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This is great news cause now I can procrastinate even more 
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Jan 25, 2024 23:38
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 09:58 |
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Ok I managed to scrounge a list together hurray Honourable Mention: Survivor I stopped being a regular Survivor viewer after Chris Underwood’s underwhelming win in Edge of Extinction and hearing about the problematic aspects of Island of the Idols just pushed me further away from the franchise. But back in September I began a full rewatch of the whole season which has given me a whole lot of joy over the last few months. I can’t put it on my list cause I’m still only up to Nicaragua but for how much I’ve got out of this show last year I had to give it a mention. 10. What If?  “All quests for redemption begin in darkness” I needed to fill out this list and I watched two episodes of the new season while visiting my parents for Christmas  9. AEW Dynamite  “I hear that you have a father… and that your father is dead.” I’ve actually dropped off watching wrestling this year but this mainly makes the list due to Christian Cage’s incredible run as a shithead narcissist who mocks people for having dead fathers while hitting on their moms. 8. Black Mirror  “I am sorry that I shat in a church” They made a new season of Black Mirror what the gently caress. Like any season of this show it was a mixed bag and it’s been a long time since they hit the heights of their best episodes but overall this season’s batting average was pretty good. The highlights were Loch Henry’s musings on our exploitation of true crime documentaries and Demon 79’s straight up supernatural female empowerment apocalypse yarn. 7. Loki  “For you. For all of us.” 2023 was the year where even the most diehard stan had to admit the MCU has gone off the boil. Season 2 of Loki was, however, one of the few bright spots of recent years. Tom Hiddleston continued to deliver a great performance as the titular character, Ke Huy Quan was a fantastic addition to the cast and we got to see Owen Wilson ride a jetski (sort of). The wibbly-wobbly timey-wimeyness worked out well and the series wrapped up Loki’s arc with a really well-earned ending. I still hope we see Hiddleston back in the MCU one last time so he can close out Loki’s story in reunion with Thor but if he doesn’t then this was a pitch perfect way to go. 6. RuPaul’s Drag Race  “Drag is not a crime but looking this sickening should be” 2023 was a rough year for your girl Rarity. March, especially. I was going through IT and one of the few things that helped me was a binge of the current season of Drag Race. I’d always avoided the franchise before due to Ru’s pretty lovely opinions about trans drag but she’s come around in recent years and Season 15 felt like one massive apology to the community as trans queen Sasha Colby romped to victory. I’m really glad I could finally find joy in the franchise as the light-hearted fun, shady reads and vicious serves were just what I needed. Sasha was a phenomenal performer who absolutely deserved her win but also huge shoutout to Luxx and her definitely 40-inches of human hair. That Anetra/Marcia3 lip sync lives in my head rent free. 5. Devil’s Plan  “Live gloriously, or die” There has been a huge hole in my heart ever since The Genius wrapped up its final season. I thought I was going to have to go the rest of my life without another Extreme Ways moment but then Netflix shoved money at the creator to bring the show over. Enter the Devil’s Plan, a show which is essentially The Genius S5 (with a few minor tweaks). Apparently most people think the changes are for the negative but I actually found them very rewarding. I loved seeing the contestants live together and I thought it really heightened the emotions and drama. Also it allowed for a fun metagame puzzle that brought many of the show’s biggest surprises. But none of that would have mattered without the right cast and while there were some misses the people that hit hit so hard. The bond between Seok-jin and See-won was heartwarming to watch while Dong-Joo’s performance in Fragments of Memory is up there with any from one of these shows. Bring on season 2! 4. Yellowjackets  “She wants us to” So I got the impression that a lot of fans were down on the sophomore season of Yellowjackets but honestly, I just don’t see it. I guess if you want to look at it as a puzzle-box mythology-focused entity then the show’s devotion to straddling the line between supernatural forest spirits and disaster survivors rationalising their trauma could be frustrating, however I don’t even know why you would even want to watch it that way. For me Yellowjackets has always been about two main things. The first is seeing how a group of normal teenage girls can descend into the most savage of behaviour through a slow series of small decisions that are all understandable but which add up to a macabre tapestry. The second is Christina Ricci being Christina Ricci. And well, she’s still Christina Ricci. Her performance as the adult version of Missy is a bedazzling portrayal of a complex character who combines legitimate sociopathy with frightening empathy. Plus this season she was joined by Elijah Wood playing his own flavour of delightful weirdo to form an unlikely rootable couple. Boy do I hope those crazy kids can make it work! Speaking of crazy kids that brings me back to the first draw of the show where the show also delivered. I mean, they got to the cannibalism! And for a moment that had been built up from the opening scenes of the series it exceeded my every expectation. From the moment that an eerily-timed storm covers Jackie’s cremating corpse in snow the events develop with pitch perfect presentation. The slow build as the girls discover that her body has left roasted to precision which gleefully transitions to the juxtaposition of their feeding frenzy with a twisted Roman bacchanalia is my TV highlight of the year and it’s not even close. All while poor, poor Coach Ben looks on in horror at the inhuman world he has fallen into. 10/10, no notes. 3. Doctor Who  “You keep on going, and that’s the adventure” As a British citizen is was my national duty to grow up with a love of Doctor Who. Of course when I was a kid the show was in its cancelled era so this was mostly gained from watching my dad’s VHS tapes of stories from the Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy eras and almost an entire collection of the novelisations. I was very excited when Russell T Davies rejuvenated the brand in the 00s and watched it religiously until someway through the Peter Capaldi run. At that point it felt like Steven Moffatt was running on fumes and Chris Chibnall taking over as showrunner did nothing to get me excited. For years I was dipped out of the show entirely, not even fussed by the news that RTD, David Tennant and Catherine Tate were returning to celebrate the 60th anniversary. I would have continued to live my life free of care from the latest goings on in the Whoniverse if not for one thing: The Meep. The Meep has been a running in-joke in my family for as long as I’ve been alive. (My dad is a massive Marvel fan and collected their 70s Doctor Who magazine where the Meep first featured. He showed these to my mum who quickly started saying meep whenever feeling flustered and she’s been doing it ever since.) So when it turned out the first of the anniversary specials had the Meep in it I felt pretty much obliged to check it out, and then when I did I saw the Neil Patrick Harris was playing one of my all-time favourite Classic Who villains so hell, might as well watch the whole bunch. So one day I sat down and blasted all three specials back to back and drat, I didn’t realise how much I missed good Doctor Who stories until they were here. The Star Beast was, eh…, fine I guess but Wild Blue Yonder was some loving terrifying Cronenberg poo poo that stands as the best self-contained story Rusty ever wrote for the show. And then there’s The Giggle, with NPH delivering a deliciously camp take on the Toymaker and Ncuti Gatwa immediately jumping off the screen. And all the way through Tennant and Tate delivered performances with such heart and pathos that truly wrapped up 20 years of NuWho in satisfying fashion. I’m so excited to see where Gatwa takes the character and I can say with full mavity that I’m hype to watch Doctor Who again. And that’s neat. 2. Wheel of Time  “Is this a sex thing or a murder thing? Because either way I’d rather you skip the talking” The Wheel of Time has been my favourite fantasy series for 25 years with an intricate web of plots and a collection of characters I love. When the first season came out a couple of years ago it was faced with a series of challenges including the first novel’s generic source material, filming that was interrupted by a pandemic and one of their principal actors noping out on the show before the final episodes had finished production. Even so while many fans were down on Season 1 I got a great deal out of it and went into this year’s batch of episodes with much excitement. With the story expanding in scope and developing more of a unique flavour I had high hopes for seeing how this would be presented on screen and I was not disappointed. As far as I’m concerned Season 2 knocked it out of the park, answering the majority of criticisms that had been levelled against it and raising the bar in every aspect. More than anything its the casting in this show that is the absolute standout. They’d set their stall out right from the start with pulling in Rosamund Pike but this year they knocked it out of the park. As soon as I heard Meera Syal was joining the line-up I knew exactly what role she’d be playing and I knew she’d be perfect for it while Natasha O’Keeffe burst off the screen as the new major antagonist. Meanwhile alongside the crop of younger actors that were really finding their feet Dónal Finn slipped into the role of Mat as if he’d been there from the start while Ceara Coveney did a wonderful toeing the fine line between Elayne’s oblivious snootiness and genuine bravery. And next season is only going to get better! We’ve already seen a sneak peek at Laia Costa’s queer af gothy villain but we’re also getting Olivia Williams and Shohreh fricking Aghdashloo! But the cast isn’t the only thing that got me going from the latest season. A bigger commitment from Amazon meant bigger budgets which really pushed the production design to a new level. Ok, we’re not talking Game of Thrones Season 8 here but we’re definitely talking around Season 4. This came into play as the show introduced a good four or five new cultures across its run and each one felt appropriately fleshed out, in particular the Seanchan where they truly captured the horror of their otherworldly and alien society. Yes, there are aspects of the books which are lost and impactful moments in the text that fail to hit but for each one of these that miss there is something new the show brings to the table that delivers a brand new insight or connection to this world that is so close to my heart. I do have one criticism though. Spend more money on Lanfear’s wardrobe. 1. Plagiarism and You(tube)  “There’s a little bit of nothing in all of us, and we’d like to fill it with something” Yeah, she went there. Welcome to the only reason I made the effort to make a top 10 this year, so that I could put a 4-hour Youtube essay as my #1 pick. You may not have heard of this video, although it did take the internet by storm when it was released at the start of December. But you’ve probably heard of its creator, former goon hbomberguy who has built a career out of extended deep dives into fascinating subjects like anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers and the Roblox OOF MP3. And if you’re still drawing a blank he’s the guy who got AOC to say trans rights during a 24-hour stream of DK64. I’ve been a fan of Harris Bomberguy’s work for many years now. He (and his backroom team) have got a fantastic capability for interjecting potentially dry topics with humour to keep the subject engaging while also being able to dissect an argument into well-constructed individual rebuttals that are all back up by a strong amount of citations. This last point is especially relevant for his latest piece, a comprehensive examination of creative plagiarism on Youtube. Over the course of this mammoth video Mr. H Bomb addresses a number of creators and uses their examples to display exactly what plagiarism looks like, how it can be spotted, the impact it can have on its victims and the tactics that plagiarists use to escape requital when their actions are uncovered. However this is all just the prelude because it’s not until the 2-hour mark that the true subject of this exposé is revealed. James Somerton is, or rather was, a queer content creator and media critic with a large online following who released new material at a rather prolific rate. His work was focused on LGBT representation with videos covering topics like the early years of gay representation in Hollywood and the history of queerbaiting. It’s hard to find his videos online any more – he seems to have purged his channels – but judging by the clips in Plagiarism and Youtube they are not particularly great. His delivery is dry and his screen presence is minimal. But he posted a lot and that’s all you really need to do to succeed in an algorithm-driven world. The problem? He was only able to keep up that pace by stealing words from the very queer creatives he claimed to represent, thereby denying them the recognition or reward that their work deserved. (One of his videos, Codebreakers, stole from 17 different authors.) And it’s here that the true genius of Hbizzle’s essay shines through. Over the course of the first two hours of set-up he has given you all the context and methodology of plagiarism you need so that when he turns to Somerton you instantly see the patterns being followed. In a way I feel bad for James. He’s far from the only charlatan to be getting away with plagiarism on Youtube. He’s just the one that lucked into becoming the internet’s main character for a couple of weeks. But at the same time there’s no denying that he is an engrossing character study. There are so many interesting quirks to his misconduct like the use of stock credit sequence, his failed production company and weird brand of misogyny that the rest of the video never feels like its running out of steam. And this feels like the point to bring up my other HM for this year, an accompanying 2-hour video essay from cynical music critic Todd in the Shadows who stepped outside his wheelhouse to do his own look at Somerton, and despite these videos closing in on six hours together there is very little crossover with Todd’s essay focusing instead on the reams of bullshit coming out of James’s mouth. Did you know he thinks that Skype was invented because of gay porn? Or that homosexuality exploded in the West after WW2 because all our soldiers were attracted to buff Nazis? Or that queer activists in the 90s only cared about marriage equality cause all the cool gays died of AIDS? Yeah, it’s loving wild. But coming back to Harry McBomb the thing that I have always found most admirable about his videos is that he is very conscious of the impact of his work and his reach. Throughout Plagiarism and Youtube he is careful to dissuade against witch-hunting and instead use his voice to lift up his community. The earnings from this video have been pledged to Somerton’s victims and he uses his time to promote other queer creators with smaller followings. But most importantly he takes his space as an opportunity to open up a discussion on the level in which we engage with art and the difference between passion and obligation. This essay caused me to reflect on the merits of the works I enjoy, the ways that I support creators and my relationship with my own creative impulses and for that it is my #1 TV show of 2023.
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Jan 31, 2024 00:37
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Jerusalem posted:Great list Rarity, I really liked your explanation for your top pick. However, my main takeaway is... She's got such an incredible role as well, she's gonna kill it
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Jan 31, 2024 01:14
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