A new guilty pleasure in our household — and I mean really guilty, as in I could find ten thousand reasons why it’s bad yet still I watch — is Guy’s Grocery Games. All that is good and bad about American TV, packed into 30 minutes. 📺

Excellent shows don’t often get better, so it is with great pleasure that I report that The Bear did. The space still feels cramped — all those close-ups! — but there are no deus ex machina-s and only one somewhat annoying character, the several previously annoying ones now completing their arc towards likeableness. The last two links have spoilers for seasons 1 and 2, respectively, and I have spoiler-ish observations below, so be warned!

Note that the two main characters, Sydney and Carmen, both have a pronounced drive. For Carmen, the drive seems wholly internal — his family is in shambles and the 21st century America is characterized by a distinct lack of a societal drive. ⊕ From that standpoint, how interesting that Carmen’s love interest is an ER physician: talk about a profession that runs on its own fumes. But a single-digit percentage of the population has that much self-contained energy — I guess you could call it grit — to overcome the kinds of obstacles Carmy did; Sydney’s own internal drive is not nearly at those levels. So it’s a good thing that her family, as small as it is, was there to give her an additional kick when she needed it.

And then we have cousin Richie, who spends a season and a half wandering about aimlessly, lacking any initiative of his own, family giving up on him, and society, well, still being the 21st century America: home base of modernity’s many mapless men. So, I misspoke and mislead in the first paragraph. There is a deus ex machina in Season 2: Richie’s transformation from grifter to greeter in the span of one week. And how does it come about? By Richie having an epiphany after speaking to the Deus, played in the dreamlike Season 2 Episode 7 by the great Olivia Colman.

Which is to say that — fittingly for a show centered on Italian-Americans — The Bear presents as good an argument as any for the increasing relevance of religion in everyday life. ⊕ Another observation is about that mildly annoying character, Carmen’s new girlfriend, being just a plot point on a hero’s journey; but a) this has already been made in that article from The Independent to which I linked, and b) I hated Joseph Campbell’s book.

Reading my post from yesterday one may think I have something against Smith Island, Maryland. Nothing could be further from the truth! Between the nature, the solitude, and the food, it has been on our list of places to visit for the better part of this decade. Stars seem to be aligning for August of this year, so fingers crossed.

We have been watching some videos in preparation, and An Island Out of Time (YouTube link) were 25 minutes well-spent. The island has been getting less and less hospitable for humans compared to the mainland, and it has nothing to do with its supposedly sinking.

If there was my type of a long-form article, it would be the making-of any complex project. Like of The Last Unicorn (via Robin Sloan), or Back to the Future (warning: Twitter thread), or Frasier (to which I keep coming back).

And I have never even seen the first one — though I do plan to now!

📺 Ted Lasso, Season 3: better than the second, not quite as impactful as the first. Since the circumstances of the show’s debut were literally once-in-a-generation you can’t really fault it for that.

But isn’t it a bit sad that everyone but Ted has had a fulfilling arc?

An oral history of the final episode of the best show of the 2010s? Yes, please.

Spoiler alert, obviously.

📺 Season two of Slow Horses: even better than the first! But with better time management we didn’t have to stay up past midnight this time around.

Side note — it is always nice to see ex-Yu actors playing the Soviets, even though a BCS accent can hardly pass for Russian.

📺 Severance… Well, what is there to be said about Severance? Just hook it to my veins.

📺 The Last of Us was the best and the worst of modern-day American television. Great acting. An engaging and dynamic storyline. A powerful message. Green screens galore.

At least (some of) the giraffe was real.

📺 Not one but two new AppleTV shows feature middle-aged men whose lives — and own selves — disintegrate after their spouse dies. Adam Scott gets a brain implant. Jason Segel spends nights partying with prostitutes. What happened to Nora Durst’s family may have been more outlandish, but her reaction was that much more believable.

Which is to say: Severance and Shrinking are overrated; The Leftovers remains grossly underrated.