April 2026 Check-In

And a very happy anniversary to me!

It's the beginning of April, which means I've been writing this culture conversation for a full year now. There's been more than 120 posts (and a couple of podcast episodes for fun), which is a lot. Looking back, it covered quasi-timely film reviews or discussions about classic films from a fresh re-watch. There was a series on the films of James Cameron and then something like 50,000+ words on a new list of my Top 250 Films of all time (plus 50 honorable mentions). Lotta movies. Probably too many. Also individual episode reviews for the most recent seasons of Doctor Who, The Morning Show, and The Pitt.

As we're in 2026, I'm still trying to balance things away from this being all movies all the time, and I need to be less precious about "having something to talk about" and being more open about filtering current topics through my weird brain. Sometimes this doesn't work out. I was planning to write about Project Hail Mary, but when it was over I didn't have much to add that I didn't already say in the brief mention of the book last month. Meanwhile the Starfleet Academy posts were originally supposed to be one, and the Harry Potter came out twice as long as I wanted it to because the sound of me typing soothes my soul.

Also, in case it wasn't clear? Fuck J.K. Rowling.

One year in, I'm still thinking about how to improve on all of this, and just like everything else the more you know, the more you realize you don't. There's so much room to grow and expand. I'm looking forward to the next and the many more to come.

Anyways. Here's stuff I've been up to...

Slow Horses Seasons 3-5

Talked about this British spy thriller a couple months ago, but spent a couple of weeks since then fully catching up so I can be current for the next season (out later this year). A quick rundown...

Season 3

Coming off of the homespun tales of the first two seasons, season three starts with an intimate rift between two lovers/spies and blooms into a massive conspiracy/scandal that runs right to the top of MI-5. It's silly, but these sorts of twisting plots are the bread and butter of the political thriller genre. While usually far-fetched, they are almost always engaging. This season makes it look easy and also keeps the scope at a good distance so everyone can keep track of what is happening. It's also the best season of the whole show, managing to keep the stories entirely about the characters while also tying everyone up in a variety of conflicts and nasty situations.

Season 4

Slow Horses gets grander and grander every season. In its first, it tells the story of a kidnapped British-Pakistani man, meaning the entire season is just a series of rooms in small houses or offices. By the fourth, the first episode ends with main character River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) in a cab on special assignment in France, and he spends a good chunk of the first half of the season gallivanting around the French countryside. It's a big, bold season, and one that most fans of the show cite as the show's best. I wouldn't go that far, but it is great to see James Callis (Gaius Baltar on Battlestar Galactica) as the inept political appointee to First Desk. Even if he were awful, it's worth it for the whole season Kristen Scott Thomas spends rolling her eyes at him and his buffoonery.

Season 5

For whatever reason, it feels like a lot of the response to this season is insanely positive. Maybe because this show has been slow to grow and is finally reaching a point where people have invested themselves etc. It's similarly big and operatic ot its previous season, with a city-wide panic due to a destabilization strategy that comes from British intelligence. There's a lot of fun to it, though... it feels like it's a volume that jumps the shark. The cliffhanger to episode four (the one with the paint can) is Slough House's ineptitude taken to an outrageous level, and it's the sort of wildly off tone moment that feels like scope creep to make the show a broad, ridiculous farce as opposed to the more grounded, slightly elevated silliness of these kooky characters who are fuckups (though they're Lamb's fuckups). Throw in Roddy's complete density at being the victim of a honey trap and it has really started to stretch believability in a bad way. Still a good show, but... not ideal.

Season 6

While not out yet, the possible shark jumping of the most recent season is not the greatest fear for the show when it returns. Will Smith has been the head writer from the beginning and with his stepping back following season five it's entirely possible the show will have a whole new tone and feel. Maybe it'll be a reset. The cast itself is plenty entertaining and should be able to hold their own. And... the books feel like they've been more or less consistent probably. I'm definitely on board, as even in its most weird and ungainly form this is still something extremely up my alley. And it's absolutely terrific to see Gary Oldman as the cantankerous and flatulent Jackson Lamb.

Highly recommended for anyone in need of a great spy thriller.

Crime 101

Caught this in theaters because the cast looked good, the trailer made it seem fun, and they actually shot the movie in L.A. It's not a... great movie. Not one that I'd recommend unless it sounds fun. But in terms of doing what it's doing and what it's aiming for, it basically nails it.

What really makes it sing is its Los Angeles setting. Los Angeles was the primary cinematic setting for nearly a century. Sure, for decades movies have shot all over the country and also the world, but making a small, low budget movie in Los Angeles was relatively easy to do. The infrastructure existed. The labor was here. Weather was generally favorable for almost every day of the year. This was the place.

One California and Los Angeles stopped cultivating this massive industry, prices skyrocketed. The more globalist society enabled easier production overseas, while others fled to where they could get the best discounts (tax breaks). Television relocated to Vancouver. Lots of productions like those of Marvel Studios moved to Atlanta. Studios and networks stuck around the city, but that was just office space. Now hollowed out, film's most famous city became both too expensive and lacking in a significant amount of institutional knowledge.

But... man there's nothing like seeing a movie in L.A., especially crime dramas/thrillers that relish in this strange yet iconic city. Movies like Heat, Drive, and The Terminator utilize its specificity with lived-in cinematography.

I'll admit, I'm easy. Crime 101 features a nighttime car chase through the streets of Los Angeles, eventually racing through North Hollywood down Lankershim Boulevard. Seeing that strip I've seen so many times totally rocked, knowing exactly the geography of where they shot it. Like... they drove through the intersection of Lankershim & Magnolia. I've ordered so many pizzas from that Dominos on the corner.

It made me long for a return to the days where cinema's home base made this town a thriving marketplace. Productions were easy and the budgets not backbreaking. Sure, this is somewhat self-serving. But specificity and location shooting bring a sense of reality that computers can't compete with. We live in a world of so many green screens and simulated environments that getting something so tactile felt better than most of the movies I saw last year.

Survivor 50 Thoughts (Pre-Merge)

Gosh this season of Survivor has been great. This time last month only the first episode had aired. Tonight is the kickoff to the merge. Which will be 17 players, smashing the previous record of... 14(?). That's a massive smashing together of everyone, but there'll probably be some change ups, multiple episodes where two players have to go home...

None of that matters, though. Because this season has been almost entirely terrific. All of the players they've brought back have been good, and even the characters who I'm sad to see go (which is... all of them) have made me grateful for every other character who hasn't. Every vote out is going to hurt somewhat, but it's great that characters like Cirie, Devens, Emily, and Kamilla are all still in it.

And even Coach, a player whom everyone I know seems to actively despise, is absolutely riveting television. What a gift he is.

The biggest problem is probably that the episodes aren't long enough. With 24 characters (17 now), there's tons the series is leaving on the cutting room floor. With Survivor's need to tell the story at hand rather than provide a survey of the entire picture, it makes sense that Christian is at the center of the season so far. His storytelling is so excellent he's basically in control of the game... and he's gone to almost every tribal. But it means we're not getting a lot of perspectives from those at the center of the action like Angelina (because Christian is sucking all the air out of their merged tribe's greater strategy) or Tiffany and Kamilla (the former because she hasn't gone to tribal yet, the latter because... well she only went to tribal for the first time in the most recent episode).

There is an imbalance, and with a season like this we're having a bit of a repeat of something like Winners at War, where the 45-minute run time couldn't contain the massive personalities, chaotic strategies, and Edge of Extinction doldrums that informed what was really happening over the course of the season. There was an entire reward challenge the show didn't show, and watching episodes felt like it was telling barely enough of the story to understand all of the intricate scaffolding supporting the entire 39 days. It (like 50) was an incredible season, regardless. But even with 50's expanded run time, the show is not doing everything happening justice, and watching a character like Angelina go without really showcasing her at all feels like a waste of a great character.

Of course, they could help this problem if they didn't go so fucking hard on their pop culture tie-ins. The real estate the show gave to Zac Brown was inexcusable. Despite only one appearance in maybe three acts of an entire episode, he surpassed Tiffany's confessional count, matched Dee's, and nearly caught Chrissy's and Kamilla's. I understand that Zac Brown is a huge fan and his presence in the show is something to entice his fans to a show they might not otherwise watch... but this isn't the Zac Brown show. Why would I want to watch Zac Brown go super duper fishing with incredible gear when Coach cramping up during his fishing trip with Jonathan just a few episodes earlier was far more entertaining television. Why are they playing a second Zac Brown song instead of conveying all the many things happening on all these beaches. Like one is indulgent. But... two?

It speaks to a lot of issues with these celebrity integrations this season. Billie Eilish Boomerang Idol™ is pretty fun, but it's... just a thing they slapped her name on. The boomerang idol was something the strategy team had already put on a menu of options. And a news story this week has a report that the show is scrambling to re-edit upcoming episodes so celebs like Mr. Beast are cameos rather than mega guest stars.

Not to make this discussion entirely about this, but Survivor thinking that they could get away with this is both peak arrogance and the show losing the plot. People aren't watching Survivor 50 because they're Mr. Beast fans or because they want to hear Zac Brown serenade the castaways with two acoustic songs. They're watching because this is a seismic season with a supersized cast of favs. With the real estate of broadcast television runtimes so limited, it's insane that production thought any of this was a good idea. Celebrity cameos are one thing, but come on now.

Now in the tenth season of the New Era, it's hard to say that what Survivor has been trying is working. The game has felt very stale for seasons now, and with the biggest shot in the arm since the pandemic, production wants to throw that away in search of an audience that has no guarantee of showing up and even less of a chance of sticking around?

It would be hard for Survivor 50 to not wind up an all-time season at this point. It's basically delivering across the board. Now if only production could get out of the way and let people play Survivor...

After Hours

Got a chance to catch this Martin Scorsese film at a local theater a few weeks ago. It's long been among my favorite of his movies and wound up at #46 on my Top 250 from last year. This strange story of a dude going out on the town for a one night hookup takes all sorts of weird directions and paths as he wanders around, struggling to get home.

I'd not seen it in a theater, and considering that I'm trying to see as many great movies as I can on the big screen, it was a no brainer. The screening itself was almost sold out, and the friend who was with me walked in knowing nothing and walked out loving it. I too loved it, obviously, but it came with a really great and important thing to always remember:

Movies are different in a theater.

After Hours has always been a dark comedy, but in that darkened room all the jokes played. The movie is wickedly funny, totally off-brand what most expect from the guy who directed Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, and Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese's work can be deathly serious, but every joke got a laugh, including a bunch I hadn't noticed before even though I've seen the film a number of times. The chuckles played pretty consistently throughout.

There are a whole number of reasons to see movies in theaters. The most obvious reason is to see the images on the big screen. Capturing that Nolan-esque scope for the majesty of Interstellar or the living 3D of Pandora in Cameron's Avatar. But there's also the opportunity to watch a film with no distractions. To lock in and sit with nothing to do but focus on a great story.

And then there's the comedies, where jokes that have always been funny come to life when an audience backs the response. Thinking about a movie like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where John Hughes's second shot is of Ferris's overly dramatic, nearly catatonic face. There's no way that's not a massive laugh moment in any theater, even if those who have seen it a hundred times/have also never even tittered at the moment.

Theaters are great, kids. Don't waste the opportunity to see stuff if you can.

ER Season 1

Surprised I didn't write about this last month, but time has no meaning or whatever.

This project started a few months ago when a friend of mine and I turned every Thursday night (when we can) into ER After Dark™. My interest (obviously) came from The Pitt and always hearing about how the show was really good, and my friend's came from hearing about how The Pitt was good and wanting to jump into the show. (She now loves The Pitt...)

At two episodes a week, this 331-episode show will take us about three and a half years. But we're in it for the long haul, and... wouldn't you know it. It really is as good as everyone always promised it would be.

Of course, I did walk in wanting The Pitt and that's not what ER is (even though the two shows share a lot of the same DNA). So much of my love of The Pitt is its one-shift-per-season, one-hour-per-episode structure. ER doesn't operate like that. In its first season, the closest the show gets to the mayhem and crosscutting is the tenth episode "Blizzard", which features the aftermath of a massive multi-car crash and tons of patients that need help as fast and efficiently as possible. That one felt like going home.

But it's a necessarily different show. Where The Pitt is about the claustrophobia of the trauma department, its walls, its ceiling lights, its relentless pace... ER is about the doctors both inside and out of the hospital. The change over time. The soap opera. The sense that everyone is here to learn as much as they can before moving into other specialties and focuses.. The Pitt's format makes this incredibly difficult (especially just two seasons in) and doesn't allow for the long-form training of how each day affects each doctor differently.

One season in, it's a marvelous, marvelous show. The cast is uniformly exquisite. The broad network television of it all (the jokes and premises) feel like classic entertainment. The set has character and color and vibrancy while capturing the confinement of its narrow hallways. And there are terrific episodes like "Love's Labor Lost" and "Into That Good Night".

Were it not for my dedication to ER After Dark™, I would have absolutely taken off like a bullet. But the wait is nice. The sense of not knowing where it's going is nice. And it makes me both miss shows like this and also recognize that the only thing the industry is missing with it is the collective will to accept that this television is far better than almost anything coming out today.

We used to be a proper country making proper shows and shooting television in Los Angeles. What happened to us?

Coming this month...

It looks like The Pitt is wrapping up this month and I find that devastating. Other than that, I am overdue for a Criterion Check-in, and according to my math this year's series on the films of Christopher Nolan needs to start by the end of the month with his first film Following. Other than that... maybe something on Paradise season 2 (which I should start watching considering the season is now over) and... I'll have to check what else...

See you out there!