Roundup August 2025 — THERE'S TOO MUCH TV (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!

Interview with a Vampire (Seasons 1-2) — AMC+/NetflixCW: violence, nudity

Interview with a Vampire is a re-interpretted version of Anne Rice’s novel and the Tom Cruise/Brad Pitt movie of the same name. There are a number of radical changes that make this series really interesting.

First, where Louis is a Louisiana plantation owner in the book and film, in this version he is a Creole pimp—he’s still involved with human trafficking, but with a very different racial element. Second, Louis and Lestat are queer lovers—something many readers assumed by reading between the lines but something that was not explicit until now. Finally, Claudia is a 14 year old girl, rather than 11 in the film and 5 in the novel.

I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to vampire stories as I get older. For a myth with such culturally established rules and conventions, it is truly fascinating how many different interpretations there are. Some focus on the class struggle and the ways in which aristocratic blue bloods drain the life from workers (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Castlevania: Nocturne). Some focus on the strange ways in which death and sex are forever intertwined (True Blood, Nosferatu). Others explore the nature of blood in a way that is inherent to the emerging true crime stories of the 1800s.

Interview with a Vampire, use the myth to explore queerness and the idea of living amongst a society while not being a part of it. You can probably think of a number of problems with this metaphor. Queerness is not something that you can catch like a blood-borne pathogen. Queer people are not inherently dangerous to straight people, waiting to feast on their blood.

But at the same time, there is a significant amount of othering that comes from being queer, and some there are certainly bigots who demonize queer people to that degree. We’re currently living through a moral panic about gender and transness that very much sees the existence of queer people as dangerous to society as a vampire. It’s a complicated, but interesting, metaphor.

I’m only midway through the second season (which came out in 2024), but I love the ways in which this show is in conversation with both its source material and the broader genre of vampire myths—even if I can’t stand Louis’s learned helplessness.

The Hunting Wives (Season 1) — NetflixCW: violence, drug use, nudity, stupidity

Was The Hunting Wives good? Um…probably not. Was The Hunting Wives entertaining? Wildly.

Malin Akerman and Brittany Snow star in a series that is essentially about a clash of cultures. Sophie (Snow) and her family have just moved to Texas from Boston, both for work and to start a new life after a tragedy in Sophie’s past. In Texas, they meet Margo (Akerman) and her husband, an oil tycoon mounting a campaign for governor. The season plays out as a murder mystery whodunit, with lots of twists and turns that I did not see coming, and I felt the show hit just the right level of camp for its absurd plot. 

Much of the early episodes of the show focus on the differences between these two backgrounds. Margo and her crew drink heavily, shoot guns, party as stay-at-home wives, and talk about the scourge of illegal immigrants in their community. Sophie is sober, her family is opposed to guns. They drive a Tesla—a complicated symbol, but in this show meant to symbolize East Coast, climate conscious elites—and Sophie had an established career as a Democratic strategist and PR manager.

But as the show continues, we learn that for all their talk about good Christian values and tradition, the conservatives of Texas are involved in all sorts of debauchery behind the scenes—adultery, homosexuality, drug use, and sexual grooming. Sophie is inversely drawn to aspects of Texas, namely guns and some of her most self-destructive habits. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but it is interesting to see the show’s take on just how hypocritical and performative these values can be.

Perhaps most interesting to me is the way in which the show gets you to hate Sophie’s annoying and controlling husband, who is just as dismissive of Sophie as these more patriarchal Texas conservatives. He also often makes pretty good points, especially about Sophie’s choices and aforementioned self-destructive habits. But, because we’ve learned to hate him, they fall on completely deaf ears, just like they do for Sophie. Is this how misogynists felt about Skylar White?

Alien: Earth (Season 1) — HuluCW: violence, xenomorphs

You don’t need to know much about the Alien extended universe to enjoy Alien: Earth, since virtually none of the characters on the show have ever seen xenomorph before, one of the most fascinating and weird movie creations of all time. I highly, highly recommend this video from Kaptain Kristian on its design.

Like all entries in this franchise, Alien: Earth is intensely focused on body horror. But instead of fixating on the ways in which these murder machines use our bodies to incubate their young, this series has taken a slightly different focus that feels very relevant in 2025.

As the opening scrawl of the series explains, humanity is entering a new phase of its evolution, seeking a melding with machines in order to get closer to immortality. There are cybernetically enhanced humans, artificially intelligent synths, and the newly created hybrids—human minds implanted into synthetic bodies. What does it mean to be human in a world where humanity finds itself increasingly replaced by the machines we’ve created? And furthermore, who or what controls that process?

In this future, the world has been divided amongst five corporations that essentially serve as empires with monopolies on technology. Whoever controls these tools for immortality has unmatched power, and they’re so focused on the arms race that they can’t—or won’t—slow down to think of the consequences. If only that were less relatable.

Peacemaker (Season 2) — HBOCW: violence, nudity, drug use, ableism against people with bird blindness

Peacemaker’s first season touched on a lot of interesting thematic material, from white supremacy to childhood trauma to the utility and morality of violence, but it was at its heart a pretty silly and fun show. This season feels different. While there are still tons of moments of silliness (Tim Meadows guest stars as an agent with a disability called “bird blindness” where he can’t tell birds apart, from doves to ostriches), this season feels more serious, and I’m honestly surprised John Cena has the range to pull it off.

This season, Peacemaker gets a window into another dimension, one where his family is together and healthy, where he isn’t a loser but an actual hero, and where his crush is actually open to dating him. But the more time he spends in this parallel dimension, the more we can see that his trauma and trials have caused him to reflect on himself and grow in a way that his doppelganger clearly has not. He’s more in touch with his feelings because he’s had to process pain. He listens more closely because he was a loser, not a hero. Losing everything has given him appreciation for the things he’s lost.

A lot of this season seems to build off a climactic event at the end of James Gunn’s version of Suicide Squad, which I haven’t seen, but it hasn’t really impacted my enjoyment of the show. At least, not yet.