What I'm Watching: I'm Going To Be In A Book Edition!

On two shows, two essays, a movie, a podcast, and some exciting career milestones.

Tom Hanks, Steve Zahn, You’ve Got Mail, Warner Bros.

Here’s everything I watched (and read, and listened to) this week and what I thought about it:

The shows:

• Unfortunately, most of what I watched this week is still under embargo, so I’ll have more to share next week. But in my ongoing quest to finally watch The Office in order, I did manage to marathon pretty much all of the eighth season (AKA the first Michael-less season) while packing for a trip, and I liked it better than I expected to. Some storylines aren’t great (the show painfully mishandles Erin’s character almost all the time) but I think the common “The Office got bad after Michael left” sentiment is perhaps a bit too tidy. Some parts are good and some aren’t, just as they were when he was around.

• I did also (mostly) catch up on Star Trek: Picard, including the upcoming third season. I’m not a big fan of this show, which is fine because I’m not the target audience, but I will say that whenever Brent Spiner shows up it gets so much better. He’s such a bright spot and it’s ironic that, although he’s mostly playing androids, he adds a much-needed human warmth to what I at times find to be an oddly emotionally detached series.

The movies:

• I spent much of this week cleaning and working and packing up a storm ahead of a trip I’ve been excited about for months, so I didn’t make much time for movies. I did, however, watch You’ve Got Mail in its entirety for (somehow) the first time while on the plane to London. The Nora Ephron favorite gets a little carried away towards the end, but mostly my takeaway was, “Damn, what a script!” Seriously, so much of this film feels like it could’ve been written last year, not 25 years ago – if rom-coms were even still allowed to have this strong a voice today. It’s confidently smart and wonderfully mature and it made me want to go spend an entire day in a bookstore.

The articles + podcasts:

• I listen to a lot of just-okay investigative podcasts in hopes of finding ones that truly scratch that “dogged, humane reporting” itch in my journalism geek brain. For the first time in ages, I found one that’s everything I wanted it to be in Unfinished: Short Creek, from Witness Docs and Stitcher. The podcast goes very deep into the culture and history of Short Creek, a Fundamentalist Mormon town on the Arizona-Utah border that was torn apart by the presence of a “prophet” who is now in prison for life. The hosts of the podcast take the open-minded approach necessary to get a group of extremely media-shy people to explain how the town got to this point, and the result is an expansive portrait of dangerous obedience and broken faith.

• I’m still trying to put into words exactly why I loved Knock at the Cabin, a movie with an ending that, on paper, is definitely deserving of some of the skepticism it’s gotten. I haven’t been able to properly articulate why it still works so well for me, but others have, like Roxana Hadadi over at Vulture.

• There’s a pretty massive cultural rift between the way older generations think about celebrities’ public presentation of their own gender and sexuality, and the way many younger folks do. I really appreciate this Mark Harris piece in The New York Times, which isn’t perfect but which attempts to bridge that gap and tackle a topic (“queerbaiting”) that I’ve seen a lot of people fail to engage with on a nuanced level.

Odds and ends:

• Speaking of books: for the first time in my career, I’m going to be in one! This is huge news that will no doubt get its own separate post down the line, but for now, I’ll share this: Brandon Stosuy put together an essay collection called Sad Happens for Simon & Schuster, with lovely illustrations from Rose Lazar. It’s a book with dozens of contributors from assorted backgrounds writing about their relationship to crying, often in the context of their jobs. I wrote a short piece about crying at the movies in 2021 after losing several loved ones. The book is out in November, but you can preorder it here.

• I also had the pleasure of appearing as a guest on Horror Hangover, the wonderful podcast co-hosted by Cass Clark and Ryan C. Bradley. This episode was a little different than their usual fare: I partnered with Ryan in a team game of movie trivia, and just in time for Valentine’s Day, we went all in celebrating LGBTQ+ rom-coms! If you remember when I was watching a bunch of movies that fit that criteria a few weeks ago, this was why! Did we take home the trivia gold? You’ll have to listen to find out (…no, we did not).

• This week marks the end of coverage from my in-depth interview with The Last of Us cinematographer Eben Bolter, and it’s been amazing to see it go live with several of my talented coworkers helping to steward the conversation. If you’re so inclined, you can read about what it was like to film those car scenes with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, gain some insights into why the show lets us see some deaths happen on-screen while others remain out of sight, and learn about how the crew created an innovative lighting system for this week’s massive climactic scene, which also includes a stunt they filmed in just one take.

• Continuing with more coverage of The Last of Us as usual, I also wrote about why I think Melanie Lynskey was a perfectly-cast addition to this show.

• In my latest Episodes column, I went long on a TV episode that I crowned the best pilot of the 21st century a few years ago: the two-part series premiere of Lost.

• I’ve been really appreciative of the response to my piece from last week about the tenuous history of TV archivism: my friend Jess even spotted it in the wild in the latest issue of The Rec Center!

I didn’t watch too much of note this past week, but if you’ve read this far, you can probably tell it was still a huge week for me in terms of incredible, surreal career moments. I’m so grateful to have these opportunities and to get to share the news about them with all of you here. Also, if you’re reading this on a Tuesday rather than a Sunday, it’s worth noting that I’m on vacation, so my definition of the weekend is going to get a little bit lax for the next week or two!

As always, feel free to leave a comment to let me know what you’ve been into lately, whether it’s books, films, shows, podcasts, or anything else that has you hyped.