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arecomicsevengood · 4 years

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I’ve been trying to slow down the pace of my anxious brain, to move it away from the obsessive unsatisfying masturbatory procrastinating of clicking refresh. I want the presence of mind that comes from focused reading, I want to heal the destroyed reward mechanism of my brain. Absent the structure to days that comes with leaving the house, quarantine conditions have exacerbated these problems. I sought out older newspaper strips, because they have a leisurely pace. While no one would actually read a book-length collection a day at a time, in recreation of how they were originally read, the guiding principle that they be taken in as a diversion while doing other things is worth keeping in mind, as it runs opposite to current directives to binge-watch TV shows. Theoretically, having these narratives exist in parallel to the procession of days would be a nice respite from quarantine’s time-warp effect. However, when reading older newspaper strips, especially if you’re paying attention to the news at all, one is frequently jarred by the presence of racial caricatures.

I really try to avoid being someone offended by work that comes from a completely different cultural context. I’m a white dude, and while I don’t want to be quick to forgive anyone’s racism, I also don’t want to be one of those people that rush to condemn things as a way to posit myself as some sort of enlightened authority. Trying to “cancel” someone who’s long dead really only makes you into someone dismissive of history, which only works to one’s detriment.

Still, when the protests against police violence turned to easily-communicated gestures of symbolic speech, and iconoclastic energy was directed against statues of historical colonialists rather than the more immediate threats presented by police cruisers, conservatives defended such statues arguing their historical importance. This argument is extremely disingenuous. We can choose the historical narrative we want to present to ourselves. While the majority of opinions enshrined in law throughout the course of American political history were those slave-owners and genocide-justifiers, there’s nonetheless a vast cultural history it would serve as well to look to and posit as who we are. Every decision made was the result of argument, the losers of the arguments unaccountably brave. Ever since reading Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, I’ve been convinced that if any woman should be preserved on our money, it’s Jeanette Rankin, if only so her story would then be taught in schools. The work of a historian is to make an argument by collecting threads of a narrative out of the collective chaos of ongoing time before it’s all lost to entropy and rot.

Much credit is due to comics historian Bill Blackbeard, who edited the Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics, for what it is now clear is the considerable effort he must’ve made to avoid including too many depictions of racial stereotypes in his survey. He did so because he was arguing for comic strips being an art form, and avoiding the laziness of racial caricature helps that argument be made. He doesn’t bypass them completely: They’re in a Herriman strip, Baron Bean, albeit only for a few panels. They’re also on prominent display in the McKay Little Nemo strips. Maybe they’re somewhere else I didn’t look at too closely, it’s a large book.

But imagine my surprise and mortification when I bought a big collection of Polly And Her Pals Sunday strips and encountered these “mammy” caricatures in the depiction of servants. And then, when I bought a collection of Walt And Skeezix dailies, there it was again. These strips are well-regarded, considered the best of their day, and the comic strip as a whole was regarded as intellectually superior to the comic books that followed. When Gary Groth wrote his introduction to the first issue of Love And Rockets, these strips were the works he cited as the historical apex of the form.

(Apologies may be in order for my not wanting to actually include the relevant imagery of racial caricature here, and this post being all text. I would definitely need to apologize if I did include them though.)

The thing about the racial caricatures is they demonstrate the limitations of their artist’s ambition. The most charitable reading I can afford to give is that the caricatures exist within a larger context where all of the characterizations are burlesques, intended strictly for laughs, and somewhat thin. Gasoline Alley, currently being reprinted as Walt And Skeezix, is meant to evoke some sense of feeling, and while there are some melodramatic plotlines, the bulk of the work it does to accomplish that end is by being low-key and gentle. If you view the strip not as a light comedy historical piece, and admit you are meant to project your feelings onto the white main characters, you kind of have to concede that maybe Frank King didn’t really see black people as human. You know black people read these strips! It ran in a Chicago newspaper. If you lived in Chicago at this time, you would see black people living their lives, which would surely include the buying and reading of newspapers. It seems really weird to then depict black people as dumb and superstitious, even if the depiction of them as working as servants was primarily how the cartoonist would have encountered them in the middle-class milieu he lived in and depicted.

Herriman is a fascinating complicating factor. Because he’s black, and he’s arguably one of the best strip cartoonists of this era, and was respected by his peers. But he was also white-passing, in all likelihood because he knew his racial background would create problems, including with his peers. I think there’s a strong case to be made for the case Ishmael Reed basically implicitly makes with his Mumbo Jumbo dedication: That Herriman is one of the great artists of the twentieth century, and his art is informed by his blackness in the same way that blackness informs the great American art form of jazz. That his identity was denied to his peers doesn’t make his own art any less great, it simply complicates the ways that art works. But if you think of Cliff Sterrett being one of the guys who called Herriman “the Greek” and then drew this comic strip that features these horrible stereotypes, it just hurts your soul.

Sterrett is even I think someone whose work gets called “jazzy,” because there’s a certain modernist verve to it, a visual inventiveness. While the limit to King’s work is in how well-written you can really view it as being when you’re considering the racism, the limit to Sterrett’s is in how well-drawn and actually wild it is, considering that every strip has the same gridded layout, when contrasted against the more inventive architectures of a Feininger page, or Charles Forbell’s Naughty Pete, or a Garrett Price White Boy strip. (I haven’t actually read the White Boy collection. The people who have read it and like it cite how it’s beautifully drawn, and how not-racist it is in the depiction of Native Americans, as being the things that credit it.)

Here’s something: I’m not even reading the strips drawn by conservatives! I’m not reading Chester Gould, or Harold Gray, or Al Capp. Each of these cartoonist is their own weird thing, with effectively different forms of conservatism, who I don’t wish to dismiss. I can get down with some Dick Tracy strips, whatever. To a certain extent, being an adult in dealing with history means seeing the virtues in people you probably disagree with in many ways. But it’s seeing the weird unconscious attitudes of people you would like to genuinely admire that makes you want to throw the whole project in the trash and start anew, because it displays evidence of such a deep taint.

Racism is basically America’s original sin. Comic strips are, along with jazz, the great American art form. It basically follows that you can’t talk about comics in any sort of accurate historic light without talking about racism. (There’s also racial caricature in Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo strips, obviously.) Reading the supplemental essays in these books of reprints, or critical reviews of them, you realize the desire to distance oneself from talking about the racism in the work is similar to how the conservative view of “American exceptionalism” goes hand-in-hand with a refusal to acknowledge the racist premises at the heart of its founding: People arguing for the exceptional quality of these strips are not addressing the elephant in the room, or only address it in the most cursory and hand-waving way imaginable. They are trying to paint a portrait without blemishes, without flaws, and in so doing depict a platonic ideal that does not actually exist.

These strips are not the work of Robert Crumb, where the racist imagery being employed has ostensibly an satirical end. It’s not Huckleberry Finn either, where the use of racial slurs is commonplace to set up a default mindset that then becomes undercut as a common humanity is realized. I’m actually unclear on if you could print such racial slurs in the newspaper at this time, or if it would be avoided as strenuously as any other profanity that couldn’t run in a “family newspaper.” What you see in these strips is the soft racism of paternalistic attitudes in the twentieth century American North laid bare for what it is. The volume I have of Walt And Skeezix collects the strips from 1923 and 1294, the Polly And Her Pals collection collects work from 1928 to 1930. This was an an era where black people could be reliably counted on as Republican voters, in the era before the realignment in politics that came with the Great Depression and the New Deal.

The current ahistorical posturing of Trump’s Republican party has them occasionally downplaying their overt anti-black racism to claim the “party of Lincoln” banner. So these strips are relevant, essentially, for depicting the sort of status quo the Republican party seek a return to, prior to FDR-instituted social programs, where black people exist primarily as servants and their concerns or agency, beyond how they exist in service to liberal white people, who address them from a place of charity, while conservatives would theoretically exist in all-white enclaves, are dismissed. The racism in the world depicted in these strips is inarguable, but the hope exists, in the eyes of conservatives, that liberals will see the way it flatters them, and wave it away as basically acceptable.

The alternative, as ever, would be in Herriman’s Krazy Kat, “the future liberals want,” where race and gender are forever up for debate in an shifting desert landscape. The issue there, of course, is the basically true argument that the strip doesn’t make any sense, and the more-up-for-debate point that the unique language of the strip is the result of repression of identity and internalized self-loathing. It’s also notable that the strip lacked popular appeal but was allowed to continue existing because it won the support of a wealthy benefactor. Maybe one day we’ll all learn to vibe with it, but I don’t really see that happening.

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filmyhub · 4 years

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Sushant Singh Rajput (21 January 1986 – 14 June 2020) was an Indian actor, dancer, entrepreneur and philanthropist. Rajput started his career with television serials. His debut show was Star Plus’s romantic drama Kis Desh Mein Hai Meraa Dil (2008), followed by an award-winning performance in Zee TV’s popular soap opera Pavitra Rishta (2009–11).

Sushant Singh Rajput Biography:

Born 21 January 1986

Patna, Bihar, India

Died 14 June 2020 (aged 34)

Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Cause of death Possible Suicide by hanging Nationality Indian Other names SSR Alma mater Delhi Technological University Occupation

Actor

dancer

philanthropist

Years active 2008–2020

Rajput made his film debut in the buddy drama Kai Po Che! (2013), for which he received a nomination for the Filmfare Award for Best Male Debut. He then starred in the romantic comedy Shuddh Desi Romance (2013) and as the titular detective in the action thriller Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! (2015).

His highest-grossing releases came with a supporting role in the satire PK (2014), followed by the titular role in the sports biopic M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story (2016). For his performance in the latter, he received his first nomination for the Filmfare Award for Best Actor. Rajput went on to star in the commercially successful films Kedarnath (2018) and Chhichhore (2019).

NITI Aayog, the policy think-tank of the Indian government, signed him to promote the Women Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP). Apart from acting and running Innsaei Ventures, Rajput was actively involved in various programmes like Sushant4Education, as a part of efforts to help young students. In June 2020, at age 34, Rajput reportedly died by suicide at his home in Bandra, Mumbai.

Early life:

Rajput was born in Patna to Krishna Kumar Singh and Usha Singh. His ancestral home is in Bihar’s Purnia district. One of his sisters, Mitu Singh, is a state-level cricketer. His mother’s death in 2002 left Rajput devastated and it was in the same year that the family moved from Patna to Delhi.

Rajput attended St. Karen’s High School in Patna and Kulachi Hansraj Model School in New Delhi. According to Rajput, he had ranked seventh in the DCE Entrance Exam in 2003, and secured admission in the Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering) class in Delhi College of Engineering.

He was also a National Olympiad Winner in Physics. In all, he cleared as many as 11 engineering entrance exams, including that for the Indian School of Mines. After he started participating in theatre and dance, he rarely had time for studies, resulting in several backlogs which ultimately made him leave DCE. He completed only three years of the four-year course before dropping out to pursue an acting career.

Career

Early years:

While a student at Delhi Technological University, Rajput enrolled in Shiamak Davar’s dance classes. It was only later that the idea of making a career in acting came to him, as some of his fellow students in the dance classes happened to be interested in acting and were attending Barry John’s drama classes. Influenced by them, Rajput also joined the acting classes.

Here, he found his passion for acting: “I found the experience liberating. I realised that I could communicate with the audience. I knew I wanted to do this forever.”

Within a few months of joining the dance class, Rajput was selected to be a member of Davar’s standard dance troupe. In 2005, he was chosen to be one of the group of background dancers at the 51st Filmfare Awards.

In 2006, he was part of the troupe that went to Australia to perform in the cultural program at the opening ceremony of the 2006 Commonwealth Games. By this time, he was tired of engineering. He was happy and successful in the dance and drama classes, and decided to do what he was good at. He dropped out of engineering and devoted himself full-time to dancing and acting.

To make a break into films, Rajput moved to Mumbai and joined Nadira Babbar’s Ekjute theatre group, which he remained a part of for two and a half years. During this time, he was featured in a TV advertisement for Nestle Munch, which became famous throughout India.

Television (2008–11)

In 2008, the casting team of Balaji Telefilms saw Rajput’s personality and acting talent while he was on stage for one of Ekjute’s plays. They invited him to audition for them and Rajput landed the role of Preet Juneja in Kis Desh Mein Hai Meraa Dil.

His character was killed quite early in the show, but he was such a popular character with the viewers that he was brought back for the series finale in the form of a spirit, looking on as his family celebrates after going through difficult times.

In June 2009, Rajput began starring in Pavitra Rishta as Manav Deshmukh, a serious and mature character working as a mechanic to support his family. His work in this serial received wide appreciation, and Rajput received three major television awards for best male actor and most popular actor.

This performance was his breakthrough and gave him a stepping stone into films. Initially when producer Ekta Kapoor cast him as lead for Pavitra Rishta while playing the parallel lead in Kis Desh Mein Hai Meraa Dil, Zee TV did not accept him. However, Kapoor convinced them to accept him.

In May 2010, Rajput joined the dance reality show Zara Nachke Dikha 2. He had already proven his acting talents by winning awards for his performance in Pavitra Rishta, and he wanted to establish that he had good dancing skills and could be trained further.

In Zara Nachke Dikha, Rajput was a part of the Mast Kalandar Boys Team. He did the shooting for both Pavitra Rishta and Zara Nachke Dikha 2 at the same time. On the Mother’s Day special episode, his team dedicated a performance to his mother, who had died in 2002.

In December 2010, Rajput participated in another dance-based reality show, Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa 4, where he was paired with choreographer Shampa Sonthalia.

In October 2011, Rajput decided to quit Pavitra Rishta to pursue a filmmaking course abroad, and in November 2011, Rajput quit the series and was replaced by Hiten Tejwani. However, in October 2014, Tejwani paved way for Rajput who appeared in the final episode aired on 25 October 2014 as Manav.

Film career (2013–20)

Rajput auditioned for Abhishek Kapoor’s Kai Po Che! and was selected to play one of the three leads, along with Rajkumar Rao and Amit Sadh. Based on the Chetan Bhagat novel The 3 Mistakes of My Life, the film proved to be a critical and commercial success.

His portrayal of Ishaan Bhatt, an ex-district level cricketer who is a victim of politics in the cricketing selection fraternity, was praised. Critic Rajeev Masand wrote: “…it’s Sushant Singh Rajput, making his film debut as Ishaan, who it’s hard to take your eyes off. The actor has an indescribable presence and it’s clear from his confidence and distinct likeability that a star is born.

His second movie was Shuddh Desi Romance, alongside Parineeti Chopra and Vaani Kapoor. Directed by Maneesh Sharma and produced by Yash Raj Films, the film deals with the subject of live-in relationships and was completely filmed in Jaipur, Rajasthan.

Taran Adarsh from Bollywood Hungama praised Rajput’s performance, saying: “After leaving a tremendous impression in his first Hindi outing, Sushant Singh Rajput… brings a lot of freshness with his unpretentious and spontaneous act.” Sukanya Verma from Rediff stated: “After a dynamic debut in Kai Po Che!, Rajput channelises his abundant energy to convey the childlike ineptitude of a man who wears his heart on a sleeve.

“Sushant’s next role was in Rajkumar Hirani’s 2014 film PK. Although his role was relatively minor, the film gave him the opportunity to work with Aamir Khan and Anushka Sharma. Upon its release, the film proved to be the one of the highest-grossing Indian films.

In 2015, Rajput’s sole release was Dibakar Banerjee’s mystery thriller Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! (2015), in which he portrayed detective Byomkesh Bakshi, created by Bengali writer Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay. The film was produced jointly by Yash Raj Films and Banerjee’s own film production company Dibakar Banerjee Productions. Set in Kolkata in the 1940s, the film was released on 3 April 2015

In 2016, he appeared in Neeraj Pandey’s biographical sports film M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story, in lead role of Indian cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni. The film was a critical and commercial success, becoming one of the highest-grossing Bollywood films of 2016. Rajput’s performance was widely praised by critics and earned him his first nomination for the Filmfare Award for Best Actor.

In 2017, he appeared in Dinesh Vijan’s Raabta, co-starring Kriti Sanon.

In 2018, he appeared in Kedarnath, a love story set in the backdrop of the 2013 floods in Uttarakhand, co-starring Sara Ali Khan. In this film he played the role of Mansoor Khan, a Kashmiri young man.

In 2019, he appeared in Abhishek Chaubey’s Sonchiriya opposite Bhumi Pednekar. He appeared in Nitesh Tiwari’s Chhichhore opposite Shraddha Kapoor that released on 6 September 2019. Later that year, he starred in Drive alongside Jacqueline Fernandez, which was released on Netflix.

In 2020, he starred in Mukesh Chhabra’s remake of The Fault in Our Stars titled Dil Bechara. The film was slated to be released in May of that year but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Projects cancelled

In 2016, it was announced that Rajput would appear in two films Chanda Mama Door Ke a science-fiction space film, along with R. Madhavan and Takadum a musical drama, opposite Irfan Khan and Parineeti Chopra was supposed to be directed by Homi Adajania. He later withdrew from the former, citing date conflicts. He was also set to essay 12 real-life characters, including political strategist Chanakya, poet Rabindranath Tagore and former Indian president APJ Abdul Kalam, in a biopic series on Stories of India

Sushant Singh Rajput Personal life and death

Sushant Singh Rajput was in a relationship with his co-star Ankita Lokhande for six years. They broke up in 2016. On 14 June 2020, Rajput, aged 34, was found dead hanging from the ceiling fan in his home in Bandra, Mumbai. He had reportedly been suffering from depression for about six months.

However, no suicide note has been found as of June 2020. According to the Mumbai Police IPS officer Vinay Chaubey, some medical prescriptions and medical reports were found in Sushant’s room and the investigation is underway.

Sushant Singh Rajput Photos Collection

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Sushant Singh Rajput Biography, Death, Height, Age, Girlfriend, Wife, Net Worth Sushant Singh Rajput (21 January 1986 – 14 June 2020) was an Indian actor, dancer, entrepreneur and philanthropist.

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danielkoethn2-blog · 7 years

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Revised Relational and Intersectional Analysis

Revised Relational Analysis:

The relations between North and South Korea, in terms of racial and social class formations, are heavily influenced by the historical contexts of the Cold War. Following World War II, Korea was taken under control of two nations: The North was controlled by the USSR, who eventually ceded control over to China, and the South was controlled by the United States. The communist influence on the North and the capitalist influence on the South eventually led to the creation of two different governments, divided at the 38th Parallel. The two strongly opposing political influences were the driving force for conflict, and eventually war. The byproduct of this war was the division of Korea, a nation that had been united for over a thousand years.

The racial formations surrounding North Korea is strongly tied to Anti-Communism sentiments that remain strong in capitalist countries such as the United States. In terms of media, politics, and culture, Communism and communist governments have and continue to be portrayed in a negative light. For example, movies such as “Big Jim McLain” have clear depictions of anti-communism in the United States. Since North Korea has been run by a communist government since its creation in the 1950s, the portrayal of North Korean citizens continue to be derogatory, thereby placing negative racial formations upon North Koreans. An example specific to this would be the recent film “The Interview”, a satirical comedy that led to aggravated relations between North Korea and the United States, eventually leading to the cancellation of theatrical viewings of the film. In contrast, South Korea, run by a capitalist government, is portrayed largely in a positive light. For example, many South Korean businesses, such as Samsung and Hyundai, are popular on the capitalist market, while South Korean music, such as K-Pop, is becoming more in demand in western countries. This difference in portrayal of the cultures of North and South Korea illustrate the effects of systems of government upon racial formations of its citizens. In many ways, these differences demonstrate the arbitrary nature of terms such as “race” and “ethnicity”. In fact, other than their geographic location, many North Korean families played no part in which of the two governments they became a part of. By simply living in a certain location, many individuals became a victim of a government established by a different country, controlled by a dictatorship in which they play no role, brainwashed by the military to take part in a corrupt system, and negatively stereotyped for reasons they have no control over. For instance, my grandfather lived in North Korea until the start of the Korean War, but chose to fight for South Korea. Although he had planned on reuniting with his family after the war was over, he was unable to, and never got to meet his family again. The photo album of the North/South Korean family reunion event demonstrates how despite being blood related and part of the same history, the effects of political regimes can create new racial conventions. The national contexts of North and South Korea remain examples of victims of their environment, with racial formations imposed upon them by other nations, torn apart by the creation of opposing governments formed by two conflicting superpowers, pitted into war against brothers and eventually divided. In spite of this, many South Koreans, with its relations and strong ideologies tied to national pride, continue to seek and desire future unity, thereby breaking down racial formations and boundaries.

Revised Intersectional Analysis:

The photo album illustrates an intersectionality between race and social class. Despite being family members, many of the individuals photographed are considered different races: North and South Korean. This formation of racial titles created by several factors such as geography, different governments, and media has had negative effects on the relations between North and South Korea. Race intersects with class because North Koreans live in much lower economic standings when compared to South Koreans. Even North Koreans who have defected from their country experience racial discrimination, which therefore limit their ability to climb up the social ladder and have access to the same opportunities as do South Koreans. The effects of being from North Korea are multiplied by the fact that these defectors start at the lowest social economic class, thereby effectively preventing them from climbing up the social ladder. The intersection between race and social class influence the lives of many Koreans in a negative way. Despite the fact that many North and South Koreans are closely related, the boundary created by political regimes, racial formations, and social classes make the chances of reunification increasingly difficult as the years go by. Therefore, events such as the family reunions depicted in the photo album are rare and valuable ways to keep this connection of brotherhood and harmony alive, in an effort to break down political barriers and unite long lost families and cultures.

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tinymixtapes · 7 years

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Feature: Screen Week: Favorite 20 TV Shows of 2016

The common perception is that we are in the midst of another golden age of television, that — given the rise of auteur-driven prestige dramas and the breadth of styles, topics, tones, and senses of humor — there’s now something out there for everyone. What has changed, however, is not a massive shift away from mind-numbing reality shows, soulless network comedies, and countless CSI/NCIS spinoffs and toward the sorts of thoughtful highbrow and offbeat lowbrow shows that dominate our list, but a drastic alteration in the ways we access television. The old model of broadcast television suggests in its very wording that it was transmitted to us rather than either chosen by or curated for us — for better or worse, people were forced to consume what was served to them. The proliferation of subscription-model television — driven by Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, as well as the once-pricey premium channels, HBO and Showtime — has now made hundreds of TV shows available even to the many brave enough to cut the cord. This has given executives, showrunners, and artists alike the bravery, and certainly the profit motive, to actually refine their shows for something other than the lowest common denominator, allowing them to reach niche audiences craving something a bit too audacious, strange, or challenging for traditional networks. It’s impossible to imagine more than a few choices for our favorite TV shows of 2016 airing even a pilot a decade ago, let alone receiving the critical love and ratings necessary to justify their continued existence. Coupled with the exponentially expanding ways in which we access and watch TV is Hollywood’s growing disinterest in the mid-level budget material that its 70s Renaissance brought to the fore before the age of the blockbuster gobbled up every last dollar once reserved for their production. Aside from a handful of established auteurs (and our Paul Thomas Andersons, Coen Brothers, and James Grays are slowly fading from the multiplexes), the $10-50 million budgeted films are simply not greenlit like they used to be. And as American cinema forks toward the low-budget indies on one side and Hollywood blockbusters and prestige pics on the other, in steps television to fill in the gap. Whether it’s the Fincheresque Mr. Robot and The Night Of or the Soderbergh spinoff The Girlfriend Experience, it’s clear that a number of TV shows have reached a level of personalized aesthetic and thematic expression that was once solely relegated to cinema. In this new televisual landscape, we found a plethora of shows that pushed the boundaries of what the medium can accomplish. From Louis C.K.’s intimate, personally financed Horace & Pete and Donald Glover’s hilarious and confrontational Atlanta to socially and philosophically challenging epic documentaries like OJ: Made in America and HyperNormalisation, the sheer array of wit, intelligence, and formal experimentation that television offered us remains a bright spot in a year that most of us will not remember fondly. Along with a few mainstays from last year’s list, we also discovered new delights in the absurd (Baskets, Lady Dynamite), reminding us that TV can simultaneously be hilarious and emotionally complex, that mindbending sci-fi (Westworld, Black Mirror, Stranger Things) can, with equal aplomb, delve into our deepest anxieties and desires or whet our appetite for nostalgia. But if we learned anything through our experiences with TV this year, it’s that television is rapidly evolving into something unrecognizable from what it once was. It continues to break free from the shackles of network executives and the implacable demands of advertisers. Thankfully for us, it has become all the better because of it. –Derek Smith --- 20 Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace Created by: Million Dollar Extreme [Adult Swim] To understand Million Dollar Extreme: World Peace, imagine a Portlandia that doesn’t try to make jokes or skewer such an easily-circumscribed (sub)cultural target as liberal hipsters. Or, Portlandia voted for Donald Trump, but maybe as performance art. Sam Hyde, Charls Carroll, and Nick Rochefort’s sketch comedy show features the Flint water crisis as mixology, breakups, a pickup artist giving a disabled dude tips to get pussy, blackface, and weightlifting: all the hot takes in your FB timeline — or Reddit feed, if you nasty — melted. It is really dumb, but in a way that seems difficult to achieve. How can something so meaningless and empty have such an innovative sense of self? Adult Swim cancelled MDE: WP after one season because Sam Hyde posts stuff about liking Donald Trump on his Twitter, and some writer for Buzzfeed or wherever said the show was alt-right propaganda. Million Dollar Extreme’s flashy voidness of meaning was too threatening to the parallel, but carefully masked, void at the heart of mainstream industry and values. But, as Hyde tweeted on January 22, “Obama awards the Purple Heart to Bangbus on his last day in office.” That is to say: this great nation’s brave producers of video culture, and the sacrifices they make on our behalf, will never be forgotten. –Benjamin Pearson --- 19 American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson Created by: Scott Alexander & Karaszewksi [FX] Ryan Murphy’s shows are typically known for their unpredictability and excess, but the first installment of his newest project, American Crime Story, offered viewers something different: a restrained take on true crime that has become part of our cultural fabric. The People v. O.J. Simpson tackled complex issues at the intersections of race, gender, and class, touching on everything from Hillary Clinton’s campaign to the Black Lives Matter movement while still leaving room for more than one satirical wink to the impending rise of our Kardashian-saturated mediascape. Murphy’s soap-opera sensibilities have always allowed his actors to shine, and American Crime Story was no different. Sarah Paulson played ill-fated prosecutor Marcia Clark with empathy and bright-eyed intelligence. As Clark’s co-prosecutor Christopher Darden, Sterling K. Brown exuded a naive intensity and vulnerability. Together, their chemistry lit up the screen. The show never forgot it was telling the story of real people, whose frustrations, humiliations, and small triumphs were all too real, with far-reaching consequences. The People v. O.J. Simpson wasn’t just a telling metaphor of our current moment, it was compelling television at its finest, with the power to leave its audience as raw and exposed as its characters. –Kate Blair --- 18 War & Peace Created by: Tom Harper [BBC/A&E] In the third episode of Tom Harper’s exquisite adaptation of War & Peace, the meek and open-hearted Pierre Bezukhov (Paul Dano) squares off in a duel against Dolokhov (Tom Burke), a trained soldier and notorious scoundrel. Bezukhov scores a lucky shot, but his one-time friend won’t go down so easy. Animated by sheer, white-hot hatred, Dolokhov props himself up, prepares to return fire — and misses, collapsing face-first into the snow. Seeing his own life spared and his foe vanquished, Bezhukov’s reaction is not exultation, or even relief; he mutters a single, self-excoriating word: “Stupid.” The image of 19th-century Russia that Tolstoy offers us is circumscribed by such acts of civilized, ornamental violence. It provides an exquisite backdrop for his characters’ small acts of pettiness and cruelty, but also mercy, generosity, kindness… the constant cycle of failure and renewal, epiphany and loss of clarity that makes up the human experience. And while we may get swept up in the grandeur of the Napoleonic wars, neither Tolstoy nor the filmmakers adapting his magnum opus ever allow us to lose sight of the futility of violence and its distraction from the serious, sacred business of living. –Joe Hemmerling --- 17 Broad City Created by: Ilana Glazer & Abbi Jacobson [Comedy Central] There is no show without their friendship: A love that refused to be one-note or predictable, even as the Abbi and Ilana caricatures embarked on more and more surreal excursions into sitcom conventions. Swapping identities, juggling multiple dates in one night, returning the fundraiser money you inadvertently stole from a childhood friend. From the premiere’s bathroom overture to the climactic terror at 1,000 feet, Broad City’s third season was its most ambitious and refined to date. As the set pieces and storytelling reached new heights (and changed locations), the show remained grounded in the free chemistry between its heroes, whose frankness about their past humiliations, creative insecurities, secret desires, and adoration of each other invited us into a mundane that felt alive and ready to burst. Adventures that screamed, “Live a little!” It was in the recurring fake wokeness of Ilana, Abbi’s pivots from humility to egomania, and the way they surprised each other in almost every episode. In a New York minute, Broad City would tackle abject millennial woes with a politics of precarity, double over into poop jokes, and remind you to call your best friend, even though it felt like she was already sitting right next to you. –Pat Beane --- 16 HyperNormalisation Dir. Adam Curtis [BBC2] Our own Joe Hemmerling most accurately defined HyperNormalisation as a more woke version of Michael Moore’s work, though that’s precisely what makes this nearly three-hour long, archival-footage-heavy documentary one of the most 2016 things to hit a TV-screen last year. Indeed, Adam Curtis charts the last four decades of Western politics to expose the forces that shaped the world we live in: a bewildering string of events that have prompted us to accept the “normality” of the simplified version of reality that economic and political operators have surreptitiously built. The British filmmaker articulates such a premise through shockingly plausible conspiranoia arguments (i.e., Henry Kissinger, Jane Fonda, and Felix Rohatyn inventing vaporwave), denouncing media manipulation while indulging in a fair bit of it himself as he leans on lots of stylishly-presented ambiguity, peaking with Trump’s election in an epilogue that can’t help but feel tacked-on despite its timelines. Nevertheless, Curtis manages to negotiate the distance between Gazelle Twin and Alex Jones, Jean-Pierre Gorin and Dinesh D’Souza, in an audacious filmic essay the likes of which they don’t make anymore, ultimately shaping his sketchy theses into a compelling piece of cinema. –jrodriguez6 [pagebreak] --- 15 Lady Dynamite Created by: Pam Brady & Mitch Hurwitz [Netflix] What comes after post-postmodern? New New Sincerity? Whatever stupid label you could generate for its truly peculiar brand of subversion, Lady Dynamite has anticipated it, embraced it, and collapsed it. Grossly, it’s a metacriticism on meta media, a deconstruction of flashback narratives (Present, Past, Duluth?), a satire of surrealist comedy shows, a no-holds-barred narrative of navigating mental illness, a goddamn pterodactyl. Maria Bamford as herself not only squashes every single wall left standing from Louie, but in an unprecedentedly self-aware performance, constructs new spaces only previously familiar in our own heads; some scenes are so strange, it’s like watching a sitcom set in a mathematically impossible dimension where we’ve all solved the Jacobian conjecture, but not our own happiness. And while it stylistically takes cues from shows as diverse as Arrested Development, Bojack Horseman, and The Sarah Silverman Program, its Gestalt aesthetic feels completely uncharted. Finally, a comedy that eloquently captures the ineloquence of break down, as much a corporealization as it is a hallucination of not knowing what you’re doing… more than half of the time. –Jackson Scott --- 14 Veep Created by: Armando Iannucci & David Mandel [HBO] Veep’s repertoire presents a perversion of our public thing, not our republic: it only suggests policy behind closed doors, alternately animating unrehearsed political performance in naked view of We the Voyeurs. It is fictional witness against the popular fallacy that public life can transcend personality, conviction, or ambition. And though the events of the show’s fifth season made a token no less, they offered a turning point and a question mark: disgraced among élites and disfavored by the public, Selina Meyer is not back by popular demand. Her lack of a true mandate, the ensuing drama and immediate downfall, were even more poignant and relatable than previous, offering not only tragic comedy, but something reflective of an incumbent American self. Yet again, this fictional District, a pseudo-Jeffersonian replica, transcended mere duplication: that of high office, of name, date, and birth, of L.C.D. demand, etc. Rather it imbued a crazed hyperbole, a deliberate hysteria un-associated with the conventional or applied, to the already hyper-normal. Third-rail in full grasp, Veep’s fifth season presaged our post-electoral theater of politics-as-not-usual: unattached, unremitting, unrepentant — though never unamused. –S. David --- 13 OJ: Made in America Dir. Ezra Edelman [ESPN] Sports can be as fiery a talking point as religion or politics. When two of the three intertwine and become a national talking point…. well, yikes. 2016 saw a Super Bowl halftime show with Black Panther imagery, and six months later, a 28-year-old quarterback sat down during the National Anthem. It also saw needed reminders that race and games are not newfound bedfellows; in a year beset by #FakeNews and a troubling conflict between emotions vs. facts, sports journalism had quite a year. Credit is due to ESPN and its triumphant 30 for 30 documentary series for giving directors like Spike Lee and Ezra Edelman freedom to encompass some touchy shit. While Spike’s Lil’ Joint 2 Fists Up spent one hour chronicling the ascent of Black Lives Matter and its impact on the University of Missouri’s most prized aspect — football — Edelman’s OJ: Made in America took over seven. It was one of two binge-ready miniseries (the other being the campy dramatization The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, or: “The One Where OJ Totally Did It”) about the first of many times a nation would unite to binge-watch the news. As Edelman tactfully demonstrates, the shitfuck-crazy “Trial of the Century” was never cut-and-dry, proving wrong those who assumed former QB/spokesperson/actor OJ Simpson, accused of murdering wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman, would be found guilty. To understand the whims of “how could a jury possibly come to that decision so quickly,” Edelman traces not just Simpson’s arc from birth to Hertz to The Naked Gun, but the black Los Angeles projects he grew up in and later disassociated from. Culling archival footage going back half a century, as well as interviewing key names like detective Mark Furman, prosecutor Marcia Clark, and those formerly near and dear to Juice, Made in America is remarkable in demonstrating how a group of people, after years of being treated like dirt, could vote based more upon “fuck yous” than facts. –Snacks Kyburz --- 12 Horace & Pete Created by: Louis C.K. [Pig Newton] After ditching the innovative and critically acclaimed Louie after five seasons, Louis C.K. returned to television like a comic to a fresh hour of stand-up. Reinvigorated and inspired, specifically by Mike Leigh’s early televised plays, Louis’s surprise release of the ineffable and achingly humane Horace & Pete saw him breaking completely free from network constraints. It challenged not only television’s often slick, streamlined aesthetic template with a strikingly minimalist style and loose structure, but also its methods of promotion, distribution, and standardization of length and format, releasing episodes of varying run times for purchase on his own web site with no details about when and how many more new episodes would appear. What could’ve been a mere stunt instead became one of the year’s most daringly personal and emotionally devastating television events with more empathy in its self-contained 10 episodes than most shows have in 10 seasons. Using brilliant performances from Steve Buscemi, Alan Alda, Edie Falco, and Louis himself, Horace & Pete transformed its two small sets — a bar and an apartment — into depressingly comic worlds that were microcosms of our own. Its touchingly melancholy examination of a family damaged by generations of emotional abuse deftly weaved in astute observations on race, politics, sex, and death, shrewdly reminding us that, although the past is seen through rose-colored glasses, it is the present we must reckon with. –Derek Smith --- 11 Bojack Horseman Created by: Raphael Bob-Waksberg [Netflix] In season three, filled to the brim with ressentiment yet unwilling to really face his own culpability in how wretched a person he’s become, Bojack Horseman (voiced heartbreakingly and hilariously by Will Arnett) turns his focus outward to find ways of becoming OK with himself and his place in the world. The genius of the series’ most recent season dwelt squarely with how bravely it confronted the things about its characters that would normally turn off an audience. As the characters we’d had a chance to grow with became increasingly desperate and despicable, the fine line between ridicule and a forlorn honest accounting of personal failings started to blur, and those with the resolve to stick with it to the end enjoyed some pretty indelible storytelling along the way. Season 3 also featured one of the most remarkable 25 minutes of animation we saw this year, featuring an entirely silent rumination on the discomfort with the possibility of connection felt by one who has so completely othered himself from those around him. Does it seem as weird to you as it does to us that the most human character on American television right now is a talking horse? –Paul Bower [pagebreak] --- 10 Baskets Created by: Louis C.K., Zach Galifianakis & Jonathan Krisel [FX] For absurdist half-hour serio-comedies, the combination of C.K., Galifianakis, and “Tim & Eric” collaborator Krisel seemed too perfect a creative talent storm. The post-Golden Age TV connoisseur’s internet-honed backlash raised legitimate questions. Will it actually be LOL funny or another occasionally-we-can-smirk-at-this character drama? Can Galifianakis overcome his post-Hangover hangover when he’s not flanked by potted plants? Will it be too weird or not weird enough? How much was C.K. really involved considering he’s got, you know, his own signature show and an ambitious self-distributed digital series? And, wait, does it matter that it’s on FX and not FXX!? In the end, Baskets answered most of these questions. Amid all the talk about gender identity, Louie Anderson’s simple human portrayal of Ma Baskets traded the easy laughs that defined cross-gender comedic performance into a complex portrayal of life’s disappointments and idiosyncrasies that defined the show. Just as vital was Martha Kelly’s Martha, a painfully acute portrayal of normalcy. Plus, the show’s Bakersfield setting was a nice reminder that there’s a whole lotta country outside of L.A. and New York. –Jafarkas --- 09 Black Mirror Charlie Brooker [Netflix] While smooth for the most part, Black Mirror’s transition from its first two seasons — as a BBC-produced darling, into its third as a bingeable Netflix product — wasn’t without a few dings. Still easily one of the most exciting, original, and oftentimes intoxicating series out there, Black Mirror’s third season seemed to push more into the grotesque, overinvesting in fx-shock tactics at the loss of more subtly moody, twisted narratives. But the stakes were incredibly high: the great ambition of Black Mirror is that, as an anthological series, it must create a new reality for every episode, one where a single aspect of technology (whether already in existence or speculative) wreaks havoc on society. All considered, 2016’s Season 3 (to be followed up by another season this year, also on Netflix) is still superb social-technological commentary, expertly crafted to make you gasp, scream, or cry (sometimes even, I swear, laugh). And not all six episodes are entirely doom and gloom — “San Junipero,” while melancholic and tragic in its own right, is an enlivening tale of second chances via a virtual, paradisiacal purgatory. Black Mirror is science fiction that matters, not because of the near-futures it imagines, but because it so eerily resembles our present — and it may be too late to go back. –Amelia Taylor-Hochberg --- 08 The Night Of Created by: Richard Price & Steve Zaillian [HBO] In a lot of ways, this eight-part miniseries was just another crime drama, with suspense around the guilt/innocence of a suspect and the colorful bureaucratic and emotional rigors of those involved with the case. Replace John Turturro’s foot problem with constant nips from a Pepto bottle or noisy nose blowings and he’s pretty boiler plate. Jeannie Berlin’s tough, cynical prosecutor with the itchy conscience is also familiar. Yet what both actors brought to their roles was everything. Everybody in this somber, sordid tale crackled with life. Bill Camp wasn’t just the retiring-cop-with-the-lingering-doubt guy, but a real thinking person with no bluster or platitudes to sort him for the viewer. Riz Ahmed played the ostensible innocent without conveying saintliness. His countenance was ever brave, yet pulsed with heartbreaking fragility (that rare thing of a tempered star-making turn). The masterpiece that was Deadwood was simple and ornate, but assailed with an unparalleled cast and dialogue, roundly revitalizing its quaint, place-holding tropes. What Deadwood did for the western The Night of managed to do for the impossibly, unflaggingly ubiquitous crime procedural — proving that sustenance, if applied carefully, can still stick to our towering, immovable genre bulwarks. –Willcoma --- 07 Silicon Valley Created by: Mike Judge, John Altschuler & Dave Krinsky [HBO] A luau at Alcatraz, a fight with a robotic deer that just got run over, Dinesh’s gold chain. These are just a few examples of some great instances of comedy in the third season of Silicon Valley. There is one moment that always springs to mind first, however, when I contemplate this season of the show: In the second episode, Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch), our hero, confronts his new boss, Jack Barker (Stephen Tobolowsky), at his horse farm. Barker is there to oversee the breeding between two horses. The scene is hilarious in how incredibly uncomfortable it is, due in large part to the fact that while the two characters try to have a serious conversation about the future of their company, graphic horse sex is going on behind them. Now, a few years ago, I never anticipated that this show would be the thing that exposed me to what an erect horse penis looks like. In some ways though, it makes perfect sense. Silicon Valley is often at its best when it is at its most ridiculous, and what better way to satirize an actually ridiculous place like Silicon Valley than to ratchet up the absurdity as high as standards and practices will let you take it. If that’s not comedy, then what is? –Jeremy Klein --- 06 Stranger Things Created by: The Duffer Brothers [Netflix] How do you really define a decade in pop culture? How is it possible to fathom and re-portray what was popular, what was cool, and what still holds resonance beyond the swarm of “what influenced me most as a kid” lists on Facebook? It’s tricky to say, other than through tackling personal experiences, news articles, and “historic” events, and by making your way through the necessary “relevant” album and film post-mortems. But at least that allows you to stumble upon a supposed aesthetic that crystalizes tendencies that fell across the span of a short few years, and The Duffer Brothers’ wiley and measured encapsulation of an estranged 1980s parallel perfectly suited the story that they were keen to tell. This was a tale of family, of trust, of dependence, and of a secret society, and within that stylized chrysalis, Stranger Things documented more than just an arrangement of disjointed family relationships (which Winona Ryder brought to the fore in her character, Joyce). It also brought a sense of curiosity that existed before the digital revolution. Sure, these episodes were haunting, daunting, and riddled with suspense, but they also tackled broader topics while taking optimum care in their exploration of a 10-year span that has been glorified, vilified, and despised from the very moment it came to a close. –Birkut [pagebreak] --- 05 Mr. Robot Created by: Sam Esmail [USA] For a show with a narrator as unreliable as the stories told by its corporate villains, it’s amazing how Mr. Robot managed to sharpen its critical attacks this season. Harboring all the twists and turns expected of high-profile dramas, Mr. Robot ramped up the cautionary tales for progressive and insurgent movements, propping up political allegories and cultural corollaries to our own fucked-up world while blurring the fictitious with our contemporary moment via E Corp, Enron, Dark Army, Occupy, fsociety, Anonymous, Snowden, Elliot, etc. Through it all, the show maintained the creeping fervor and horrifying thrust of the first season, the filmic pastiche and quotations this time exaggerated to even more surreal ends through long, hallucinatory sequences favoring kineticism over plot. This season’s masterstroke, however, was to zoom out of the corporate paranoia and highlight, both on the show and in our own lives, the global oppression and exploitation also imposed by state violence, conflating the spheres of capital and the state in complex, multifaceted ways. Here, the show sought to temper the frailties of the human condition with the revolutionary possibilities of technology, couching the personal-is-political (the parents of the show’s protagonists, Elliot and Angela, were victims of a chemical spill — sound familiar?) with broad messages about mental health, accountability, rhetoric, and mediations to power. Mr. Robot is simply the most critical, high-stakes show on TV, aimed brilliantly at those who, as Elliot put it, play God without permission. –Mr P --- 04 Game of Thrones Created by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss [HBO] Our time in Westeros is running short: in 2016, showrunners announced that there will be just two more seasons of everyone’s favorite family-friendly fantasy drama (just kidding, don’t let young children watch Game of Thrones). The antepenultimate season perfectly encapsulated what makes GoT great TV: We got answers to some of our long-standing questions, sobbed over the deaths of beloved characters, rejoiced in the comeuppance of hated ones, and cheered for our preferred House in carefully-constructed battles. Sure, there were some misses (the dead silence that Tyrion faces when trying to teach Grey Worm and Missandei how to crack jokes pretty much mirrored exactly what was happening on the other side of the screen), but the massive hits (Dragons! Wildfire! White Walkers! “Hold the door!”) more or less made up for those. And as storylines became intertwined and the ties that bind the main characters became more evident, the various chess pieces that make up the Game of Thrones universe began to fall into place, setting us up for what will surely be two more incredible, history-making seasons of television. –Lil’ Doe --- 03 Atlanta Created by: Donald Glover [FX] In the embarrassing tradition of rough critical-consensus adjectives ironing out their own usefulness, “peak tv” is now a style. It’s basically a snobby genre, à la “important” or “prestige” film. The draw still boils down to sex, violence, and jobs, but things are generally quieter, slower, and oh so portentous. Despite its crass-slingin’, bro-centric target demo, FX has been an impressive host to the more surprisingly winning content of this sort, and they truly did peak with this perfectly pitched marvel of a show. Donald Glover and his creative team put us in a space that, while utilizing that familiar peak minimalism, structurally surprised without ever losing its lithe tonal refinement. This first season clicked as misadventures loaded with biting satire, but enraptured with intricate, loving human detail. Earn, Van, Darius, and Paper Boi all left indelible, endearing impressions, and the secondary characters, often their quarry, were nonetheless shrewdly observed. Claims of the “cinematic” in TV are often overblown, but Atlanta’s transportive, just-this-side-of-dreamy direction frames its deft social critique/character study in such a seamless way that it feels like the most expansive visual storytelling in years, peak or plummet. –Willcoma --- 02 The Girlfriend Experience Created by: Lodge Kerrigan & Amy Seimetz [Starz] Women’s work necessarily balances — between eggshells — tradition and meek innovation. Quilting is variation stitched together by sameness; blowjobs, sameness punctuated by variation. Throughout The Girlfriend Experience, these binary codes play out in gloriously narrow fashion. Directors/Writers Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan take an entire aesthetic whole from Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 film of the same name — unrelentingly voyeuristic distance shots of interiors and the buzzing of office lights — but use their half-hour TV series format to foreground the redundantly transactional nature of sex work in ways impossible for cinema’s slant toward spectacle. As student/law firm intern/sex worker Christine Reade, Riley Keough (who also killed it in her supporting role in this year’s American Honey) likewise lit up the screen in the most boring of ways, showing just how staid fucking for money — at least on the selling end — can be. The narrative arc follows the thoughtful, meticulous acquisition of dollars, not the predictably erratic pattern of seduction or cumming, as Reade successfully navigates yachts, expensive hotel rooms, abandoned mansions, and the men who own them: she’s good, we gather, at her work (wink wink), but more skilled as the manager of her business slash self (solemn nod). Despite — or yes, because of — being one of the most explicit shows of the year, The Girlfriend Experience was no empty pantsuit, deploying sex-as-formalism to hold its own against 2016’s most vexing debates around gender and power. –Benjamin Pearson --- 01 Westworld Created by: Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy [HBO] “Cultural phenomenon” is hardly the first descriptor to spring to mind when one thinks about the original 1973 Westworld film. Michael Crichton’s campy exploration of an android takeover of a Western amusement park remained largely forgotten outside cult circles. Similar to countless other outlandish cinematic experiments from the 1970s, Westworld was mostly remembered as yet another oddity of unfulfilled potential rather than as a forgotten flawed masterpiece. HBO-induced revisionism may now change this perception, however. It came as a surprise to many when HBO announced it was in the process of producing a Westworld TV show. Late-night TV nostalgia still had fond distant memories of the original film, and the hype train was soon boarded, especially after the first released teasers and cast announcement (Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, and Evan Rachel Wood have all given career-defining performances this season). Crichton’s original concept remains fascinating, but not only was the original film terribly outdated, the few spin-offs from the original story were either underwhelming or straight-up silly (a 1978 sequel titled Futureworld and a 1980 short-lived TV show with only three episodes aired before cancellation). Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s Westworld, however, is a different beast entirely. An elegantly ambitious work, it was as painstakingly fashioned as an intricate puzzle game, which led to a richly interactive communal experience with its viewer base. Contrary to the binge-watching phenomenon, Westworld made a strong case for the seemingly outdated weekly TV show format, wherein every week spectators would endlessly debate new theories or further illuminate old ones. This format worked so well because, unlike shows that prompt similar viewer experiences with wild speculation (Lost, Game of Thrones), Westworld actually provided narrative material and imagery to support fan theories. Parallel to the robots seeking to escape their programmed slavery, the pieces were there all along for us to assemble. The maze, the holy elixir of conscious life constantly referenced throughout the season, exists both for the hosts and for the spectators. Among the many noticeable and important changes from the source material is the terminology. The robots in the park are called “hosts” in HBO’s Westworld, a much more fitting term for the repetitive and excruciating humanization process that the machines must undergo before offering a truer-than-life experience to the park guests. Repetition plays a central role in Westworld’s narrative, as well as in the hosts themselves. While they experience their lives within their predetermined narrative loops, the audience witnesses numerous apparently duplicate scenes, in which each new repetition reinforces an evolving meta-narrative. At every break of dawn, the hosts’ programmed AI narrative determines their personal stories, how they should behave, feel, and perform. In spite of all their technological complexity, however, their ultimate objective in artificial life is painfully mundane and exasperating: to fulfill the fantasies of the human guests, which, as human fantasies often go, are grounded in the immediate satisfactions and pleasures of violence and lust. Violent delights have violent ends: a recurrent prophetic statement in Westworld (and a nod Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet) that signals the ultimate price we must pay for our egoistical, anthropocentric search for gratification by way of reckless eroticized violence. There is something God-like in creating a fictional character, and Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the park’s larger-than-life mastermind, certainly appears to derive sadistic pleasure from creating pain out of nothing, watching his hosts eternally endure whatever tragedy his personal whims dictate. Ford’s obscure personal vision even inspired think pieces on the ethics of artificially constructed pain. Roxa Luxemburg once said that those who do not move, do not notice their chains, and ultimately, in a somber twist of events, continuous incessant pain becomes the only path for the hosts to perceive their condition, to regain class consciousness and overtake the means of their own production. But the enduring question remains: to what and where can they ever actually hope to break away to? The loop becomes static, the story eternal, their fates shackled. Season 1 left us with many unanswered questions (and sadly season 2 is scheduled to return in 2018). Westworld, however, does leave a defining mark in a year that witnessed a slant toward the experimental in TV (another significant example was the flawed, yet deeply enthralling The OA). We are going to repeat it all again this year, no doubt, yet something has been broken away. Our loops slightly changed. And we owe much of this to the sacrificial pain of the hosts of Westworld. –Paulo Scarpa http://j.mp/2k3XWZW

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