THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup May 2025 (Patreon)

“What are you watching?” is pretty much the automatic question I get when I tell people what I do for a living. Usually I lie to people so I don’t get into a massive debate about the police while I’m trying to hang out. But to you, dear patron, I shall never lie!

Only 3 shows this month but I have some thoughts!

The Rehearsal (Season 2) — MaxCW: cringe, evanescence

As longtime patrons know, I was a huge fan of the first season of The Rehearsal, and particularly how it presented anxiety. It was such a unique and visceral exploration of the kinds of everyday doubts and uncertainties we all face, cranked up far beyond the highest degree you could ever imagine. Ever laid awake at night reliving all of your mistakes? Well what if we spent an HBO budget creating an insanely elaborate simulation of those mistakes so that we could relive them and learn where we went wrong! It was a show completely unlike anything I’d ever seen in media.

Somehow, season 2 is even more impressive, finding a real issue—airline pilot communication—and trying to fix it through this bizarre and novel approach to roleplaying the minutiae of human interaction. As Nathan says in the finale “we’re all just people in the back of an Uber trying to avoid an awkward conversation.” It might sound minor, but Nathan points out just how fundamental this impulse is to our everyday lives, and how the superego for societal pressure can steer our lives in ways we don’t even realize.

Without getting into any spoiler territory (although I doubt you would believe me even if I told you), this season touches on how much control we really have over the course our lives take, how much we all assume roles and masks in order to navigate social interactions, and perhaps most interestingly to me: the institutional forces and incentives that make changing systems such a monumental task.

Your Friends & Neighbors (Season 1) — AppleTV+CW: light violence, nudity

I binged this entire series after finishing my latest West Wing video (which you should share with all your friends to get the views up hehe). Jon Hamm stars as a wealthy hedge fund manager living in suburban Westchester after he loses his marriage and his job. In order to maintain his expensive lifestyle, he turns to robbing his neighbors of the riches they either don’t appreciate or won’t notice are missing.

The show is very interested in critiquing the ostentatious and performative wealth of the upper class, who buy things just to show them off, or worse, to fill the empty and growing void inside of them. This dynamic is driven home when Jon Hamm explains in narration the luxury item he’s about to steal as if it was a commercial, playing into Hamm’s role as spokesman for brands like Mercedes-Benz.

Overall, the show is…fine. Ultimately, I think it tries to have it both ways. On the one hand, it mocks these shows of wealth and the ways in which they force the upper class to pay massive expenses to keep up with social pressures. But on the other hand, it clearly admires these luxury items, portraying their theft as okay since the rich don’t even appreciate what they have. 

It seems that the message is not that this accumulation of stuff is pointless, but rather that wealth is wasted on the rich. They’re not real art fans, they don’t even know what it is that they have their hands on. Jon Hamm is just restoring the natural order by stealing from them.

It’s a weird note to hit, because it sets Hamm’s character separate from the upper class, while he is clearly trying to make enough money to maintain his position among them. So are they empty and vapid and pointless? Or are they an exclusive group we all should aspire to gain entry into? I suppose the answer is both, but I’m not sure the show is as interested in this paradox as I am.

Vanderpump Villa (Seasons 1&2) — HuluCW: trash tv

I bet you didn’t expect to see this show here! Look, we all love trash TV from time to time.

What was fascinating to me as I watched season 1 of this show, stoned out of my mind, was the way it portrayed work. Of course, we have a queenlike reverence for Lisa Vanderpump, the boss, where everyone talks incessantly about how much they want to impress her and how they don’t want to let her down, all while feuding with their coworkers. There’s also a blurring of work-life boundaries by having the entire cast live together while they work together, giving them no space to breathe.

But more interesting to me is the very nature of what that work is. While ostensibly about providing some kind of luxury experience for guests in a European villa, it’s very clear that none of the servers were hired for their hospitality expertise, but rather because they’d be highly entertaining on television. This is not a dynamic that is unique to Vanderpump Villa, but Lisa is often confronting her workers about the poor job they’re doing in the hospitality business, telling them that they need to be doing a better job.

What job is that exactly though? Is it to serve the guests? Is it to party with them? Obviously, the job is to be an entertaining reality TV star and to cause drama, which is directly at odds with providing a good vacation experience for the guests. To work in hospitality is to make the guests the star, but to be in reality TV is to make yourself the star, and these things are in direct opposition, which is where the conflict of the show comes from.

But I also find the ways the show addresses this blatant conflict really interesting. Lisa encourages her workers to “be the best version of themselves” or to be “authentic,” with the implication that they’ll perform their tasks as a server better that way. This is useless advice for food service workers, but it’s great advice for being a reality TV star.

In the second season, they solve some of these conflicting impulses of reality TV competition and hospitality service by creating a cash prize of $30,000 and a full-time position for the worker who receives the best reviews from the guests over the course of the season.

But this also introduces other wonky work dynamics. The cast is clearly prompted to talk about how this is “life-altering money,” since every single one of them says the phrase at some point in their confessionals despite being below a minimum wage salary in most states, and introduces a different kind of conflict between workers, where they are focused on outclassing and sabotaging each other rather than providing the best experience for the guests.