Television – Spectre Collie

A Sense of Like a Dozen Endings

What We Do In The Shadows had a satisfying end to the series, and then a whole bunch more. Spoilers for the Finale and final season.

What We Do In The Shadows will most likely be one of my top 10 television series of all time. It was never “appointment viewing.” I’m sure there’s a lot that I’ve forgotten, and I probably couldn’t give details of entire seasons, much less individual episodes. But overall, it was relentlessly¹ clever, surprising, hilarious, goofy, and as much as I hate to use FX marketing language: fearless.

One of the things that I most respect about the series is that the comedy and the tone were all over the place, but it always felt true to itself. It could be almost unforgivably corny, shockingly daring, and astonishingly clever all within the same episode, and sometimes within the same scene. One episode would feel like a traditional sitcom bottle episode, and the next would have an over-the-top bit of gruesome violence as a punchline, and the next would be a visual effects showcase that seemed far beyond the budget of a 30-minute comedy series.

As an example of how varied its comedy was: the gags that seemed to take hold with viewers the most, like “creepy paper,” Jackie Daytona, or the cursed witch’s hat, were rarely my favorite, but were usually alongside the funniest moments of any television series I’ve seen. I don’t know what the production of the series was actually like, but it sure seems like they would ignore the concept of a “show bible” or a consistent tone or style, instead choosing that anything was fair game as long as it’s funny.

Leading up to the finale, there was an episode inspired by The Warriors where the action was instigated by a character having his head burst like a tick and then ripped off at the neck; and then an unbearably awkward office party at a supremely shitty venture capital² firm, which somehow made me even more uncomfortable. The series will have some of the corniest jokes you can see coming from a mile away, followed up by someone vomiting a torrent of blood or having their entrails spill out onto the floor. And it rarely feels too over the top; always exactly the right amount of excess.

That anything-goes mentality seems to have gone into the finale as well, where they decided to just try every possible ending they could think of. I only just found out that there are even a couple more I hadn’t known about — if you weren’t quite satisfied with the Newhart finale, you can go to the extra features to have Nadja hypnotize you two more times, with two more heavily-referential endings.

The series could have ended with the penultimate episode. It didn’t give closure to everyone’s story, but it was a very sweet and fitting ending to Nandor and Guillermo’s. Gizmo finally realized he was never going to fit into the human world, and Nandor finally started to treat him as an equal partner, and he proposed a new life where they fight injustice.

But it’s probably more fitting that the end of the series is the end of the documentary. It was full of meta-commentary on the series as a whole, in particular calling out the criticism that the series could’ve ended after season five had wrapped up the story of Guillermo wanting to become a vampire. I did appreciate that they explicitly acknowledged that the vampires were just going to keep on living their weird, stupid, after-lives, doing basically the same things over and over again for centuries. But it often felt more like it was giving closure to the writers more than the audience, giving them a chance to say goodbye to the series after six years.

And I’d never blame them for that! But I do think that my favorite aspect of the finale was the documentary crew just stopping the characters mid-interview, saying that they had enough footage. It was so callous and disrespectful that it felt perfectly in tone with this series.

The other thing that’s perfectly in tone with this series is taking it to the line of what’s tolerable, and even past that line, but then knowing exactly when to pull back. They can be so mean, or so gross, or so nihilistic, or so selfish and inconsiderate, or so violent, or so stupid, that the characters seem irredeemable and the writing feels like an overhard attempt to be edgy. But then they’ll have a surprising moment of kindness or cleverness that makes any sentimentality feel earned.

They did exactly that with the end of the series, choosing to have it both ways. They got the tear-jerker where Guillermo says goodbye forever and turns out all the lights one last time… and then they got the adventure-nonsense ending, riding a high-speed coffin elevator down to Nandor’s hidden underground lair. The key wasn’t just the effects — which, again, seem like way overkill for a 30-minute comedy series — but the fact that Nandor and Guillermo got to sit in the coffin together, as adventure pals instead of master and servant.

Now that it’s over, I do have a favorite moment from the entire series. Not the funniest, but the one that sums up exactly what I think is wonderful about the tone of What We Do In The Shadows. It’s in season five, when the vampires’ neighbor Sean is staging a pride parade as he’s running for office. Guillermo has just recently come out, and he’s given a special place in the parade: sitting by himself in a lawn chair on a flatbed truck, holding a sparkler and a piece of poster board reading “GAY GUY.”

It’s a good gag on the surface, because the characters are paying lip service to inclusivity without genuinely getting it. The result was Guillermo going through all the stress and self-doubt of coming out, only to be tokenized and put on display.

(As a side note: I liked how the show treated homosexuality as being distinct from Nandor and Lazlo’s hypersexuality; the series has mentioned the two of them having sex with each other and other men and male vampires plenty of times, but it never describes it in terms of romantic attraction, or as a part of their identity).

What makes the pride parade my favorite moment, though, is what happens as the camera lingers on Guillermo. He initially seems humiliated and miserable, but as the parade goes on, you can see a smile start to take over his face. By the end of the episode, he’s waving the sparkler and bouncing along to the music. Finally happy with himself and proud of the label. In an episode that’s been all about callously and clumsily making a show of pride just to win inclusivity points, it makes a very sweet and even subtle point about how much it means to the participants to be able to be out and open and not afraid of looking ridiculous.

That kind of satire, mockery, or nihilism followed up with a bit of sentimentality or kindness is what elevates What We Do In The Shadows from an extremely funny series to a memorable and even important one. It asserts that you can be smart without being elitist, sentimental without being maudlin, goofy without being pointless, shocking without being shallow, and have a tone that’s all over the place, just as long as you’re funny enough.

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Because it does not relent
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Or is it something to do with lamps?

Agatha the Irredeemable

Final (for now) thoughts on Agatha All Along. Spoilers for the entire series.

Agatha All Along ended a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve spent the time since then trying to figure out what exactly I thought of it.

My initial reaction was that I was a little disappointed. Midway through the season, it seemed like they suddenly decided they weren’t content to do another televised MCU installment, and they wanted to be putting out stuff for Emmy reels and best-of compilations. But I initially felt as if they’d managed to make all the plot threads fit together, but without the end result meaning much of anything.

The last two episodes were genuinely surprising. For WandaVision, the big “reveals” had been mostly figured out by fans of the comics early on in the season, so that series was a case of watching stuff we already knew was going to happen, but in a way that was so satisfying and fun that nobody really cared. I’d assumed that Agatha All Along was going to do the same, presenting some not-particularly challenging mysteries and let us all have fun pretending to be surprised. “Oh, she’s still under Wanda’s spell!” “Oh, that’s Wanda’s son Billy Kaplan/Wiccan!” “Oh, she’s the Marvel embodiment of Death!” “Her sudden outbursts are foreshadowing things that will happen later in the series!” I was perfectly satisfied with this level of engagement, only to get a double rug-pull in the last two episodes.

I hadn’t suspected at all that the Witches’ Road was Billy’s creation. I did expect that we’d meet a Great and Powerful Oz type character at the end, who had some connection to Rio, but hadn’t even considered the possibility that the entire premise of WandaVision was playing out again on a smaller scale. And it seemed kind of obvious that Agatha was lying about the road, and her experience with it in particular. But I’d thought it was going to be a simple case of undeserved bravado, claiming she’d been on it when she hadn’t. Or we’d see the rumor play out, where her previous trip on the road had presented a choice between the power she wanted (the Darkhold?) and her son. It never once occurred to me that the final episode would take agency back from Billy Kaplan and make the title of the series make sense! It was a really clever layering of surprises: he subconsciously created the road just like Wanda first created the Hex, but in the end, the instigator of the whole thing really was Agatha all along.

Mid-season of the Witch

Agatha All Along revealed a bunch of stuff we already knew, and it was surprisingly good

Up until episode 6 of Agatha All Along, I’d been enjoying it a lot, if not exactly loving it. I couldn’t help but compare it to WandaVision, which I loved for being so aggressively meta and having each episode feeling like a dense puzzle box. But if Agatha All Along had tried to be as gimmick-driven, it would’ve come across as an uninspired retread.

So I think the show runners used the extended gag of the first episode for all that it was worth, and then wisely set off in a new direction and allowed this series to be its own thing. Instead of each episode being themed to a different era of sitcom, each episode has been an escape room themed to a different decade. They’re still packed with easter eggs and references the MCU hyper-fans crave, but the episodes have felt a little more straightforward as a result.

Which feels odd to type, when I think back on stuff like battling fire demons with prog rock, or an extended Evil Dead slumber party with Agatha hanging from the ceiling and backwards spider-walking. This is still some spectacle-driven television, high-budget even if not quite high enough budget to avoid cutting away right as someone turns over Elizabeth Olsen’s body. And all the elements of horror-comedy are there. The series deserves a ton of credit for sticking to its dark and weird tone without watering everything down. But for whatever reason, it hasn’t felt as cohesive; I haven’t gotten a larger sense of this is what the series is all about.

Until episode 6, which jumped back in time to tell the Teen/Billy’s story from the start. And which was so well done that it’s retroactively made the entire series better. There weren’t any incredibly surprising reveals¹, but it all fit together perfectly, and it answered questions that I didn’t even know I had. There was way too much I liked about this episode for another “one thing I liked,” so here’s a bunch of barely-organized observations (with spoilers).

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My fiancé predicted the one returning character from WandaVision in another bit of stunt-casting, but I hadn’t seen it coming at all.

One Thing I Like About Agatha All Along and also a bonus thing

Even in the middle of super hero fatigue, the WandaVision spin-off insists that it has a reason to exist.

I could tell that I had hit my over-saturation point with promotional material for Agatha All Along when I was watching an interview with Aubrey Plaza. The interviewer mentioned Patti Lupone, and I said — out loud, even though I was alone in the room at the time — “Oh, what are you going to say? That they lived together? That they were roommates? Oh, what fun! What an unlikely pair, huh? I bet there are some zany stories that came as a result of that, I tell you!”

And I felt bad, because they seem like fine people, and it’s not their fault that YouTube and Instagram have spent years honing in on my interests to such a degree that I’m now getting practically nothing besides ads for and interviews about the series, all the time, on every possible channel. And it’s not their fault that Disney is so eager to promote the series. But what it does is really drive home the inescapable fact that the show is product.

As is every piece of commercial art. It feels like a weirdly Generation X fixation to always look for the exact point when “art” becomes “commerce,” when the reality is that they’ve always been inseparably entangled. It’s just especially noticeable with something like Agatha All Along, which is not only a spin-off series, but part of a 14-year-old, multi-billion dollar multimedia franchise. The MCU has programming slots to fill, whether or not you’ve got a groundbreaking new idea to fill it with.

That all sounds like a cynical, damning-with-faint-praise set-up, but the truth is that I’ve been enjoying Agatha All Along, and I’m pleasantly surprised. I loved WandaVision, and it’s still one of my favorite television series of all time, so I was predisposed to like the spin-off, but I was also predisposed to hold it to an impossibly high standard. From what I’ve seen so far — at the time I’m writing this, I’ve seen the first three episodes — it’s not particularly groundbreaking, but it is engaging and clever TV with a bunch of outstanding actors. Which as I understood it, was the whole point of the MCU on television.

One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 3)

Rounding out my list of my favorite things from season one of Poker Face

Previously on Spectre Collie… I couldn’t wait until I finished the season to mention more of my favorite things from each episode. Now I can finally round out the list with the last two episodes of season one.

I’d been avoiding reading anything about the series, so that every aspect of it would come as a surprise, but I’ve seen that a second season has already been ordered by Peacock, so I’ve got something to look forward to. It’s good knowing that Rian Johnson has so much cachet (and so does Natasha Lyonne) that I can be pretty confident that he’ll end the series on his own terms, instead of letting it drag on indefinitely.

Lots of unmarked spoilers, so please don’t read until you’ve finished season one!

One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 2)

Picking out more of my favorite parts from Poker Face season one

Previously on Spectre Collie… I’ve been so impressed by Poker Face that I already wanted to start calling out my favorite aspects of it even though we were only halfway through the season.

We’ve still got two episodes left, but at the rate we’re going, it’ll be a while before we can finish the season, and I’m impatient. So here are some more favorites from episodes 6-8 of a series that continues to be excellent.

Lots of spoilers throughout, so avoid reading this until you’ve watched up until episode 8.

One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 1)

Poker Face is so clever that every episode has at least one thing I love

It’s probably inaccurate to say that I’ve been “surprised” by Poker Face, since I knew I was predisposed to love it based on Rian Johnson’s involvement alone. But I have been a little surprised by how much it’s been surpassing my expectations.

I’ve got to acknowledge that I haven’t seen that much of Columbo, and I don’t remember that much about the episodes that I have seen, apart from the most basic premise (you know the murderer(s) from the start) and Peter Falk’s performance. But a huge part of what makes Poker Face feel so novel and so clever is how it’s all about manipulating the audience’s expectations and sympathies, and how it is constantly re-contextualizing what you’ve seen so far. It seems like they took the stuff I loved about Glass Onion and then spent an entire season’s worth of television exploring all the different ways you could change up or expand on the concepts.

For the first time in a very long time, I’ve been loving a series so much that I desperately wish I could write scripts for it. Are spec scripts still a thing? Do I have to resort to fan fiction?

I’ve already written about the first episode, twice, but I’ll try to keep things more focused this time. And this will only be the first part, because we’ve still only seen the first five episodes at this point. Lots of spoilers throughout; assume that you shouldn’t read any of these until you’ve watched episodes 1-5.

Just Fine (Another Thing I Like About Poker Face)

Product placement, or establishing character and mission statement through the use of brand recognition? It doesn’t matter!

I realize that it often seems like my blog posts are written by a LLM using the prompt “write about this in the style of a pretentious nerd under the influence of Ambien,” but I swear that isn’t the case. Even though, when writing about Poker Face, I did hallucinate an Agatha Christie story called Murder on the Nile.

I also evidently ignored years of teachers stressing the importance of making outlines, because I started trying to make a few observations that quickly got away from me. One of them was about how much I like Rian Johnson’s assertion of ethics and morality in his works (that I’ve seen, of course): he doesn’t seem to care much for anti-heroes or ethical ambiguity, much less outright nihilism. He makes his values abundantly clear, but without ever being so didactic that it overwhelms the entertainment.

The other was that there’s such an economy and efficiency to the first episode of Poker Face, where it reads as casual and funny on first watch, but you quickly realize that there’s hardly a single moment in the entire show that doesn’t serve a purpose.

A great example of both: in the scene between Charlie and Sterling, Jr, where he’s setting up not just their relationship but the premise of the entire series, he starts the scene by offering her a drink. When she asks what her choices are, he seems surprised by the question. They’re in the owner’s suite at the top of a casino; she can have whatever she wants. Shortly after, we see her with Heineken in a can. Later in the episode, a bartender who knows her offers her favorite, and it’s a Coors Light. (She chooses coffee instead, which has its own repercussions).

There’s so much packed into that. The question immediately puts Sterling on the defensive, which we soon learn is key to his whole character: he’s in charge of this whole place and can have anything he wants; why is she acting like his options are limited? She’s immediately found a way to change up the power dynamic, choosing to serve herself. And the thing she chooses, out of presumably a wall’s worth of expensive liquor, is a canned beer slightly fancier than the canned beer she normally drinks.

That last part is important, because it’s the core idea of the entire scene that follows. The beer, and more explicitly, the conversation that follows, are all about establishing her character as someone who genuinely appreciates the value of having enough.

One Thing I Love About Poker Face

Poker Face is really nostalgic for 1970s detective shows, but it isn’t content to be stuck in the past

It was a foregone conclusion that I was going to at least like Poker Face — I love Rian Johnson’s murder mysteries; Natasha Lyonne’s got a “presence” that makes you eager to like everything she does; it’s a revival of the Columbo-style mystery; and it’s got a long list of guest appearances from actors I like a lot, and also Adrian Brody¹. But I never got around to watching it until my ticket to Halloween Horror Nights got me a subscription to Peacock as a bonus.

(There’s no real point to that detail; it’s just a signifier of what life was like in 2023, where streaming networks and synergy within huge multimedia companies means I have to go to a theme park to watch a show I’m interested in).

I finally watched the first episode tonight, and it nails everything I expected it to. The opening titles alone were enough to set the tone, even if they hadn’t been set on top of shots of a casino seemingly stuck in a perpetual state of mid-to-late-70s-ness. It’s a perfect setting for a series concept that itself seems to be stuck halfway in the past.

The main character suggests a call back to Jim Rockford — mostly in her sense of humor in the face of being constantly targeted by bad guys and misfortune — and of course, the format calls back to Columbo. But calling it just an homage would be selling it short. You could make a very, very good pastiche of 1970s detective series. Or you could take the premise of “the audience knows the killer(s) from the start,” and experiment with it in loads of interesting ways. Poker Face does both, breaking down its inspirations into their component parts, and then using them to make something new.

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To be fair, he has to play a reprehensible sleazebag in the first episode, and he sells it so well, it’s as if it comes naturally to him.

One Thing I Like About Ahsoka

The live-action continuation of an animated series somehow managed to feel bigger on the inside

Watching The Mandalorian often felt a little unsettling, because it was so overwhelmingly my thing. Not that I was being targeted, but that the people who grew up around the same time I did had finally been put in charge of Star Wars productions. The closing credits really drove the feeling home, feeling simultaneously like a call out to the concept art by Ralph McQuarrie that I had hanging up on my bedroom wall, and TV series from the 1970s like The Wild Wild West that had a near-subliminal impact on my aesthetic.

Ahsoka was not that. It was completely, unapologetically, made for fans of The Clone Wars and Rebels, rewarding them for their loyalty with live action versions of their favorite characters.

I didn’t dislike those series, and in fact there’s a lot of aspects about them that I love, from the stylized character designs reminiscent of Thunderbirds, to the storylines that delivered on jetpack-wearing Mandalorians totally kicking ass years before The Mandalorian season one. But I could never really get into the series, either. Several times I’ve attempted to get caught up on both of them, but I never last more than a few episodes.

As a result, I could recognize a lot of what Ahsoka is doing, but I spend the whole time extremely aware that it’s not speaking to me as it would a super-fan.

Subverting the Thing

Barbie, David Letterman, and the impossibility of being a mass-market radical

I didn’t like the Barbie movie very much, but I can’t stress enough how much that doesn’t matter. I didn’t dislike it, because it’s got some really good performances by actors who understood the assignment completely, a couple of stand-out gags¹, and it works pretty well as a modern homage to so many classic fantasy movies that inspired it. In that interview with director and co-writer Greta Gerwig, she mentions Barbie greeting Astronaut Barbies and saying “Yay, space!” and it really is a fantastic, charming moment.

The most clever thing about the trailers for the movie was the tagline that went something like “If you love Barbie, you’ll love this movie. If you hate Barbie, you’ll love this movie.” It might simply be that I’ve never had a strong opinion about Barbie one way or the other, so I couldn’t get into this movie. But it’s a toy company spending tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to deliver an honest and earnest message about feminism to as wide an audience as possible, so what could possibly be the problem?

My biggest issue with it isn’t that it’s bad, but that it was so on-the-nose that I never felt like I had anything to engage with. It was two hours of characters always saying exactly what was on their minds, explicitly delivering a message that I already agreed with. Everything that seemed like an original or clever twist on the basic premise (which I’d already seen on SNL, to be honest) had already been given away in the inescapable torrent of marketing for the movie.

It’d be churlish and hypocritical to be too critical of anything I thought was “just fine overall,” much less one that explicitly comments how the patriarchy demands that women be exceptional just to be recognized as having any worth at all.² I don’t actually have any strong opinions about the movie, but about the idea that it was subversive.

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Especially the narrator’s voice-over about how appropriate it was to cast Margot Robbie
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And especially when a bunch of dipshits have tried to leverage Mattel’s marketing budget to take their own idiotic potshots in their own stupid attempt at a culture war.

Being Reminded of Sarah Marshall

Nostalgia for a nostalgic TV series from the early 2000s is making me nostalgic for a rewind to the early 2000s.

Last week I was forced out of retirement to re-explain the end of How I Met Your Mother to people on YouTube who just didn’t get it, man. That re-awakened my long-dormant fandom for the series, which has had the side effect of waking up every morning the past few days with “Let’s Go To The Mall” going through my head¹.

I honestly can’t tell if it’s ironic or completely predictable that a series all about nostalgia has triggered a fierce nostalgia in me for the early 2000s. And I’d never made the connection before, but that period — from around 2003 to around 2008 — was the time before Twitter really took off.

To be honest, I probably overestimate the impact Twitter had on pop culture, and we were all headed towards being cynical, pedantic, self-righteous, and bitter anyway. But I still get super-strong feelings of “They couldn’t make a show like that nowadays!” when I think about the early seasons of How I Met Your Mother.

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In the running with “the cake is a lie” as one of those brilliant pop culture ideas that got ruined by excessive repetition