It's real cold out there folks, stay safe. A Thing in my Possession: An extremely needy cat I'm trying to finish this newsletter for you this morning, but it hasn't been easy. At around 3 AM my at woke up me up for breakfast. this in not particularly unusual for her, as she has a tendency to do this to me. Most days I can get up, feed her and get back to sleep with minimal disruption. But this particular morning it wasn't enough. From about 4-6:30 she insisted that I pay attention to her. She alternated between meowing loudly as she wandered around to jumping on my bed and clawing various parts of my body. I can't tell that she actually wanted anything other than attention and I was trying too hard to stay asleep to give it to her. And now that I've gotten up she is standing (not sitting or relaxing) on my lap and repeatedly shoving her head under my hands as I type. This has become a new favorite pastime of hers, as she has discovered that it almost feels like getting petted, and results in further attention. I will say as a side effect it has made me slow down while typing and I have caught more errors than I would usually have. Maybe she's just trying to help.
Poorly Organized Thoughts On: Video Media Formats Our Flag Means Death got cancelled after 2 seasons. It was a good show! I liked watching it, it was funny, heart wrenching and surprising in equal parts. I've seen people upset about how they don't get to spend more time with their favorite gay pirates (also the show is very gay(superlative.)) But I have also seen the take that this is why TV is never going to be as good as film, because the creators don't know how long they are going to have to tell the story. Sometimes shows get cancelled before they're done telling a story and sometimes they have to keep going because the show gets renewed beyond the original intended lengths of story the creators wanted to tell.
With a movie, this argument goes, the creators got to tell a complete story and then it's done. There's no chance of a movie getting cancelled in the middle (although Monty Python and the Holy grail makes a joke about this exact thing happening.) But I reject this argument because the core unit of film as a medium isn't the same thing as the core unit of television as a medium. In film, it's the film. This isn't a shocking or controversial opinion I hope. But the core unit of Television is not the series, or even the season, but rather the episode. The great TV series in the history of the medium all understood this. Sure you have your strictly episodic greats like The Simpsons or M*A*S*H but even your best serialized TV Shows know that the episode is the building block of those great series. All you have to do is look to the Sopranos or Breaking Bad or even the recently finished Succession to see that. Each episode of these shows is, while part of a larger story, a complete unit.
Next time you watch a TV show, ask yourself if what you just saw was an episode or just a chunk of story that started and ended at arbitrary points in time? This is an extension of Ten-Hour-Movie-itis, where the people who are making the show don't understand how the medium they're working in works. I would argue that most of the mediocre shows out there are better than a lot of so-called 'prestige' TV if they know how to use an episode well.
Television, by using the episode, also gets to grow and change over time in a way that a movie cannot. If a movie works, it works, but once it's done there's no going back. A TV show can course correct from early mistakes and even make past decisions retroactively better. They can also make progressively worse mistakes too, but we're talking about the peak potential rather than the worst case scenario. If a show goes beyond the originally intended lifespan, it can even improve beyond what was expected. Sarah Z made a compelling video not too long ago about how Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 6 is good actually, and it is in part because the main story lines had wrapped up in season 5, so now they had to figure out what to do next, and then they did it in a way that grew and changed the show while still remaining true to it's core principles.
I think the binge release model has really hidden the importance of episodes in recent years. When a show is released and watched in a very short period of time, the distinction of the episode becomes blurry. it becomes easier to overlook the faults in the structure if you are drinking from the firehose of content instead of letting it sit and marinate between episodes. Even miniseries, a format that hasn't seen a lot of success recently, historically released one episode a night. Roots is the typical example, a miniseries that took a popular novel and turned it into a ground breaking miniseries with one episode released per day over a week. I typically don't watch shows that get dropped all at once all at once. I usually space them out to at most one or two a week. But even then I find myself less attracted to the binge released shows because they tend to be muddy and unfocused and full of filler trying to meet the time limit they've assigned to themselves.
One last complaint: I occasionally see people say "I won't try new shows until they're over" because what if they get cancelled," and that just makes me sad. A good show can be good from episode one, and the best shows are made from episodes that work. Stuff I'm playing: I bought a bundle of 6 Yakuza games from GOG a couple weeks ago and I installed Yakuza 0, the prequel to the main series, but apparently a good jumping on point. I didn't really know what to expect, other than the games are quite popular. What they turn out to be is actually three types of games in one. The first game is a pretty fun action brawler where you fight large groups of mooks with just your fists and any random objects you can find lying around. The second game is not a game at all actually, but a series of surprisingly long cutscenes telling a melodramatic crime story of betrayal with twists and turns aplenty. The third and final game is actually a series of minigames where you can do all sorts of stuff like playing claw machines to win prizes, sing kareoke, play darts and even play other video games inside this one. I don't know if the three different games inside this one game of Yakuza 0 are all great, but the wild swings in tone between each one is surprisingly fun. Sure I've got to go fight a crime boss and monologue dramatically about it afterwards, but first I need to win the best toy in this claw machine.
