism for a lot of reasons, but there’s only ever been one for me: I love talking about this stuff. I love asking people to tell me about the stories that move them, or watching them light up as they pinpoint their opinion on a movie or series we’ve been trying to parse through together. I love explaining why a story matters to me, and I love helping someone else find stories that might matter to them, too. That’s why, for nearly five years of my life, I loved clocking out for lunch from my day job as a receptionist, stepping into the cramped back room that doubled as a break room, and either asking or being asked the one question that I’m convinced will never, ever get old: “Hey, what are you watching?”

I hope that this Substack, which has been on my mind in some form or another for over a year now, will serve as an extension of those great conversations. Like all the best chats, it will almost certainly get off track sometimes. I neither plan nor hope for it to focus solely on pop culture, although it surely will include reviews, recommendations, and musings on the media landscape, informed by my now ten-year-old career as an entertainment critic, essayist, and news writer. But since this is my own space, I intend to let the conversation wander: to the personal, political, poetic, or whatever else feels right.

Just as every great break room conversation circles back to that one question, though, so will I. At this point, when I visit my friends in the Bay Area after moving to Los Angeles last fall, the inquiry feels like a love language in itself: we often skip “How are you?” and go straight to “What have you been watching?” I’m eager to tell you about what I’ve been watching and hope you’ll enjoy hearing about it. I also hope you’ll take the question in the title as I intend it: as an open and continuous invitation to tell me what you’re watching, and how you feel about it.

Finally, there’s no way to open up this new chapter without acknowledging someone who loved to ask me my favorite question, and who can’t anymore. I spent a lot of hours in my old break room with my friend Darlene, and she asked me what I was watching nearly every day, knowing I sped through so much TV that the answer would always be different. She was also one of the only people I knew in my day-to-day life who asked more than a few times to read my work, and who I actually felt comfortable sharing it with. She was a lot of special things to a lot of people.

I miss you, Darlene. I still think about the shows I told you I’d catch up on so we could talk about them – the ones I never got to watch in time. I’ve seen them all now. I thought the new Perry Mason was interesting and creepy, but it sometimes felt too self-serious. Tatiana Maslany was fun, though, right? Also, sorry, but I thought The Flight Attendant was really ridiculous.

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Thank you to everyone who’s read this far, and to everyone who reads further. You know I have to ask now, for the first time but not the last: what have you been watching?