An Island Out of Time (2019)

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.

📺 The Americans are to the 2010s what The Wire was to the 2000s: a masterfully crafted epic overshadowed during its original run by more critically acclaimed and more popular shows (Game of Thrones and The Sopranos, respectively). But I’ll take D.C. over Westeros any time.

📺 I was 10 when The X-Files came out and watched it week by week through hyperinflation, school closures and bombings. Now that we have a 10-year-old at home I thought it would be a good time to revisit the series, and it has aged very well indeed. This will be fun!