Today's the series finale of Succession, which I just watched. On Tuesday it'll be the series finale of Ted Lasso. Just last month it was the end of Picard.
(For good measure, it's also the end of Leicester City's tenure in the Premier League, but perhaps that's thematically the odd man out here, so I guess I won't be talking about it)
There are some spoilers after the jump, probably, so beware.
One of the great certainties of the early years of the streaming era was that no matter what happened to licensed movies, the likes of Netflix, Disney Plus and HBO Max (sorry, just Max now) would keep their own shows forever. Sure, someone might be revealed to be a sexual predator and have their shows scrubbed, but in the main, the assumption was that original shows and movies owned by the streamers weren't going anywhere.
Then HBO realized that A) no one was watching Westworld anymore, and B) they had to cut loads of costs ahead of the Discovery merger. There was a lot of talk about the Batgirl movie that got canned, and about the various weird animated shows that also got culled. And about Westworld, which was once one of HBO's marquee titles but which hemorrhaged viewers season to season until it got cancelled. For my part, I'd been put off by the second season, which was both more violent than Game of Thrones and more confusing than the first season; I'd kind of entertained the thought of watching the third and fourth seasons, but the announcement came just a couple of days before they yanked it, so I didn't bother.
More recently Disney said it was going to do the same thing with a few of its own shows, including the Willow reboot and Hulu's adaptation of Y: The Last Man. With those I had a week of notice, so I calculated how much I had to watch (the Willow movie, 8 episodes of the show, and 10 episodes of Y: The Last Man), then decided to watch Willow because it had a better Rotten Tomatoes score and was shorter.
I'm old enough to remember when Willow came out in theaters, and I remembered that I'd watched it on VHS in elementary school once, for some reason. I also remembered that there was a pretty good-looking arcade game based on it, which I've seen in various retro arcade/bar establishments since then. As it turned out when I watched the movie again, those points were literally all I remembered.
The movie, seen 35 years later, is so clearly George Lucas's attempt at a fantasy version of Star Wars. It plays with certain of the same well-established tropes, and has similar characters. Val Kilmer's performance as Madmartigan is obviously indebted to Harrison Ford as Han Solo, right down to the bemused facial expressions and the romance subplot with a princess. A lot of the dialogue is also pretty excruciating, though in fairness, his dialogue has always been pretty cringe. Watching it felt like unearthing some lost cult object from the 80s, but not necessarily something that needed to become a big franchise, though maybe if Lucas had waited a decade he could have ridden the same wave that lifted Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.
As for the show, there are good points and bad points. It doesn't feel essential, but in the end it is quite well-done, at least in points. Beyond Warwick Davis, it's nice to see Kevin Pollak and Joanne Whalley reprising their roles, while the various new cast members inhabit different fantasy character archetypes, from Tony Revolori as the aspiring sorcerer and Erin Kellyman as the first young woman to be selected as. a knight for her kingdom. Amar Chadha-Patel is also a lot of fun as the roguish Thraxus Boorman, who kind of takes on the Madmartigan role here and provides a link back to Val Kilmer's character.
The show's tone changes repeatedly, which is less of a good point. At points it's epic, but at other points Tony Revolori delivers his lines like he's still in Grand Budapest Hotel mode, which is a little off-putting when in the midst of an epic battle of good versus evil. Other modern flourishes, like the rock songs at the end of almost every episode, were also jarring, though I don't know if the cover versions of classics like Metallica's Enter Sandman were more or less appropriate than the original version of Dire Straits's Money for Nothing. I love the song, but it doesn't really feel like something I'd tack onto a high fantasy show...
I didn't watch the show when it came out on Disney Plus a few months ago, but I'd planned on catching it when I finished the Marvel shows that came over from Netflix (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, et al). The news that I had only a week to watch it made me prioritize it, and while I'm glad I did (overall), I do also feel bad for the creators. They clearly put a lot of effort into the show so it's a shame that not only did it get stealth-cancelled, it's disappearing to who-knows-where.
Everybody's talking about free, ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) as the resting place for these unloved shows, and maybe that's where everything's going to end up. But I haven't heard of any specific place, like Tubi or Pluto TV, that's going to be the new home of Willow. There's a very real possibility that it's not going to any of those places, which means it'll basically just disappear entirely.
That's one of the bad things about the digital age we're living in. I got laughed at on social media and at the office because I still get DVDs from Netflix (at least, until September, when they kill that too), but the advantage of DVDs and VHS tapes before them is that, being physical objects, there's always the possibility of finding one lying around. Among my most prized possessions are DVD versions of the original Star Wars Trilogy, Episodes 4-6, that include the non-special editions as bonus discs. They're prized possessions because I don't think those versions exist anywhere in streaming form.
It happens with podcasts, too. I remember when the Nerdist Comic Panel's dozens (hundreds?) of episodes were just deleted when the hosts pivoted that show to something else. Books and DVDs and comics in physical form can go out of print, but the copies still exist in some form, whereas streaming media can just disappear if someone decides to move it away from the servers it's hosted on.
Maybe very few people are going to lament the loss of the Willow TV show, but think of it this way: the original movie was able to inspire the show's creator, Jonathan Kasdan, to develop a sequel, more than 30 years later. If the show isn't on DVD and isn't available to stream anywhere, it won't be able to inspire anyone else to pick up the story, which is a shame. You might scoff at the endless rebooting, but I like the idea of being able to remain in conversation with these older shows and movies across the decades.
As I write this, on 25 May, the show is supposed to disappear from Disney Plus tomorrow, so I won't say to go out and watch it. But as I say, it's too easy for content to just disappear now that everything's hosted on a server somewhere. The fact that streamers are getting more cost-conscious about how much they're hosting means that nothing, really, is safe: so if you have something you've been meaning to get to, maybe look at watching it ASAP, because who knows where it's going next week?
It might feel a little premature, but I think the title says it all. With today's 3-0 loss to Brighton, Arsenal's title challenge is most likely over, and that's unfortunate.
This writing has been on the wall for a while. Even though Arsenal have spent most of the season in first place, and at two different times found themselves eight points ahead of Manchester City, the bookmakers and predictors have given City the best chance of winning the league. Part of this handicap was the fact the City had played two games fewer than Arsenal, but also just the fact that City always seem to find a way to win. It didn't help that they've been breaking all kinds of scoring records with Erling Haaland up front.
The turning point was when City and Arsenal faced one another, and City won handily. Now City are four points ahead with three games to play, compared to Arsenal's two. City need one win or two draws to win the league, and it's hard to see them slipping up at this stage, especially since their next match will be against Chelsea.
Chelsea, of course, have played kingmakers in closely contested title races before. The most notable example I can think of is the 2015-16 season, when their draw with Tottenham Hotspur meant that Leicester City's lead was unassailable. Leicester won that season on the back of that match, as probably the most unfancied champion in the Premier League era, if not longer.
Interestingly, Chelsea were in the middle of a transitional season then, too. Jose Mourinho had been sacked following his traditional third-season meltdown (this was his second spell at Chelsea), just as Chelsea now are lying in 11th place after the chaos of being bought by new owners, sacking two managers, and then hiring Frank Lampard again on an interim basis.
However, I doubt Chelsea are going to put up enough of a fight this time around. They may have started picking up points again in the last couple of weeks, following a nightmare streak of losses, but it's hard to imagine a team that just drew 2-2 with Nottingham Forest could derail the consummate professionals of Manchester City.
It's all a shame, because this is the best Arsenal have looked in years, nay, decades. They may have spent many of the seasons following the 2003-04 Invincibles season qualifying for the Champions League, but I'd say they haven't been close to winning the league since then. Previous manager Arsène Wenger forgot how to scout players after a few years, and his immediate successor, Unai Emery, turned out to be a bad choice (though not for Aston Villa this season, as he's helped them challenge for Europe since taking over from Steven Gerrard). Mikel Arteta was seen as a bit of a bold choice when he was hired in 2019, but he's gradually improved them since taking over, and they've made some good signings, particularly Manchester City castoffs Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko.
I guess I was hoping for a different champion for once. The last time a London club won the league was 2016-17, when Chelsea won it under Antonio Conte, but Man City have won almost every season since (except 2019-20, when Liverpool won it). The Premier League isn't quite as dominated by a single team as some of the other big European leagues, but it's also nowhere near as open as some of its more starry-eyed defenders like to say.
It's hard to say whether Arsenal will bounce back from this and challenge for the title next season, or if this season's performance will just be a blip. Even if they don't screw up their recruitment during the summer, they should expect stiffer competition from Manchester United, Spurs and Chelsea as they bed in after their transitional seasons (although who knows if Spurs will ever attract another manager?). Also, whether or not Haaland hits the same heights as this year, Man City will have strengthened even further, making them even harder to catch.
It'll also be interesting to see if any of the mid-table teams can build on this season's performances, notably Brighton and Aston Villa. Both have done extremely well out of their new managers this season, but the important thing will be whether they can cope with the added pressure of Thursday night matches in the Europa League (or Conference League, depending on where they finish in the table). This seems to be the step that trips up most promising teams, and sends them back to flirting with relegation, as we've seen with West Ham this season.
Arsenal isn't necessarily my team, but they're the closest thing to a local club for me, so it's nice to see them do well, especially after so long in the wilderness. I hope that they do manage to capitalize on this season's successes, and challenge for next season's title, because I'm looking forward to the end of the Man City era.
It's been a while since some of my yearning posts from way back in 2020 about all the things that I was looking forward to doing again when the pandemic ended. For various reasons I've continued to be pretty careful about masking in public and avoiding places where I couldn't easily wear masks, but also, in the last year or so I've started venturing out to do some of the things I used to do before the pandemic.
Seeing friends in person was one of the first things I started doing again, but always with some strictures about avoiding eating at restaurants where possible. It took me some time to get comfortable with even eating outdoors, but as time has passed, and as the case numbers here and in Italy have gone down, I've considered the relative risks and rewards of eating at restaurants. For instance, when I met someone for a date last December, I agreed that it was better to sit inside (without masks), because it was too cold and rainy and miserable to sit outside.
Now I've started eating indoors at restaurants more often, including a few times this week and even today. I still think it's worth being careful in crowded places, and I'm also still trying to be careful of where I eat (I'd rather get Covid or some other airborne virus from a good restaurant than from Taco Bell or KFC), but it's nice to be eating food on-site again. It helps that it's still warm when it gets to my table, rather than cold from being picked up by me or by a delivery person.
Part of what changed my mind about eating at restaurants was flying to Italy twice since last summer. Going to Europe was a big thing I missed from my pre-pandemic life, and I'm happy to have managed it, even if it's always been to go to my family house rather than on my solo adventures from years past. When I went last summer I also decided that I'd be willing to eat at certain, particularly good restaurants in Rome and Turin, because they were special occasion-type places. When I went this past February, I found myself eating at restaurants and cafes even more often, and though I picked up a pretty bad cold I didn't get Covid.
I've been to pubs, but generally sitting outside. I still think that the interier of a crowded bar isn't necessarily the best place, but at least until cases spike again in the fall and winter, it'll probably be more okay than the last couple of years.
One thing I haven't done since before the pandemic, but that I could do just fine, is watch movies at the theater. I'm not particularly bothered by wearing a mask for a few hours, so going to see the latest Marvel flick or whatever doesn't feel like a burden. But... well, everything seems to come to streaming sooner or later, and even if my TV screen isn't big, it's just more convenient to watch things at home (and with access to my own bathroom). That said, while I've had to decline the last couple invitations to go to the movies, it's been because of scheduling issues, not because I was afraid of catching Covid.
Attending work conferences wasn't on that list from three years ago, but I've changed that as of this past week. It was a big tech show, with a huge and crowded expo floor, but I just wore my mask whenever I was walking around or talking in close proximity to people. It was nice to get back into that element and being able to strike up conversations. I should note that I was prepared to do it last year, but the show I wanted to go to had moved from Santa Clara to Austin, and my company wasn't prepared to pay for me to gad about out of state, so that fell by the wayside (also, I was still reluctant to go to states that were less Covid-conscious).
The thing I'm still not doing is working out at the gym. I'm continuing to look at how cases are developing, and am actually hoping to get back to the gym, but that's the dirtiest place of all the spots I used to frequent, with loads of exhalations and droplets splashing all over the place, to say nothing of the sweat and grossness. I also don't miss a lot of the people who went to my gym, like those who reracked weights badly or otherwise violated gym etiquette. The pandemic has made me more conscious of how nice it'd be to have my own place with room for a home gym, so I don't have to share workout space with jerks.
Overall, I'm glad to be getting back to something close to normal, even if it's a bit slower than most other people I know. I don't claim any specialist knowledge about Covid, virology or epidemiology in general, but I haven't bought into the narrative that Covid is over or that it's fine now that we've all been vaccinated. Rather, everything I've read about catching it multiple times makes me think that I'd prefer to avoid catching it even once, for as long as I can.
Still, life is out there, outside my house, and it feels good to be going out and doing a bit more stuff now. Hopefully soon it really will all be back to normal.
Just a quick one this week to praise/review the third and final season of Picard. There may be spoilers after the jump, so proceed accordingly.
I've talked on this blog about how much I read each year (50 books per year, on average), and how much I'm reading concurrently (too much). That latter part comes out of a point in time last year when I borrowed a bunch of books from a friend and read a little bit of each every night for a couple of months, until I'd finished them all.
That unlocked some weird gamification gene in me, and I kept doing that for the rest of the year, but with a lot more books, and with books that were longer. I'd select 12 books, and plan on finishing four each month, the idea being that I'd read a little bit of each and focus the rest of my energy on the last, until I'd gone through all of them. And then the following quarter I'd choose 12 more and start over again.
Well, things didn't quite turn out that way. I still have a few books on the go since that period, which I've been picking away at. Others have been added to the selection and have been finished with more priority, for a number of reasons, but mostly because they were more interesting than the rest of the pile. And one of them went into the donation pile unfinished, because I realized, 200+ pages in, that it wasn't that enjoyable and I wasn't retaining anything.
This change in attitude has partly been influenced by a few things I've read or seen recently. For one thing, a lot of women say on their dating profiles that they want to read more, or to read a specific number of books per year. On the other hand, I read an piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago by a writer whose grandfather kept a house filled with books and read obsessively, a trait that he'd passed on to the rest of the family. This writer, by contrast, had decided to let go of this neurosis and just read for fun.
That appealed to me, so I decided to do the same, although I'm still stuck with the big TBR pile. But then I read another piece, this one in the Guardian (could've been CNET), by a writer who wanted to read more, and suggested doing reading challenges, including keeping a reading journal and setting reading targets on Goodreads or other sites.
All of this is kind of a long preamble to saying, I want to stop doing reading challenges, at least for the time being. My experiences for the last year or so have shown me a number of things about my reading habits, but the big takeaway is that if I'm reading for pleasure, I should just read in a relaxed way. Trying to read a bunch of books concurrently, one or two pages at a time, has the same effect as forcing myself to read a set number of pages each day to reach a self-imposed deadline. The effect being that I don't take anything in from the books.
My page-count target comes from the days when I'd borrow books from the library in London. I usually had four weeks to finish them, so I'd divide the page count by four, to get my weekly target, and then divide that by seven, to get my daily target. I'd then aim to read a little more than that target each day, so the amount I had to read would be less than the day before. And I'd try and hit specific goals by the end of each week to ensure that the following week would require fewer pages to read as well.
When I moved here and stopped going to the library so much, I kept dividing books by 28, so that I could finish them within a given month. I also, for reasons I don't really understand, did something similar with my e-books: I'd aim to read 5% of them each day, so I could finish an e-book every 20 days.
These numbers have started to feel more and more irrelevant as I've gone on. On Kindle, I've scaled my reading goal back to targeting just one e-book per month (the app keeps track of this, and I've also got a 240-week reading streak going, which I should acknowledge is pointless but I'm actually kinda proud of). With my physical books, I'm still dipping into them bit-by-bit each day, but I'm trying to resist the temptation to add more as I finish books, and eventually get to the point where I'm actively reading just one physical book and one e-book at a time.
Like the writer in that NYT piece, I've found that obsessively setting weekly and daily page targets has sucked the fun out of writing. I compare it with the period in 2018 when I was in London and working in an office. I read loads of e-books on the train to work, and a physical book in the lunch area on my hour off at noon. I had no distractions (ie I couldn't watch YouTube or Netflix in that office), so I just read and powered through an epic amount of books - and it all felt organic, because I was paying attention to the words rather than the page numbers.
This is what it comes down to: when I have a daily target to hit each night before bed, then I'm focusing more on getting to my goal than on the narrative, so I end up not taking anything in. I do myself a further disservice by trying to power through to my target page even when I'm too tired to really take in what I'm reading.
To be clear, all of what I've just said is about my own reading habits. I'm probably an uncommonly voracious reader, especially considering that most Americans read just one book per year, whereas I average close to one per week. My life circumstances are such that I can easily fit in an hour of reading on my lunch break, and another hour at bedtime. That Guardian article about reading challenges was written from the perspective of a mother trying to recapture some reading time for herself, which is completely fair enough.
But I do also think that some people who try to fit more reading into their lives are doing so because they think they "should", rather than because they want to. I appreciate that there are a lot of other distractions, like TV and video games, and I'm gradually coming to appreciate the idea that you should just do those things if they're more enjoyable. Nobody's grading us on how much we read or the quality thereof, so we should just be comfortable reading as much or as little as we like - even if that's one book per month.
I'm still probably going to be more interested in hanging out with or dating people who actually like books. But that's not set in stone: as long as they don't mind that I like to read, then we should be fine.
I've been following the Gary Lineker-refugee bill controversy in the UK for the last three days with an attention I usually reserve for football tournaments or prestige TV dramas. I'm pretty heavily on Lineker's side, even to the point of being a little tired of even his defenders saying he maybe shouldn't have compared the UK government's asylum-seekers bill to Nazi Germany: I agree with takes that the comparison is over-used and risks diluting the meaning of the Holocaust, but at the same time if you have a dystopian bill like the one the UK Home Office is pushing, you have to be able to describe it accurately.
More interesting than the question of what language to use is how the BBC has reacted to the whole thing. Beyond people pointing out all the times that freelance BBC presenters have expressed right-wing sympathies, the move to suspend Lineker for not apologizing shows how terrified the corporation is of criticism from right-wingers.
It's partly justified, because there's a large, right-wing print industry (mostly led by Rupert Murdoch-owned outlets but not exclusively) that pounces on any misstep by the BBC. On top of that, Conservative party ministers have been contributing to this atmosphere for years as well, by threatening to privatize it or seating sympathetic administrators on its various management boards.
But there's also a sense of a crisis that didn't have to happen: for one thing, they didn't have to suspend him, and more importantly, they didn't have to then lie that he'd "agreed to step back" from presenting duties. They could have weathered a few days of criticism and then the raging beast that is alt-right social media would have moved on to something else. And for another, that inchoate mass of rageful protoplasm that is the alt-right wouldn't be happy with anything the BBC does, just because they see it as in thrall to the left in whatever it does.
This is a problem that other news outlets face. The New York Times has come in for criticism of its lukewarm handling of culture-war and white-nationalism stories in the last few years, because it's seen as moderating its positions to avoid criticism from bad-faith actors on the right. It even went so far as to ban its journalists from appearing on Rachel Maddow's show on MSNBC, for fear that alt-right outlets would use it as evidence of how far left the Times has gone.
Except: the Ben Shapiro's and Breitbarts and whoever else are going to say that about the Times no matter what it does. And, as a commentator pointed out on Twitter, this ban just gave the Times's rivals, like the Washington Post, all the speaking slots on Maddow's show that would have gone to the Times. This meant that the Post could talk about its own reporting, and essentially promote itself, while the Times cowered in its offices and pissed off the people who would normally be supporting it.
Both these cases get at the point that, in many cases, centrism is just as problematic as airing extreme views. What's the "centrist" approach to issues like abortion or the death penalty? Do you advocate for only half of women's or LGBTQ rights, or do you air equal amounts of pro-Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter reporting?
Some people (probably on the right, and certainly not very sophisticated) insist that if a reporter's viewpoint is in the article, then the reporter has failed. That's probably okay for human interest pieces (although this NYT restaurant review will never not be hilarious), but the act of reporting demonstrates where the outlet's and the reporter's interests lie: a paper that doesn't believe climate change is real won't report on it. An article should probably not be a harangue, but if we're reporting that climate scientists believe the increase in strong hurricanes and droughts is caused by global warming, then that's probably because we agree with that position.
Most importantly, trying to hew to a too-centrist approach risks amplifying voices you shouldn't: if it's raining outside, do you "balance" the meteorologist's opinion with someone who says that it's not, in fact, raining? Or it risks confusing the issue by presenting two sides to stories that don't really have two sides.
It's easy for me to say the BBC and the NYT should grow some spine and report honestly, because the culture is such that they're probably inundated with threats all the time. But when they make self-defeating decisions like these, like suspending possibly the most-loved man in Britain for saying what the legitimate opposition party hasn't found the balls to say, then maybe it's time they re-evaluated some editorial choices?
