What I'm Watching: The Blackening, The Idol, Black Mirror, and More

Anjana Vasan, Paapa Essiedu, Black Mirror, Netflix

Here’s the rundown on everything I watched and wrote about this week.

The shows:

• Black Mirror is back after a four-year hiatus, and I dug this season a lot more than the majority of the two previous ones. The dystopic sci-fi show took some bold swings this time around, including going more meta than ever in its repeated criticism of Netflix (which I wrote about here) and completely switching up its genres (which I’m writing about in an upcoming piece that I’m super excited to share soon). It turns out I missed this show more than I thought, and even with some shaky parts (it doesn’t stick every landing), I like it more than I have in a long time.
• I’ve been catching up on The Witcher ahead of the third season premiere, and I think it’s a really entertaining series that offers much more than its posters full of bad wigs led me to believe. It’s much less self-serious than I anticipated, it knows just how much to let its cast smolder, and the nomadic, monster-of-the-week format makes for some great episodic adventures. Also, I’ve been singing that damn song for days now and do not show any signs of stopping.
• If you caught The Crowded Room, you might be interested in checking out the 2021 Netflix docuseries Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan, which tells the true story of the guy Tom Holland plays in the show. As I suspected, the real story is much more complicated and messy than the Apple TV+ series version. This doc commits a few popular Netflix true crime sins, but they’re more of the aesthetic than morally objectionable variety: it’s an interesting, weird watch.
• I finally checked out the controversial pop star drama The Idol, and before I even talk about it I want to give the disclaimer that a lot of people are choosing to sit this show out entirely for very good reasons. Given how much I write about watercooler TV and topics related to the show, I figured I needed to see it for myself, and I think it’s both better and worse than social media pile-ons led me to expect. On the one hand, it has an ultra-strong supporting cast and Lily-Rose Depp is giving a captivating performance. On the other, by episode 3 anything genuine it’s trying to say about fame, sex, or control seems to have gone by the wayside in favor of edgelord dialogue and an overindulgent performance by Abel Tesfaye. It may not be quite as disastrous as you’ve heard, but it’s still frustrating and stupid.
• Like millions of other people, I bowed out of The Walking Dead long before it ended. Yet I also had a morbid curiosity about the new show The Walking Dead: Dead City, which follows the absolutely bonkers pairing of Maggie and Negan on a New York-set mission. Though I will admit the show improves a little as it goes on, I did write about how this week’s premiere tries every trick in the book to make us empathize with the man who was once TWD’s most-loathed villain, and ultimately just comes across as looking desperate.

The movies:

• I filled in a major horror blind spot this week by watching the controversial 1983 slasher Sleepaway Camp. The end of the film is obviously and infamously a whole hot mess, but honestly? I think a lot of what comes before it kind of rips. What’s not to love about a Friday the 13th-style camp slasher with middle school-level drama, some creatively gruesome comeuppance, and commentary on the endless hellscape that is living as a girl? Again, other than that ending, which isn’t just bigoted and exploitative but is also almost laughably underwritten.
• It only took me a full decade to feel mentally prepared enough to watch Denis Villeneuve’s pitch-black crime thriller Prisoners, and even then the 2.5-hour movie left me drained and anxious. Still, the tension-soaked film about the torturous fallout of a missing kid case is exactly as riveting as I’ve always heard it was.
• I caught The Blackening in theaters today and it was a really fun one. I went in expecting satire, but in some ways, the horror comedy about a group of friends who gather for Juneteenth and start getting picked off by a Blackness-obsessed killer feels like a throwback in line with the farcical, goofy comedy of the Scary Movie franchise. It has some great pop culture riffs, and Dewayne Perkins in particular is a standout in a strong cast.

Odds and ends:

• Writer and music video aficionado Sydney Urbanek celebrated three years of her excellent newsletter Mononym Mythology this past week, and I was lucky enough to help! For the anniversary edition, Sydney put out a special Pride month-themed call for writing about music videos or musical moments that felt especially formative or vital to LGBTQ+ friends of the newsletter. I wrote about Wayne’s World (yes, really), but you should check out all the fantastic contributions here.
• I dove back into CBC’s great, prolific investigative podcast series Uncover this week, listening to a particularly wild non-fiction miniseries called Run, Hide, Repeat. Unlike some seasons of Uncover, this was more of a retelling than an actual docuseries investigation, but the story itself – about a woman who learns some unbelievable, paranoia-inducing secrets about the nature of her chaotic childhood – was mind-boggling enough to keep me captivated nonetheless.

This was a major transitional week for me, work-wise, so I don’t have a ton of my own writing to share. A few emotional hiccups aside, though, it’s been a great first week of figuring out what I want to try next, and I’m hoping this next week will be even better. I hope yours is a great one, too. If you feel so inclined, drop me a line below and let me know what you’ve been watching, reading, hating, or loving.