My preferred form of cardiovascular exercise is playing pick-up basketball in a regular faculty/staff/student game on campus, followed by riding my bike moderately long distances. Anyone who follows me on Instagram has seen a bunch of screenshots of maps from Strava showing various routes around the Schenectady area that I ride for exercise.
Unfortunately, a couple of spokes broke on the rear wheel of my bike, so the wheel now rubs against the frame (I’m getting it fixed next week), and the hoops game was displaced this week by a temporary Covid testing center for athletes returning to campus. Which means my exercise for the last few weeks has been pedaling fake miles on the stationary bike we have in the basement:
The one advantage this offers is that we have a good-sized tv down there, and reasonably solid wi-fi, so I can stream videos to keep it from being too deadly boring. What exactly to watch during this is a bit of a problem, though, because of choice paralysis. There’s so much stuff on the various streamers that it’s hard to pick something, and I end up doing a lot of aimless scrolling through menus.
We only recently added HBO Max to our options, though, so I’ve taken the opportunity to sample some of their “prestige television” programs that I had otherwise missed. There are huge swathes of pop-culture discourse that have mostly gone by me because we haven’t had HBO, and I’d like to have more of a sense of what’s going on. The end result of this experiment has left me feeling that maybe I was just as happy being passed by.
In one case, I actually tried to get ahead of the discourse, and watched the first episode of The White Lotus the week it premiered. I lasted about an episode and a half with this, and the half only because I read a review of the first that said it was filmed at the Four Seasons in Maui, where a friend got married a couple of years ago, and I wanted to see if I could recognize it. (The answer is yes; the pool scenes are in a part that we didn’t spend time in, but the beach and the restaurant and the lobby were, in fact, familiar.)
The show is very well made, but it’s kind of overstuffed, and all the people in it just suck. I had hopes for it after the opening with the staff, which had a bit of a low-key Fawlty Towers kind of vibe, but the actual guests are all so unpleasant and weighed down with melodrama that I just don’t want to spend time with them. I’m sort of curious to know who ends up dying, but I figure I can get that from episode summaries online more quickly and pleasantly than watching the actual show.
(This is actually longer than I lasted with another HBO show about awful rich people, Succession, where I only managed half an episode (I had to stop biking to nowhere because I had somewhere else to be, but I won’t be finishing it). To be fair, I was pretty sure I’d dislike that, but the characters get name-dropped so frequently on some of the podcasts I listen to that I wanted to watch a little just to put faces to the names. I got enough of the idea, I don’t need more.)
The most recent show I’ve attempted is Mare of Easttown, seen in the screen shot above, which got a tone of buzz during its run back in late spring. This is Kate Winslet playing a small-town cop (and doing a great job). I made it through three episodes of this one, and it’s very well-made, but yesterday when I was thinking about heading down to the bike, I just wasn’t feeling it. I ended up doing yard work instead.
In this case, the problem wasn’t really that the people involved weren’t relatable— on the contrary, the characters are all very well drawn, and the cast is doing great work. It’s just so damn much—there’s the new murder, and the cold case, and the strained family relationships, and the awful high school kids, and the paternity question, and the dead son, and the grandson’s medical issues, and the custody fight, and the police misconduct, and oh yeah, a creepy priest and a couple of romance plots. And that’s less than halfway through the run of the show. All of which are cranked up to 11, at all times.
I find it way more exhausting to keep track of all this stuff than to pedal the bike while I’m watching. Unlike the other two, I like most of the people involved (which makes it painful when they do incredibly stupid things), but they could stand to trim a couple of movie-of-the-week subplots out of this. It’s like they’re trying to cram every single social issue of our time into the plot, and it gets to be a bit too much, at least for me.
So, the end result of this experimental sampling of prestige tv has mostly been to make me feel even more old and out of touch than not watching at all did. I suspect I might be better off watching two-hour movies in workout-sized chunks— that worked well with Summer of Soul, and God knows, there are a lot of documentaries out there these days…
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