#8 // Best Things
#8 // Best Things
Hi, everybody! I've been on a bit of a Netflix & Phil hiatus, but I will be picking up the pace again in the new year. I wanted to start that out now, though, because I wanted to write about a few of my favorite things I watched on TV this year. This will be a little truncated, but I will follow up shortly with a post about my favorite things I read. So, for the moment:
TV SERIES //
Better Things
These top three could come in any order. I loved all three in very different ways, and all three are totally unique on television. But I’m giving it to Better Things because it’s the one that didn't win me over immediately. We watched and liked the first episode, watched and hated the second, and then stopped. Then, the DVR piled up, and we started again, and it was miraculous. Being skeptical of the genius of Louis C.K. is a hobby-horse of mine, and, especially when writing about auteur-driven half-hours on FX, it’s easy for me to fall into “this is better than Louie,” or “this does all of the things people say Louie is supposed to be doing.” I already wrote that about Atlanta, but damned if it isn’t also true of Better Things. The easiest way to say this that functions as both a criticism of Louie and stand-alone praise of Better Things is that Louis C.K. is great at thinking through rhetorical questions, and Pamela Adlon, it turns out, is great at thinking through actual questions. I don’t mean this to be a version of, this show is so REAL, but there’s something about how funny this show is without being theatrical, how hard the punchlines land without tortured set-up, how good the cross-cutting is—for a show with such a naturalistic handheld feel, it’s beautifully edited—how talented and idiosyncratic the kid ensemble is, how it made me want to get Lenny Kravitz his own TV show, how kind the show is about meanness, how it gets that transcendent goodness and pettiness are only separated by ordinary on-the-fly decisions about how to react to things, how gutting and warm the finale is, how it accuses everyone (including us) and then forgives everyone because, holy shit, this is a show about what love is like.
Atlanta
American Crime Story: The People v. OJ Simpson
Insecure
Fleabag
Bojack Horseman
The Americans
Catastrophe
Girls
Full Frontal w/ Samantha Bee
TV Watching Experience // NBA Finals, Game 7, June 19, Pittsburgh, PA
I loved basketball when I was a kid in the nineties, but I never had a pro team. I rooted for Jordan’s Bulls, and I wanted Charles Barkley to win with the Suns, and I collected hats from all the teams whose logos I loved, but, growing up in Pittsburgh, I didn’t have what you could call a rooting interest. And if we wanted to see a pro basketball game, we drove to Cleveland. The Cavs weren’t always bad during those years, but when we’d get tickets to see whatever team of superstars were on the road in Cleveland, it felt like getting tickets to a Harlem Globetrotters game at the Washington Generals’ home arena.
So, while it might have been a logical—even a virtuous—thing to become a Cavs fan, I didn’t. That’s a failing on my part, though the notable rivalry between other Pittsburgh and Cleveland sports franchises may have done a lot to discourage me. Anyway, as years have worn on, and I haven’t lived in Western PA in a while, I’ve grown affectionate of Cleveland from afar, and I have desperately rooted for two of their teams to snatch championships from benighted rivals this year.
The one time it worked, I watched Game 7 of the NBA Finals in my parents’ condo in downtown Pittsburgh with my mom and dad and my partner Melanie, and our infant daughter Maeve asleep in the other room. Since I’ve lived away from home, I’ve managed to see the NBA Finals with my parents enough that it’s almost become a tradition. It’s in June, so I was often just home from college, and since it’s generally around my dad’s birthday as well, it would often coincide with visits after I no longer went home for the whole summer.
But this year was different. Two nights after we watched Cleveland win the championship, Melanie and Maeve and I drove back home, halfway across the country to St. Louis, where we’ve lived for a little while now. And two nights after that, my parents, who have lived in Pittsburgh their entire lives, took all their stuff, left Pittsburgh, and moved to St. Louis with us to help us care for Maeve.
LeBron James has an unusual relationship with his hometown. When he decided to come back a few years ago after his quest in Miami, he said that his time in South Beach was like going away for college. He grew up a lot, and he learned how to win, etc, and he decided to bring that back home to Cleveland. I’d love to be able to draw at least this one comparison between myself and King James, but I can’t. When I went away to college, I didn’t come back home. I went to two grad schools, and I got jobs in far-flung locations, and I made new homes in some of them. (I’d be interested to know what LeBron’s grad-school option would have been.)
When LeBron won, after The Shot and The Block and The Weird Moment Where It Looked Like He Broke His Hand Or Something, and he collapsed crying on the ground, I cried, too. I was really happy to be able to be there to see it in Pittsburgh, with my mom and dad. I cried because LeBron was so happy, because it was such a dramatic game of basketball, because you could see him work every second of that game to keep this one thing for Cleveland, because when he collapsed you could feel the weight of all of that guilt and all of that hope, because my parents were leaving their home for me and my family, because it felt like I was leaving Pittsburgh again too, because I thought about my daughter being eventually old enough to stay awake to watch the NBA Finals with us, because I could feel that we were all in the same place and sharing the same thing, because LeBron left Cleveland but he always loved Cleveland, because I left Pittsburgh but I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, because I don’t know LeBron and I am not LeBron but I think I understand at least one thing about him.
Pittsburgh didn’t win the NBA Finals, but this game was somehow about me and my parents and our city. As long as I live, I will never forget watching Game 7 with my family in that place. Witnessing the spectacle of a person doing something that beautiful and that hard for the people who believe in him.
Happy new year,
Phil.