May 18, 2024:
Cannes, quitting therapy, and an overgrown garden 

A year ago this week, the Vulture TV team was in the middle of preparing for what we were calling either “finalepalooza”(when we were feeling optimistic) or “finalepocalypse” (when we weren’t), a television confluence the likes of which I haven’t experienced in nearly two decades of pop-culture journalism. The season and/or series finale of five major shows, together composing the closest we’ve come to the monoculture in our current era — Ted Lasso, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Yellowjackets, Barry, and, of course, Succession — plus the delightful, understated Somebody Somewhere, were all airing within a five-day period that just so happened to span Memorial Day weekend, and we were covering all of it to varying degrees of obsessiveness. Oh, and we were also in the throes of a little thing called Scandoval. It was a heady, stressful time during which I burst into tears at least three times a week and made numerous esoteric/deranged custom Slackmojis, my personal coping mechanism. But looking at that period from the vantage point of May 2024, it’s cloaked in the golden glow of wistful nostalgia.

To say TV feels sluggish at the moment is charitable. Frankly, it’s a wasteland out there. I’m not talking in terms of quality; there’s a decent number of serviceable-to-good shows floating around right now. I’m talking in terms of discourse, those shows that pass the tipping point between a general awareness of their existence — the “I’ve been meaning to check that out” show — into a plurality of people feeling some kind of way about them. (The only recent shows that have approached this line are Baby Reindeer and Fallout, but because those are binge releases instead of weekly, the result is a truncated, diffuse strain of discourse.) I’m talking about the kind of show where you need to set a whole separate meeting to hash out your coverage strategy.

Due to delays and rescheduling resulting from last year’s strikes, we’re in a bit of a dead zone for major releases. But this week, a bright ray of hope crested the horizon, and then a bunch of dragons flew through it. Look, did I love the first season of House of the Dragon? Sure didn’t. Am I nonetheless psyched to dive back into the Dragon Show discourse? Gods, yes. I don’t even care if the second season is an improvement on the first — though I suspect it might be, based solely on how Game of Thrones leveled up in its second season — as long as it gets people riled up. The season doesn’t premiere for a month, but combined with the work my co-editor Julie Kosin and I (mostly Julie) have been doing on next week’s summer TV preview, the full HOTD trailer is a well-timed reminder that TV is about to get, if not necessarily better, then at least more discussable in the near future. Trust me, we already had a meeting about it.

If you had asked me when Shōgun was airing if I wanted the FX limited-emphasis-on-limited-series to return for another season, I would have responded with an adamant no and then probably subjected you to some annoying rant about how we shouldn’t force stories past their natural end point and just allow good things to end and blah blah blah. So imagine my surprise when I not only accepted but was genuinely excited by this week’s confirmation that the series will return to “continue” the saga of Toranaga & Co. Part of that could be the weeks of Shōgun withdrawals I’ve endured since the finale, but it’s also because it finally clicked for me how this could work as an ongoing story. Personally, I’m rooting for my vision of “Deadwood but make it 17th-century Edo,” but the Vulture critics have some suggestions of their own that I endorse as well.

While I would never be so naïve as to assume Hollywood-slash-society has evolved past the Me Too era, it sucks to realize we’re in the middle of another wave of allegations about powerful men behaving shittily — all playing out against the backdrop of Stormy Daniels’s testimony in Trump’s hush-money trial, no less. It feels like 2018 again, in the worst way possible.

Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri and Rachel Handler are in the middle of their annual sojourn to the Cannes Film Festival, and I’m gobbling up every little dispatch like they’re free macarons. Rachel’s style of on-the-ground scene reporting is the exact sort of jolt the famously uptight fest needs, and Bilge’s reviews of Furiosa and Megalopolis have me levitating with excitement to see the former and bracing apprehensively for the latter. Also thanks to Rachel, I’ve been haunted all week by the sight of jury president Greta Gerwig graciously enduring a “Modern Love” serenade as an homage to the famed Frances Ha scene. Someone singing directly at me is a top-five phobia, but Greta is clearly made of stronger stuff.

In the spirit of offering a TV recommendation, which my job title all but requires me to do here, I’ll note that there are new episodes of Bridgerton out this weekend, if that’s your thing. (If it is, be sure to check out Vulture’s recaps by Maggie Fremont, one of the best to ever do it.) But thanks to my professional screener privilege, I’ve already seen not only this batch of episodes, but the second half of the season that’s dropping in June. (Yes, Netflix is doing that annoying split-season thing again.) I was unfortunately unmoved by this season’s central pairing — Penelope Featherington and Colin Bridgerton, representing possibly the worst portmanteau in existence, “Polin” — but there’s some fun stuff happening outside the main story line, and the hilariously over-the-top costuming and production design remain as appealing as they are anachronistic.

So, barring any last-minute arrival of House of the Dragon screeners, I’m likely going to avoid screens both small and big this weekend in favor of curling up on my backyard swing with Miranda July’s new novel, All Fours. For the last several weeks, I’ve been watching my colleagues who got an early look at the novel fawn over it in Vulture’s books Slack channel, in which I mainly lurk. Since I haven’t written a word about books in many, many years, I no longer possess ARC privilege, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting the moment I can purchase a copy, “pick it up and neglect my life until the last page.” That moment is now.

Normally, I have low-to-negative interest in anything pertaining to the royals, but something about the unveiling of King Charles’s new portrait has really transfixed me. Red is an attention-grabbing color, after all. I was dismayed to learn that Jerry Saltz wouldn’t be doing an official review for New York, but gratified to at least see the “reddish radish of a picture” grace his esteemed Instagram account. (P.S., if you’re not getting Jerry Saltz’s Favorite Things yet, why?)

As I enter a third summer of trying to wrangle the overgrown, invasive-vine-filled garden I inherited with my house into submission, this garden that took literal decades to achieve its current glory is giving me both inspiration and patience. Sort of. Picture me showing this article on my laptop to my sluggish peonies and hissing, “Why can’t you be more like them?”

When the first full trailer for Wicked (part one — ugh, another two-parter!) hit, my co-workers’ reactions started flying so fast I couldn’t keep up. Thankfully, they’ve been helpfully compiled into this list of 54 very pressing questions about the trailer, the most important of which is clearly How does Dr. Dillamond put his tiny glasses on with his hooves?

As someone who quit therapy a couple years back and eschewed having bridesmaids at my wedding, I would like to personally thank the Cut for validating my life choices this week.

Next week’s newsletter will be helmed by Gaby Grossman, director of editorial operations at New York.

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