I saw a trailer for this show, assumed it would be about lab-grown animal meat, made a mental note to watch it and then forgot to watch it. Only the next day did I learn it was a hoax documentary! And a very clever one, I think. If I’d watched it live where would the penny have dropped for me? Hopefully at the “pain is subjective” part with the blatantly evil CEO. After that things start to get so over the top it’s obvious it’s a satire but on the other hand the past few years have felt like a satire as well.
Anyway, right now in Britain the cost of living crisis is still going on, but all the newspapers seem to care about is Nigel Farage’s bank account. Maybe we should just eat him.
This expose of The Jeremy Kyle Show aired on Channel 4 yesterday. It made for difficult watching and invoked that all-too-common feeling of “Wait, this was happening in plain sight for ages and everyone just accepted it?” I never sought out the Jeremy Kyle Show but I always assumed from what I saw of it that everything was staged, not that people were being abused and belittled on a regular basis.
It sort of makes you wonder, which things that are currently commonplace are going to be seen as horrifying in a decade or so? I have a list. I hope I’m not doing any of them.
Me, a person who’s just lived through a pandemic, seeing the Sweet Tooth poster: Oh this looks so cute! Kinda Tim Burton-esque I guess, maybe wholesome
Me, a person who’s just lived through a pandemic, actually watching Sweet Tooth: OH OKAY NEVER MIND.
…..
Sweet Tooth is very good! But wholesome it is not. It’s horrifying, really, in that it poses the question “Would the average person accept the killing of an unwanted child if it meant they themselves got to live?” and answers it with a depressingly firm “yes.” It also presents a very bleak view of how people might act in the wake of a truly deadly pandemic, which obviously hits much closer to home now than it would’ve done when the original Sweet Tooth comic was released in 2013. Yeesh.
But APART from the deaths and burnings and plagues and executions and experimentations and abuses it does have a geniunely sweet found-family story at its core, which was lovely to see. It takes the very well-tested plot of “hard bitten survivor must escort special child through the apocalypse” and sure it’s super cliche but I loved it, Nonso Anozie and Christian Convery bounce off each other so well.
Also as a forever fan of The Last Man on Earth I was so happy to see Will Forte in this, and him really getting to stretch his acting chops too. Dude is so underrated as a serious actor, I swear.
Not the original one with *spits* Ricky Gervais, the much better and as it turns out GENIUNELY HEARTWARMING one with Steve Carrell and co. I didn’t expect to love it but I did! Really good fun, really hilarious and really sweet at the end.
And now I know where all the memes come from! My god this show apparently barely had a line that wasn’t meme’d! “Dwight, you ignorant slut?” The Office. “Yeah, I have questions, number one, how dare you?” The Office. “Looks into the camera like I’m on The Office?” THE OFFICE.
It is the WILDEST, DUMBEST, WORST show ever and I regret so much I didn’t watch it when it first came out. It’s the most so-bad-its-good fun I’ve had watching TV in ages, if I can ignore the fact that a lot of the “storylines” (trust me, the quotation marks are needed) are crassly ripped from the headlines half the time. Lemme recap-
Here are, in no order, (some of) the most ridiculous things that have happened during the episodes I’ve watched:
-A man has a hyper-rare medical condition which makes him appear dead. He ends up on an actual autopsy table (ick) and upon waking up scares the autopsy guy so much he passes out and cuts himself with the chest-cutter-open tool. When the emergency services turn up they VERY REASONABLY suggest that the guy wear a medical alert bracelet to stop anyone cutting him up or burying him. He says no because he “likes to feel alive” or something. Well, screw the next autopsy guy who slices himself open then.
-Four flashbacks, one after the other and only barely in coherent order, reveal that a man abused his wife into suicide but she once shot a bullet into the tree she hung herself from. Man decides to blow up the tree (??) and the bullet explodes out and kills him.
-Kenneth Choi gets in a car accident and ends up with a spike in his head. He lives! He’s put in a induced coma and everyone very briefly worries. His flaky girlfriend gets a stern lecture about how she’ll have to be there for him if he survives. He lives again! His so called friends get him a “welcome back” cake shaped like his face with a spike through it.
They look all smiley and attractive (all of the unattactive folks on the show are obviously murderers or victims) but these are awwwwwwful people.
-There is what appears at one point to be an actual zombie?
-There’s a guy called Buck who’s a poorly drawn sex addict with very few other characteristics. His name rhymes with “fuck.” He’s insufferable.
-Abby the lonely 911 operator who narrates the show and Buck find themselves in a situation where they have to rescue a small child from a swimming pool that a live power cable somehow fell into. Aw an incarnation of my beloved old whale floatie, bought from America during a holiday, has a cameo as “Thing Buck thinks he can jump on to get through the ELECTROCUTED POOL”
My whale friend was named Kyle. I’m so sorry Kyle. Also guess I’m not going in one of those small personal swimming pools which seem to be a staple of American culture again!
-Abby goes on a date with Buck and he immediately almost chokes to death on his food. I think the universe wants him dead, as do I.
-A lift plummets! The mother and son inside don’t die on impact but they do get trapped as water slowly rises around them. I forgot how that happened but Los Angeles apparently is up there with the Death Star in terms of health and safety rules. I’m never going in a lift again either.
-Buck attempts to rescue a guy from a dangling rollercoaster, and fails as the guy falls dramatically to his death. He angsts for about an episode but later it turns out the guy was suicidal anyway and this…fixes things? What?
-A man gets a massive live tapeworm removed from, ur, his rectum. (Don’t watch this show while eating.) I feel so sorry for the poor actor whose agent called him up with, “Would you like to play ‘Man Who Has Massive Live Tapeworm In His Rectum?'” I wonder if he asked any follow-up questions.
I hear there’s several more seasons of this show and a spin-off. Oh god.
Recently Channel 4 started showing trailers for a thing called Mary Kills People and it caught my interest. Turns out it’s best described as… I guess… a REALLY REALLY dark almost-comedy about euthanasia? Mary only Kills People who are already dying but are prevented by law from ending their own lives. Most of them are in pain and longing for a way out that only she and her illegal drugs can give them.
Again REALLY REALLY dark but it’s very good. It doesn’t shy away from the horrors of terminal illness or death. It also poses a lot of questions about them, none of which can be answered because there aren’t any answers.
On a much lighter note this show has a lot of gay characters in the main cast and they’re all well-developed and interesting! And all of them are women! So bearing that in mind I guess I’m sort of surprised this show never seemed to develop any of a following whatsoever? It doesn’t even have its own TVTropes page! And…
…well it is also finished now! It got cancelled, thankfully without a cliffhanger, after three seasons. Which sucks because there was so much more they could have done with it. Oh well. The story they did get to tell is extremely interesting so check it out if you can. I know Channel 4 has it on their player if you’re in the UK!
Oh hey! They’ve made a drama about a true-crime story I actually remember happening! The Charles Ingram Who Wants to Be a Millionaire case. It was big news for a couple of days, IIRC, and then, well, then 9/11 happened and it got pushed out of the news. (This is mentioned in the show itself too.) I couldn’t remember for the life of me whether the Ingrams got declared guilty or not guilty so that was a surprise too.
It’s a great show to binge-watch while on lockdown, anyway. (I say binge-watch. There’s only three episodes.) True-crime stories without particularly high stakes are my favourite kind of stories. It’s pointed out in the show itself that is stealing a million pounds from a company who had more than that to give away really a crime deserving of the sort of justice the Ingrams recieved? They didn’t kill anyone, didn’t hurt anyone. And I appreciate it left things open-ended as to whether they even did what they were accused of.
Also Michael Sheen is fantastic as usual. ALSO also about halfway through the show I drank a glass of water wrong and had a massive coughing fit, how incredibly ironic.
It came out almost a year ago but I finally got to see Doom Patrol! It was… how to even describe it? DC does Deadpool? Justice League via the most batshit insane fever dream you’ve ever had? I got nothin’.
But the CAST! My god the cast! It’s so good to see Brendan Fraser again and he looks like he’s having the time of his life, I’m so glad. And Cyborg, that’s Joivan Wade from Doctor Who!
But Diane Guerrero oh wow! She did not have to Go That Hard, as the kids say. She was amazing playing several very different and usually terrifying people (sometimes in the same scene even.) WHAT A PERFORMANCE, damn.
If you are interested in watching actors kill it in the most ridiculous of scenes please watch this show! Also watch it if you are interested in any of the following:
fourth-wall breaking
musical numbers
Matt Bomer, specifically, doing musical numbers
friendly sentient streets
Alan Tudyk wearing the most amazingly terrifying grin I have ever seen on TV outside of political broadcasts
a person with a dinosaur for a second head
a person with a dinosaur for a second head who wears a mask over both heads when robbing a store
Timothy Dalton
tortured parent-child relationships
the weirdest damn sex scenes you can possibly imagine
Brendan Fraser as a robot wrestling a massive alligator while you cry tears of heart-wrenching sorrow
Ever since yesterday afternoon I’ve been bingewatching The Act. (Apparently it first came out in 2019 but it only seems to have made it to Britain now.)
I came out of thinking, wow AMAZING performances from the entire cast (my god I barely even recognised Patricia Arquette), really well done show that had me constantly on edge, but there’s no way most of that was true right?
I WAS VERY WRONG. THE REAL STORY IS EVEN WORSE. (The potential poisoning?! That horrible extra detail about the night of the murder?! The fate of the ashes?!) Holy fuck. While I’m writing this, right now, I still absolutely cannot wrap my head around any of this. I had definitely heard the name “Gypsy Rose Blanchard” before but I had no idea this was the story connected with it. I can’t believe this happened only a few years ago and I’d never heard of it til now. Honest to god I’m still reeling. Bloody hell.
If you see this pop up on the Netflix homepage, I highly recommend it! It’s cute and creative and beautifully animated. As well as great main characters it has astronomer wolves, ’80s raccoons and an evil monkey voiced by Dan Stevens. It’s a blast.
And in the middle of it all there’s a really good, sweet, simple coming-out scene. In an ideal world that probably wouldn’t be a big deal but it is, especially since this show seems to be aimed mostly at kids and teens. So go check it out if you wanna/you can!
