📺 The Great British Baking Show Series 16 had fewer anxiety attacks and temper tantrums, and was more enjoyable to watch than last year’s. Still, the sheen is beginning to wear off, the artifice of it is becoming more and more apparent, and am I being a horrible person just for liking that a contestant doesn’t get all teary-eyed when kicked out?

Want to introduce some drama? Have people make madelains — a desert that needs at least four hours for the batter to chill to achieve its characteristic “hump” — in 2 hours 15 minutes total and then stress about not doing it correctly. Or, come judging time, be a bit more circumspect about the clear favorite and heap praise on the also-rans so that you can hem and haw about your very difficult choice. Also, is it just my middle age performing mind tricks or are the contestants getting ever-younger? Will there be a point in a decade’s time when Junior Bakeoff and the main attraction meld?

It is still by far the best “reality TV” one would come across, and following it from beginning does make one more interested in baking. As its cultural relevance grows, however, so does the amount of pressure it puts on the bakers, to the point of unpleasantness. Luckily, the finalists this year were wise beyond their years, but how many more people are left in Britain with that kind of mental fortitude?

🎃 At a friend’s recommendation, our trio of children dressed up as Greg, Wirt and the frog from Over the Garden Wall, a family favorite for over a decade now. To our surprise and delight, they kept being recognized. A group of millennials handing out candy even broke out into song (To Adelaide, then Potatoes and Molasses). “Greg” had some candy in her pockets to throw out each time people guessed, but soon ran out and had to recycle the hard-earned treats from her bag. So, I’d call this Halloween a great success.

📺 Six episodes in, Season 5 of Only Murders In the Building — the only show we were excited about on Hulu — has been a thorough disappointment, and now Disney+ hits us with a whooping 100% increase in the annual subscription for its package deal. Granted, we were grandfathered into the $80/year plan and the new one is still better than the current price of standalone Disney+ Premium, but still — how much is it worth to pay for something you will never use?

By the way, the link above is to the Disney+ pricing website, and it is confusopoly on steroids, a roadmap to the world Philip K. Dick so brilliantly described in Ubik. I regret every bit of schadenfreude I had canceling cable.

📺 Slow Horses, Season 5: even better than the last. Less violence (season opener notwithstanding) and more laugh-out-loud moments in this one, which was fine with me!

The British crime drama Broadchurch came out in 2013. John Favreau’s food porn vanity project Chef was released in 2014. Despite both now being more than a decade old, in my mind they are still filed under “new things that came out that we missed because we had an infant in the house while also being medical residents”. It was therefore jarring to see how dated they both were, and for similar reasons.

Broadchurch deals with the murder of an 11-year-old boy in a small coastal community. Twitter is mentioned a handful of times, only in the context of breaking news. There is no Instagram or messaging apps: pre-teens email each other. The boy’s family is at a loss for how to attract national attention to the killing and finds the answer in a tabloid journalist. It all feels quaint, though admittedly I don’t know if that was intentional even in 2013 (from the edgy music and the oh-so serious tone of the show, I suspect not). I won’t mention a recent British show by name for fear of spoiling other, but if you’ve seen both you will now what is the clear parallel and how much things have changed.

Chef, on the other hand, is completely Twitter-dependent, and is arguably one of the first movies to use Twitter #MainCharacter dynamics as a plot point (Justine Sacco had landed a few months before the movie was released, and probably wasn’t even on Favreau’s radar). Twitter is shown in a completely positive light, and I can’t think of any other movie that has done that. It is also a good time capsule of the food trucks on Twitter craze. The early 2010s were the peak time for both, before culture wars killed one and covid the other.

So now I am inclined to see what else came out in that 2010–2015 period. Is it too early to be nostalgic for those times?

📺 Broadchurch, Season 1 got my full attention the moment David Tenant screamed Bloody Twitter. The show deserves an A+ for drama, a B- for the mystery, and an F for its medical chops. Fortunately, medicine didn’t come into play until very late, when drama and mystery were already at full steam.

📺 The Night Of (2016) we somehow missed when it first came out nine years ago (!?) but it was well worth revisiting. These kind of competent dramas with a deeper message than just whodunnit have become rare — was Mare of Easttown the last one? — particularly ones that feel like they were set in an actual place and not a softly-focused, sterilized backdrop of Netflixland.

The complete package is high enough quality to compensate for a few annoying stereotypes. Cutting to a street scene full of Southeast Asian pedestrians milling about? Queue vaguely ethnic music with a techno beat. Our innocent protagonist is sent to a penitentiary like a lamb for slaughter? Queue the wise black inmate to provide advice and protection… but is he himself in fact a wolf?

That whole prison story was a needless diversion, a sped-up Walter White to Heisenberg transformation which detracted from (to me) the more important message about the criminal justice system and all human systems in general. It says that competence in a profession is indistinguishable from obsession, is driven by annoyance not love, and is powerless against the greatest force of human civilization — institutional inertia. Application to medicine comes immediately to mind, a case of missed diagnosis standing in for wrongfully charging someone with murder. Now that would be a show to watch.

📺 Untamed (2025) had wonderful scenery (Yosemite!) and above-average acting, but the thinnest of cores. My 13-year-old could have written more convincing dialogue and made the charters' motivations more believable. A missed opportunity for greatness.

📺 Dept. Q, Season 1 (2025) was as good as a Netflix show gets. Which is to say, not exactly to the level of Slow Horses (Apple TV+) and certainly not Mare of Easttown (HBO), but with a cast that good I had to give it a pass for the occasional plot hole and choppy pacing.

📺 The Residence (2025) had great acting, a gorgeous set and a satisfying plot so of course Netflix decided to cancel it after just one season. The show was not a good fit for such a trashy distribution channel, so I hope that Cordelia Cupp and friends find a new home on HBO or Apple TV+.