SultanĪBC may have reversed its decision to produce a second season of this scrappy drama following resourceful but troubled private detective Dex Parios (Cobie Smulders), but that still leaves 18 lively episodes, half of which aired in 2020. They also make the tension nestled in the show’s title increasingly plain: Great is both what Catherine will become and what Peter will never be. Moments that expose Peter’s vulnerability, like a shot of him curled up on a statue of his father, render his arrested development more tragic than laughable. The Great occasionally lends startling poignancy to its depiction of Peter, a vicious man-child more interested in philandering than leading. In time, however, Catherine embraces crudeness, her speech assuming the harsh bloodiness that lands crowns atop usurpers. Its jarringly crass dialogue, abundant in period-drama affect and dripping with verve, initially highlights Catherine’s alienation as a naïve idealist, prim and proper and shocked by her court’s vulgarity.
#I MAY DESTROY YOU NICK KROLL SERIES#
The series chronicles the attempts of the future Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning) to depose her new husband, the doltish Emperor Peter of Russia (Nicholas Hoult), with gleeful irreverence. Like Yorgos Lanthimos’s alternately riotous and poignant The Favourite, which series creator Tony McNamara co-wrote, The Great rejects the commitment to historical fact that burdens many period pieces. The joke, it seems, is on them, for hoping for an escape from their centuries-long drift into obsoletion that doesn’t involve a stake in the heart. Meanwhile, they deny Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), Nandor’s meek familiar, his wish to become a vampire not out of principle, but out of apathy-pushing away the one person who cares about them and unknowingly nudging him toward his vampire-hunting destiny. The riotous escapades that Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) stumble into highlight relatable fears-lost time, growing irrelevance, unwelcome solitude-and gradually reveal the tragic and poignant truth that underlies the show’s otherworldly comedy: these bloodsuckers want out of their monstrousness and in to human society. Early in the mockumentary’s second season, a rare invitation to a human party delights and then disappoints them, when they realize that they’re celebrating the Super Bowl rather than a Superb Owl. Sequestered in modern-day Staten Island, the ancient vampires of What We Do in the Shadows are woefully out of touch. But whether we latched onto entertainment because it revealed some inner truth or simply because everything looks like a mirror in the midst of cabin fever, these are the shows that spoke to us most in a year where everything seemed to speak to us more loudly than ever before.
#I MAY DESTROY YOU NICK KROLL TV#
The way we perceive TV is changed, at least for now. When locked away from the world, the vicarious experience amplifies. Shows like Ted Lasso, The Good Place, and Joe Pera Talks with You are often praised as some sort of balm for our times, their gentler quality representative of “what we need right now.” But we need to give voice to other things too: despair and alienation ( Perry Mason, Unorthodox, and I Am Not Okay with This) introspection ( I May Destroy You and The Virtues) and our complicated feelings about companionship and the prospect of needing other people ( We Are Who We Are, Primal, and Normal People).
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The drama, the relief, the tension, and the comedy hits harder. When we have less going on, we look to entertainment to speak for us. Even old shows found new lives through wider streaming availability, as the sardonic, hilarious misery of The Sopranos tapped into our current anxieties about generational rot and the mess left for the future. New shows became impromptu cultural events: The Queen’s Gambit sparked a renewed interest in chess, born out of our months-long solitude, while our fascination with weirdo fuckups manifested the collective embrace of the Tiger King. With so many public events shut down-or, in the case of sports games, peopled by bizarre simulated crowds-TV this year became, more than ever, our distraction of choice.
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We watched people live mask-less lives, among friends, family, and even crowds of strangers. But in the wake of 2020’s Covid-19 pandemic, even the most mundane TV moments had the potential to be aspirational. Their world-building can transport us to other times, countries, and universes. The best TV shows let us live vicariously through their characters: their wealth, their romances, their happiness and rage.