This week:
- Finding the entertainment in Musk vs. Trump.
- A fun new show to binge this summer.
- My vacation travelogue.
- The Carrie Bradshaw hat to end all hats.
A Perfect Summer TV Binge
I am terrified of the youth.
That they’re so self-actualized and bold intimidates me. That they’re so young still infuriates me. That they think they know it all exasperates me, and yet also makes me feel nostalgic. (Everything Boomers said about me and my fellow millennials, I think about Gen Z. It’s the smarmiest circle of life.)
So, this abject terror has been a hurdle for me to overcome when it comes to new programming featuring the new generation. I either scoff at it: You think you’re making cute commentary on the world from your fresh perspective? We made cute commentary first! Or I am forced to view it through it between my fingers because I’m so alarmed by what I’m seeing. (Euphoria, I’m sure you’re a great show, but you and I were never going to be a match.)
It’s to my surprise, then, how charmed I was by the new comedy Adults.
The FX series, now available to stream, centers on a group of friends in their twenties who all live together in a house in Queens. They each have distinct personalities, of course, but operate as one amoeba, together shepherding each other through the indignities of having to face the responsibilities of adulthood while training to white-knuckle onto the gregarious identity you formed while coming of age in college.
I was slightly older, but generally the same age as the characters in Girls and Broad City. And, in a different, trippy way, was roughly the same age as the college students in Overcompensating—another fun summer comedy binge—in the year that show takes place.
With Adults, it’s weird to both identify with their struggles, the way that, often to my horror, certain plots in Girls and Broad City resonated with me, but also feel so…old. I find the curios of their travails humorous—the premiere brilliantly satirizes how the generation uses wokeness and activism for clout, or at least how we assume they do. I also want to shake them by the shoulders and give them advice.
In that respect, Adults is a fine entry into a “young in NYC” canon alongside Girls and Broad City.
These shows reveal how all the ways the city can devastate you seem like levels in a video game when you’re young, with endless opportunities to beat it again when you fail because, at that point in your journey, you still had a bank of new lives to use. You don’t know yet how it gets harder and harder to regenerate each time the Big Boss defeats you.
That got existential real fast; it’s also simply very fun. Adults is a breezy, humorous watch, perfect for a “ain’t no way I’m going out in that heat” afternoon.
What I Consumed on My Vacation
I was away last week on vacation. (Highly recommend.) I embarked armed with three hardcover books and enough downloaded episodes of TV shows to max out the storage space on my phone.
Naturally, I read about 100 pages of one of the books, and watched not one episode of those shows.
Instead, I watched Paddington in Peru on the plane, and cried—yet took solace when, after glancing over my screen numerous times, the bro in the aisle seat next to me proceeded to turn on the movie himself. The number of Sex and the City and The Office episodes I watched instead of anything new I could write about in this newsletter? The limit does not exist.
I spent several nights in London, where I saw the ABBA Voyage concert, in which holograms of ABBA looking exactly as they did in their heyday perform their catalog of hits to a crowd treating it as if they have taken a time machine and are watching the group in an actual concert. It was the weirdest f---ing thing I’ve ever seen. 10/10 experience. Everyone must go.
I saw another musical on the West End that’s based on a beloved movie that was so bad I left at the intermission. It would be rude to reveal what it was, so, um, that’s all.
And Just Like Hat…
If you love Sex and the City or And Just Like That, have ever watched an episode of Sex and the City or And Just Like That, or even have ever just heard of Sex and the City or And Just Like That, I implore you to read Tom Smyth’s ranking of hats worn in the new sequel series in Vanity Fair. It’s called journalism.
What to watch this week:
Dangerous Animals: A serial killer feeds his victims to sharks. Sold. (Now in theaters)
The Tony Awards: Earnest moment: This telecast every year brought me so much joy growing up…and still does now. (Sun. on CBS and Paramount+)
What to skip this week:
Ginny & Georgia: Yes, messiness is the point of this hit Netflix show. But where’s the line? (Now on Netflix)
The Ritual: Al Pacino, call your agent. (Now in theaters)
