Loads of bits

Watching and reading

Me and my daughter for The Sunday Times. I’m really that happy about having a landline (see below)

Here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve been whanging on about, reading and watching over the last few weeks.

I think it’s time to bring back the landline and here’s why.

**Warning: spoilers ahead for The Last of Us, series 2. Although apparently no one else watches it?

I accidentally watched The Studio because Apple TV auto-played the first episode and that was that. It didn’t set my world alight but it’s stylish and pretty funny. Seth Rogan plays a Hollywood executive, Matt Remick, who lands his dream job as the head of a major film studio. He’s not totally hapless but his desperation for the approval of the actors and directors he works with derails every project he works on.

There are loads of celeb cameos from Olivia Wilde, Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron and more, all very keen to show they are in on the joke, poking fun at the ridiculousness of the industry and how monstrous everyone is.

The second episode, The Oner (which is itself a ‘oner’, a single take), where the filming of an intricate sunset shot on a film falls apart when Matt visits the set, is really well done. The tone of the show is quite manic and I’m not sure it’s saying anything particularly original about Hollywood but it’s fun.

Speaking of Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron, their 2019 rom com, Longshot (Netflix), is very, very funny and underrated.

Regrettably, I watched 3 episodes of another Apple TV series, Your Friends & Neighbours. Ugh, it’s so bad. It’s yet another show about the hollow lives of the 1% but without any of the insight or sophistication of Succession. The opening titles are so tacky and lame but they think they’re prestigey and clever which makes the whole enterprise even worse.

I know only one other person who watches The Last of Us which I don’t understand because series one was excellent and series two was going so well until they KILLED OFF A MAIN CHARACTER!!! This piece helped me make sense of why, beyond not wanting the death to happen, it was actually badly handled.

I quite enjoyed The Four Seasons on Netflix. Eco Resort was the best episode and made me laugh out lout at least 4 times. A nice, easy comfort watch with Tina Fey on good form. I do enjoy her prickly charm.

My ridiculous second-screen-watch at the moment is The Resident on Netflix, a medical procedural with Matt Czuchry who played Cary Agos in The Good Wife. This show is absolutely fine as long as you don’t look directly at the screen during any of the surgery scenes.

This week, I’ve been reading and enjoying:

Why I broke up with New York by Lena Dunham.

All this may seem to imply some deeper judgment about the city—that I think it’s wanton and unregulated, a “Where’s Waldo?” of Boschian perversion. But I will always defend New York from those sorts of charges—after all, no one can talk shit about my mother but me. The issue isn’t that New Yorkers leer, jeer, curse, and shit in public. It’s that the city’s messy scrum was a poor fit for a chronically ill child with obsessive-compulsive tendencies and a preternatural inability to look both ways when crossing the street.

This Is the Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. (Thank you to my friend Emily for sending me to this astonishingly good article.)

Dream State by Eric Puchner

Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley

Three Days in June by Anna Tyler

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Do you remember the landline number from the house you grew up in? What good/mediocre/bad TV have you been watching? What are you reading? Talk to me in the comments. But, actually.

See you next time!

Hannah