Intro / Only Murders in the Building / A Mid-Season Succession Check-In
A little bit about why I'm writing this newsletter and what it's gonna be, plus some nice New Yorkers solving a murder and some mean New Yorkers being rich and awful
Intro
Hello, friends! Welcome to the first issue of the idiot’s lantern. Over the past 20 months, I’ve been watching a truly unhinged amount of TV1 and I realized that I needed to do something productive or else I would go crazy, hence this newsletter! Time to A some Qs:
What is this? A space for me to write about any TV shows I’m currently watching or have just finished. I’ll try to do a good combination of writing about entire series that have ended and series that are currently airing. I might write about some other pop culture—I am a gay man, after all, so I’m legally obligated to—but the focus will be on TV (and occasionally movies, especially now that it’s Oscar season babyyyyyyyy).
What does “idiot’s lantern” mean? I stole the name from a season 2 episode of Doctor Who (lol) also called “The Idiot’s Lantern,” which is about an alien that uses television to suck up people’s energy, which is objectively hilarious, and the phrase “idiot’s lantern” as a euphemism for television has stuck with me ever since.
Will you charge for this newsletter? No, simply because I don’t think anything I write is worth paying for tbh.
When will this be published each week? As of right now, I’m shooting for Friday afternoons. If there’s something I absolutely need to write about, I might send out bonus issues, but for now I think once a week is enough.
How can I get in touch with you? If you want to reach out to me for any reason (say hi, suggest a show for me to write about, profess your undying love to me, etc.) you can leave comments here, or you can slide into my DMs on Insta or Twitter.
Okay, on to the good stuff.
Only Murders in the Building
I’m gonna be honest, I started Hulu’s mystery series Only Murders in the Building with fairly low expectations. I like Steve Martin and Martin Short well enough, and I have absolutely zero feelings about Selena Gomez (a couple bangers notwithstanding), so I was just expecting a fairly average murder mystery. However, I was surprised by how much the show managed to charm me and win me over, and by the end I was fully invested.
The show follows three New Yorkers living in a bougie Upper West Side apartment building: Charles-Haden Savage (Martin), an actor who was on a popular ‘90s detective show and hasn’t done much since; Oliver Putnam (Short), a failed Broadway director who is quickly running out of money; and Mabel Mora (Gomez), a young woman who is living in her aunt’s apartment while she renovates it. The three don’t know each other, but after a chance encounter at a restaurant during a building evacuation, they discover that they all love the true crime podcast All is Not OK in Oklahoma, a hilariously named send-up of Serial hosted by Cinda Canning (Tina Fey, answering the question “What if Sarah Koenig was kind of awful?”). When the three return to the building, they find that one of the residents, Tim Kono (Julian Cihi), has died from a gunshot to the head. The police have ruled it a suicide, but Charles, Oliver, and Mabel don’t buy it, so they decide to start their own true crime podcast and try to solve Tim’s potential murder.
The show’s biggest asset is, without a doubt, the chemistry between Martin, Short, and Gomez. No matter their exteriors, the three characters are all deeply lonely in their own way, and they’re clearly drawn together not just because of their shared love of true crime but because they can recognize that they are kindred spirits. Mabel is a 20-something who has grown apart from her friends and is living alone, and Gomez plays her with an aloofness and ennui that I found very affecting. Charles is a man who has been unlucky in love (his ex left him in the middle of a family cruise he had booked for her and her daughter, and in a visual gag that is simultaneously absurd and very sad, Charles is haunted by visions of the people in Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig outfits who were on the cruise with him) and he yearns to get back in touch with his ex’s daughter. Oliver has a strained relationship with his son, whom he only ever appears to reach out to when he needs money, which is fairly regularly. Watching these three bond over this mystery they’re solving is what really drew me in, and while there are the expected “Millennials always be on their phones, old people don’t know how to text” jokes, the writing and acting are charming enough that it didn’t even bother me.
Now, all of this isn’t to say that the show isn’t also an engrossing mystery. The series is a sort of meta-commentary on the true crime genre, which it tries to subvert in some ways (What if the murder victim wasn’t an angel and was, in fact, just kind of a dick? What’s the point of spending a whole episode chasing a lead both you and the audience know isn’t going to go anywhere?) and play straight in others. It’s easy to get caught up along with Mabel, Charles, and Oliver as they uncover more clues, and every episode ends with a twist.
There are also a ton of fun side characters that show up, played by people like Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Jane Lynch, Sting (playing himself as a potential suspect), my king Jaboukie Young-White, and my queen Jackie Hoffman. Ryan is particularly charming as Jan, a fellow apartment-dweller and bassoonist who wears shirts that say things like “The only thing sexier than a bassoon… is me with a bassoon.” Jan becomes a love interest for Charles, helping him to open up about his own past, and the scenes of the courtship between the two of them are sweet. Later in the series, Lynch shows up as Sazz Pataki, Charles’s stunt double from the ‘90s, and there’s a series of very dumb but very funny gags of people mistaking Sazz for Charles.
Only Murders also does some interesting structural things, such as episode 7, “The Boy from 6B,” which is from the perspective of Theo (James Caverly), a deaf character, and contains almost no dialogue. This has the dual purpose of being inclusive and giving us a perspective we rarely get to see in film and TV2 while also just being a fun structural experiment that shakes up the format of the show and keeps the audience engaged.
I’m a staunch supporter of weekly release schedule superiority (shows are almost never better when you binge them as opposed to watching weekly) but I do see how this could be an easy binge. The show isn’t necessarily groundbreaking, but it’s also not trying to be. It knows what it wants to be, and it delivers.
I also appreciated that the eventual conclusion managed to be satisfying (this might be a tiny spoiler, so heads up: there is an actual resolution to the mystery) while also setting up a second season, which thankfully is happening. So I’ll be looking forward to that while drinking hot cider and pretending I live somewhere that actually gets cold in the fall. (It was 90 degrees last week! In November! Greta, we need your help!!!)
Succession Ep. 305: “Retired Janitors of Idaho”
Hell yeah, my favorite terrible rich family is back!!! After a loooooong wait of 2 years and 4 days, the best show about the worst people on TV, Succession, started its third season in October, and I’m loving it. Listen, has that much actually happened so far? Not really. I’ve heard a few people compare the show to a sitcom, since the stakes don’t usually change that much, and it can start to develop a bit of an episodic feel. And while I don’t fully disagree—I do think a big part of the appeal of the show is simply putting different combinations of these characters in situations and just watching how they interact with each other, and also it’s just laugh-out-loud funny sometimes—I think reducing it to those terms also disregards how hard and how intelligently the show works to build up to big, status quo-changing moments, such as Kendall’s (Jeremy Strong) coup attempt in episode 106, “Which Side Are You On?”, and his more successful attempt in episode 210, “This is Not for Tears.”
All that being said, nothing that earth-shattering has happened yet this season, even at the much-hyped shareholder meeting the first half of this season has been building to. After the fallout of Kendall airing the Roys’ dirty laundry in the season 2 finale and making it clear that he wants to depose Daddy, everyone is in damage control. The children are picking sides, and everyone seems afraid of Logan (Brian Cox). In a brilliant scene in episode 302, “Mass in Time of War,” Logan finds out that Kendall has summoned everyone to try to convince them to join him, and he sends them a box of doughnuts. The doughnuts, which may or may not be poisoned, are enough to singlehandedly scare siblings Roman (Kieran Culkin), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Connor (Alan Ruck) into abandoning Kendall.
As for other fun standout moments from the season, the iconic Ziwe makes an appearance in episode 303, “The Disruption” (directed by Cathy Yan!), as Sophie Iwobi, a comedian with a late-night show. Sophie is basically an alternate-universe version of Ziwe, and Kendall, like the dumbass he is, gets obsessed with her negative coverage of him and insists that he go on her show to prove that he’s #woke or that he’s in on the joke or something. However, that doesn’t happen after Shiv drops a press release detailing Kendall’s failed relationships and history with substance abuse as payback for him disrupting her town hall event about sexual harassment by playing the Nirvana song “Rape Me” at full volume. You know, just sibling rivalry things.
We also get to meet shareholder Josh Aaronson (Adrien Brody) in episode 304, “Lion in the Meadow,” in which Kendall and Logan have to make an uneasy alliance to try to convince him to let Logan keep the company at the upcoming shareholder meeting and not vote to give control to other board members Stewy (Arian Moayed, who looks so sexy in a turtleneck) and Sandy (Larry Pine). However, once Logan becomes sick from too much exertion, Josh loses trust in them and meets with Stewy after they leave.
Oh yeah, and through all this, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) offers to go to jail for Logan once the DOJ starts investigating Waystar Royco, and then even though Logan says it won’t be necessary, Tom becomes convinced that he will and starts trying to pick out which jail to go to and starts tracking his wife Shiv’s menstrual cycle to see when she’s most “fertile” so that he can impregnate her and have a baby by the time he gets out, which, understandably, freaks her out.
Anyway, we finally get to the shareholder meeting in episode 305, “Retired Janitors of Idaho” (the people who Roman disparagingly says make up Waystar’s shareholders). And even though there’s a lot of buildup… not much happens. It’s still a taut episode filled with great moments and lines. Stewy, Sandy, and his daughter Sandi with an I (Hope Davis) are playing hardball with the Roys and refusing to make a deal with them, and if they all let it go to a shareholder vote, all of them might lose control of the company. However, Logan has developed a UTI and is down for the count (at one point, he hallucinates a dead cat under his chair and insists that someone take it out for him), leaving the Roys and Gerri to make their own decisions. After a meeting where a very ill Sandy, through his proxy Sandi, tells the Roys that they’ll join them if they agree to make sure none of the Roy kids become CEO, Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron) jumps at the opportunity to make that deal, much to Shiv’s chagrin. Eventually, Stewy and Sandy/i (referred to from here on out as SSS) say they’ll make a deal if the Roys get rid of their private jets (or PJs, as they call them) for no other real reason than to fuck with them, it seems. The kids hate this idea, and Roman does a whole “First they came for the PJs, and I said nothing” speech, which is great. Roman also has to talk to the president of the United States on the phone, who says he’s resigning because of the Roys’ cable company’s negative coverage of him,3 which is probably not great for the Roys!
Eventually, after scrambling for a while because no one knows what to do with Logan incapable of making a decision, Shiv secretly meets with Sandi and agrees to give the SSS bloc another board seat as long as she can get one too. Sandi agrees to this, and they don’t have to go to a vote. Logan gets some medicine and regains his composure before shouting at Shiv for giving SSS another seat while also giving Roman a pat on the head for speaking with the president. Basically, not much has changed, but there were a lot of funny lines and interactions this episode, and we’ll get to see HBO’s shitty dude in residence, Alexander Skarsgård, show up soon as a “confrontational tech CEO,” so I absolutely cannot wait for that. Oh yeah, Connor is also running the European cable division of the company now (???) so we’ll see how that goes. God I love this show.
Other Miscellaneous Things
In case you missed it, Cecily Strong did a very good Weekend Update piece on SNL a couple weeks ago about the Texas abortion ruling, and it’s genius, it’s funny, it’s weird, and it made me cry, so watch it
Riverdale just started its sixth season, and it is predictably batshit insane, so you can bet that I will be writing about it soon
Red (Taylor’s Version) and 30 came out, and both are very good, but the only thing I care about is that this Pure Heroine outtake by Lorde is finally available on streaming (it only took 8 years)
In case someone wants to buy me (or anyone else) a Waystar Royco hoodie for Christmas
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Next week I’ll be writing about the bizarre AMC+ series Ultra City Smiths and episode 306 of Succession. Join me then!
I just didn’t feel like leaving my apartment, no real reason
BoJack Horseman and Mr. Robot both did dialogue-less episodes first (and masterfully imo) but the reasons for those episodes were thematic, not because of deaf characters. Also, shoutout to Lauren Ridloff, a deaf actress who is very good in things that are not very good (Eternals, The Walking Dead)
This shows this is truly fiction, because in what universe would a R*publican (I don’t think it’s explicitly stated that that’s what he is, but it’s heeeeeeavily implied) resign because of negative coverage from Fox News