What I'm Watching On Vacation

I'm out of office, and into The Price is Right.

I’ve been visiting family and other loved ones in America and Canada for the past two weeks. Here’s what I’ve been watching, reading, and listening to along the way:

The shows:

• I’ve been chasing the high of a lazy afternoon wasted watching cable ever since I cut the cord a full 11 years ago (if you’re doing the math, yes, that means I’m a TV critic who’s never had cable TV in their adult life). It’s nearly impossible to recapture that feeling, but I think hotel channel-surfing comes pretty close, and I’ve finally found the holy grail of fun-bad hotel TV: The Roku Channel. If you’re unfamiliar with Roku’s game, it’s a smart TV accessory in the same vein as an Amazon Fire Stick, Chromecast with Google TV, or Apple TV. I already knew about Roku before this trip – I used one for years – but I didn’t know about a newer feature it has that aggregates a ton of free, often-obscure channels into one live TV guide. Thanks to this system, over the past week I’ve fallen back in love with Robert Stack’s melodramatic docuseries Unsolved Mysteries and the geek heaven that is Antiques Roadshow. I’ve been reminded that Ghost Hunters is one of the dumbest shows on earth, and have been introduced (better late than never) to the extended beachwear ad that is Baywatch. Most importantly, though, this Roku live TV thingy has a channel that plays classic 1970s and '80s-era episode of game show The Price is Right 24 hours a day. I understand now why this show drives people to the point of obsession and beyond. There was a heat wave in Montreal this week that kept us from going out much, so I can now tell you how much a can of soup cost in 1973, and I don't want to brag, but I recently guessed the price of a silver tea set to the dollar. I promise this isn’t an ad for Roku, but I will happily hype the best thing I’ve read all week: if you missed The Price is Right's perfect bid scandal back in 2008, you’ve got to read this incredible, thrilling Esquire piece about the show's biggest controversy.
• We meant to watch Paddington the other night, but ended up getting distracted by a new release on a streamer home page, as one does. In this case, it was an engrossing, disturbing, animated-bear-free docuseries called Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown, which is on Hulu in the states and Disney+ elsewhere. One Day in Jonestown is by no means a comprehensive look at the life of cult leader Jim Jones: it skips over most of his backstory and leaves out key details of the Peoples’ Temple story, so if you know nothing about the tragedy, this three-parter isn’t the doc to start with. That being said, the series makes this editorial choice in service of its premise, which is a good one. One Day in Jonestown zooms in on the single most cataclysmic day in the cult's history, stitching the harrowing story together through firsthand interviews with survivors including journalists, defectors, a famed political aide, and one of Jones’ own sons.

The movies:

• In recent years, my favorite groupchat has made “the grandma from Dante’s Peak” both a meme and a particular bit of conversational shorthand that has never made sense to me. Since the groupchat gang is in the same place this week, we figured it’s high time I check out the movie that’s inspired so many references, and it was nothing if not a cinematic experience. In terms of story beats, the Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton-led volcanic thriller is one part Jaws, one part Jurassic Park, one part Twister, but it’s also – importantly – not good. Roger Ebert actually organized its many tropes into a numbered list for his spoiler-filled and perhaps overly-generous review of the film, an adventure thriller that I found simultaneously fun, half-baked, and comically punishing. The best part of watching Dante’s Peak – other than finally having the quintessential Millennial experience of screaming at grandma as she gets out of that damn boat – was seeing my Scottish partner, whose home is natural disaster-free, realize in belated horror that he was admiring the close-up view of several active volcanoes when we visited Washington state last week. Oops.
• I gave 1994’s Interview with the Vampire another try this week, and I’m pretty much as cool towards it now as I was a decade ago. With the phenomenal AMC series as a point of contrast, though, it’s easy to see what went right and what went wrong here. Tom Cruise’s Lestat (understandably) gets all the best lines in a script that’s otherwise uneven, and the overly-philosophical film doesn’t lean into camp as often as Anne Rice’s melodramatic story requires. It’s also led by a hollow void of a performance from Brad Pitt, though tiny Kirsten Dunst is even better than I remembered. I may never like this movie, but I at least feel confident in saying that the finely crafted TV series is better than ever – season 2’s recent flashback episode, which should not be missed, is my single favorite hour of television this year so far.
• Whatever you do, don’t (re)watch 2014’s Godzilla on a plane. The first installment of Legendary’s MonsterVerse is a weak movie anyway (go, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Everyman military guy, give us nothing!), but the lighting design is also far too dark to even be distinguishable on a seatback screen.

Odds and ends:

• I found Canadaland’s investigative podcast Thunder Bay, about a Canadian town that’s been plagued with reportedly widespread corruption and deadly anti-Indigenous violence, both illuminating and painfully grim. The podcast sands off a few of its more brutal edges for two more holistic, policy-forward follow-up series, Return to Thunder Bay and Post-Mortem, but its early episodes about hate crimes, sexual violence, and overt racism are hard-hitting, tough listens. It all adds up to a detailed look at a town that, like so many others, spent years dead-set on refusing to acknowledge its own rotting heart.
• I’ll probably be Challengers-posting all year, so forgive me for sharing Matt Zoller Seitz’s insightful, precise breakdown of Zendaya as a leading lady months after the fact.
• I’m not going to share a link to that bizarre GQ piece about an admittedly obsessive hanger-on who’s dead-set on becoming friends with writer and actress Tavi Gevinson because it’s so weird and so bad...but I do feel the need to mention that it’s both weird and bad enough to have crossed the rubicon and reached me despite my being almost entirely offline during this trip. Yikes. It’s been a long time since an essay gave me the ick like this one.

Thanks for reading this special vacation issue of Hey, What Are You Watching? I’ll be back soon, hopefully with my finger back on the pulse of some of the year’s best new releases. As always, feel free to drop me a line (in the comments below or elsewhere) to let me know what pop culture you’ve been loving, hating, or thinking too much about.