Winter 2022-2023 TV

Wednesday (Netflix, Season 1) – I don’t love the actors playing Gomez and Morticia; their performance feels awkward and stilted. I appreciate the call-backs to the original series and movies and also that they aren’t overwhelming. (I adore Christina Ricci and I’m glad they used her in this.) I think there’s a thesis to be written about Wednesday’s autism-coding. They aren’t terribly consistent about where her interests and fascination with death, gore and mayhem end and where her dislike of the season’s villains begins. When the monster finally does his smirking confession to her, it felt like she should have responded, “I’m shockingly attracted to you right now;” but instead she inexplicably stayed in “You’re evil and I hate you” mode. They go into the second season (assuming they get one) with pretty much all of the “adult” regulars dead, so a return to Nevermore will be with the same core cast of teenagers and a completely new staff. Oh, and yes, the “Wednesday Dance” scene was worth all the hype about it.

The Dragon Prince (Netflix, Season 4) – The existence of a fourth season of this caught me off-guard; I figured it was dead and buried. I’m wondering if they’ll actually get the full six seasons they were clearly going for from the start (there are six forms of elemental magic and they’ve been naming each season after them). They have an issue with constantly repeating the exposition over and over, even within the same episode; and the season felt stretched out because of it. They do some decent foreshadowing, but Chekov’s gun can only get you so far. And there are several points where a character clearly does something specifically because the plot needed them to get somewhere, not because it made any particular sense. There are a couple of cute references to Avatar. I appreciate that characters are just matter-of-fact queer, including the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reveal that the himbo wood elf boyfriend is trans. I think this is going to end up being a forgettable imitator to Avatar when all is said and done, but I’ll watch whatever else they manage to produce.

Titans (HBOMax, Season 4, Part 1) and Doom Patrol (HBOMax, Season 4, Part 1) - I’m annoyed that HBOMax dropped half a season of each of these, both leaving off on big cliffhangers. The Titans narrowly escaped to The Red as Brother Blood rises to use Trigon’s power to destroy the world. The Doom Patrol are captives of the Scissormen who are going to bring Immortus to destroy the world, and the zombie butt apocalypse is still a going concern. I think both of these shows have really found their voices and hit a good stride (and love that, since they’re keeping Tim Drake as a main character, Titans has introduced Bernard), I’m mostly just annoyed I can’t binge the who season in one go.

Superman & Lois (HBOMax, Season 2) – They apparently felt the need to beef up the show’s diversity credentials by having Sarah come out as bi and letting her change from the Cushing family back to the original Cortez after her quinceañera. This season’s villains include a self-help guru/cult leader; and Superman’s new liaison to the US military whose America First brain poisoning causes him to fundamentally misunderstand the government’s relationship to Superman. Credit here for maintaining Clark and Lois as decent parents who love each other and try their best, and for giving all of the really stupid decisions to either teenagers or villains.

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The First Set of Books for 2023

Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer by Rax King - King is a disaster human and an excellent writer, and this uses the vehicle of “tacky” culture to tell you her life story. (Jethrien read it first and lured me in with the last chapter about Meat Loaf. If you ever hear me refer to “motorcycle” as an emotion, this is where it comes from.) It’s funny, it’s poignant, it gets pretty dark at times but it’s from the perspective of having made it through to the other side.

Die by Keiron Gillian - Six teenagers are pulled into the world of a fantasy roleplaying game…and five reappear traumatized two years later. Twenty years after that, the fantasy world comes calling again. There’s a lot of deconstruction of the LitRPG genre here, but also some genuinely clever worldbuilding and deep literary cuts. There are a bunch of sequel hooks (I don’t know if there’s going to be a second volume), but the arcs of the main characters get completed and the various mysteries pretty much all get addressed. Also, the painted artwork is gorgeous.

Evil By Design by Chris Nodder - Like Usable Usability, this was arguably reading for work. The gimmick is that it centers around using the seven deadly sins for product and sales design; in practice it’s a great overview of business school psychological tricks that you can use to manipulate people and separate them from their money. There are a number of suggestions for how you might use these powers for good (or at least how you might recognize when people are using them on you), but there’s also plenty of justification for why manipulating people is probably okay in the grand scheme of things.

The Illustrated Al ed. Josh Bernstein - The idea here was to do an illustrated “music video” for various Weird Al songs that never had them, and each song was done by a different artist. There were a bunch of problems with this: 1. The songs that didn’t get music videos are generally B-sides, so you’re already trying to pick the “best” of Al’s second-tier work. 2. Making a good music video is a lot more than just illustrating the events of the song, and some artists didn’t get that memo. 3. Some of the songs didn’t age well (“Trigger Happy” is high on the list). All of that said, the “epic” songs were the ones that generally worked the best, because they have a bit of a plot and actually translate well into graphic novel form: “Biggest Ball of Twine” was probably my favorite and “Jackson Park Express” did a romance comics pastiche that really used the comics genre to do something clever with the song. “Everything You Know is Wrong” gets an honorable mention for making me actively laugh out loud because the rabid wolverine in Al’s underwear is, in fact, the superhero. “Albuquerque” was overall decent except for the problematic depiction of the person Al fights for the snorkel, and the fact that I can’t decide if the author got the joke about his “Flock of Seagulls” haircut, which was depicted as three seagulls on the person’s head. (It’s a reference to the 80s band Flock of Seagulls and their frontman’s distinctive hairstyle.)