Chernobyl became a last-minute entrant for the best show on TV of the 2010s, but it is apparent now that the 2020s are its decade. From governmental incompetence to criminal cover-ups to the bravery of regular humans, the parallels between a 1980s nuclear meltdown and a 2020s societal meltdown draw themselves. Being an 80s baby, I can only count my blessings that nuclear fallout isn’t self-replicating.

But I do hope I’m still around when Wuhan comes out.

The Mandalorian is still a series of fantastic action pieces connected by enough plot to make it interesting without requiring you to build your own crazy wall. It’s the good kind of mindless, now with some old favorites.

There is a place in everyone’s life for mindless entertainment: things with which to amuse and delight your brain when it can’t handle anything more mentally taxing. But whereas mindfulness is always the same: complex, developing characters, plot twists, emotional range (yawn), there are many different ways to achieve mindlessness. Most shows take the easy route: if there is no “there” there, there is nothing to worry your mind about — just react to what’s in front of your eyes without worrying what came before or what will come after, football in the groin-style.

As you could have guessed from the thumbs up emoji in the title, The Mandalorian does it the hard way. It counts on the viewers' familiarity with Star Wars and western movie tropes to do the mental work in the background without taxing the frontal cortex. There is a before and an after, but you’ve seen the before and can guess the after so you can focus on the here and the now of blasters firing away and villains monologuing themselves into a stalemate. Familiar but fresh, just what the brain needs after dealing with the stale strangeness of the last year.

Kelsey Grammer once said that Fraiser — the show, not the character — was so good because the writers and cast never went for the easy laughs, the jokes that came to mind right away. That’s what made it the best sitcom of the 1990s and still eminently watchable¹.

TGBBS goes for the easy jokes all the time but that’s OK because we watch it for the emotions it elicits in its competitors, judges, and us viewers, not for the triple-A-rated comedy. And here it does not go for the easy ones, the emotions that will arise any time competing humans are being judged: ridicule, shame, anger, rivalry, envy… You know, the ol' staples of American reality TV. There is lots of sadness and frustration when a baker overproofs their sourdough, sure, but there is also friendship, compassion, empathy, and a kind of gentleness even when a steely-eyed judge ribs your rhubarb pie’s soggy bottom.

I am sure this wasn’t easy, particularly in a season in which early on one baker makes another drop their finished goods on the floor right before judging (anger hidden), a good baker leaves after a week of horrible performances in what was supposed to be their specialty (ridicule averted), and an oversized bakerette who tends to spill everything everywhere whilst making visually mediocre — though no doubt tasty — goods serves up a cake-shaped splodge in one of the last showstoppers (no shaming of any kind and there were plenty of kinds to think of in those moments). It was a trying year and the season could not have been easy to make. Yet, I can happily report that the baking tent and the hyper-green lawn it sits on continue being cynicism-free zones, making better people of its participants and viewers alike.

It’s full of style, has excellent casting, and pretty good chess¹, which is enough to make it into an enjoyable but forgettable miniseries. If only they had put in as much effort and thought into character development as they did in Beth Harmon’s dresses…

As long as I can remember, Which is to say, mid to late 1980s. any protagonist of a movie or a TV show who wasn’t world-weary and cynical was either naïve, stupid, or both. In American popular culture, “good” people are the way they are only because they don’t understand how the world truly works. As side characters they are mostly comic relief. As protagonists they can only succeed through piercing the veil of ignorance — becoming worse people in the process — or by pure dumb luck. Ned Flanders, Forest Gump, Kimmy Schmidt all come to mind.

Not so with Ted Lasso, the only character in recent memory who is well aware that the world is harsh and that there are people out to get him, ⊕ The show doesn’t hide who this is: all of England, save for two close friends. yet defaults to thinking the best of everyone he meets. He is still capable of mild deception in the service of punishing the wicked, but he can’t even punish someone without an endearing monologue on what he’s all about: being curious and not judgmental.

Being more curious and less judgemental would serve everyone well at any time, but never more so than this year, when everyone suspects the worst of everyone else. The default behavior is mistrust, the default sentiment cynicism. This show starts with plenty of both, yet they melt away under Lasso’s high-power beam of un-ironic and very self-aware goodness. If the 2000s were the decade of The Wire and the 2010s were the decade of the Game of Thrones, I wish, hope, pray that the 2020s turn out to be the decade of Ted Lasso.

• The HBO show manages to be more like the comic book than the movie ever was, even though — or rather exactly because — it is nothing like the original while the movie was for the most part a literal shot-for-shot translation of the comic and therefore missed two things that made the comic great: 1. amplifying the anxiety of the day to intolerable levels, and 2. deconstructing its own medium.
• Re: no 1, the original was all over the place time-wise but mostly set in the 80s and the perceived threat was nuclear holocaust. The movie came out in the mid-2000s, during the time of war against terror and existential angst, but was still set in the 80s and the threat again was nuclear holocaust — two beats already missed. The HBO series is all over the place time-wise but is for the most part set in 2019, and the perceived threat is white supremacy. Note the "perceived" and note that it takes some time for the real villains to be revealed.
• Re: no 2, I'll pick just one example although there are many. The original featured a comic book within the comic book. Of course, in a world in which super heroes are real, escapist media wouldn't be doing its job just by featuring even more super heroes. So what kids get instead are pirates, and what you as a reader get are panels featuring ships at sea, pirate raids, and the like, interspersed with the "real" story, to great effect. The movie had… breaks in which it showed panels from that same pirate-themed comic book, with the same story line. Only because you're not mixing two comic books but instead are interrupting a movie to show some drawings, it doesn't work at all. The HBO series, brilliantly, has a TV show within a TV show, which is, again brilliantly, not pirate-themed. As to what it is, well, that's one knock I'd have against the show because it's trying to be cute and funny, and yes a parody docu-drama about super hero origins in the style of American Crime Story is cute and funny, but it's not in the spirit of the original.
• Another knock against the HBO series is that it coddles the audience, almost as if HBO got complaints about a few of its other shows being too obtuse. A dialogue line was foreshadowed 10 minutes ago in a different dialogue? Cut to the foreshadowing. Characters recognize a clue in something that occurred two episodes ago? Cut to that scene to remind you what happened. A character breaks an egg? Cut to them holding a different egg in a scene from the same episode. Why?
• Yes, it's petty criticism, but the show is so masterful in so many other ways that the tiny imperfections stick out. Also, it's also easier for me to list the few things I didn't like because everything else (Regina King! Jeremy Irons! Jean Smart! The kid actors! The two skinny white guys who I hope will team up for Season 2! The self-conscious wokeness. That soundtrack!) is pitch perfect.
• A half-sequitur: everything I liked about Lost was put in there by Damon Lindelof, and everything bad about it came from JJ Abrams. I didn't realize that at the time, but their work post-Lost speaks for itself.
• It ties with Westworld Season 1 as the second-best season of the decade, but The Leftovers Season 2 is still my number 1.

Directed by Various, 2019

“Diagnosis” is a Netflix reality show first, a comment on American healthcare second, and Lisa Sanders’ medical show on crowdsourcing the diagnostic process a distant third. If you wanted to see more of what made her book and column great, like I did, well, tough luck: this ain’t it. Because — and this isn’t a surprise — most people with access to a tertiary medical center do get an adequate diagnosis. Those who are undiagnosed either lack access, or have a functional-slash-undiagnosable condition that ultimately doesn’t change much in their management.

Realizing this, the producers add a spin: the crowdsourcing they bring is also there for emotional support, connecting with people, getting different treatment recommendations. As if Facebook didn’t exist. If this show were a clinical trial, it would be a phase II with an unimpressive response rate but hey look at those bio markers we hadn’t initially planned on doing!

Warning: spoilers for Episode 1 ahead. I may get to the other ones, eventually.

Only the first episode half-lives up to its promise. A young woman from Las Vegas has a problem. Her local doctors don’t know the cause; I certainly didn’t, but could make a ballpark guess as to which type of a disorder it was and which subspecialist she should see. However, instead of giving her a referral to the nearest university medical center, the doctors flood her medical bills, and sue her for non-payment to boot. Only in America!

Enter Sanders: her NYT article gets a bunch of people across the world sending video suggestions as to the possible diagnosis. A medical student from Turin, Italy, offers a free work-up. Netflix, bless their hearts, films the patient and her partner flying to Italy to get it done, marveling at the wonders of a single payer system. I can only presume travel and boarding were paid for by the production team. But why not pay for a trip to San Francisco instead? Well, the skyline isn’t as dramatic as that of Turin; and it would rob Dr. Sanders of the opportunity to marvel how crowdsourcing brought the answer from half way across the world, literally.

In a nutshell: Because of No Insurance and TV Drama Makes Better Ratings, woman from Nevada flies to Italy — instead of driving to California — to get diagnosed with a rare medical condition.

To be continued…

Serbia’s public broadcaster, RTS (that’s PTC in cyrillic) has a good chunk of its archive spread across multiple YouTube channels, and it is magnificent (this one in particular).

Observe the 1960s-1990s televised plays and TV dramas. I still have vivid memories of watching one particular product the first time it aired, about a Serbian family keeping in touch with their ex-pat relatives in Germany via VHS tapes. Replace camcorders with smart phones and speed up the timeline to account for the internet, and it could have been shot today. Technology changes, people don’t.

My favorite childhood TV show hasn’t aged well at all; then again has anything from the ‘90s? If you consider most of it was made during a civil war and in a time of hyperinflation it is actually quite good. What was 90210’s excuse? Better kids’ shows have been made in Serbia both before and after.

Best for last: the celebration of hard core nerddom that is Serbia’s longest-running quiz show, important enough to have its own channel. It starts with anagrams and math problems, makes a detour to Mastermind, then finishes off with three different ways to test for trivia. Jokes about the autism spectrum would be writing themselves if this were an American show, but it’s not, and (before I left, at least) Serbian viewers still had some admiration for the participants. It is all very serious and competitive, and has been on the air every weekday for the last 24 years. (A political side-note: this does not mean Serbia is free from anti-intellectualism, quite the opposite in fact. Some combination of militant anti-intellectuals, gas-lighters, and proponents of economic/financial scientism has been in positions of power since the early 90s. There are no lessons here, just observations).