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neighbourskid · 3 years

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2020

What a year, huh? Surely not anything anyone has expected to happen when we woke up on this day a year ago. I certainly haven’t. I’m not even sure, now, where to begin to sum up this year like I’ve done years prior. But then again... I may just as well just dive right into all the media I consumed this year, as I have done every year. I haven’t kept track as detailed as I have last year, but my year was definitely punctuated by pieces of entertainment that have come into my life.

Continuing on from 2019, my obsession with Good Omens was still going strong. Which was ideal, since I was gonna spend the first half of the year writing my Bachelor thesis on it. The intensity of the obsession may have waned a bit since, but I still love that show and book dearly and hold it close to my heart, and I don’t think that will ever stop. But while Good Omens was certainly an overall theme throughout my year, there were some other things that actually stood out.

With January came new episodes of Doctor Who, and having returned to that particular bandwagon the year prior, I was all about that. Jodie’s second season finally brought what I had longed for in her first--a darker kind of Doctor. She wasn’t quite as bubbly anymore, you could finally see some of the depths in the character that I loved so in the previous regenerations, which made me love Peter’s Doctor so incredibly much. In this season, I felt, Jodie was finally becoming the Doctor. Overall, that season catered to me personally every single episode. So many of the time periods they visited were of people I loved, and the introduction of Sacha Dhawan as the Master was absolutely....well, masterful. Sacha is brilliant in that role and I am utterly stunned by his talent. Although both John Simm and Michelle Gomez brought things to the Master that I liked, it’s Sacha’s completely unhinged take on it that made me finally like the character. He’s a madman and I love it.

The next major thing was The Good Place. I tend to have a talent of getting into shows just as they either ended their entire show, or the final season is just coming up. It’s happened quite a bit, and it was the same with this. I finally binged the show early in January and it would end its final season at the end of the month. True to form, I was completely obsessed with it for about a month, before I only occasionally thought about it again. But, thinking back now, I get this incredibly fond feeling for this show, and I remember that the finale absolutely wrecked me and I basically ugly sobbed through the entirety of it. Also very true to form, actually. I want to rewatch it again some time, but honestly preferably with someone who has never seen it before. Which, obviously, is a difficult thing to do given, well, everything.

Next up is something that surprised me a lot. In the middle of having to write my BA thesis, my procrastination thought it would be a great idea to rewatch and catch up on the entirety of Criminal Minds. And so I binged 15 seasons of that instead of writing my thesis. Which, coincidentally, had also just aired its final season not long before I started my binge in March. Rewatching this, I realised just how little I took in of the actual, like, stuff in the show when I first watched it as a teen. Although I mostly cared about the characters and their found family this time around--although I do find the cases really fascinating most of the time too--I noticed just how much I am not watching this for the fact that they are in the FBI. I was hyperaware of how often they shot at people before doing anything else, how many of the suspects died before ever being questioned or being brought in, and it made my skin crawl. I am aware how fucked up the criminal justice system is, and especially in the US, how the police functions and how incredibly glorified they are in the media. But rewatching this show, I realised how little I actually paid attention to anything when I was younger. Big yikes. Still, I remembered my love for these characters, and I really enjoyed that rewatch a whole lot. Found family will always get to me.

Once I finished writing my thesis and handed it in early in July, I then found my next momentary obsession: Community. The show had finally come to Netflix earlier in the year and a friend of mine had watched it then. I remember watching that pilot episode back then and being completely uninterested in watching it. The comedy felt like it wasn’t quite up my street, the characters were entirely unlikeable, and I especially disliked Jeff who the show was more or less centred around. I binged Criminal Minds instead, but then decided to give it another try. And, well, I watched it twice through without taking a break to watch something else in-between. Ironically, and maybe actually unsurprisingly, Jeff ended up being my favourite and I found myself relating a lot to him and his arc throughout the series. I even found myself writing some short ficlet-like things in the notes app on my phone. I made an attempt at starting a third watch, but I guess then the month was up, and my brain decided it was time for something else. My hyperfixations usually tend to die out after about a month. Which is why my complete devotion to Good Omens was a pleasant surprise. I did, however, end up watching quite a bit of Joel McHale and Ken Jeong’s The Darkest Timeline podcast throughout August.

Early in September, while already preparing for the new term at uni, and my first semester in my Master’s studies, I then turned to New Girl. Friends of mine had seen it and recommended it, and I remember watching probably the entire first season on TV while I was in San Diego the first time around back in 2016. Or at least I think it was the entire first season. Either way, I binged that whole thing, realised through Nick Miller that the go-to character I am drawn to and tend to project on in any piece of media is usually what I like to call “the garbage man,” which Nick is a prime example of. And although I spent a month watching the show in-between starting university again and volunteering at a film festival, I didn’t spend much time afterward thinking about it and moved on to other things rather quickly. I enjoyed watching it, that much I remember, and I’m pretty sure I cried at the finale because it was done wonderfully, but seeing as another month was up, my brain was probably like “okay fine that’s enough”.

I then spent most of fall and early winter watching every single bad Christmas movie available on Netflix, which was quite fun. In that moment of festivity, I also watched a movie I found absolutely brilliant and fell in love with immediately. It’s a beautiful movie called Jingle Jangle, it has a magnificent soundtrack and is absolutely incredible. I had no idea Forest Whitaker could sing and he completely blew me away. If you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend it. It doesn’t matter that Christmas is already over, it’s beautiful either way.

By the time December finally rolled around, I was already over the whole Christmas thing, to be honest and I turned away from festive movies or shows, and eventually ended up finally picking up a gem I had heard much about and had been meaning to watch for a while. A show which, as it were, also aired its final season earlier this year. This little show is Schitt’s Creek. I will be going on about what this show means to me probably in another post at length, but for now just let me say: if you haven’t seen it, find some place to watch it, and put this beautiful show in your eyeballs. I am on my second run through already (although I’ve seen the second half of the show a second time already while watching it with a friend on their first run through), and it brings me so much fucking joy. It’s a gift, this show. And it will likely stay with me for a very, very long time.

That’s about it for the big things. I also watched a whole lot of other stuff, including entirely new things, or just newly released seasons of things I was already watching. Here’s what I can remember off the top of my head:

Charlie’s Angels (2020). The Night Manager. The Witcher. Dolittle (2020). The Librarians (rewatch). Harley Quinn (2020). Sonic the Hedgehog (2020). The Chef Show (S1 part 3, S2 part 1). Avenue 5. Money Heist (part 4). The Good Fight (S4). Brooklyn Nine-Nine (S7). DuckTales (2017 reboot). Frankenstein live. Staged (2020). Hamilton. Sense8. Julie and the Phantoms. The Boys in the Band. One Night in Miami. Enola Holmes. Supernova. His Dark Materials (S2). Happiest Season. The Great Canadian Baking Show.

I also got some reading done in-between what I had to read for my thesis in spring, and then for regular university courses in fall. Here’s some of what I can remember:

Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk. Ramona Meisel, Sunblind. Donna Tartt, The Secret History. Good Omens novel and script book. Matt Forbeck, Leverage: The Con Job. Keith R.A. Decandido, Leverage: The Zoo Job. Greg Cox, Leverage: The Bestseller Job. Greg Cox, The Librarians and the Lost Lamp. Greg Cox, The Librarians and the Mother Goose Chase. Greg Cox, The Librarians and the Pot of Gold. Neil Gaiman, Marvel 1602. Christina Henry, The Lost Boy. Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology. John Green, An Abundance of Katherines. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh. Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game.

Having mulled over all this entertainment I consumed in 2020, there are also some non-tv or book things I need to point out. As many, many��other people around the globe, I have also spent a large amount of time this year on my Nintendo Switch, playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It is a game I have waited for since the Switch was first announced, and I fell in love with it from the moment the first trailer dropped. It has brought me great joy in this weird fucking year, and I have more or less consistently played it since it came out in March. I ended this year with the in-game New Year’s Eve celebration and I feel like that summed up this year quite neatly and appropriately.

This year also brought with it another game very close to my heart: Super Mario Sunshine. With their release of Super Mario 3D All-Stars in September, Nintendo finally brought my all-time favourite Mario game to my all-time favourite console, and I played the entire game through in the first week of owning it, in-between university courses and volunteering at the film festival. Also contained in that package was Super Mario Galaxy which I have also played through in its entirety since. All that’s left for me now is Super Mario 64, which I am excited to play through in the coming year.

And to round off my year of entertainment, there are two more things I would like to mention. First, David Tennant Does A Podcast With..., which released its second season this summer. It is one of the only, if not the only podcast I keep up to date with and listen to immediately whenever a new episode drops. I’ve loved the first season dearly, and David came back with some incredibly fantastic guests for the second season as well. I can’t wait for what the podcast will bring in the future, but I will wait patiently until it is time. I can highly recommend it for everyone who likes interesting conversations between lovely people who clearly adore each other a whole lot.

And finally, while this year brought a whole lot of bullshit with it, it also gave me something I never thought possible and did not even dare to imagine in my wildest dreams. My all-time favourite show announced that it would be rebooted with the same main cast (minus one), a new wonderful member, and involvement of the original creators, and even started filming already in summer. Leverage is coming back. I still cannot believe it. I hoped for a movie, always. That maybe one day, they might bring the gang back together, for one last job, just one more encore. But to get a whole new tv-show with Aldis, Christian, Gina and Beth returning? With the addition of Noah Wyle? I can’t wrap my head around it. I am so excited for this. I predict that I will ugly sob through the entirety of the pilot episode, if not the first season, and will have to rewatch every episode because of it, but I have no doubt that it will be brilliant and wonderful.

True to form, I have now gone on about tv shows and movies for far too long, and haven’t really said anything about this year at all. 2020 was fucking weird. And I don’t think 2021 will be much different quite yet. I wrote an entire BA thesis in 2020. I successfully finished by Bachelor’s degree and started my Master’s studies and even got some excellent first grades in as well. I was lucky enough to be able to see some friends and family throughout the year, and even celebrate my birthday with a small circle of friends. I’ve become closer with friends, shared experiences I wouldn’t trade for the world, and, I think, maybe also grown a bit as a person.

I started this year excited to finally be able to start taking testosterone in February, and to finish the first part of my studies by summer. Although I did both of these things, they didn’t happen quite how I imagined them, but I am glad that I could do these things nevertheless.

2020 was a hell year, for sure. But there were some moments in there that I wouldn’t want to lose.

I’ve tried very hard to not be optimistic about this upcoming year, and rather take a more realistic, even pessimistic approach. But I can’t help but be hopeful. Hopeful that this year will be kind to us, and if it isn’t, that at least, we’ll be kind to ourselves and each other. It won’t be easy, and not much will change, I think. But we have to approach the coming time with kindness and compassion. That’s where I’m at currently. And I think that’s all for now.

Be well, friends, and take care.

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