TV is back, baby! Andor is helping lead the rebellion!
There have been a few constants in my life that reach back to my childhood. Cultural loves. Television (obviously), movies, DC comic books, and Star Wars.
And without fail, all of them have been giving me very little pleasure for the last few years. I’ll concede that my attention has been elsewhere since around September of 2021, with a little person entering my world and demanding a huge amount of my attention. But it feels like there have been other forces at work.
This has been a time where movies and TV have been hit hard by COVID shutdowns and industrial action, comic books have been in a creative rut for years, and Star Wars has struggled in my heart since the day I sat down in a cinema to see The Phantom Menace one fateful midnight screening in May 1999.
Sure, there have been green-shoots here and there. But I am finding myself less and less enthused with new product and instead retreating to media of yesteryear. I did recently watch eight seasons of LA Law, for example of where my cultural attention has been.
It’s difficult writing a daily TV newsletter about TV when so much of it is junk. That’s always been the case with TV, but I’ve largely been able to craft my space online avoiding reality shows and factory churn procedurals. The challenge is when the prestige, high quality material is often soulless and dull limited run shows that are movie plots stretched out to 6/8/12 episode orders. Those sorts of shows used to almost always fail within a few weeks under the network & cable TV model, but thrived within the streaming space.
But in the last few months, I have felt a stirring. A cultural reawakening.
TV is back, baby!
Just look at this week…