prestige TV

Keep going

~ MaryG ~ 8 Comments

What’s a personal mantra or philosophy you live by?

I finally got around to watching Season Three of The Comeback on HBO and it was wonderful. It’s topical (the writer’s strike and AI are big themes) but also I’ve never loved Valerie more. At 63 years old, Lisa Kudrow’s tragicomic Valerie Cherish somehow gives women of a certain age the dignity they deserve.

Here’s the defining scene (copied from Reddit):

Jane: “I’ve watched you for 20 years, Valerie. 20 years, in an industry that offered you nothing but humiliation. I don’t know how you kept going.”

Valerie: “Isn’t that funny? I never felt that. Humiliation? No. No. Well, I felt when people were mean to me or insulting, sure, you know? But that didn’t serve me. I just needed to get where I was going. But humiliation? No. I think you have to agree to be humiliated, and I never signed up. I don’t know. Just did the best with what I was given, right? Isn’t that what being a human being is though? Right? You just make the best of things. Otherwise, you’re just left behind and miserable all the time, you know? Yeah. Things aren’t always going to be the way you want, right? Not always gonna get the perfect job, or whatever, but you have to make the best of it. You have to adapt. Keep going. Anyway, that’s what I tried to do.”

Jane: “I feel like I’m seeing you for the first time.”

Valerie: “Really? Maybe that’s why you haven’t been able to get this doc right. You’ve been telling the wrong story. Now tell the one about Valerie Cherish.”

Along with Hacks, The Comeback is one of the greatest TV shows ever about women in entertainment. And so so funny 😂

Also, cameos galore in Season 3. Actors I love just kept showing up in scenes.

White Lotus Avoidance Day

~ MaryG ~ 1 Comment

My husband and I are major consumers of “prestige TV.” We get all the channels and watch all the shows. (Severance, Succession, Hacks, The Last of Us, The Bear, Handmaids Tale, etc.) We watch together and we talk about the shows. TV is our thing.

Sometimes a show is too violent for me, so I relinquish it to my husband to watch while I’m at choir or doing something else. (For example, I bailed on The Sopranos fairly early on and I never watched Breaking Bad.) I always have a few shows I’m watching on my own, because I stay up later than him. Currently, I’m watching Marie Antoinette on PBS Passport on my own. Downton Abbey is another example of a show that my husband didn’t watch with me, though he fully embraced The Gilded Age, so it’s not that he won’t watch period pieces. (We’re big fans of Wolf Hall.)

We plan our TV watching out in advance. Sometimes, a very important show—like last night’s White Lotus season 3 finale—needs to be watched live (rather than on demand) in order to avoid spoilers, which will undoubtedly be everywhere today!

We fully intended to watch the White Lotus season finale live last night, but then my husband got tired and wanted to save it. Obviously I wouldn’t watch it without him, so now I will spend the entire day trying not to read anything about it, which basically will require staying offline altogether.

So, as the stock market crashes (I’m assuming another Black Monday is underway) and people are distracting themselves by discussing whatever happened on White Lotus last night, I will try to finish reading my library book today.

Ironically, the book is Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (author of Normal People) and I could totally see it getting made into a Hulu series (like Normal People did) that I would end up watching on my own because my husband doesn’t like shows that are too “relationshipy.”

Comments closed due to abject fear of White Lotus spoilers.

Related: Consider the Source

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