Favorite Television of 2015

High Art
Mad Men

Phenomenal
Nathan For You
Rick and Morty
Broad City

Very Good
Wet Hot American Summer
Community
Inside Amy Schumer
Game of Thrones
Fargo
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Gravity Falls
Justified
Wolf Hall
Silicon Valley
Review
Portlandia

Good
Veep
Parks & Recreation
Mozart in the Jungle
Kroll Show
Homeland
Catastrophe

Recommended with Reservations
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
W/ Bob & David
The Man in the High Castle
The Mindy Project
Master of None
Difficult People
The Americans
Last Man on Earth

Intend to Start or Finish
Hannibal
Better Call Saul
You're the Worst
BoJack Horseman
Bob's Burgers
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Thanks, Scott! Now on Hulu)

Scottcast

"Maybe that's how whales do behave," "it's easy to remember Margot Robbie in a bathtub for any number of reasons," and many more bon mots and precise insights that only Scott can provide.

Classic Pat

Last night we had a fire, hot toddies, turned on all the Christmas lights and watched Die Hard.   Having a Die Hard marathon in Scott's basement was a delicious swizzle of bizarre and enjoyable, crowned by Pat instantly knowing the answer to the mystery of Die Hard 3: Chester A. Arthur.



Be safe in Turkey, Pat!  PS are reindeer as scary as horses?

Favorite Singles of 2015

It's Zoo-Sized!

Sunday, Steph and I had a double-feature of a WashU student production of Molière's The Misanthrope, or the Cantankerous Lover and Anomalisa from Charlie Kaufman.  They fit really snugly together as portraits of how men can turn into miserable bastards, by two nearly opposite routes.    

Alceste is the protagonist-fool of The Misanthrope, a man who holds his friends and enemies up to absurd, Platonic standards, and castigates anyone who disappoints him, which is everyone.  He impotently rages against the imperfections in society with nearly identical speeches to ones I made in college.  Steph was often the audience for these screeds and thought it was pretty funny that Moliere captured that nearly 400 years ago.  In an essay, Rousseau wrote about how good the play was even if the audience should agree with Alceste.  This is a lovely bit of art criticism, in my humble opinion.

Michael Stone, the main character of Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson's stop-motion dark comedy, Anomalisa (read Scott's excellent review right now please and thank you) self-medicates his way through a boring, predictable life where everyone might as well be the same person, as far as he is concerned.  He certainly doesn't treat anyone from cabbie to wife to waitress with an ounce of warmth, until he has a breakdown and meets a woman he sees with fresh eyes, Lisa.  He is genuinely dazzled by her (while under the influence of several martinis and some prescription drugs) but in the cold light of morning, he sees flaws and commonalities in her that transform her into just another clone human.  When it is finally time for Michael to give the presentation, Kaufman reveals how he became this man apart.

Michael teaches customer service representatives how to be better at their job, which mostly involves improved ways to sell your kindness to earn your corporation an extra buck.  He advocates treating all people the same, as if they were your friend, and says smiling costs you nothing.  By treating each human with the exact same hollow kindness, he has descended into a hell where each person is just an interaction to be tolerated until finished.  Neither he or Alceste give a whit for the dynamic range of human variation and their lack of curiosity damns them to lose friends and influence no one, except as a cautionary tale.  

Both pieces were terrifically funny satires of angry men and I, prone as I am to apoplectic tirades*, sure need the reminder.  Be cool, my babies.

*sounds like an oxymoronic phrase, but these are my patented rants that start off with speechless indignation before rapidly accelerating belly-aching, like you started a car in fifth gear going downhill