Tag: tv

TV Show Review: Abbott Elementary, season 3, episode 9 (“Alex”)

I had been missing out on watching Abbott Elementary for the past couple of weeks. Every Wednesday at 8 pm I tune into ABC to watch the show, which is currently on its third season. If you haven’t seen Abbott Elementary, it’s a show created by the actress Quinta Brunson, who I used to know from watching Buzzfeed videos (she was with Buzzfeed around the time I was in college, and I loved watching her videos.) It takes place at Willard R. Abbott Public School in Philadelphia, and it’s about a team of teachers who do their best to educate the students and encourage them with the limited resources that the district provides them. Janine Teagues is an optimistic idealistic teacher who works at Abbott, and she makes many mistakes along the way but learns that these mistakes are learning opportunities. Her fellow teachers, Melissa, Barbara, Jacob and Gregory, are all in the same boat as her, and everyone is doing their best. Ava Coleman is the school principal who loves to goof off and be very relaxed about school rules. In season 3, she briefly becomes a serious micromanager who does away with her permissive principal-ing and decides to take away all the fun at Abbott to accord with the district’s policies. However, all it took to change serious Ava back into silly fun Ava was turning on “Back That Azz Up” in the gymnasium. Gregory has a crush on Janine, and Janine has a crush on Gregory, but at the time of season 1, Janine is still with her boyfriend, Tariq, who depends on Janine like a child and doesn’t treat her with respect. Gregory decides to start dating Amber, the mother of one of Abbott’s students, and at first, they are enjoying their relationship, but Amber realizes that she’s not interested in Gregory anymore, so they break up. Gregory and Janine are taking time away to figure themselves out, but there is still palpable sexual tension between them, and in season 3, this sexual tension gets hotter when Manny, one of the superintendents in the district, takes a liking to Janine. (The actor who plays Manny is pretty darn cute, by the way. Just sayin’)

In season 3, things change a lot. Manny tells Janine to apply for a fellowship, where she would follow her dream of working as a representative of the school district, and Janine wants it, but she’s not sure if she’s qualified enough and she also doesn’t want to leave her students at Abbott behind. Even though Jacob wanted the fellowship, as it is a very competitive fellowship that not everyone wins, Janine ends up getting it, but Jacob is proud of her anyway. The hardest part for Janine when Superintendent Reynolds offers her a full-time position at the school district is saying goodbye to her classroom. Which brings me to episode 9 of season 3, in which Janine tries to convince one of her students, Alex, to come back to school. Gregory lets Janine know that Alex is missing school to watch The Price is Right with his grandmother, and after calling Alex’s grandmother to ask her why Alex isn’t coming to school, he finds out that Alex is missing school because he misses Janine and doesn’t want to go to school if his favorite teacher, Janine, isn’t there anymore. Janine realizes that she has made a profound impact and significantly transformed her relationship with the people at Abbott. In season 1, Janine can barely control the class, and especially because there was one student, named Courtney, who made Janine’s life a living nightmare. Courtney got the class to sing the Pledge of Allegiance wrong (instead they sang “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of Courtney, and they replace every “America” with “Courtney” as if Courtney runs not just Janine’s classroom but an entire nation.) However, Janine is also able to patch things up with Courtney, and she ends up building wonderful rapport with her students. Gregory and Janine decide to go to Alex’s grandmother’s house, and they end up sitting with Alex and trying to convince him to go back to school. At first Alex refuses because he wants Janine back, but Janine is honest with Alex and explains to him that people are going to leave your life at different points in life, and after a lot of convincing, they finally get him to come back to school. I’m really curious about what is going to happen to Gregory and Janine, because I’m getting the sense that Manny, the district representative who Janine works with, isn’t totally out of the picture.

TV Show Review: Abbott Elementary season 3, episode 10 (2 Ava 2 Fest)

I missed the last episode of Abbott Elementary last week, so I am playing catchup, but I was able to catch this recent episode tonight. In this season, Janine is working as a member of the school district and is away from her classroom at Abbott Elementary most of the time. In this episode, she has to make a huge decision about whether to continue working for the school district or go back to being a teacher at Abbott. There are several signs throughout the episode that indicate she is going to go back to being a teacher at Abbott. She often revisits the photos of her students and coworkers, and they make her miss Abbott. However, her coworkers at the school district–Manny, Simon and Emily–are super pumped and want her to stay with them at the school district. Also, the new superintendent (played brilliantly by comedian Keegan-Michael Key of the comedy duo Key and Peele) informs Janine that she has been reassigned to work for a high school. Janine tries to get the message across to her coworkers that she doesn’t want to work permanently for the school district, and wants to go back to Abbott, but it takes her a while to get that message across because she knows there will be some consequences against Abbott if she quits her job at the school district. However, what really gets her to come back to Abbott is the really sweet card that Barbara and Janine’s students made for her. They all signed it themselves and Barbara wrote a sweet message to Janine about how she is looking forward to all of the things that Janine will accomplish. I only worked as a pre-K teacher for about two years, and frankly I missed a lot of days of work and called in sick, so I couldn’t really understand how hard teachers work for their students every day and show up to do that hard work. (I just realized Teacher Appreciation week is in a month) But it must have been hard for Janine to be away from her students since she has built such a strong bond with them for the past two seasons of the show.

The Ava Fest part was pretty hilarious. At the beginning, Shanae and the other members of the cafeteria staff are stressing out and running around the kitchen preparing all this food to prepare for Ava Fest, which is really an open house, but Ava wanted to glam it up in her authentic Ava style, so she made it all about Ava and invited Questlove from The Roots as the guest musician. When the kitchen staff have Mr. Johnson taste-test the food, I thought Mr. Johnson was going to like it, but he said it tasted like trash, prompting Shanae to throw his food across the room and get even more stressed about how people were going to like the food. Barbara, Melissa, Jacob and Gregory think Ava is lying about getting Questlove to come to Ava Fest. They also think she is lying about her connection to Questlove and how they started The Roots together. When Questlove doesn’t show up at first, Melissa tries to kill time with the audience by doing a lot of impressions of actors, but many people find these impressions unfunny and cringey. I thought Ava was lying about her connection to Questlove and that Questlove was coming, but it turns out he shows up for the open house after all, and he throws down a lot of sick beats as always (if you’ve seen him or heard his music, the man can jam. He DJ’d at the Academy Awards one year and it was so dope!) To be honest, I was glad when Janine decided to go back to Abbott. Gregory was also quite happy because while they were dancing, he had this huge smile on his face. Gregory mentions at some point during the episode that Janine is the main reason he stayed at Abbott. It was also stressful for Janine to not be in her classroom and to have to deal with the various substitutes who came to her class while she was away. In one episode, there is a substitute teacher named Jessca (no “I”) who rejects the traditional grammar rules and has a very permissive style of teaching, to the point where she lets the students call her by her first name. They end up repeating these behaviors when Janine visits, calling her by her first name instead of “Miss Teagues.” Janine thinks Jessca is going to stay at the school permanently, but she only ends up staying for a week, especially because her week subbing for Janine has been rather “mid” (I just looked it up in Urban Dictionary because I didn’t know what it meant, and apparently it means “below average.”)

Abbott Elementary, season 3: episode 4 (“Smoking”)

Yesterday I couldn’t get enough of Abbott Elementary, so after catching up on episode 1 (“Career Day”) I watched the latest episode, “Smoking.” In this episode, a student at Abbott is caught smoking, which caused the fire alarms at the school to go off. Apparently, there is not a no-smoking rule at Abbott. The teachers end up having a discussion about drugs in the lounge. Jacob says that smoking is bad, but Janine says he can’t say that because he vapes. Jacob argues that vaping is not as bad as smoking, and then he tells everyone that Janine does weed. Janine admits that she smokes it every night and that she needs it to function. Ava admits that she does hookah, Gregory admits he has an occasional protein-bar edible, and when Barbara tells them they need to give up the sin of taking these drugs, Melissa laughs and says that Barbara drinks alcohol. Mr. Johnson tries to chime in, but Janine sees a student has been taping the whole discussion with his phone, and the teachers confront the student about how he needs to not let the discussion become public. However, it is too late. The student ended up posting the conversation on social media, and now students everywhere in the school now know that their teachers do substances even though they told the students that substances were bad. During a lesson Jacob is teaching on the Dust Bowl, one of his students asks, when looking at a photo of the Dust Bowl, if that is what the inside of Jacob’s car looks like when he is vaping, and they laugh at him. Janine greets a student in the halls with a simple “hi,” and the student whispers, “Bet you are.” (At first, I didn’t catch this, but then I watched it again and realized the student was making fun of Janine being “high” on weed.) Barbara is teaching her students and takes a sip from her traveler mug, and a student asks her if she is drinking Pinot Grigio. The teachers are fed up, and so they find a way to clear things up with the students.

They end up enlisting the help of Tariq’s program, F.A.D.E. I honestly thought Tariq was going to show up again, but instead it’s Slim, another guy who is part of the F.A.D.E. program. Slim was deeply influenced by Tariq, and it is clearly showing in his performance. He ends up giving a really hilarious spoken word about not doing drugs, and it is very cringey for the students to watch. He enlists another F.A.D.E. spokesperson, Caroline (played by a really brilliant comedian named Aparna Nancherla), who ends up engaging the students in a very chaotic discussion about which drugs are better or worse than others. The school ends up employing a strict checking policy where the teachers have to check the students’ bags for any drugs. Obviously, this isn’t fun, and it stresses the teachers and students out. The teachers talk more about it, and they realize the best way to address this is to actually have a conversation with Curtis, the student who was caught smoking. Melissa and Gregory sit down with the student, and the student apologizes and says he won’t do it again, and that he doesn’t even like the taste of smoking. Melissa and Gregory tell him he isn’t in trouble and tell him that they just want to make sure he is being careful. When the student asks if it was his fault for having the F.A.D.E. program brought into the school, Melissa assures him that wasn’t his fault (“it’s the government’s fault) and they send the student back to class. Gregory and Melissa don’t want Curtis to be suspended, and so Gregory finds a way so that Curtis’s suspension will be lifted. When Curtis finds out, he goes into Ava’s office and gives her a hug (this was really touching).

Meanwhile, Janine also has to deal with Jessca (yes, this is actually how she spells her name) who is the substitute for Janine’s classroom. Jessca insists on the students calling her by her first name and doesn’t teach them grammar properly. She lets the students misplace commas and just has a very lax attitude towards teaching, and Janine has a problem with this. One of the students calls her Janine when she comes into the classroom, and Janine corrects him and says, “it’s Ms. Teagues,” but Jessca insists it’s fine and that nothing is wrong with her teaching. Janine confronts Barbara about Jessca, but Barbara tells her that every teacher has their own teaching method and that is fine. Barbara also admits that she wasn’t too thrilled about Janine’s teaching methods when Janine first came to Abbott because Barbara had a certain way of doing things, but after she got to know Janine over time, she came to respect Janine’s ways of teaching.

Poor Jacob had to give up his vaping pen at the end, though. The teachers cheer him on when he drops it in the trash can, but then he fishes back in the trash for his vaping pen because he doesn’t want to let it go. He ends up finding another alternative to vaping, a Bref pen, which is just straight up air (I had to look up if Bref pens were real, but I couldn’t find any.)

Succession, season 3, episode 6: What It Takes

In this episode of Succession, Kendall is working with his lawyer to testify against his dad, but Lisa isn’t making as much progress as he wants. He wants her to try harder in getting the case out about his dad’s corruption, but Lisa tells him that she is doing her best to represent him. Kendall tells Lisa that he likes working with her, but that she needs to try harder. He later goes before a group of people and they ask him questions about the allegations against Waystar, and he tells Lisa that the meeting with these people went horribly and raises his voice so they can hear him cussing them out. Lisa tells him to behave himself, and then pulls him aside and tells Kendall that she is doing her job but she feels he is disrespecting her expertise and her authority as a lawyer, and that he needs to check himself.

On the private jet, Greg nervously looks at his phone because he wants to check in with Kendall if Kendall is going to “burn” Greg, but he hasn’t gotten a response yet. Logan calls over the family and his team and talks about his strategy to bring down the tech industry, which is trying to outshine Waystar Royco so that it will lose its standing in society. Many people in the tech industry lean politically liberal, while ATN news (the media outlet of Waystar Royco) leans politically conservative, and many people are turning to the tech industry and this is hurting Waystar’s sales, so Logan wants to put together a plan so that Waystar can stay on top. Logan also thinks that the Attorney General has a photo of Logan on her dartboard, but Tom thinks that is just a rumor. The family goes to Virginia to a conference where they are trying to find the next president of the United States, since the old one isn’t running anymore. Many of the people at the conference are conservative and they argue about each other’s positions and gossip a lot. Greg confronts Tom and tells him he is worried about Kendall “burning” him, but Tom is too preoccupied with the possibility that he might end up in prison. During one evening in their hotel room, Shiv is watching the news on her tablet about the election, but Tom just wants to have a nice evening with her where they taste different wines. He went out of his way to get her these fancy wines, but she keeps looking at her tablet and doesn’t look at him. When he doesn’t stop talking about prison, she snaps and tells him to get over it. This hurts his feelings because he feels she isn’t really listening to him or providing any support for him when he needs it.

Tom feels lonely and he calls Greg in the middle of the night to grab breakfast at a local diner because that is what Tom thinks he is going to eat in prison. Greg tells Tom he is really worried about prison, and Tom unloads his own worries onto Greg about everything he has been reading about the horrors of prison. He tells him that the diner food they are eating won’t taste as good once they get into prison. I remember earlier in the first season, Tom invites Greg out to dinner to celebrate Greg getting his first paycheck. Greg suggests they go to California Pizza Kitchen, and Tom snorts and starts laughing, telling Greg that California Pizza Kitchen isn’t that great, and that he (Tom) is going to teach Greg how to eat rich people’s food. Tom thinks that CPK is inferior, middle-class fare, and that they should eat like rich people because Greg is now around rich people, so he needs to act and behave like a rich person. He has Greg eat songbirds and drink fancy wine, but now he is eating food at a diner, which early on he would have turned his nose up at. Honestly, I am sad I can no longer eat at diners like IHOP; they had really delicious pancakes, and I used to always get the Funny Face Pancake as a kid. However, I really love Spiral Diner. They have really good vegan breakfast items. Okay, that was totally a tangent, so back to the review of the episode. Honestly, I have never seen Tom so scared and intimidated before. It’s like he went from being this seemingly overconfident guy who acted like he was better than Greg, and now he is quiet during meetings with Logan and also is fearful of Logan’s authority. It’s like he has become a different person since testifying in Congress about the allegations at Cruises.

At the fancy gathering, Connor and Willa show up, and Willa is busy typing her play on her phone. She wanted to stay home to write her play (Willa is a playwright) but Connor wouldn’t let her, so she has to type it on a tiny screen while a bunch of conservative men talk around her. I feel bad for Willa; it looks like she really didn’t want to be there. Honestly, I thought that she and Greg were going to get together because Greg had a crush on Willa when they met at Logan’s house during Thanksgiving. Greg, though, is too busy trying to sue Greenpeace and not go to jail to worry about that. There is a scene in the episode where an older gentleman is making lewd comments about Willa in Connor’s presence, and when the guy leaves, Willa tells Connor she didn’t want that man coming up to her again. Willa felt disrespected, and I think Connor also doesn’t respect her work as a playwright. He is only focused on his presidential campaign. Honestly, I was so happy to find that the actress who plays Willa was the same actress who played Astrid in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (the actress is named Justine Lupe.) Her character is so different from Astrid’s. Astrid was very eager and excited to participate in Jewish traditions as someone who converted to Judaism, and she was very happy in her marriage to Noah. Willa, however, isn’t happy in her marriage to Connor and feels like she always has to tag along to his social events where she has to be around people who don’t care about the arts.

At the gathering, Roman finds out that his mom, Caroline Collingwood (Logan’s ex-wife) is getting married to a man named Peter Munion. He lets the other Roy children know, and then he later tells Logan, who can’t believe that his ex-wife would marry a man like Rupert Munion. In the break room that evening, they talk about who they think the next president of the United States should be. Some agree it should be Jeryd Mencken, but Shiv strongly disagrees because she doesn’t agree with Jeryd’s extremist policies. Earlier, Jeryd insulted ATN and said that it was only still around to maximize shareholder value, and that Logan Roy was no longer relevant anymore. Logan lets Greg join them, but he tells Greg to keep his mouth shut. When Greg speaks up and asks if he can contribute to the conversation, Roman tells him to shut up and that he can vote in the election like everyone else (he means the American middle and working class people.) Honestly, I think the real MVPs of this show are the people who work behind the scenes to set up all of these lavish gatherings. I really appreciate that the show shows them setting up the tables, catering the food and doing other important unseen things. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it at first, but after doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work myself, I appreciate that they showed these people setting everything up. It was soul-crushing in one episode where they had a nice gathering at Logan’s house, and they had to throw all of the catered food out because Logan’s team found a bunch of dead raccoons in the chimney that was stinking up the house. Logan screamed at all of the caterers to throw out everything and that they would order pizza since the bad smell from the raccoon carcasses tainted the food.

Roman has a talk with Mencken, and he starts to dig Mencken’s policies, prompting him to take his side. Connor thinks that he should be the next president, especially because he has been campaigning for a while now, but Greg politely tells everyone that he doesn’t think Connor should be president and then he has to leave the room. Tom gets a call from Kendall and Kendall brings him up to the diner, and Kendall tells Tom he can find a way for Tom to not have to go to prison for the Cruises allegations, if Tom joins him in taking down Logan. Tom, however, says that he is just a “public servant” and can’t do that. Kendall feels that Tom betrayed him, and Tom leaves, telling him that in the room they are deciding who the next president will be. Tom goes back to the hotel, only to find a bunch of people in the ballroom hoisting Greg on their shoulders, celebrating him for something he did. He confronts Greg at breakfast because he is jealous and upset that Greg is happy and he is not, but Greg shrugs it off. Logan has Shiv join him, Mencken, Tom and Roman in a group photo, but she refuses to be in the photo because she doesn’t like Mencken. Logan tells her to come in the photo and she stands, arms crossed, refusing to get in the photo. Logan then goes up to her and asks her if she is really a part of the family, and so she finally acquiesces and gets in the photo, but only if she doesn’t have to stand next to Mencken.

TV Show Review: Succession (continued)

I haven’t finished watching the show Succession yet, but it is really good so far. I am currently on the second season. I was watching the Golden Globes and saw it had received a lot of awards and nominations, and so I became curious about the show. I was seeing it advertised on commercials for HBO, and so I finally decided to watch it a couple of weeks ago. And to be honest, I am hooked. The acting is so good. I also enjoy satire, so I really love this show. I was kind of nervous to begin watching it because I have a lot of anxiety around vomit scenes in movies and TV, and so I read some trigger warnings for the show and saw there was a vomit scene at the beginning of the first episode. However, because I had read about it beforehand, I knew when it was coming so I was able to close my eyes. And I am glad that my impending fear of this scene didn’t prevent me from watching the full show, because I would have missed out. I also really love the music in the show. I have heard Nicholas Britell’s music in movies, namely Moonlight and Vice, and especially the score for Moonlight was absolutely brilliant. I love the opening theme music for the show. It has these strings and the piano and I also love the percussive beats. It gives the show its theme, which is power, and a very Wall-Street New York City sort of mood (the show does take place in New York City).

I really love the acting in this show. I haven’t seen many of Brian Cox’s previous works, but he really acted the heck out of his role as Logan Roy. Even though the show is a drama, it incorporates elements of humor. And the dialogue is really witty. Greg Hirsch and Tom Wambsgans have an interesting dynamic. Tom is from the Midwest, but he marries into the Roy family and becomes wealthy. Greg, however, is always asking his mom for money and doesn’t have his own place to live. He also has a job being a mascot at a Waystar theme park (Waystar is the media conglomerate that the Roy family owns) but he does marijuana before his gig and then vomits, getting him fired from the park (if anyone is squeamish about vomit scenes, it is around the part where Greg is walking through the theme park in his mascot costume. I closed my eyes around that part.) His mom has him reach out to Logan, who is his great-uncle, and so he visits the Roy family. He is an outsider at first because even though his mom belongs to the Roy family, he sticks out like a sore thumb because he comes to the father’s birthday celebration wearing a baggy jacket and worn shoes and he has a very friendly personality. Tom gangs up on him and makes fun of him for being the new kid to join the party, and he continues to bully Greg. There was one scene in particular where he approaches Greg in the break room in the office building, and finds Greg stuffing cookies in a dog poop bag, and he insults him for wearing the wrong shoes and using a dog poop bag to put his snacks in. Greg is intimidated by Tom but in season 2 I really saw how Tom bottled up so many of his insecurities and that he was also dealing with a lot of his own personal stuff and needed someone to take it out on. There is a scene where Tom is having dinner with Shiv, Roman and Tabitha, and Tom talks about his work in the ATN news department and how he is digitizing its algorithm, and they all are happy for him, but Roman then pokes fun at Tom’s humble roots as a Midwesterner who grew up in the corn fields and how funny his suits look. Shiv also joins in on the fun, but Tom tells her to fuck off because he is really hurt that everyone is making fun of him. Tom wanted to show that he had moved up from being an average person and wanted to show people that he was an upper class person with status.

There is another scene that always sticks out for me, and it’s when Greg and Tom are talking in the office, and Greg says that he got his first paycheck and Tom congratulates him and says they should go out to eat. Greg is super happy, and he suggests that they go to California Pizza Kitchen. Tom snorts and giggles and tells him that California Pizza Kitchen isn’t great food, and Greg tries to reason that they make his favorite dish, cajun chicken linguine, and Tom makes fun of Greg for having what he calls an “undereducated palate,” and he tells Greg that he will take him out and teach him how to be rich. To be honest, my first reaction to Tom dissing California Pizza Kitchen was “WTF?!?” And as I was drafting this blog post and scribbling my thoughts on the first season, I wrote a long paragraph about how I would have loved to go with Greg to eat at California Pizza Kitchen. To be honest, I am lactose intolerant and vegan, so the last time I went to California Pizza Kitchen in 2019 I got a pizza that didn’t have cheese (it was pretty good, not going to lie, and the crust was slammin’. Also, I actually was in California eating at California Pizza Kitchen so it was pretty special and made me feel like a little kid again, which I loved. It was a dream come true.) As an ovo-lacto pescetarian kid, California Pizza Kitchen was my jam, and we went a lot when I was younger. The split pea soup was my favorite, as was the cheese pizza and the ice cream sundae for dessert (oh, and don’t forget the Shirley Temple!) So when Greg suggested California Pizza Kitchen, I was pretty pumped, and I kind of deflated when Tom dissed California Pizza Kitchen. Tom ends up taking Greg out to this fancy restaurant where they eat roast songbirds. Greg is really hesitant to eat the songbirds, but Tom has him put his napkin over his face as they eat. Early on, Greg’s grandpa, Ewan, takes Greg to get noodle soup at a restaurant downtown, and Ewan loads his son up on soup, so by the time Greg gets to the fancy restaurant with Tom, he is full and he tells Tom that his grandpa took him out to dinner already. There is another scene where Tom calls Greg and tells him he has an assignment for him to do over the Thanksgiving break, but Greg is driving in the car with Ewan. Greg tells Tom he is driving with his grandpa so he can’t come into the office to complete the assignment for Tom (Ewan lives in Canada, so Greg has to drive from Canada to New York for the Roy family Thanksgiving) and Tom insults Ewan over speakerphone. Ewan gives Greg a side-eye like “What did he just say to me?!?” and Greg is fumbling over his words, and Tom is telling him to hurry up. Ewan is not as enthused as Greg is to see the Roy family, and there is one scene that evening where Logan is showing off these veteran medals he collects, and Ewan points out that unlike him, Roy never served in the war. Ewan calls out the Roy family for being dishonest and corrupt people. Honestly, I gave the same side-eye that Ewan gave to Greg when Tom said, “Fuck your grandpa, Greg!” Like “Sir, you do not cuss out James Cromwell!” (James Cromwell is the actor who plays Ewan. I knew of him from the movie Babe: Pig in the City. Also, I just found out it’s James Cromwell’s birthday today.)

Greg is really inexperienced, and he wants to be part of the higher ups, but he hasn’t gotten there yet, and he still has to earn Logan Roy’s respect to get to the top. The Roy kids also pick on Greg and ignore him. When they are eating at the restaurant, Ewan warns Greg that he needs to steer clear of this family because they are a bunch of vipers who will eat him alive. However, Greg continues to get involved with the Roy family and curry favor with Logan so he can get out of working in the amusement parks division at Waystar Royco. But when he goes to Hungary with the family for one of Logan’s business deals, he almost gets in trouble because early in the episode he spoke with this biographer named Michelle Pantsil, who was planning to write a biography about the Roy family. Greg is nervous and tells her that he doesn’t want to disclose any information, but Michelle tells him he should have told her when he signed an agreement to meet with her that he wanted to remain an anonymous source. On the plane to Hungary, Logan is scouting out the person who spoke to Pantsil, and Tom is even scared of Logan at this point. During dinner, where everyone is eating the roast boars they hunted and killed, Logan forces everyone to play a cruel game called Boar on the Floor, where he has Greg, Tom and Karl fight each other for sausages and calls them “piggies.” He does this so that someone in the room will confess that they spoke to the biographer. I feel really bad, to be honest, that I initially thought the scene was funny, because when I read an article about the actors’ experiences with this scene, it was humiliating and stressful for all the actors to go through this Boar on the Floor scene. There have been times when I have laughed at someone for going through some problem, and then I go through my own experiences of humiliation and shame and realize, Wow, feeling these things isn’t fun for anyone. I really love reading Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown because she unpacks a lot of these emotional experiences that humans can feel at any time, and it really has expanded my view on emotions beyond just sad, happy, mad, and glad. There is a part in the book where she talks about experiences we have when we fall short, and one of these experiences is the feeling of humiliation, which is defined as “the intensely painful feeling that we’ve been unjustly degraded, ridiculed, or put down and that our identity has been demeaned or devalued.” (Atlas of the Heart, page 147) Reading this entry on humiliation helped me understand why the Boar on the Floor game was so terrible for everyone, and why many viewers found the scene unsettling. The day after Logan forces them to play that game, Tom goes to breakfast and says good morning to some of the people at breakfast, as if he is hoping to leave that experience in the past, but people chuckle when he comes in and the room is really silent because everyone is thinking about how horrible that game was. One of the people there that night, Syd, says good morning to Tom and offers him some breakfast sausage but he quietly declines. Greg is sitting by himself, processing the humiliation he felt after having an old man throw sausages at him and call him a “piggie,” but Tom joins him for breakfast because he, too, is feeling humiliated after what he had to go through. Greg thanks him for not telling Logan about him meeting with Pantsil, and Tom quietly rubs his arm in a quiet gesture of sweetness. Of course, he doesn’t suddenly become nice to Greg after that and he continues to be mean to him, but it was that one scene that showed me that both of them went through that painful experience of humiliation, so now that Tom knew how it felt to be made fun of, he could understand how Greg felt.

TV Show Review: Succession season 1 (some thoughts, part 1)

Written a couple of weeks ago when I first started watching the show. I don’t remember when that was but it was probably the week of January 15th.

So I decided to watch the show Succession after hearing a lot of buzz about it. I wasn’t super hip to the show when it first came out, but I saw it advertised all the time. When I watched the Golden Globe Awards this past Sunday I saw it kept getting all these nominations and awards, and I was like, Wow, this show must be really, really good. And as stressful as these first few episodes have been, it is quite good.

To be honest, I was really nervous to watch the show at first because I was reading the parent’s guide on IMDB and they mentioned that there is a scene where a character vomits. I have emetophobia, so I am pretty sensitive to vomiting scenes in movies. But I read on some other sites that have trigger warnings, such as Does the Dog Die and a tumblr dedicated to emetophobia warnings in movies and TV shows, about the scene, and after a while, even though my heart was racing and I was getting pretty nervous about watching the scene, I thought, It is literally just one scene. I don’t want that to make me not watch the show. And thankfully, I knew that the minute Greg goes to the theme park I could close my eyes and not have to watch the scene, which didn’t last super long.

The first episode, titled “Celebration” opens up with an elderly man waking up and walking through the house. He urinates and has to get the assistance of the lady who is helping him. The show opens with an incredible theme song by Nicholas Britell. It conveyed a lot of the power and prestige that runs throughout the show, and I love how he uses the strings and piano. I really love Nicholas Britell’s music. I remember he composed the music for the movies Moonlight and Vice, both movies I really enjoyed watching. Seeing the footage of the Roy family was also really intriguing, just seeing them grow up in this wealthy lifestyle. I was also excited to see that actor Will Ferrell was one of the producers on the show.

There were a few scenes from the Celebration episode that stuck with me. One is when Greg meets the Roy family for the first time when he goes to Logan’s birthday celebration, and everyone pretty much ignores him. He is the only one not wearing a fancy suit; he is wearing baggy clothes and he stands out. Greg has a really unlucky gig at an amusement park when a bunch of kids jump all over him and he vomits. When he gets fired he has to contact his great-uncle Roy (Greg’s mom is connected to the Roy family) for a job, and when he arrives it’s like the family treats him with a cold distance. There is also another scene where Conner, who is the firstborn of Logan Roy, gets Logan a sourdough starter but Logan calls it “gunk” and dismisses it, which frustrates Conner because he just wanted to get his dad something to make him happy. There is another scene where someone gives Logan a really nice watch as a gift but then when they are playing ball in the park as a family, Logan gives the watch to a family that is nearby. I also saw how Roman’s character was, because Roman promises this kid in the park that he will give him one million dollars if he hits a home run, and when the kid doesn’t win the game, Roman acts cruel and tears up the one million dollar check he was going to make out to him, prompting his sister, Shiv, to knock it off. Throughout the show, Roman comes off as overconfident and thinks that when he becomes the Chief Operating Officer of Waystar Royco he is going to get this prestige but he is unaware that it is going to be much more than a job to him. He also does something wild. He goes into one of the offices, unzips his pants and starts jerking off against the window. He cleans up his mess, but it kind of showed me how this power and influence can go to people’s heads.