What I'm Watching: Shogun, Girls5eva, The Program, and More

Plus: a Film Twitter favorite, a Guillermo del Toro creature feature, a Spielberg deep cut, a Pulitzer-winning podcast, and the Dune popcorn bucket.

Here’s a not-so-quick rundown on everything I’ve watched, read, and written about in the past two weeks:

The shows:

• It never ceases to amaze me that the natural comedic successor to 30 Rock – zany girl group comeback series Girls5eva – is three seasons deep and yet barely anyone I know (who isn't a TV critic) talks about it. Luckily, the show’s move to Netflix should help get some eyes on it, and season 3 deserves a lot of love. While the sophomore season kept the group (an inspired and ridiculous ensemble that includes Hamilton star Renee Elise Goldsberry, singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, comedy writer Paula Pell, and actress Busy Philipps) in a bit of a holding pattern, the new batch of episodes is a smart and satirical joke-a-second delight. There are too many great bits to pick a favorite, but I will say that this season includes one of the most inspired deployments of John Early as a guest star ever.
• I put on the new three-part Netflix docuseries The Program with the expectation that it would be as sensationalistic and half-assed as its clickbait subtitle (Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping) would indicate, but was instead blown away by filmmaker and “troubled teen school” survivor Katherine Kubler’s deeply personal investigation of the institution that tried to break her. It’s no secret by now that so-called disciplinary schools are basically just expensive child abuse factories (see also: the Paris Hilton doc This Is Paris), but there are still massive revelations being made in this doc, and they’re delivered with guts and tenacity aplenty by the people who lived through them. This joins Telemarkers in a subgenre of docs I have the utmost respect for: scrappy exposés made by people who feel they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by revealing the monsters behind the curtain who made their and other vulnerable peoples' lives hell years ago.
• One of my first big projects back at Slashfilm after my immigration hiatus was a ranking of the best episodic TV anthologies of all time, and while I usually make “best of” lists by spending months toiling over spreadsheets and torturing myself with hundreds of hours of TV-watching, I decided to approach this one a bit differently. Most of the list is made up of shows I already love, but I also factored in historical relevance, critical and viewer consensus, and the takes of industry colleagues and TV fans I know to build a ranking that went beyond my own initial scope. Along the way, I watched highlights from the few shows on the list that I wasn’t quite so familiar with, and (obviously, given their inclusion) loved them. I had a blast reliving some of the greatest hits of ‘90s kids mainstay Are You Afraid of the Dark? and checking out the gorgeous animation of Star Wars: Visions, but I think the show I’m now most keen to watch in its entirety is Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. The short-lived ‘80s series is an impressively wide-ranging anthology with an utterly stacked cast and directorial slate. I’ve found something to love in every episode I’ve seen so far. Now if only some streamer would suck it up and add the show to their free streaming catalog…
• I know FX’s new historical drama Shōgun is impressive, well-acted, and already has plenty of passionate fans who are ready to go to bat for it. I know it features incredible production design, arresting visuals, and (seemingly, though I'm certainly not expert enough to know) a great eye for detail when it comes to portraying feudal Japan. This is all true, and yet I also know that the best reviews of Shōgun that I’ve seen so far are the tweets about how the lead sounds like he’s doing a bad Tom Hardy voice and how, as Paste’s Jacob Oller puts it, “Everybody in Shōgun talks like they’re a marine hyping up Master Chief.” The show (which is based on a book by a British-Australian writer) centers its one raggedy, unimpressive white guy hero far too much for my liking – especially when there’s so much else worth paying attention to in the world it swiftly established in its very first episode.

The movies:

• Someone finally did the right thing and forced me to watch Shane Black’s The Nice Guys recently, and I’m better for it. The ‘70s-set neo-noir comedy led by Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe may have been a tad overhyped for me (an ironic side effect of me having seen tweets about how the film is underrated pretty much every day since it came out), but it’s a rich and ridiculous comedic text anchored by two performances that get funnier every time you think about them. And yes, it’s bonkers that there’s no sequel.
• Guillermo del Toro’s sophomore feature, 1997’s Mimic, made for a perfect rainy-night watch this week. The movie isn’t deep – it has none of the heart-expanding (and wrenching) emotion of del Toro’s later works – but it’s a lot of fun, and the filmmaker’s eye for the cinematic is already fully developed. On all levels except literal, this cockroach-monster horror flick is basically the best-looking SyFy Channel original movie you’ve ever seen.
• The team behind Sony’s Spider-Verse movies released a short film for charity this week. It’s called The Spider Within, and while I think it’s a bit too brief to hammer its central point home, it’s still beautiful and surprisingly terrifying.

The reads:

• I’ve gone full English Lit. nerd once again, this time after discovering a classics read-a-long and lecture series Patreon called Hardcore Literature Book Club. I just stocked up on every book on the club’s reading list and kicked things off with Othello, a Shakespearean masterpiece I never managed to read in school. After getting into the swing of reading the Bard again (and pre-gaming with a bad graphic novel adaptation that awkwardly cut out all the racism), I ended up loving Othello more than the vast majority of the other dozen-ish Billy Shakes plays I’ve read. I’ll save my lengthier analysis for the Patreon message boards, but suffice it to say I was surprisingly touched by this story, which I interpreted as largely a tragedy about social and cultural expectations for women and people of color. Also, I like that Iago really just is that bitch.
• I’ve also been catching up on multiple versions of the Dead Boy Detectives comics ahead of the upcoming Netflix series’ release, in hopes of figuring out which I like best. So far I think I’m enjoying the 2014 Toby Litt interpretation of the story about boarding school boys (who are also ghosts, duh) investigating supernatural crimes more than Pornsak Pichetshote’s grittier LA-set 2023 run, but I still have to read some one-offs and revisit the original Dead Boys – who were invented by Neil Gaiman as part of The Sandman Universe – before I give my final verdict.
• Did you know that Scotland has a poet laureate who’s given the title Makar (an old Scots word for bard), and that the country only started officially appointing Makars in 2004? I wanted to check out some work from the current Makar, so I read Kathleen Jamie’s collection The Bonniest Companie. Jamie’s image poems about nature just aren’t really my thing, but any time a human being enters her prose – as in poems like “Ben Lomond” and “The Missing” – it becomes fraught with a strong, stunning brew of emotion that often doesn’t require full context. Still, the book’s context is itself interesting: Jamie wrote one poem a week in 2014, the year of Scotland’s failed independence referendum.
• On the journalism side of things, I’ve been enraptured by all the great and clear-eyed writing coming out about Civil War, Alex Garland’s intense new film which has already proven extremely divisive ahead of its release. I haven’t seen Civil War yet, but I found that Katie Rife’s IndieWire review and Robert Daniels’ take for Screen Daily gave me a good sense of what I might like (or, perhaps as likely, hate) about the upcoming apocalyptic movie.
• Speaking of dystopias, this Cosmopolitan piece about kids who spent their formative years as influencers – whether they wanted to or not – was interesting and depressing.
• The new Variety cover story about the future of Star Trek made me giddy in the best, nerdiest way, especially since I’ve been worried about the impact the media company restructuring purgatory we seem to be trapped in these days will have on all the great Trek stuff in the works.

Odds and ends:

• Connie Walker’s Pulitzer-winning podcast Stolen is back for a third and final season, and this time it’s investigating missing persons cases – and some major systemic failures – within the sprawling Navajo Nation. Stolen: Trouble in Sweetwater still seems to be in the active reporting stages, which is a little nerve-wracking given how many people involved in these cases are hinting that vigilante justice could come at any time, but if anyone can handle a complicated, unnerving case like this with the care and determination it deserves, it’s Walker.
• I’m really happy with how this essay, which I wrote for IGN about the women's stories being erased from streaming, turned out. If you loved G.L.O.W., A League of Their Own, Paper Girls, or any other women-led show that’s gotten canned in the past few years, this one’s for you.
• Over at Slashfilm, I wrote a few pieces about Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, including a Game of Thrones cast cameo tracker, a piece tentatively siding with the aliens, and an essay about how the science in the show is ooey-gooey gross.
• Finally, I took a silly assignment very seriously when putting together this 3000-word ranking of ridiculous novelty popcorn buckets (yes, it has the Dune sandworm).

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