TV Diary

Thursday, March 12, 2026

 







a) "Vladimir" 
Netflix's "Vladimir" is just okay, which feels like a ridiculous thing to say about a show where Rachel Weisz is having, fantasizing about, or talking about sex for a significant portion of the screentime. But she also talks to the camera in the middle of scenes without ever saying anything funny so it just feels like an unfocused "Fleabag" knockoff. And she's playing in American, which just isn't as delightful as hearing her real accent. It probably would've been better as a movie, you could just staple together the first and last episodes and one or two in the middle where there was actually some story or character development. I did like the last episode, though, other than the worst possible needle drop I've ever seen a season of a show end with. 

b) "American Classic"
The Canadian 2003-2006 series "Slings & Arrows" is a classic in my personal canon, and I was immediately reminded of it while watching the first episode of "American Classic," a tonally similar show that's also about Shakespearean dramatists -- and quickly confirmed my hunch that the same person, Bob Martin, co-created both shows. This one stars Kevin Kline, in the first live action role I've seen where he sounds pretty much exactly like his "Bob's Burgers" character, Mr. Fischoeder. MGM+ (formerly Epix) has always been the one pay channel/streamer I never felt tempted to subscribe to, but I might have to sign up at least temporarily for "American Classic" based on the one free episode I got on my cable package. 

c) "Sunny Nights" 
I like this show where Will Forte plays an American entrepreneur going through a divorce in Australia, maybe not as much as the show a couple years ago where Forte was an American podcaster going through a divorce in Ireland, but it's pretty good. If he and Tina Fey split up on "The Four Seasons" he could be the most divorced guy on television. D'Arcy Carden is really funny in "Sunny Nights," definitely deserves to be thought of as possibly one of the best comedic actresses we have right now. 

d) "The Gray House" 
"The Gray House" is one of Kevin Costner's history buff passion projects that he started doing again after his "Yellowstone" comeback, the entire miniseries was filmed in 2023 and screened at a festival in 2024 but I guess it took a while to find a buyer and is just now finally streaming on Amazon Prime. "The Gray House" is a fascinating true story about women who worked as spies for the Union side during the Civil War, and Mary-Louise Parker leads a strong cast. But it just kind of looks shoddy, doesn't have the kind of costuming and hair and makeup and production values that a period piece of this size should have, and is just kind of mediocre and corny in a number of other ways, one episode ends with a song by Scott Stapp.

e) "Scarpetta" 
Nicole Kidman is the hardest working Oscar-winning icon in show business and "Scarpetta" is the 6th series she's starred in so far in the 2020s (the 7th premieres in April). Kidman plays the titular forensic pathologist from a series of Patricia Cromwell novels, and the first episode was pretty good, it's fun to see Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis play sisters who hate each other. 

f) "Young Sherlock" 
I don't like to reduce television to being an inherently lower artform than film, but certainly there are some filmmakers that seem to find their level a little bit when they start working in television and Guy Ritchie is one of them. I don't mean that as an insult, he just makes fun stuff and I think his strengths come off better in a series format, "Young Sherlock" being a good case in point. 

I rolled my eyes pretty hard at Ryan Murphy producing a show about JFK Jr., it's such a predictable combination of fame and romance and tragedy for him. And we're living in a time when America's unhealthy fascination with the Kennedy family has put a dangerous moron in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services. But I will give Murphy and his team credit, they made an engrossing little show of celebrity fan fiction with lots of nostalgic '90s fashion and a well curated soundtrack of '90s music. Even the casting feels pretty spot-on. But I definitely enjoy the show more than I respect it, and at one point someone says "beast mode" in 1995, which is definitely not something people said back then. 

Patrick Dempsey plays a contract killer with Alzheimer's in this Fox adaptation of a German series called "De Zaak Alzheimer." Dempsey doesn't really have the right vibe for this kind of role, and Michael Imperioli is too good for a show like this. Odeya Rush is beautiful, though. 

i) "Scrubs" 
I liked "Scrubs," it was a dependable cable rerun staple, the cartoony fantasy cutaway gags can be embarrassing but they had a very funny cast and some sharp writing and navigated some tricky swings between silly and serious. I was fine leaving "Scrubs" in the past but I am enjoying seeing most of the cast back in a revival for a 10th season, I'd prefer if there was more John C. McGinley but tonally they fell right back into the old show without much different. It feels like they've really just taken all the comedy out of Sarah Chalke's performance and made her character mainly a source of conflict, though, which is a bummer, and this week's episode had Matt Rife in it. Gross.  

As much as I do still enjoy "Scrubs," I think a lot of Bill Lawrence's post-"Scrubs" shows have been better, and I love "Shrinking," absolutely one of my favorite shows on TV right now. It didn't occur to me until watching it right after the "Scrubs" revival that the Jimmy/Paul dynamic is basically J.D./Dr. Cox. It also didn't occur to me that Paul's Parkinson's storyline might have been inspired by Bill Lawrence's friendship with Michael J. Fox until Fox started guesting on "Shrinking." I wish he was on there a little more often because it's so nice to see him again, but it probably makes sense that he just does fairly brief appearances. And the whole cast is so strong, by the third season they've already started to develop a bench of entertaining recurring players (Rachel Stubington, Kimberly Condict). I watched a few episodes in a row when I was up until like 3am unable to sleep recently, so take it with a grain of salt but this show makes me literally laugh out loud and cry in just about every episode. 

A Turkish show on Netflix, the kind of sexy soap opera about feuding wealthy people that transcends cultures, pretty good. 

"Scandal Eve" is about a Japanese talent agency that has 72 hours to try to stop a magazine article that could end a client's career, which is a great premise, 

A sexy Colombian show on Netflix about a love triangle, quickly became one of those background noise shows I put on while I'm writing. 

This Netflix series is about the great true story of 'the Hugh Hefner of Italy,' a Catholic mother who started running her husband's erotic magazine after he disappeared. 

This Korean show is one of those romcoms where one character is misrepresenting who they are for a job, and then they fall in love while living a lie, so you just kind of roll your eyes at watching them keep up this doomed cliched deception. Kind of a cute show, though, the leads have chemistry. 

Pretty good Japanese show on Netflix, impressive action scenes. 

A Korean show about a middle-aged corporate guy who doesn't get the promotion he was hoping for and his career kind of implodes and he starts to rethink what life and success are about, pretty good. 

In a weird way this Korean show is like the inverse of "The Dream Life of Mr. Kim," about a young CEO working to save the family business. 

A Japanese show that's also about rising and falling career fortunes, in this case an accountant who loses his job and then falls in love while getting involved in the world of horse racing. 

An animated series about a mythical war in ancient India, don't really love the visual style but it was at least different than what I've seen before. 

This is is about a group of friends in Denmark who realize that a series of killings in their small town were committed by someone in their social circle, just a chilling story to think about. 

A docuseries about this TikTok influencer guy who people found out was a convicted killer after a woman disappeared shortly after meeting him. Crazy shit, I'm surprised I didn't hear about this when it happened a couple years ago. 

More extremely depressing true crime, this time about a West Virginia teen who was murdered in 2012. 

A Steven Spielberg-produced Netflix miniseries narrated by Morgan Freeman that presents animated dinosaurs as accurately to current scientific consensus as possible. Neat idea but I didn't really find it interesting at all, I put it on when my kid was around and he didn't care either, he never got obsessed with dinosaurs like I was as a kid. 

I guess this was a hit on YouTube before it became a Netflix series, it's basically just couples therapy. Feels a little weird and voyeuristic, even by reality TV standards, to delve into other people's marriages like this. 

This show is still just as good as it's ever been, I thought the recent body cameras episode was particularly good at breaking down the nuance in an issue. I'm just trying to enjoy the show while it's here because I don't know what's gonna happen to it under the Paramount/Warner Bros. merger. 

11:56 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 393: The Wu-Tang Clan

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

 




The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced the nominees for the class of 2026, and The Wu-Tang Clan are on the list alongside The Black Crowes, Jeff Buckley, Mariah Carey, Phil Collins, Melissa Etheridge, Lauryn Hill, Billy Idol, INXS, Iron Maiden, Joy Division/New Order, New Edition, Oasis, Pink, Sade, Shakira, and Luther Vandross. I feel like there hasn't been a ton of excitement over Wu-Tang's nomination among their fans, which makes sense, but I still think they're easily one of the most deserving out of this set, I'm not even the biggest Wu head but they're inarguably one of the most important rap groups ever and a singular phenomenon, it's the most great MCs you'd ever get in the hall at once. 

Wu-Tang Clan deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber
2. Clan In Da Front
3. Tearz 
4. A Better Tomorrow
5. Cash Still Rules/Scary Hours (Still Don't Nothing Move But The Money)
6. As High As Wu-Tang Get
7. Diesel
8. Put Your Hammer Down
9. And You Don't Stop
10. Windpipe
11. Fast Shadow
12. The Abduction
13. Conditioner f/ Snoop Dogg
14. The Monument f/ Busta Rhymes
15. Iron Flag
16. Radioactive (Four Assassins)
17. Campfire
18. Rivers of Blood f/ Kool G Rap
19. A Better Tomorrow
20. On That Shit Again

Tracks 1, 2, and 3 from Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993)
Tracks 4, 5, and 6 from Wu-Tang Forever (1997)
Track 7 from Soul in the Hole (Original Music From and Inspired by the Motion Picture) (1997)
Track 8 from Funkmaster Flex's The Mix Tape, Volume III: 60 Minutes of Funk (The Final Chapter) (1998)
Track 9 from Rush Hour (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1998)
Track 10 from Belly (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1998)
Track 11 from Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai - The Album (2000)
Track 12 from Tony Touch's The Piece Maker (2000)
Tracks 13 and 14 from The W (2000)
Track 15 and 16 from Iron Flag (2001)
Track 17 from 8 Diagrams (2008)
Track 18 from The Man With the Iron Fists (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2012)
Track 19 from A Better Tomorrow (2014)
Track 20 from Of Mics And Men (Music From The Showtime Documentary Series) (2019)

Obviously, The Wu-Tang Clan has a sprawling discography that includes dozens of solo albums and offshoot groups. But there are only 7 proper group albums, 6 of which are commercially available -- famously, only a single copy of Once Upon A Time In Shaolin was made, and it was sold for $2 million, making it the most expensive album of all time. Given the downward slide of quality on the later Wu albums, I don't particularly care if the public ever gets to hear it, but of course I'd be curious to put it on if I ever got the chance. But there were also a good number of soundtrack and compilation tracks credited to the group, and it was fun to bring those together in one place, some of them might be a little obscure even to people who know the first few Wu albums by heart. 

The two tracks titled "A Better Tomorrow" are completely different songs, although the 2014 album A Better Tomorrow and its title track presumably took inspiration from the Wu-Tang Forever track. It was tempting to include "Black Shampoo" simply because it's the most talked about song on Wu-Tang Forever, but I think people are generally right that it's not a good song. I remember having a terrible internet connection in my dorm room when Napster became a big deal and I didn't buy The W but I downloaded a handful of tracks that my friend Josh recommended. 

I'm going to do some separate deep album cuts playlists for some of the more notable Wu-Tang solo careers -- definitely Ghostface Killah and Method Man and Raekwon, and beyond that, I dunno, maybe GZA? Maybe RZA? So I gravitated a little toward songs that showcase people who won't get their own playlists, like Ol' Dirty Bastard, who sadly left behind a pretty small catalog, and Inspectah Deck, who's probably the MVP of the group's output who never had a classic solo album. But I tried to showcase everybody, some of my favorite verses on this playlist include Meth on "Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber," RZA on "Tearz," GZA on "Clan In Da Front," Rae on "Cash Still Rules/Scary Hours," U-God on "A Better Tomorrow" (the 1997 one), ODB on "And You Don't Stop," Inspectah Deck on "The Abduction," Masta Killa on "Radioactive (Four Assassins)," Cappadonna on "Campfire," and Ghostface on "Rivers of Blood. " 

10:35 AM

Monthly Report: February 2026 Albums

Monday, March 09, 2026



























1. Ratboys - Singin' To An Empty Chair
Chicago's Ratboys have been releasing albums for over a decade but I didn't really know anything about them until hearing the Singin' To An Empty Chair single "Anything" on WTMD a few times piqued my interest, and I absolutely love this record and need to go back and hear their earlier albums now. I particularly like how the first three tracks kind of gradually ramp up in tempo and intensity to reach "Anything" on the fourth track, it's a really thoughtfully sequenced album with a strong emotional throughline, which becomes even more apparent in Tom Breihan's track-by-track Stereogum interview with frontwoman Julia Steiner. Marcus Nuccio is a great drummer, really elevates these songs with creative fills and always driving the tempo forward even on the slower, gentler songs. And I actually like the country-ish Ratboys songs more, which is not at all the case with a lot of the new school country-adjacent indie buzz bands. Here's the 2026 albums Spotify playlist I fill with new releases throughout the year. 

2. Department - Audacity Files
In 2023, I interviewed Department, aka Adam Kyriakou of Melbourne, about his sample collage project Dumb Angel, and even then it sounded like he was planning on revising what he'd done next rather than crafting a follow-up. And now he's back with basically a longer, fleshed out version of that record, Audacity Files, as his debut album, and he's getting more press and has thousands of plays on Spotify, I'm happy to see his career thriving. I'm still getting into the new version and catching things that weren't in the earlier release, but it has the same basic appeal, this very melodic, emotional approach to mashups with lots of '60s wall of sound pop, indie rock, and bits of modern pop and R&B and hip hop all rising and crashing in these almost operatic movements. 

3. J. Cole - The Fall-Off
J. Cole ended 2018's KOD with the "intro to The Fall Off" and spent the next 8 years fitfully teasing it as his farewell album with a multitude of stopgap projects and other stalling tactics, seemingly trying to set it up his closing argument for being the best rapper of his generation. Now it's finally here and it's a double album, and I think nearly a decade of throat-clearing really backfired and it didn't feel like a grand career sendoff like The Black Album (which also felt like a fake retirement even at the time, but I'm always skeptical about rap retirements). I think it's really good, probably in his top 3 best projects. The first disc in particular has some great production, some slightly more novel flows and perspectives, while the second disc falls into the usual J. Cole doldrums of navel-gazing about the music industry ("What If" in particular is some ridiculous '90s rap fan fiction) and gratuitous samples and interpolations from the classic rap albums he's emulating. Between Bad Bunny, Ratboys, and J. Cole, empty chairs on album covers are so hot right now. 

4. Charli XCX - Wuthering Heights
A soundtrack can be a great opportunity for an artist to make a record that exists as its own thing and not "their new direction" or the official follow-up to their last record, and Charli XCX did that really beautifully here. I never thought Brat was her absolute best work, and in some ways this brings back a little more of the melody and drama of her 2010s stuff. There's still a dance pop pulse on some of the tracks, but it's often buried under orchestral strings. It's one thing to regularly namedrop the Velvet Underground as an influence, but to open an album with a slow, ominous John Cale collaboration at the height of your fame is pretty badass. 

5. The Paranoid Style - Known Associates
Elizabeth Nelson's dense, dark, dryly funny lyrics are justifiably usually the focal point when people talk about The Paranoid Style's records. But more than their previous records, I'm drawn back to Known Associates for the tunes and the textures as well, the jaunty organ lines and the lush horn arrangements and the anxious lead guitar lines and the backing vocals that underline the catchier melodies

6. The Tomeka Reid Quartet - Dance! Skip! Hop! 
I have been following and appreciating the output of Out Of Your Head Records since the label's inception, and the new album from Chicago-based cellist Tomeka Reid seems to be easily their most praised and talked about release to date, and with good reason. I feel like you don't often see a cello and an upright bass together in a small jazz ensemble very often, and it's really fun to hear Reid and bassist Jason Roebke coexist in a counterintuitive way that feels really natural. Guitarist Mary Halvorson kind of gets the higher frequencies to herself, but leaves a lot of space for the cello and bass to dominate and duel. 

7. Willow - Petal Rock Black
Rarely do young musicians with famous parents actually act like they have the financial freedom and public platform to make whatever weird music they want, but Willow Smith really just fearlessly darts around and gets more interesting to me with almost every release. The intricate, jazzy arrangements on 2024's Empathogen really blew me away, I thought that was a huge step forward for her creatively. With a surprise release and a 26-minute running time, Petal Black Rock feels like an intentionally low key continuation of that sound, but she seems to be flexing her musicianship a lot more. Willow played guitar on a few songs on Empathogen while Chris Greatti and guest musicians played the majority of the instrumentation, but she produced and played just about everything (guitar, drums, bass, keyboards) on Petal Black Rock outside of the three tracks that feature, respectively, Jon Batiste, Kamasi Washington, and Merril Garbus of Tune-Yards, and she's got some pretty serious chops and cool ideas. 

8. Megan Moroney - Cloud 9
With Megan Moroney ascending to an arena headliner with her third album and Ella Langley's Hot 100 triumph, I feel better than I have in a long time about women regaining the ground they lost in mainstream country during the 2010s. "Medicine" is my favorite on Cloud 9 so far, and also one of Moroney's most old-fashioned country tracks to date, was happy to see that it was the highest charting new track after the album's release. I also love the soft/loud dynamic of "Change of Heart" kicking into the chorus. 

9. Shane Parish - Autechre Guitar
I love when someone arranges songs for a completely different instrument and sound than how they were originally recorded, particularly something like this, with Georgia guitarist and Bill Orcutt collaborator Shane Parish doing fingerstyle acoustic solo guitar versions of ten tracks by "intelligent dance music" poster boys Autechre. Obviously Parish picked some of Autechre's more melodic work for this collection, but it's still kind of fascinating how faithful he was able to be to their tracks, and how this made me kind of rethink Autechre's whole rep as really out there experimental dudes, I think the weird song titles might've done a lot of heavy lifting there. 

10. Brent Faiyaz - Icon 
When I interviewed Raphael Saadiq, I asked him about the 3 tracks he produced on Brent Faiyaz's Wasteland, and Saadiq had a lot of praise for Faiyaz ear and how he's navigated his career. So I wasn't surprised at all when Faiyaz announced that his new album was executive produced by Saadiq, although it's a little disappointing that it appears that was more of a consulting kind of role and he didn't work on any individual tracks this time. Calling your album Icon and then doing about 2/3rds the first week numbers of your previous album is a little embarrassing, but I still think what Faiyaz has done as an independent artist is really impressive and I dig this album, "Other Side" and "World Is Yours" are great.  

The Worst Album of the Month: Joji - Piss In The Wind
I feel like Joji kind of sings in the same annoying whisper mutter as Alex Warren, another guy who got famous making stupid comedy videos for tweens and then got more famous for singing humorless ballads. I call it 'the content creator croon.' 

10:34 AM

Friday, March 06, 2026

 





I wrote about Kendrick Lamar's "Mortal Man" for Spin's Deep Cut Friday column this week. 

10:43 AM

Movie Diary

Thursday, March 05, 2026

 





a) Blue Moon
I always knew that a bunch of major musicals and timeless songs were written by Rodgers & Hart, and a bunch more were written by Rodgers & Hammerstein, but I didn't know much about why Richard Rodgers changed writing partners. Blue Moon captures the moment when Rodgers & Hammerstein were having their first major success together with Oklahoma! and Lorenz Hart, his career in shambles from alcoholism, was months away from dying of pneumonia. Ethan Hawke gives a great performance as Hart, and I don't think I'd mind if this was the movie that finally got him an Oscar, but it is a little irritating to see someone who looks like Ethan Hawke palying someone who was bald and about 10 inches shorter than him, as if they couldn't find an actor who actually looks like Lorenz Hart to play the part. It's not as bad as Colin Farrell with the big rubber face playing The Penguin, but I have to roll my eyes a little at these eternally handsome movie stars uglying up to take away roles from character actors. 

Another movie based on a true story about musicians with "blue" in the title that got one of its stars an Oscar nomination! My mother has lived for the last several years in Milwaukee, where Lightning and Thunder were local heroes, and she's actually met Claire Sardina, and she really raved about the movie when it came out. So I was happy to finally see it when it hit streaming recently, and it's really good, Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson each give one of the best performances of their careers and it just felt like a lovely tribute to Mike and Claire's story, Neil Diamond's music, and the life of a gigging musician. That middle section of the movie gets surprisingly dark and real, but the tonal shift works. In a weird way this is the closest Craig Brewer has come to really following up Hustle & Flow, with Neil Diamond songs in place of Three 6 Mafia songs. I'm a music journalist, so I'm always a little weary the way perfectly interesting true stories get distorted and compressed in music biopics, and Song Sung Blue turns a 19-year-relationship into a 3-year story. I got into an exchange with Brewer on Twitter about the timeline of the movie, but he was very nice about it and I ultimately respect the choices he made as a filmmaker. 

c) Man on the Run
Paul McCartney's interviews for this new documentary about his life in the '70s are all audio voiceover, you can hear that it's modern day 80-something Paul, but you only ever see his face as a young man in his prime. And the movie really benefits from his current day perspective about all the scrutiny and backlash he endured after the breakup of the Beatles and what was on his mind through it all, and how he's probably got some more peace of mind about it all now. I found Morgan Neville's direction a little over overstuffed, there was just a lot of little visual things where they'd chop up and manipulate footage or put things on billboards that I found kind of tiresome and unimpressive, they had enough interesting footage and interviews that the bells and whistles felt unnecessary. 

d) One to One: John and Yoko
One to One doesn't have any formal connection to Man on the Run, but it's also about John Lennon's life immediately after the Beatles, albeit a more specific moment in the early '70s, so I decided to watch them both this week. I thought One to One might be mostly a concert film of Lennon's only full-length post-Beatles solo concert, but it was about a lot more than that, and honestly I think is the best depiction and explanation of Lennon's political activism that I've ever seen and gave me more respect for the specific issues he stuck his neck out on and how he tried to make the world a better place. I also thought the directors Kevin Macdonald and Same Rice-Edwards connected what Lennon was doing to a broader cultural context really well and did clever visual things with audio from phone calls. 

Andrew Stanton is one of the real geniuses behind Pixar who wrote and/or directed several classics including Wall-E and Finding Nemo. His first live action directorial effort, John Carter, was a big budget flop, and his second, In the Blink of an Eye, was recently released on Hulu. In some ways it's a very ambitious movie that spans virtually the whole of human existence, from cavemen to space exploration, and it's easy to imagine a more kid-friendly version of this maybe being conceptualized as an animated movie in the style of Wall-E. What it ended up as, though, is this odd little low-budget movie starring Kate McKinnon and Rashida Jones that almost feels like something you'd see in the IMAX theater in a science center with some half-hearted attempts at compelling adult drama shoehorned in, it's frustrating that someone as talented as Stanton just could not make this thing work. 

f) People We Meet On Vacation
Originality isn't really important when it comes to romcoms, and People We Meet On Vacation doesn't get substantially less derivative of When Harry Met Sally after the opening scenes where Emily Bader and Tom Blyth don't like each other at all while going on a road trip together. But I thought it was really excellent, easily one of the best romcoms I've seen the last few years, great performance from Bader and some snappy dialogue and genuine onscreen chemistry. 

g) Swiped
A lightweight but moderately enjoyable Social Network-style movie about the CEO of Bumble with a whole lot of scenes that make you go "that definitely never happened in real life." It stars Lily James, daughter of Phil, and there's a silly meta scene where Myha'la's character plays the "In The Air Tonight" drum fill and says that Collins's character probably loves Phil Collins. 

h) Trap House
A pretty solid action movie with a somewhat ridiculous premise, I feel like Dave Bautista is a name you can trust at this point, just about everything he acts in is, if not great, then very good within its modest genre parameters. 

i) The Outrun
A great performance from Saoirse Ronan in this, at least as good as any of her Oscar-nominated roles. 

j) Fall
One of those silly movies where two women are in a terrifying ordeal, stuck at the top of a 2,000-foot tower for several days, but still just look absurdly glamorous for the entire movie. The premise is kind of half-baked and then the 'twist' is really stupid, but I enjoyed it. 

k) The Sound
Another movie about mountain climbers in a dangerous situation, but a little more high concept, a little more dedicated to depicting climbing realistically, and a little less engaging overall. . 

l) Eden
In that weird cultural panic where Sydney Sweeney was getting more famous and people became obsessed with pretending to know what her political views were and making sure she was punished for them, Eden was one of those movies that people rooted for the failure of, even though she's like fourth-billed. A decent Ron Howard movie about a fascinating moment in history, where a group of Europeans tried to settle an island in the Galapagos in the 1930s, Ana de Armas is particularly good, one of her best performances. 

7:03 AM

My Top 50 Pop Singles of the 1980s

Tuesday, March 03, 2026

































The first thing I should say is that I've already done several other genre lists for 1980s singles, so a lot of things you might expect to see in an "'80s pop" list might not be here. Michael Jackson and Prince were in my R&B list, Bruce Springsteen and Phil Collins were in my 1980s mainstream rock list, Van Halen and Bon Jovi were in my hard rock/metal list, Tears For Fears and U2 were in my alternative list, and Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers will no doubt be in the country list that I do next. And along the way here, I have a lot of thoughts about how "pop" really became a genre as we know it in the '80s, in that complicated and sometimes problematic process of rock becoming soft rock, and Black influences being minimized in music derived from R&B and disco, and so on. Here's the Spotify playlist: 

1. Cyndi Lauper - "Time After Time" (1984)
I got close to finalizing this list about 10 months ago, before I put it to the side for a bit while I focused on the release of my book. And at the time I think I had "Time After Time" as low as #3 on the list, but the emotion brought forth last fall by listening to Cyndi Lauper's whole catalog, watching her get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and re-watching her documentary really made me decide it had to be #1. And I just always love the stories where the last song written for an album is an absolute classic that you can't imagine not being on the record. 

2. Katrina And The Waves - "Walking On Sunshine" (1985)
I'm posting this on a Monday morning, so I feel like Barry popping in his special Monday morning tape in High Fidelity. A whole lot of this list is white people doing Motown homages, and "Walking On Sunshine" is one of those songs I loved before I could even distinguish much about who made a song when or where just from the sound of it, and I was a little surprised when I realized it was written by British white people in the mid-'80s. It's a little funny to think that this song was the first hit Scott Litt worked on before he produced six platinum R.E.M. albums. 

3. Madonna - "Like A Prayer" (1989)
As I said, Michael and Prince and Whitney and Janet were on my R&B list, which leaves Madonna as by far the biggest pop star of the '80s who's actually on this list (and even she, believe it or not, was marketed as a racially ambiguous disco singer on her early 12"s, which had no photos on the sleeves). "Like A Prayer" still has the biggest streaming numbers of her imperial era hits (a recent, surprisingly decent Weeknd collaboration is her only song with a billion plays on Spotify). But "Material Girl" and, surprisingly, "La Isla Bonita," a song I seldom heard growing up and have never enjoyed, are nipping at its heels, and I'll be said if they ever catch up, because "Like A Prayer" is perfection. 

4. Wham! - "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" (1984)
Another Motown homage by white people, although it's so charmingly synthetic and white that I would say it actually fits Bowie's 'plastic soul' concept better than what Bowie did. 

5. Michael McDonald - "I Keep Forgettin'" (1982)
Another guy who was so obsessed with Motown that he made Motown covers the focal point of his career in the 21st century. But on his albums fronting the Doobie Brothers and his early solo career, he really had one of the best and most distinctive voices in pop and crossed over to the R&B charts with "I Keep Forgettin'" (twice, if you count Warren G and Nate Dogg's "Regulate"). His brand of soulful soft rock is now retroactively tagged with the playful name "yacht rock," but I don't really care what you call it, I grew up on Michael McDonald's harmonies. 

6. Daryl Hall & John Oates - "You Make My Dreams" (1981)
Are we still saying "blue eyed soul"? I think that term's more frowned upon now. In any event, Hall and Oates became pop icons by staying pretty true to their Philly Soul roots. "You Make My Dreams" originally peaked at #5 in the middle of a golden run where it was preceded by a #1 and followed by two #1s, but at some point amidst the various film and TV syncs it became their defining song, and I got to interview Oates not long after it became their first track with a billion streams. I barely heard it growing up, and when I did I thought of it as the song that sounds like the "Ducktales" theme, but now I adore it. 

7. Debbie Gibson - "Only In My Dreams" (1987)
Today we live in a pop music ecosystem that's been significantly shaped by women who wrote or co-wrote hit songs as teenagers (Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, etc. -- although there's still always a vocal contingent of the public that's quick to assume a man really did all the work). Carole King wrote hits as a teenager, but she didn't become a successful artist until she was almost 30. So Debbie Gibson, who became the youngest person to write, produce and perform a #1 single with "Foolish Beat," is a more important figure in that history than I think she gets credit for. My favorite of hers, by far, though, is the debut single she wrote when she was 14 and recorded when she was 16. 

8. Tracy Chapman - "Fast Car" (1988)
A lot of the guitar-driven music on here is soft rock, but Tracy Chapman is an example of someone who came from the folk music tradition when she made a pop classic (that has since, via the Luke Combs, made her the first Black woman with a solo writing credit on a #1 country hit). 

9. Paul Simon - "You Can Call Me Al" (1986)
Paul Simon also came to pop stardom through folk music a couple decades before Chapman, but Graceland came out of him embracing a whole bunch of musical traditions from different countries and cultures, and inspires debate and adoration in equal measure 40 years later. A lot of people say that I must hate this song because my name is in it, but I've always loved it. My late aunt Linda would always sing "You Can Call Me Al" when I was little and going by Alex, so the song always reminds me of her, and maybe I wouldn't go by Al today if not for this song? I really don't know. 

10. Robbie Nevil - "C'est La Vie" (1986)  
I initially forgot all about this song when I did my list of 1986 singles and went back and added it. I think it's only a couple of songs I've done that with. What a banger, this really epitomizes how hard that really slick, antiseptic '80s pop sound can hit. 
































11. Billy Joel - "The Longest Time" (1984) 
Billy Joel is in some ways the typical rock musician whose career wound up defined by how much more people liked his ballads than his rockers. And even as someone who loves that Attila album and has no use for "Just The Way You Are," I have to admit that he really thrives as a pop songwriter. And he reached a new level of pop chart ubiquity, oddly, by making 1983's An Innocent Man, a nostalgic throwback full of pre-British Invasion styles, including the biggest doo wop song in the history of MTV. 

12. Elton John - "I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues" (1983)
I grew up thinking of Elton John and Billy Joel as the being the concurrent piano man titans of pop music, but once I started to really look at their catalogs, I realized that Elton's imperial period ended around 1976's Blue Moves just as Billy's began around 1977's The Stranger. But Elton managed to bounce back pretty well in the '80s, and this one has always been my favorite, partly because of the really funny standup bit Tommy Davidson used to do about it. 

13. Madonna - "Borderline" (1984)
Kind of an outlier in Madonna's catalog, it's just sweet and earnest in a way she didn't allow herself to be very often ("Cherish" is another great one in that lane), and it has some of my favorite '80s synth sounds. 

14. Starship - "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" (1987)
Haight-Ashbury psych rock legends Jefferson Airplane's transformation into Jefferson Starship and then simply Starship is the purest distillation of that familiar narrative about idealistic '60s hippies growing up and becoming unabashedly commercial capitalists. There's some truth to that, but I also like Grace Slick's voice on "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" just as much as on "White Rabbit." This song was the first of nine Hot 100 #1s written by Diane Warren as well as the first of Warren's 17 songs nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Song, and in both cases it's my favorite. "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" is better in The Skeleton Twins than in Mannequin, though. 

15. George Michael - "Faith" (1987)
George Michael created a little 2-minute number with a Bo Diddley beat without intending it to be a single, and extended it with a guitar solo once people started to suggest it could be a single. And it seems strange to think this song was a happy accident, because now it's so central to his pop iconography. 

16. Christopher Cross - "Ride Like The Wind" (1980)
It's weird to think that Christopher Cross, then already doughy and pushing 30, and a teenage Billie Eilish are the two only artist in Grammy history to come out of the gate so strong with debut albums that they won all four general category awards (Best New Artist and Song, Record, and Album of the Year). "Ride Like The Wind" also provided one of Michael McDonald's finest moments as a backing vocalist and Rick Moranis's greatest SCTV sketch. 

17. The Pointer Sisters - "Neutron Dance" (1985) 
The Pointer Sisters really epitomize how talented singers can move between genres fluidly -- they learned to sing gospel as kids, won their first Grammy in a country category, had a long string of R&B hits, and crossed over with some big pop hits in the '80s. "Neutron Dance" came out when I was 3 years old, and I remember getting so hyped up to this song when I was little, I just thought it was the hardest thing I'd ever heard. I also loved their "Pinball Number Count" song on "Sesame Street," of course. 

18. Donna Summer - "She Works Hard For The Money" (1983)
I just made a Donna Summer deep album cuts playlist last week, and it sort of bookended her reign as the Queen of Disco with her early pop/rock material and her return to pop/rock with She Works Hard For the Money. 

19. Cyndi Lauper - "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" (1983)
You really have to hear Robert Hazard's original recording of "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" to appreciate how completely and brilliantly Cyndi Lauper overhauled the music and the lyrics to make it into the pop classic we know and love today. 

20. Rick Astley - "Never Gonna Give You Up" (1988)
Before the "rickroll" memes, well, I wouldn't say this song was respected, but it was just another '80s pop hit, not one so infamously bad that people used it to taunt each other. I've never minded the memes, though, because if someone surprises me with this song, I just listen to it because I enjoy it. His soundalike follow-up hit "Together Forever" is a jam too. 

































21. Daryl Hall & John Oates - "Private Eyes" (1981)
Now that's a really good, really fake-sounding electric piano sound, maybe the best. 

22. Bonnie Tyler - "Total Eclipse of the Heart" (1983)
Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman went their separate ways for a decade after the enormous success of Bat Out of Hell, and while Meat struggled, Steinman wrote a few smashes for other artists, most notably "Total Eclipse of the Heart," which I started to understand and like a lot more after I realized who wrote it and understood it as part of Steinman's maximalist oeuvre. 

23. Tina Turner - "The Best" (1989)   
Desmond Child produced the first recording of "The Best" by Bonnie Tyler, before Tina Turner recorded what became the biggest and...simply the best version of the song. Desmond Child also wrote "If You Were A Woman (And I Was A Man)" for Tyler, and it also got recycled when Child used its melody for Bon Jovi's "You Give Love A Bad Name." 

24. Madonna - "Express Yourself" (1989) 
Like A Prayer is my top Madonna album, but I can't tell you what a buzzkill it is to hear the album version of "Express Yourself," it's gotta be the video mix all the way. 

25. Buster Poindexter And His Banshees Of Blue - "Hot Hot Hot" (1987) 
I knew David Johansen for "Hot Hot Hot" and Scrooged for so many years before I heard a New York Dolls song or realized it was the same guy. What a wild life he had. 

26. Huey Lewis and the News - "If This Is It" (1984)  
It's not exactly a Buster Poindexter-level reinvention, but Huey Lewis was a pretty credible rocker before becoming a pop superstar. While his early band Clover spent some time across the Atlantic, Lewis played harmonica on a few Thin Lizzy and Phil Lynott tracks, while the other members of Clover were Elvis Costello's band on My Aim Is True. And even when Huey and the News became adult contemporary crossover stars, he still had that big, raspy, commanding voice that most rock frontmen would kill for. 

27. Kenny Loggins - "This Is It" (1980)
Another great Michael McDonald backing vocal, his second co-write with Kenny Loggins after their work on the Doobie Brothers' "What A Fool Believes" went supernova. I think this song is kind of underrated, I only really heard it more and a couple times and realized how much I liked it in the last decade. 

28. Wham! - "Last Christmas" (1984) 
In the streaming era, Christmas songs bum rush the Hot 100 every December, but so far "All I Want For Christmas Is You" and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" have been the only ones to go all the way to #1. And if any other song ever gets there, I really hope it's "Last Christmas." Really I was pretty disappointed that it didn't get there after George Michael died on Christmas day in 2016. 

29. Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine - "1-2-3" (1988)
Gloria Estefan had so many hits, she was really my introduction to Latin pop before I knew what it was, great voice, hooks for days. 

30. Murray Head - "One Night In Bangkok" (1985)
This song felt like one of those delightfully bizarre '80s chart oddities even before I realized it was from a musical about chess. Murray Head also kind of sounds like James Urbaniak to me now, so I picture Rusty Venture performing it. 
































31. Kim Carnes - "Bette Davis Eyes" (1981) 
My wife and I sang karaoke for the first time just a few weeks ago, at this little bar in Napa, California. It was fun, but after people sang their picks, the DJ would random put them back in the queue with his own song picks, and my wife and her brother's fiancee were very surprised when the DJ informed them it was time to go up and sing "Bette Davis Eyes." They muddled their way through it, neither feeling very confident about their feel for the song, but it was still kind of a fun moment. 

32. Indigo Girls - "Closer To Fine" (1989)
Another gorgeous, emotionally affecting folk pop crossover hit from that moment when Tracy Chapman and Suzanne Vega helped bring acoustic singer-songwriters back to the mainstream in the late '80s. The 2023 Indigo Girls documentary It's Only Life After All is highly recommended and gave me a greater appreciation for both this song and the rest of their catalog. 

33. Frida - "I Know There's Something Going On" (1983)
If a lot of what we think of as pop is just anglicized R&B, then it makes sense that ABBA's big hits are the pre-'80s example of pop-as-a-genre that everybody can agree on -- they were Swedes doing really really white disco. ABBA broke up in the early '80s, and their biggest U.S. hit of the decade, "The Winner Takes All," isn't anything special, but Anni-Frid Lyngstad had a pretty great single as a solo artist. 

34. Olivia Newton-John - "Physical" (1981)
Olivia Newton-John, the Australian pop country singer of the '70s who became a household name via Grease, kind of stumbled into becoming the template for the blonde pop superstar before Madonna's arrival. I was born during the 10 weeks that "Physical" was at #1 on the Hot 100, tied with the much less horny "You Light Up My Life" for the longest-running #1 at the time. 

35. Madonna - "Material Girl" (1985)
I think Madonna probably disliked being nicknamed 'the material girl' more than she dislikes the song itself. But hearing as a kid that she didn't like this song was an early lesson for me that you don't have to agree with an artist about their own music. 

36. Bananarama - "Cruel Summer" (1984)
I think another song with the same title, Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer," become so ubiquitous in the last few years has really increased my affection for the clearly superior Bananarama song. 

37. Daryl Hall & John Oates - "Kiss On My List" (1981)
Three big Hall & Oates hits from 1981 are on this list, and it easily could've been four, they really hit an incredible hot streak that year. 

38. The Weather Girls - "It's Raining Men" (1982) 
I was very surprised to learn they were already releasing music as The Weather Girls before "It's Raining Men," it was actually on their third album, I'd always kind of assumed the group name was inspired by the song. Paul Shaffer co-wrote it, originally intending it for Donna Summer, and the Weather Girls made it a hit the same year that Shaffer began his run with "The Late Night with David Letterman." Hell of a year for ol' Paul. 

39. Neneh Cherry - "Buffalo Stance" (1989)
This song was kind of futuristic, in the sense that a club kid with two famous parents rapping over a dance pop track was really a vision of how the music industry works today. 

40. Karla Bonoff - "Personally" (1982)
Karla Bonoff wrote songs that were hits for Linda Ronstadt and Wynonna Judd, but she didn't write her only top 40 hit "Personally," which Glenn Frey suggested to her after it had been pitched to Bonnie Raitt. I never heard this song until a couple years ago, but it was just one of those tracks I found while looking at old Billboard charts that I ended up liking so much that I found room on it on this list alongside all this music I grew up on. 































41. George Michael - "Father Figure" (1988)
I'm not saying the Babygirl needledrop tipped the scales, but I went back and forth a bit about whether this song would make the cut. 

42. Dead Or Alive - "You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)" (1985) 
Stock Aitken Waterman sounds like a law firm, but it was a trio of British producers and songwriters that really helped turn pop towards the streamlined, professionalized assembly line system that it is today. "You Spin Me Round" was the first of 13 SAW productions to top the UK singles charts and was the first to reach as high in #11 as well (they also did the Rick Astley song I wrote about earlier). Pete Burns of Dead Or Alive was a much more unusual character and wilder vocalist than most of the people that fronted Stock Aitken Waterman productions, though. 

43. Jermaine Stewart - "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off" (1986) 
I didn't mean to put three songs by queer artists in a row here, but it certainly warrants mentioning that pop music was extremely gay in the 1980s even while mainstream culture was extremely homophobic, most gay entertainers were in the closet, and AIDS was killing so many people. Jermaine Steward died of AIDS complications in 1997, and in that context, his charmingly chaste and massively catchy crossover hit is heartbreakingly poignant. 

44. Cyndi Lauper - "Money Changes Everything" (1985)
She's So Unusual is the only album with three singles on this list, which feels about right for me. The much bigger "She Bop" was going to be the third, but the way Lauper sings The Brains' "Money Changes Everything" just floors me every time I hear it, what a performance. 

45. Was (Not Was) - "Walk The Dinosaur" (1989)
I know lots of people were into dinosaurs when they were kids, but I was really into dinosaurs, like I was reading college-level paleontology textbooks before Jurassic Park was out, I was basically a dinosaur hipster. So obviously this was my favorite song when I was 7, and learned much later that Was (Not Was) started out in Detroit making weird avant funk and collaborating with Wayne Kramer of the MC5, before Don Was became a super producer who worked with the Stones and Dylan. 

46. Bobby McFerrin - "Don't Worry, Be Happy" (1988)  
Guys who could do weird stuff with their voices were very big in my world as an '80s kid. Michael Winslow (the sound effects guy from Police Academy and Spaceballs), John Moschitta (the fast talking guy from the Micro Machines commercials), and a cappella musician Bobby McFerrin were some of the world's greatest entertainers in my mind. I understand why people find this song irritating I guess, but as a 6-year-old kid, I just thought it was so cool that he made this entire song with his voice, and I still think the melody is really catchy. 

47. Madonna - "Open Your Heart" (1987) 
I didn't have MTV until the '90s, but my dad would tape NBC's "Friday Night Videos," so that was my earliest exposure to music videos, I have vivid memories of Tears For Fears and Peter Gabriel videos. I'm pretty sure "Open Your Heart" was the first Madonna video I saw, which is kind of appropriate given the video's weird-ass concept of a kid watching her in a peep show. I was surprised at how low this song's streaming numbers are, of her #1 hits, only "Justify My Love" and "Who's That Girl" have fewer plays (and who the hell is listening to "Crazy For You" in this day and age?). 

48. New Kids On The Block - "You Got It (The Right Stuff)" (1989) 
Two of my older cousins were teenage girls in the NKOTB era so I have that very classic boy experience of growing up sneering at boy bands and being baffled by their popularity. And even as an adult who loves a lot of pop music today, it feels uncontroversial to say that New Kids were probably, musically, the weakest of any hugely popular boy band, and they probably have a lot to answer for by becoming the first "white version of New Edition" success story. I think their is their best hook, though, and "Weird Al" Yankovic did a pretty good parody that was about the white stuff in Oreos. 

49. Harold Faltermeyer - "Axel F" (1985) 
As far as pop hits that were an incidental byproduct of how funny Eddie Murphy was in the '80s, the instrumental theme from Beverly Hills Cop is a much better song than "Party All the Time." And writing about the Crazy Frog phenomenon for Stereogum last year gave me a renewed appreciation for how good "Axel F" is when there's not an animated frog jabbering over it. 

50. Olivia Newton-John and Electric Light Orchestra - "Xanadu" (1980)
I'm not much of a musician, and contrary to popular belief, it takes more musicianship to cover a song than to write one. So I haven't recorded many covers, but "Xanadu" is one of the three songs I've covered with Western Blot, last year for a friend's film project. So I had to listen to this song so many times to figure out the melody and structure, and it's now tattooed on my brain in a way few songs are.

9:58 AM

Friday, February 27, 2026

 






This week on Spin, I ranked Outkast's albums and wrote about Todd Snider's "Ballad of the Devil's Backbone Tavern" for the Deep Cut Friday column. 

10:06 AM

TV Diary

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

 





a) "How To Get To Heaven From Belfast"
Maybe it's reductive to say one Irish show reminds me of another one, but "How To Get To Heaven From Belfast" is, like "Bad Sisters," about a group of Irish women who are harboring a secret about a man's death. Even the romantic subplot is kind of similar. But it's pretty good, from the same creator as "Derry Girls," a show I liked but never kept up with beyond the first few episodes, I should probably go back and finish that one. I was surprised at how dark the story got by the end, but it worked and set up a possible second season well.

b) "Can You Keep A Secret?"
Another dark comedy with a similar tone, this one British. It opens with a guy mourning his father who died 2 months earlier, and then his mother says "Can you keep a secret?" and his father walks in. And so the rest of the series is them collecting the insurance money from his death and trying to keep the secret that he's still alive, pretty entertaining stuff but that opening moment is just perfect, I love that they made it the title of the show. I wasn't familiar with Mandip Gill and she's absolutely gorgeous. 

c) "56 Days" 
"56 Days" on Amazon Prime is kind of an old-fashioned 'erotic thriller' with a very overused modern plot device -- the first episode shows two characters meet and hook up, and also shows you the discovery of an unidentified dead body in one of their homes 56 days later. So the couple episodes I've watched, and probably nearly all of the 8-episode season, are devoted to showing you various ways those characters are deceptive and untrustworthy and making you try to predict who's going to kill who. I'm not a big fan of that kind of storytelling, although I don't mind terribly that those characters are played by two very beautiful people, Avan Jogia and Dove Cameron (he's engaged to Halsey, she has a budding music career as a replacement-level Halsey). There are some cartoonish bits where Cameron will be acting friendly or flirtatious with somebody and then will turn away from them and immediately make an evil face so you know she's planning something devious and underhanded. 

The idea of doing a "Star Trek" show about the Starfleet Academy that we've always heard about is so good, and it's such a bummer that it's another mediocre Alex Kurtzman "Trek" show rolling off the assembly line. It's fun to see Holly Hunter as a Star Trek captain and even Paul Giamatti in a guest role as a Klingon, but I just hate the look of these shows and some of the dialogue is just so corny and not in an appropriately "Star Trek" way. 

On paper, "The Beauty" could have been the right show from the right person at the right time. Ryan Murphy's first hit "Nip/Tuck" was all about the dark side of vanity and insecurity, and revisiting that subject matter from a body horror angle in the 'looksmaxxing' era could've been a slam dunk on the zeitgeist. But it's genuinely one of the worst shows Murphy has ever made, and he's made a few duds. The first three episodes feature long, repetitive setpieces of three different people undergoing the same grotesque transformation, before introducing to a larger array of wacky characters like a one-eyed assassin who loves yacht rock. And there's just something about the slick Murphy house style that makes the gory special effects shots and the knowingly absurd moments all just not land as well as they should. Like if you had a David Fincher-type director with a real sense of style and atmosphere direct these actors with these scripts, it might not be great, but it would probably be good. 

I liked the first season of "School Spirits" a lot and got a bit bored of it in the second season. It feels like they sort of finished off their original idea for the show and are trying to revitalize it with a new storyline and some new cast members for season three, though, including Jennifer Tilly, so far I think it's working pretty well. 

g) "Hijack" 
The first season of "Hijack" was about Idris Elba as a corporate negotiator who has to negotiate with airline hijackers, and the second season is about a train hijacking. The spirit of Speed 2 is alive, I love it, I hope a boat gets hijacked in season 3. 

I miss some of the old supporting cast from the first three seasons of "Shoresy" -- at one point in season 5 they mention Sanguinet but he didn't actually appear on camera or anything, which was kind of disappointing. But it's still a pretty great show, I enjoy seeing Shoresy and Laurel finally become a couple, and just felt kinda proud of the show for actually getting a Wayne Gretzky cameo. 

Time flies, it feels bizarre that this show is already in its fourth season. Vella Lovell's character on "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" was so hilarious that I'm sometimes annoyed that she's a bit more of a straight man character on "Animal Control," but she's still great, I think it's nice that they let her and Michael Rowland's characters finally get together. I've also enjoyed Ken Jeong being in the last few episodes and having a little "Community" semi-reunion with Joel McHale.  

The 'animated sitcom for adults' genre has been in pretty rough shape for a while now, so I was cautiously optimistic when I saw that voice cast for "Strip Law" includes Keith David, Stephen Root, Adam Scott, Janelle James, and Jim Rash. It's pretty good, though, some of the humor is a little predictable but it occasionally gets a belly laugh out of me. 

A French show on Netflix that takes place in the 16th century, one of those old-fashioned pulpy action shows, but with lots of nudity. 

m) "Dudes" 
A German sitcom about a group of guys who are all dealing with middle age in different ways, but with lots of nudity. A decently funny show, I could see an American adaptation being popular, without the nudity (or possibly with, idk). 

A fun Japanese show on Netflix about a young woman who wants to be a serious reporter but ends up getting transferred to a tabloid and has to cover sordid scandals and gets caught in that world, kinda reminds me of The Devil Wears Prada. 

It's funny to see a Korean show with the corniest premise about someone having wishes granted by a literal genie, like it makes me wonder if someone would ever try to reboot "I Dream of Genie" in America today. 

Sweden first allowed women to be police officers in 1958, and this Netflix period piece is about some of the first women on the job. Like a lot of period piece TV, the costuming and visual details are more impressive than the writing, which feels a little shallow and obvious. 

A truly weird Korean show where a modern day chef magically gets transported back to the 10th century and becomes the personal chef of a monarch of the Joseon dynasty and impresses everyone with her futuristic cooking techniques, like how do you even come up with a premise like this. 

This Indian show is about a game developer who's dealing with misogynistic online harassment, it's weird that the only TV show I've seen reckon with Gamergate at all was made on the other side of the world. 

Another pretty weird premise for this Taiwanese show, two women practice a resurrection ritual to bring the head of a scam center back to life to avenge their daughters who were kidnapped and forced to work there, one of whom died and one of whom is a coma. 

Maybe I heard something about the ABA at some point in the past but I don't think I had any idea that an NBA competitor existed for 9 years in the '60s and '70s and it's a pretty fascinating story, especially how they hired away some NBA players but also gave a bunch of unknown amateur players a chance to go professional. 

Most showbiz documentaries these days fall into two categories: docs where the celebrity subject has editorial control and makes sure they come out looking good, and docs where the celebrity subject doesn't participate at all. "Reality Check" is an increasingly rare and entertaining example of a third category: Tyra Banks sat for interviews about "ANTM" and tries to put a positive spin on every problematic story, but the whole thing is just so unflattering to her. It's interesting because the show was sort of ahead of the curve in trying to counteract some of the harmful standards perpetuated by the fashion industry but still managed to reinforce a lot of them, so it's like an autopsy of the pitfalls of the early woke era, and of trying to be politically correct in the messy sensationalistic reality TV system.  

Watching this Amazom Prime docuseries about female CEOs, including "ANTM" alum Winnie Harlow, right after finishing "Reality Check" kind of made impossible to watch this through anything other than the lens of the weaknesses of girlboss feminism. 

These true crime docs always make me aware of stories that probably made the national news that I have no memory of hearing about that the time. And "Girl On the Run" is about Sarah Pender, who was convicted of a double murder and described as a 'female Charles Manson,' and escaped from prison for several months in 2008. Pretty crazy stuff, and it's fascinating that Hull sat down for onscreen interviews to share all the details, and also maintain her innocence in the murder case.  

This PBS miniseries is pretty interesting, I feel like a lot of people would benefit from watching it right now, when it feels like there's more resentment festering between the Black community and the Jewish community than I've ever seen in my lifetime. 

The score in this is way too dramatic, it makes me feel like I'm watching a movie full of intense forboeding like Tรกr and not a Netflix docuseries about a famous TV chef. 

This A&E show, where each episode follows a police investigation beat by beat via body cam and dash cam and Ring camera footage, is kind of impressively put together, but I don't particularly like watching this kind of stuff and I really don't like the whole surveillance state we're living it that makes it possible.

6:37 PM