#10 // The Sun Chips Place
#10 // The Sun Chips Place
So, my initial idea for this issue of the newsletter was a B-Side of the appreciation of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood that I wrote for Slate last week. (Please read it, please!) The newsletter was going to be about Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. But, I can see the dread in the eyes of my friends when I start talking about whether X the Owl’s tree is a duplex or a multi-unit apartment or when I ask the question nobody’s asking about how it’s possible for Prince Tuesday to play on a baseball team when there are no other teens in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, so I have decided to keep that one in the vault.
Instead, I want to talk about a YouTube series where two dudes play a video game! Car Boys isn’t something I discovered. It’s produced by Polygon, it’s part of an already pretty robust genre of game-play web series, and it’s even received some notice from the more prestige-y precincts of TV criticism. More than that, one of its two co-hosts is Griffin McElroy, the “sweet baby brother” of the outlandishly popular comedy podcast, My Brother, My Brother and Me (now also a series on Seeso). So people know about Car Boys, though I didn’t, and maybe you don’t. But, here’s the thing: it is outrageously good. It’s a little bit Mystery Science Theater 3000, a little bit Space Ghost, a little bit Twin Peaks, and a little bit Bourne Identity. It is captivating, and it is hilarious, and it’s, honestly, seriously, occasionally a little scary. You’re going to love it.
The premise is simple. Nick downloaded a game called BeamNG.drive, which is a simulator designed primarily to allow players to—very realistically—crash cars and other vehicles into things. It’s extremely violent, but because there are almost no human figures, it’s not gory. Over the course of 41 episodes, Nick and Griffin indulge their every whim to create the most satisfying types of crashes they can imagine: shooting vans with Civil War cannons, altering gravity in order to drag a tractor trailer into the stratosphere and then drop it back down to earth, crushing a cement truck with transparent blocks made of dark matter or something. They encounter a crash-test dummy with a chaotic and malevolent power, they spend numerous episodes simply trying to pull an inanimate race-car driver out of a driver’s seat, and, in one of the most inexplicably shocking moments of television drama I’ve seen all year, they find a bag of Sun Chips in the back of a school bus.
But it’s their familiar, absurdist voice-over interplay—their audible and immersive friendship—that makes the show so addictive. These guys aren’t making fun of this game; they are in awe of the way it lets them into the strangest crevasses of their medium. What does it sound like when two friends who know their way around a console encounter something they genuinely couldn’t have imagined. (A recurring twist is when Nick and Griffin try to do something that causes the game to either freeze up or contort in alternately grotesque and beautiful ways.) It’s juvenile and silly and nonsensical, but it’s also joyful in an unrestrained way that I, at least, don’t see a lot on TV.
On the surface, I am the last person who should be interested in a 41-episode web series that consists entirely of a screen-shared video game. When I was a teenager, I went to sleepovers at my friends’ houses, and I’d be having a great time playing pool, eating Cheetos, watching Top Gun, making fart jokes, until somebody would crank up GoldenEye, and I would either spend dozens of lives trying to figure out how to avoid getting trapped in the corner of a room or, more often, I would sit and watch my friends play until early in the morning. It’s how I imagine Ebenezer Scrooge would have felt if one of the ghosts had just insisted he watch Fezziwig do a crossword puzzle for four hours.
So I was hesitant, but my best friend Thom visited us this weekend from Philadelphia, and he insisted I try it. We watched a dozen or so episodes, staying up later than I’ve stayed up since Maeve was an infant, and we laughed until we were crying and choking. I don’t think I can attribute my love of this show entirely to the enabling context of Thom’s visit, but it’s appropriate that he, of all people, introduced it to me. Watching two people play a video game isn’t the same as playing a video game. And watching a show about two friends isn’t the same as having friends. We live with and through media even though maybe we shouldn't as much as we do. Sometimes a show helps us to make sense of ourselves, and sometimes—the people we are when we are watching and hysterically laughing with our oldest friends—we make sense of a show.
Finally Started // Master of None (Season 2 / Netflix)
This show is so lovely, and we haven’t even gotten to either of the episodes people are raving about this season. Aziz Ansari is both a charming actor and a brilliant writer of charming things to say. The sequence about Scatman is one of my favorite things in any show this year.
Flagging // American Gods (Starz)
I’ll let friend of the newsletter Annie Petersen take this one:
Finally Finished // Billions (Showtime)
If you’re watching House of Cards, you should stop and start watching Billions instead. This show is a riot.
Recommendations //
Dear Television keeps chugging on Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. If you’ve caught up, check out our episode reviews here!
In the wake of recent, horrifying events in Oregon and elsewhere, this piece at The Intercept is a totally convincing piece of analysis about why domestic (white supremacist) violence is not only an urgent issue in the U.S. but one that many lawmakers on both sides seem to have a hard time recognizing as a thing at all.
Anne Helen Petersen's journey to Montana has been extraordinarily revealing. As much as I love it when Annie writes about pop culture, she's becoming a fantastic chronicler of local political cultures.
I don't know what the movie will be like, but this trailer for Okja is amazing!
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu's speech about confederate memorials is an extraordinarily strong and learned piece of political oratory, and I think of it every time Maeve and I stroll past the confederate memorial in Forest Park in St. Louis. (Btw, take that dumb thing down.)
Having now finished The Obelisk Gate, the second book in N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, I am in the exciting and infuriating position of having to wait three months to read the final book. Catch up with me!
Thom and I tried the legendary "Saint Paul Sandwich" this week at a restaurant called Hon's Wok in Saint Louis. Here's a piece from Lucky Peach (with recipe!) about why that was such a weird and delicious experience.
Ugga mugga,
Phil.