My Favorite Pop Culture Things from 2024

Hey, everyone, sorry I haven’t been around for a couple months. After early November Darkness took me and I strayed out of thought and time, yada yada yada, still freaking out and will probably be mid-key anxious for the rest of my fucking life anyway let’s talk about the stuff I actually liked in 2024.

Spoilers for The Acolyte. Every other topic is safe.

The Giedi Prime Scenes in Dune: Part Two

If you were around last year you’d know that I was absolutely going to be a lazy asshole and not do a year end review for 2023, but then I saw the second Dune movie and immediately knew I wanted to include Giedi Prime in my 2024 list and I thought leaving 2023 out would be the weirder thing to do. So here we are.

In the World of Dune (coming to Universal Studios Epic Universe Park in Orlando, Florida in 2028 (probably)), Giedi Prime is the home planet of House Harkonnen, a group of people genetically modified by space witches over hundreds of generations to be criminally insane feet. The planet orbits that black hole sun I’ve been hearing about my entire life so the color schema of the planet is super fucked in the best way possible.

The coolest thing about these scenes is that in a world of CGI slop, these visuals were achieved with the camera filming in black and white and using infrared lighting and filters. I’m not usually much of a camera and lens nerd, but I do appreciate when film makers use literally any technique besides overworked-underpaid computer lackies to make their movies look cool.

The Oscars Actually Mostly Worked This Year

I’ve got two theories on this:

  1. I’ve aged into the demographic that finds this collection of quickly written banters performed by half-drunk and half-over it actors reading it for the first time actually funny, OR
  2. You, as an attendee and nominee of the Oscars, literally cannot spend the entire night being as stuffy, intense, and extremely invested in the ‘aht of the crahft’ as you usually are at these things when you have the threat of an “I’m Just Ken” performance breaking out at literally any moment. You’ve heard the announcement, you know it’s going to happen, but you don’t know when. What if you’re tagged to present something, and you go up there, and you’re very serious, and you’re very stiff, and you did a fine enough job even if it wasn’t great, and the very second you are off the stage Ryan Gosling is lowered down from the ceiling in tiny pink underwear? Do you really want to be known as ‘oh, yeah, didn’t she make a really stilted speech about the history of gaffers in Hollywood right before Simu Liu high-kicked her in the face?”

Everyone seemed to be a little more relaxed than usual at these shows. I watch The Oscars every year because I love pretty dresses and cringe in equal measure but this is the first year there were multiple clips I was sending to my friends and family who don’t watch because they were actually funny instead of just ‘wtf’ funny. Other clips I think still hold up are Arnold and Danny DeVito, John Mulaney Vamping about Field of Dreams, and The Streaking Bit.

What the Fuck is Happening With Movies??

I don’t know if the kids even have this anymore – I’m guessing ‘no’ because this feels like a very cable-specific phenomenon – but back in the days of broadcast television everyone had a handful of movies that they wouldn’t actively seek out but if they were flipping through stations at one in the afternoon on a Sunday and found it, they had to watch it. Seriously, if you’re too young to remember life before streaming, find an older family member who watches a lot of TV and ask them if they had a movie like that and I can almost guarantee you they’re going to make a short list and furthermore Con Air is going to be on that list.

One of my movies was Twister, the 1996 weather action romp starring Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. I don’t have a firm number on how many times I’ve seen this movie but I can assure you it’s in the double digits. I even have a stuffed cow named Bill Paxton I purchased at “Twister…Ride it Out” at Universal Studios Orlando when I was eighteen. So when I heard they were making a sequel and calling it Twisters I Was Seated.

So, like, I can recognize that this was way too much hype for an okay movie from almost thirty years ago and figured if I saw the sequel in theaters it was just going to be me and the thirty or so other people who also had Twisters on their Must Watch on Cable list. Imagine my surprise when I went with a friend to a four-thirty showing on a Tuesday two weeks after the movie had released and the theater was almost sold out. According to Box Office Mojo it ended up making $370 million dollars worldwide, like, fucking damn, man, I honestly did not think there was that much demand for tornadoes and Glen Powell and so, so, so much country music oh my gahhhhd I’m so glad my husband didn’t come or fifteen minutes in he would have walked out of the theater and directly into traffic. The first movie did not have country music. It barely had music at all. It had some Tori Amos on the radio and that was fucking it.

I don’t have a thesis on what it says about what audiences want these days, I was just astounded at how many people not only showed up to this weird sequel but also seemed to be having a good time. If I had to guess I think a major part of it was this was a movie that didn’t exactly require homework. Sure, it’s a sequel, but there’s no lore. It’s not like you had to remember the name of Bill Paxton’s character. I certainly don’t, and I have seen that movie at least two dozen times!

Long series are great but I’m starting to think the average movie goer is yearning for an experience that lasts two hours and then fucking ends.

The Sith Reveal in The Acolyte

Still bummed this one got cancelled because while it wasn’t great I still think it was better than The Book of Boba Fett or even the later seasons of The Mandalorian and Mando is still going and I don’t think we’ll ever get more of that Boba Fett show but it wasn’t ever officially cancelled and while I don’t think the only reason the show got cancelled is because of the culture war chuds on the internet whining about black women and lesbians it’s really hard to think that didn’t have an impact.

ANYWAY, enough about that.

I’d heard Manny Jacinto, aka Jason from The Good Place, was cast in one of the earliest announcements, and I was very excited because I wanted to see what Jacinto could do besides Jason. Imagine my disappointment when he’s introduced on the show as Qimir, drunken shopkeeper friend of one of our main protagonists Mae. While he’s not doing Jason exactly, Qimir has a lighthearted, nervous energy that’s not not like Jason. He is once again a sort of bumbling sidekick, doing his best to keep up with a situation that is clearly out of his grasp.

Meanwhile, the show was clearly making a mystery out of the identity of Mae’s ‘Master,’ obviously building up to a big reveal, and around episode three I jokingly said to my husband, ‘what’s if it’s Qimir?’ And we laugh and laughed and laughed.

And then episode five happened.

As far as I’m concerned, everything about his reveal works. I am now completely convinced they cast Manny Jacinto banking on the fact that people would think he got cast as Qimir because of his role as Jason Mendoza, and I fucking love it when movies and television use our preconceived notions of an actor and their roles against us.

Furthermore, the whole scene fucks hard. I’ve seen people point to this scene in derision because yes, at one point there are like ten Jedi and they all get their lightsabers out and it looks like a European EDM festival. But these people are missing the part where, immediately after, Mr. Sith Qimir Stranger Arms kills all but one of them. He’s introduced not like a villain in a Star War, but like a monster in a horror movie. He comes up behind them, floating down from the trees with those plucky violins horror soundtracks love to use. One of the Jedi breathlessly asks, “What is that?” And even when they figure out it’s just a dude in a FUCKED UP mask with a lightsaber they’re still terrified because at this point in the Star Wars timeline the Jedi have become so ensconced in their own bureaucratic bullshit they don’t even know what Sith are anymore.

The editing of the scenes leads you to believe that the two Jedi we’ve met previously and are obviously important to the show will survive but fucking PSYCH. Now they’re dead, too. The mask gets knocked off and we finally get introduced to the real version of this dude and for half a second he switches back to Qimir and you get to see how different the performances are and then he uses that half a second as a distraction and it’s all great. It’s fucking great.

AND THEN the entire show turns into a fucked up Wuthering Heights-esque “we can make each other worse” romance where Qimir, who previously had only expressed polite, professional interest in Mae, is immediately down bad for her identical twin sister Osha and is determined to have her as his Sith Padawan or whatever but also to just have her and invites her to be evil while slanging dong in a tide pool and somehow she manages to turn that down but later when he presents her with the option of killing her previous Jedi Master who’s also mostly responsible for killing her real family she flips the fuck out and her rage and hatred turn her kyber crystal red in front of our eyes and I know this show has its flaws but God Fucking Damn It this is some of the best Star Wars shit I’ve seen in years.

Gojira at the Olympics Opening Ceremonies

Based on what I’ve seen on the internet since it looks like I’m in the minority in generally not liking the opening ceremony. Okay, I’m in the minority because I didn’t like and it wasn’t because I was superficially offended by some sort of Drag Last Supper which – surprise – wasn’t supposed to be the Last Supper at all.

I didn’t like the opening ceremonies because it felt all over the place. Literally. Scattering all the performances across Paris is interesting in theory but in practice the only thing I really felt was the loss of focus. I also hated the countries coming in on boats. I don’t know, maybe I don’t like change.

The only section of the Opening Ceremonies I actually loved was fucking Gojira.

We were having a Watch Party and spent most of it going back and forth between making fun of it and not really paying attention, and as soon as the guitars started my brother in law, who had been paying, like, 15% attention the entire time, immediately perked up and went, “Holy shit, is that Gojira?” and then stood entranced at the back room for the entire three minutes until it was over, at which point he stopped caring again.

Dirt Man

Dirt Man

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

I don’t usually include books on this list because I’m usually not reading new releases and also books don’t feel like pop culture moments unless they’re fucking huge like Harry Potter or Twilight.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is the best book I read all year and it’s not even close. It was chosen for my book club back in, like, July, and we never actually had the book club meeting about it (we are a bad book club) which is a shame because I want to talk to literally everyone I meet about this book. It’s so far removed from any of my own life experiences but so compelling I felt every memory and emotion. Everything from the story to the prose to the ending is a genuine delight and I can’t believe it’s a debut novel. I’m going to be keeping an eye on Kaveh Akbar in the future. Please check this one out.

Count Orlok’s voice in Nosferatu

This one should probably be in next year’s list but it came out Christmas Day 2024 and I want to talk about it right the hell now so fuck it.

I know people talk about actors disappearing into roles but my sister and brother in law went into this movie completely blind and didn’t know Bill Skarsgard was Count Orlok until the end credits. Obviously this has much to do with the amount of prosthetics and mustache he’s in, but also that fucking voice. I’m no musical type person but to my ear it sounded an entire octave lower than how Skarsgard usually talks, and is completely unrecognizable as him. Like, he put on a different voice for Pennywise for the IT movies, but you can still hear him in there. For Orlok I was questioning whether they had someone else dub him, Darth Vader style.

Nope! And it wasn’t done in post either. Apparently the man trained with an opera singer to be able to achieve that deep growl, and then had to do twenty minutes of warm ups every day and do vocal exercises like Mongolian throat singing between takes to keep his vocal cords where they needed to be.

This is directly related to something I was bitching about to my husband recently. We rewatched Little Shop of Horrors and then I went to the IMDB trivia page and there were dozens of little tidbits of how they worked the Audrey II puppet and, like, not to be an Old Man Yelling at Clouds, but with movies nowadays, the answer to ‘Wow, how did they do that?’ is almost always computers and that just fucking sucks. It’s so boring.

So to find out Skarsgard’s voice was not modulated in post and he, in fact, just worked his ass off to achieve the effect is exactly the sort of movie making I’m here for.

Between Dune Part Two and Nosferatu, I guess my Favorite Thing from 2024 was “Movies Made by People Who Actually Want to Make Movies.”

How Real is Realism?

I don’t know how I’m supposed to pay attention to anything at all this week so here’s me bitching about Disney and the MCU again before I shutter my house and hide in the basement until this election is over, however long that may take.

Maybe You Should Watch Agatha All Along

I was initially skeptical of this show because I thought we were doing this simply because that “Agatha All Along” song from WandaVision got big on the internet for a few weeks and Disney decided that meant people desperately wanted an entire show about Agatha Harkness and I don’t know if you’ve noticed but Hollywood is still Not Very Good at understanding the intricate relationship between Internet Popularity and Actual Popularity (see: It’s Morbin Time).

But it’s obvious in hindsight this show was written by people who actually had a story to tell with these characters. It’s a direct spin-off to WandaVision but otherwise doesn’t require any more MCU homework and besides a few little things in the last episode doesn’t really connect to the wider universe at all which is fucking refreshing. The casting is fantastic – Kathryn Hahn and Aubrey Plaza and Patti Lupone are of course perfect but honestly the standout to me was Sasheer Zamata as Jennifer Kale, who I have not seen in anything since she left SNL and now need to see her in so much more. And I honest to goodness thought I would go to my grave at ninety-three still being queerbaited by the MCU, but this is, in fact, the gayest thing Disney has made so far and the representation is so pivotal to the plot I can’t imagine how they would edit around it to air it in more homophobic markets.

It’s also, somehow, the cheapest show Disney has made for the MCU so far. By a lot. Reportedly the budget for the show was $40 million total. As opposed to Loki which cost $23 million per episode, and that fucking terrible Secret Invasion show which cost $224.3 million and almost all of my goodwill for killing off Maria Hill for absolutely no good reason.

This links back to Twitter I am so sorry.

I say ‘somehow the cheapest’ but honestly you can tell just by looking at it. And that’s a very good thing.

Down The Witches Road, But Not Too Far. We Only Built Thirty Yards Of It.

The plot of Agatha All Along follows Agatha Harkness who collects a coven of fellow witches to walk the Witches’ Road, which will all give them something they need if the successfully navigate the trials. Now, the trials are all done in different house-shaped sets – easy to build for realism or to film in an actual house – but the Road between the trials is paved with colorful leaves through a dark, night time wood. And at no point does it feel like the actors are in the actual woods. It’s a set. It’s all sets.

Now this does, in fact, have a plot-related reason, but what I’m saying is that even if it didn’t, having the entire Road constructed with obvious sets is perfectly fine. Better, in fact, than forcing all the actors into the woods in the middle of the night and leaving them to catch pneumonia while gaffers fiddle with background green screens and lighting set ups, and for two reasons:

  1. It’s not a real road in the woods, it’s the Witches’ Road. A magical road. It should look a little off from reality.
  2. It’s not a real road in the woods, it’s a television show. Even if there was no magic in the show, no reason for the artifice, even if it was supposed to be regular women walking down a regular dirt path in the regular fucking woods, I would accept that it looked like sets on a soundstage because I do not expect absolute realism from television and I don’t think anyone else should, either.

Also: the Road sets were gorgeous. The sort of gorgeous you could not achieve attempting realism in actual damp woods. There’s a scene midway through the show where the witches take to their brooms and fly over the road and it doesn’t look real, but it does look perfect. It’s very reminiscent of the broom-flying scenes in Hocus Pocus and probably done the same way, and the fact that it’s not CGI’d to hell to convince me that Patti Lupone is fifty feet in the air on top of a sturdy branch doesn’t take any of the emotion away from the scene.

I Think Sometimes Producers in Hollywood Forget Broadway Is Still a Thing

Or, like, what about community theater? What about stage plays in the days of Shakespeare when all of the sets and costumes were made out of straw and wood? What about old epics where someone would just sit on a stool in the middle of an empty stage and tell a story? What about fucking reading, where all that’s literally, actually happening is words on a page?

Humans do not need absolute reality to become involved in a story. I actually think total realism in movies, television shows, and video games should be nothing more than a curiosity. Like 3D movies or those theaters where the seats rumble for some reason. Like, yeah, it was fun the first few times when the de-aged actors for a couple-minute flashback, but now we’re just actively resurrecting the dead because we want Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia back? I don’t know if you kids remember, but back in my day when we wanted to flashback to a time when the character was younger, we just pancaked the shit out of the actor’s face with makeup and put them in a bad wig, or hired someone else altogether. And it worked. Because humans are fully capable of playing along with artifice as long as the story is good.

Yes, I Am Still Bitter About The Acolyte

The official line from Disney is that this show got cancelled because it cost too much money but my brothers in Christ you are the ones who decided how much to spend. Yeah, I know just by its nature a show that takes place in space on multiple planets is going to cost more than something that takes place on earth but like…does it really have to? We have a long history of Star Trek shows where a variety of alien planets looked suspiciously liked the deserts outside of Los Angeles. Or just, you know, soundstages.

Yeah, sure, go all over the planet if you’re making a movie but if it’s a television show, especially one you’re not super confident about, fuck it. Do it all in Hollywood. Or Orlando, if you even still actually use Hollywood Studios to film anything. Build a ship set, a Jedi Temple set, and a set for where those space witches lived, I forget what it was. Did you know you can build those sets right next to each other in the same building and, through the magic of filmmaking, your viewers won’t know? Did you know California has beaches? And forests? Did you know if you film in a normal California forest but tell me it’s a forest on another planet I’ll believe you for the story’s sake?

You do not need to spend a billion dollars to convince me your show takes place in Middle Earth, just film somewhere pretty and tell me it’s in Middle Earth and I’ll believe you because I specifically showed up for a story that takes place in Middle Earth and I understand that Middle Earth is not a real place so as long as you know that I know that all of this play-pretend we can continue on with this farce.

I don’t know, I’m just complaining to keep my mind off things, but it seems like everyone in Hollywood has fallen into this belief that everything has to be 100% realistic to keep the audience watching and honestly that feels a little insulting. Like if we notice the alien is actually just a working actor in a rubber mask we’re going to become confused and start crying and turn the television off.

Zen and the Art of Organization

I don’t have either. No Zen. No chill. What I do have is clutter, everywhere, all the time.

It appears around me, I don’t even really know how.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness. I appear to be a child of purgatory.

I spend a Saturday going to that holiest of holy place: The Container Store. My office closet is in a derelict state that would make even the calmest monk gnash their teeth. It is the source of chaos in my life and it must be tamed. I pick and choose the weapons of mass construction. I take too much. The things that I pack into the back of my SUV will not fit into my closet alone, let alone with all of the chaotic detritus already there. It is okay, I convince myself. I will keep the receipt and return what doesn’t work. I tithe. I leave.

Three months later, after tripping over the pile of containers for the thirty-ninth time as I enter my office I realize I must begin. It is a Tuesday. I must wait.

Three Sundays later, it finally happens.

I put on music. I turn off my phone. I set about correctly the insanity of this office closet. It is Bedlam inside, and the patients are unused office supplies, unread books, papers and receipts and invoices of services long since rendered, tchotchkes, oh the tchotchkes, so many fucking tchotchkes. I rip out the old set of shelves, dusty and insufficient for my purposes. I am not just fixing this closet. I am fixing my life. I am attaining Nirvana.

It takes me all day. It is dark when I am done. But it is done. I can feel it.

I did it.

My closet is in order.

And so is my life.

In the next few weeks I float on a cloud. Everything is perfect. Everything has been fixed. My gutters? No longer clogged. My check engine light? Like it was never on. My hair falls perfectly and my houseplants stay watered and people stare at me as they pass me on the street. They can tell. They wish it for themselves. When people ask at work I toss a hand in the air to indicate it was nothing (even though it was everything). I tell me they can do it, too, it’s really not that hard once you set your mind to it. But I make sure my tone tells them that, in fact, it is hard, so hard only I could ever pull it off and I really don’t think they can do it.

I have heard that tone plenty.

My friends, my coworkers, even people on the subway, they all try to get close to me. To touch me without noticing. They want that holy spirit to rub off on them. To get a little piece, just enough to fix their own closets. I see others like myself. Perfect closets, perfect minds. We give each other little nods as we pass, secure in our holiness.

Pride goeth before destruction and all that.

It takes three weeks and five days for it all to fall apart. I open my perfect office closet and take a stapler from its designated spot in its designated bin. I staple as I walk back to my desk and absently leave the stapler on the edge, almost ready to fall.

It has begun again.

I can pretend I have Zen for a while. I can fake it. I cannot make it. The closet slowly falls apart as I do not put things back where they are supposed to be. Things clutter up and my eyes skip over them, betraying me. I am, always, thinking of something else.

I don’t notice my fall from grace until I trip over a pile of books. Books that should be on a shelf. A specific shelf I know exactly. A shelf currently covered with the scissors, the stapler, the paper receipt from the mechanic, and a little figurine shaped like a cow. All of these things have proper places, too, but there other things there, and so on, and so forth.

My life crumbled around me and I didn’t even notice.

The next day my hair falls flat and my check engine light comes back on and all my houseplants die. It’s over. I was in the sun, but I flew too close. I sit miserably on the subway, not making eye contact. Everyone is squished on the other end of the car. My vibes are no longer desirable.

I go home. I try to make an easy one pan, five ingredient chicken dish and it turns into a Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza in front of my eyes. I eat it in the kitchen next to the pile of paint cans I bought two weeks ago, the walls still lined in painters tape.

I will never belong to higher order.

Nurse Lynette

Names changed to protect the innocent. Me. I’m the innocent one here.

I don’t usually talk about when I was a nurse on this site for a few reasons. I don’t really feel like I have any good stories. Sure, I have the sort of juicy stories to tell at parties all nurses do, but nothing that has enough meat or meaning to be worth writing out. And of course, even if I did, there’s HIPAA. Sure, these stories are all years ago and could be told without locations or names but there’s still some part of me that will be forever paranoid that someone would sleuth it all out. I also feel like a lot of people want nurse stories to paint nurses as either heroes or villains, the pure saint giving of herself so the sick children might live or the high school mean girl who only became a nurse to continue to be mean to the defenseless. And I don’t have any stories like that because – surprise – nurses aren’t villains and they aren’t angels among us, they’re just people.

I mean, this is about a bitch, but I’m not saying all nurses are bitches. If they were, then Lynette wouldn’t have stood out so much.

I worked nightshift in a step-down because I liked the quiet. To be clear: the patients were not the ‘quiet’ part. Dayshift nurses who have never worked a nightshift all secretly believe that nightshift has it easier than they do because the patients all go to sleep promptly after the 2100 med pass and only wake up in time for the 0600 vitals. This is bullshit. Nobody sleeps in a hospital, especially on a unit inches away from the ICU. We have to wake them up for vitals and usually more meds around midnight. Sometimes we’re in and out hanging antibiotics every other hour. Most of my patients were on “as-needed” pain meds, and they needed them as soon as they were allowed to have them, whether that was eight pm or three in the morning. And then there’s just the general sleeplessness and anxiety of being sick enough to be in the hospital. Nobody sleeps.

Nightshift is quieter because everybody else in the hospital was gone. Doctors. Physical therapy. Occupational therapy. Nurse navigators. Management. Most family members. They’d dim the hallway lights around eight o’clock and then for the most part the hospital was humming on neutral, just the occasional IV alarm and the sounds of The Golden Girls and The First 48 reruns wafting out of patients rooms. Then the hallway lights would get turned on again around six in the morning and you’d know it was time to make sure you’d done everything possible for your patient and to get ready for the most stressful part of the day: report.

God, I hated report. Especially toward the end of my time, when they started insisting on bedside report. I get that they wanted patients to be more informed, but Jesus Christ, most of our patients were confused, and the ones who weren’t were usually at least trying to sleep and didn’t want to hear all about how much their body currently hated them at 7:03 in the morning.

As with every job, there were dayshift nurses I loved giving report to, and the ones I hated.

Jennifer would start doing her morning vitals and assessment with each patient as you were giving report, something she was supposed to do later, when report was done, when you the nightshift nurse were happily in your car going the fuck home. Actually, after about a year of working with Jennifer on opposite shifts she transferred to nightshift. When her move was announced one of the dayshift nurses smirkingly asked me, are you excited for Jennifer to join you on nights?

And I answered honestly, actually, yeah, I really like Jennifer except for giving her report. Which I guess you guys will get to do now.

The dayshift nurse had not considered this. Her smirk was gone.

There was Agnes, who was your classic, and what about this surgery they had in 2007? Like, I don’t know fucking know, Agnes, that was a hernia repair and they’re currently here for heart failure so it didn’t feel relevant, do you want to know when their next sotalol is due or not?

Oh, and Maria, who showed up to her shift directly at seven and wouldn’t take report from you until she had looked her patients up. For everyone who isn’t a nurse: it was expected that you would show up fifteen to twenty minutes prior to the shift change so you could look up your patient  before getting report from the exhausted nurse who only wants to wash off the hospital and go to sleep. Eventually we all just started giving her report anyway as she furiously tried to ignore us in favor of looking through the patients’ chart.

And then there was Lynette.

Lynette was just mean. That’s kind of the long and short of it. Well, she was mean, and she thought she was the best nurse on the planet. Giving her report was basically her searching through your entire twelve hour shift to find something she could complain about.

You gave this antibiotic half an hour late, now my whole day is going to be thrown off.

Why wasn’t a second IV started on this patient? What do you mean ‘their veins are all blown and the IV team couldn’t get them either?’ Great, now I’m going to have to deal with it.

These fluids should be running at 100 mL an hour, not 75! Everything is ruined.

Stuff like that. Every. Single. Time. Little stuff. Stuff we all notice the previous nurse might have done but have the good graces to realize it wasn’t actually an emergency and just fix it after they left. But no. Not with Lynette. Lynette was going to point out every single mistake, every single time, until you walked off the unit to your car with tears in your eyes.

At least I did. I’m not a very confrontational person, it’s part of the reason I stopped being a floor nurse. Medicine really brings in people who think its perfectly okay to berate co-workers in public. I once got screamed at over the phone for five full minutes by a doctor who then demanded to speak to my charge and tried to have me written up, all because I, a nurse on the liver unit, couldn’t tell him the names of the cardiac units in literally one of the biggest hospitals in the United States, when it didn’t matter because all I had to write in the order was ‘transfer to cardiac unit’ and our unit secretary would have figured it out.

It’s probably misogyny, yet again, that nurses can get the ‘high school mean girls’ label when most of the nurses I worked with were kind and supportive while at the same time most of the doctors I worked with were raging assholes and they get all the excuses for their behavior.

All that said I still hated Lynette. I feared her. I wished every day that she would just quit or transfer out, and every morning I would hold my breath looking at the dayshift schedule to see if I had to talk to her.

One time I got her good. I took a patient from her knowing full well she was back the next day. I get a call from the patient’s doctor two hours into the shift telling me he wants to do a bedside procedure the next morning and needs a bunch of stuff ready. Knowing this was exactly the sort of thing that would make all of the snakes growing on Lynette’s head in lieu of hair stand straight up, I went to fucking work. As soon as the orders were in I called the pharmacy to get all of the medications the doctors would need. I figured out exactly what syringes and such were required and I got it all together and put it in a med bag and put the med bag in the patient’s bin in the medication cabinet.

Of course, as soon as I told Lynette about the doctor wanting to do the procedure bedside her eyes fell out of her skull and her snakes all passed out. She put her eyes back in and dear lord the venom. Her snakes were ready to strike. She was going to kill me for the sin of having a patient who needed care from the both of us. Shame. SHAME.

Until I showed her in the med cabinet where all the supplies were neatly waiting for her and told her all she had to do was fetch the bag when the doctor showed up. She of course examined every vial, the syringes, everything, to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Which I fucking hadn’t.

The pinched look on her face made me giggle the entire way home.

It didn’t fix anything between us. She was a still a bitch and I was still afraid of her. One morning I found out I had to give her report on a single patient and I immediately showed my charge nurse my FitBit. My heartrate had jumped up to 115 bpm. For a while I refused to give her report, but then so many of us refused that all of that went out the window and we were back in the mix.

The hospital would never fire her because besides all this, she was a good nurse.

Or was she?

I said that to one of the other nightshift nurses once. She’s a monster, but at least she’s a good nurse. As far as I could tell none of that venom and ire was ever pointed at her patients.

But this nightshift nurse looked at me with so much incredulity, and then said something that still sticks with me.

She’s not a good nurse. Being a good nurse means having a good relationship with your co-workers, it means being able to communicate without having a tone in your voice all the time. If we’re all afraid of giving her report, then she’s not getting a good report. She’s not a good nurse.

I never thought of it that way, and now I can’t stop thinking of anything that way. We make such hay in movies and television of the professional who is so intelligent, so skilled in his field, that everyone just sort of has to ignore the fact that he also has a shit personality. Like Gregory House or Tony Stark. And that makes for good drama, but I don’t think it works in reality. I think my friend was right. If you can’t talk to other people, especially other people in your field, with decency and respect, then I don’t think you’re actually good at that thing.

A Little Something Stuck in Your Head

“Oh, my God, you guys,” Jenny said, her syllables long and slurred as she spoke directly into her latest mimosa. “We don’t do this enough!”

It was the third time she’d said it in half an hour. Her friends had all been matching her on mimosas – they were bottomless, after all, and they were going to get their money’s worth, damn it – and so none of them noticed or cared. They all just cooed back the same responses of ‘of course’ and ‘ohmygod yes’ and ‘totally.’

This was part of the ritual. They only ever managed to get all four of them together for something roughly once every three months. Seeing each other more frequently was not for lack of trying, but for a profound excess of other things they had to do. Work travel. Home maintenance. Out of their nine collective children there were eight different sports, and at the moment not a single one of them could remember which ones their kids participated in.

“Mmm, okay, so, like, here’s another one,” Angie said, waving at the waiter for another pitcher. Thirty minutes earlier they had gotten onto the topic of weird conversation starters and had since been trying to think of all the ones they had ever heard before and then answer them. So far the fan favorite was, ‘Out of all your past lives, which one do you regret the most?”

Once the waiter had dropped the pitcher in the middle of the table like a zookeeper tossing enrichment into a pen and fled for his life, Angie continued.

“Everybody gets songs stuck in their heads, right? Well, have you ever gotten just, like, a word or a phrase stuck in your head?”

The ladies were all blissfully quiet for a few seconds as they forced their champers-soaked neurons to spark. The other unfortunate customers who had elected to sit out on the patio, not knowing what they were in for, all breathed a tentative sigh of a relief.

“Oh!” Kayleigh said with a clap of her hands, causing the grandmother one table over to jump in surprise and fling the butter she’d been trying to spread onto her granddaughter’s face. “I’ve got one.”

She looked around conspiratorially, her head swinging from side to side, and then leaned into the table. The others leaned in to, Deborah unaware of dropping some of her hair directly into the remaining hollandaise sauce on her plate.

“When I was a teenager, after I learned the word…” Here her voice dropped to a barely audible whisper because no matter how drunk she was she was still a mother and vaguely aware of the children sitting nearby. “…cunnilingus…oh, my god, I couldn’t get my brain to stop thinking it! I’d be in the middle of a calculus test and every time I couldn’t think of an answer my brain would just start chanting it!”

The others were all already laughing, barely hearing the rest of her story.

“But why?” Jenny wailed.

“I don’t know! It just got jammed in there! I wasn’t even thinking of, like, the concept. The act. Just the word. All day long.”

Angie snapped her fingers. “Oh, yeah, I know mine! It’s ‘baby shark!’”

“That doesn’t count, that’s a song!” Kayleigh just about screamed. She realized other tables were staring and brought herself back down a few pegs. “That’s a song, you said no songs.”

“No, but, like, when it gets in my head it isn’t the song. It’s just, I don’t know, the other day I walked into the boys’ room after I asked them to clean and instead of it being, you know, clean, they had instead decided to have a clothes fight and had flung all of their clothes in their dresser and closet literally everywhere, and while I went to go find them to tell them they were about to be introduced to Marie Kondo my brain just kept chanting baby shark baby shark baby shark baby shark. No singing. Just like that.”

All of the women spent the next few minutes talking over each other, trying to decide if the boys’ room or a mutinous brain chanting baby shark on repeat was worse.

“Okay, wait, me next, me next,” Deborah said, waving her hand around. “It’s this weird phrase that’s popped into my head all my life, I don’t know why! It goes-”

Deborah’s normally soft, breathy voice was replaced by something too gravelly, too deep, too inhuman to be coming from the five-two dental hygienist.

“ THE END IS FAST COMING, THE TIME OF DARKNESS IS NIGH, REPENT YOUR SINS BEFORE THE WORLD IS CONSUMED IN FIRE.”

Then Deborah giggled and downed her mimosa. “Isn’t that the funniest?” she asked in her normal voice.

The rest of the women stared at her, immediately sober. The rest of the patio was staring at her, too, unable to ignore the voice that had issued out of her. Even a few of the tables inside were peering through the window.

Deborah looked around, embarrassed. “Is that one too weird?”

Jenny made a face. “Girl, what the fuck?”

Prophecy

The baby Holly burbled in her little chair as she tried to cram her little wooden horse into her mouth. The mother, Sunny, sang to her quietly as she did the dishes. And the witches of the house, Esther, Ethyl, and Miriam, were brewing a horrible potion, doing her stitching, and napping upstairs, respectively.

Sunny had come to the witches out of desperation, although not the particular kind they were used to. She had been done up by the son of a noble, who had then declared that any child growing inside Sunny had nothing to do with him. And who was to argue with the son of a noble? Certainly not her parents, who decided if their daughter could not give them the name of the father – never mind that she had, repeatedly, at the top of her throat – then the child was obviously of the devil’s, and they would have no spawn under their roof.

“Where would I go?” Sunny had asked before they had closed the door on her for good.

“The convent is a day’s walk in that direction,” her father had pointed. And then, with a smirk, had pointed the other way. “Or you could go to the Stellae Sisters. I’m sure they’d take in a child of their master.”

Deciding that a convent was no place to raise a baby, let alone a place she wanted to spend all of her time, Sunny had gathered up her things and walked to the Stellae.

“Well, she ain’t a child of the devil,” Esther had said months later with a cackle, holding the newborn out to the exhausted new mother. “Doesn’t have the old goat’s eyes.”

Sunny always wanted to show the witch’s her appreciation by joining them, learning something, working for the family business, as it were. But no matter how much she tried she couldn’t pull off even the simplest parlor trick. She paid back the kindness by keeping house and giving angry locals the runaround.

“Sunny,” Esther said, staring at her ingredients rack in the corner of the kitchen. “Mind getting me more mustard seed the next time you’re in market?”

“Oh, Aunt Esther, I already did.” Sunny crossed the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. “Did I misplace it? Or dream it? Ah, no, here we are.”

She plucked the packet from where it had fallen behind the shelf.

“Mind reader,” Esther said. “Hiding magic again, are we?”

It was a joke between them, one that Sunny pretended didn’t sting. She would do magic. If she could.

“Sisters! Oh, sisters!”

Miriam came down the stairs, half running, half falling, one hand holding up her gown and the hand on the wall holding up her. Esther put down the mustard, and Ethyl, who had been dozing herself over her stitching, woke up with a start and half-flung her work onto the floor.

“What is it, Miriam?”

“Sunny, get the paper and the inkwell, quick!” Miriam pulled herself up to full height, ignoring the way her thin hair pointed in every direction known to man and some only known to the occult. “I have heard…a prophecy.”

While Sunny ducked into the side nook to find the paper and quill, Esther quickly put her things away and Ethyl clapped her hands in front of her.

“Oh, a prophecy! Haven’t had one of those in…my, I can’t remember how long it’s been!”

“Seventy years, at least,” Esther said, sitting down at the table. “For the last king.”

Ethyl made a face. “The one with the lazy eyes and the temper?”

“Yes, him. I believe we told him if he raised his daughter to be a queen instead of a princess she would bear sons and the kingdom would stay with his family.”

Sunny set up the paper and ink in front of her, ready to write. Their country’s current ruler had taken over some forty years ago in a rather bloody coup, so it would seem the lazy-eyed king hadn’t listened to advice.

“Okay, Aunt Miriam,” Sunny said, holding up a pen.

The woman had been standing at the other end of the table, mumbling to herself over and over, trying to keep the words in her mind. She put it all together, and spoke slowly so Sunny could follow.

“I heard… ‘If the king of Palomia starts a war with Agete, they will defeat Agete, but enough of Agete’s sons and daughters will survive, and will return and destroy Palomia once and for all.”

Sunny read the words back to Miriam to make sure she had it correct. Miriam nodded and for the first time since waking relaxed.

“Where the hell is my pipe?” she muttered, poking around the part of the kitchen she thought she had left it.

“I wonder if the king is already thinking of starting something,” Ethyl said.

“We should find out,” Esther said. “It’ll change the way we tell him.”

“What’s the matter, dear?” Miriam asked as she lit her pipe.

At the table, Sunny was still reading the words she had written, the words that had come to Miriam in a dream. A frown had crossed her face, one she hadn’t been aware of. She blushed and waved a hand.

“It’s nothing.”

“No, no, daughter, if you have a question, speak up!”

Still sitting in her chair on the floor, Holly babbled and laughed.

“See, granddaughter gets it. Now you.”

“Well,” Sunny started, tapping the page in front of her. “It’s just…I guess…aren’t prophecies usually more…poetic than this?”

The sisters all exchanged looks with each other before bursting into laughter. Holly joined in, laughing louder than any of the women.

“They don’t come that way!” Miriam said. “They come like this. Plain statements of facts. But do you know what men in power think of women who come to them with plain words?”

“Orders!” Ethyl said, and then lowered her voice into something gruff and rather stupid. “How dare you think you can tell me what to do! Only I tell me what to do!”

“We tried giving royalty the original prophecies in the past,” Esther said. She held up her arm so Sunny could see the lingering burn scars climbing up past the elbows. “It doesn’t work.”

“So, we are the ones who pretty it up!” Miriam said. “Make it a little vague, too. Like there’s some clue they have to work out. That always gets them.”

“This is always the hardest part,” Esther sighed. “None of are particularly inclined in the way of word making. Hopefully this war the king might start isn’t going to start tomorrow.”

Sunny held the paper in front of her, letting the light from the kitchen window shine through. She thought of the poems she’d spent hours writing in childhood, the ones she hid from her parents lest they rip them off.

She smiled. This was how she would help.

Grease Fire

I had a smoke out back by the dumpsters while I waited for the fire department to show up and deal with the burning kitchen.

The kitchen was burning because the fryer exploded. I don’t actually know why the fryer exploded, I hadn’t been there. I had been in the manager’s office, trying to get him to do something about the new hire, Diane, who didn’t seem to be graced with the brains God gave a cockroach.

Thinking about it, pulling a long drag out of my cancer stick, I bet Diane had something to do with it.

The manager and I were doing that thing. You know that thing. That scream whisper thing. Stage whispers, I guess, but for the opposite reason. We weren’t supposed to be heard. The door was shut and even as we breathily screeched at other we kept stealing glances at it. Make sure no one was lurking outside. And by ‘no one’ I’m sure we both were thinking of Lois. Gossipy bitch.

I’m pretty sure Roger didn’t want anyone to hear us screaming for employee morale, whatever the fuck that was worth at the fourth worst third-rate fast food chain in town. I didn’t want anyone to hear us screaming because I wanted Roger’s job. Was supposed to have gotten Roger’s job. But Roger was cousins with the district manager. And Roger hired Diane because he was fucking her. And then Diane fucked up so severely with the fryer that now the entire kitchen was belching flames behind me.

I took my second cigarette across the parking lot as sirens started screaming on the edge of my hearing. I stared at the place I’d worked thirty-eight hours a week for the past six years as it burnt to the ground. Went quicker than I thought it would.

Connie found me right around the time the fire trucks finally pulled into the front parking lot. She held out a hand for a smoke without asking and I gave it to her without protesting. Connie I liked. Connie knew what she was fucking doing. Connie showed up on time and did her job without having to ask a million questions and then when it was quitting time she cut out, didn’t matter if the dining room was empty or if the line was up to the back counter with the napkins and the condiments. I respected the shit out of that.

“You see what happen?” I asked her.

“Nah.” She lit her cigarette and took a drag. “I was out front refilling the napkins. You?”

“Nope. I was screaming at Roger.”

“Again?”

Connie knew all about it. She didn’t know why I wanted to be a manager. She’d been working there twice as long as I had and was still running the register and wiping down tables, and she liked it like that.

“Ain’t got the patience to order a bunch of snot-nosed shit-for-brains around. I’d rather be the shit-for-brains.”

Easy thing to say for a woman whose husband had a successful laundromat next to the college dorms. I needed the money. Needed to get more than thirty-eight hours a week. Two hours away from benefits, for fuck’s sake.

“Maybe he deserved it, today,” Connie said, watching as a bunch of hoses started spraying down what was left of the building. “Ness was out front with me.”

There it was. Roger and I in his office. Connie and Ness out front with the napkins. Only left one person in the kitchen.

“She’s probably up front with Roger, then. Crying into his arms.”

Connie raised an eyebrow, and then glanced around.

“I was up front with the rest of them before I came back,” she said. “Came around to make sure you got out okay. Expected to see the two of them back here with you.”

Despite the summer heat, goosebumps rose on my arms and the back of my neck.

“They ain’t up front?”

“Not that I saw.”

When we heard the explosion and saw the fryer oil splash against the door, I’d gone out the back. Roger had gone into the kitchen, grabbing the walls to keep from slipping. Screaming Diane’s name.

We lit new cigarettes and walked around the building to the street side, giving it all a wide berth. More worried about getting hit with the hoses at this point. The building wasn’t a building anymore. It was charred rubble. We used to joke about the place being built in the seventies, probably loaded with asbestos. Guess we’d been wrong.

Roger’s car was sitting right where he’d parked it that morning. Roger had fixed his tie clip and whatever was left of his hair while Diane had fixed her makeup, and then they’d crossed the parking lot laughing while Roger had grabbed her ass. Neither had noticed I’d been sitting in my car, three spots down. As far as those two were concerned there was nothing out there besides each other.

Ness was out front with the family that had been eating by the windows. No reason for them to still be there, except the spectacle. Couldn’t really blame them. They thought it was just a chicken joint burning.

Ness knew immediately. As soon as she saw Connie and me walking toward her, and only Connie and me. She glanced at the family, calculated whether she could get them to leave, then hustled over to where one of the firefighters was standing, watching the other two work.

I’d hated both of them, but I never wanted this. Ain’t no one deserve to die in a grease fire in a shitty fast food place, even if you were the one who accidentally started it. Connie and I watched in silence. Couldn’t think of a thing to say.

After the hoses were off she dropped her cigarette butt and rubbed it down with her shoe.

“You can probably be manager now. Once they rebuild.”

“Nah. Think I’ll see if that sub shop is hiring.”

English Class

It’s another fucking bullshit day, she thought as she settled behind her desk, delicately placing her venti Starbucks on the table like if she jostled it too much it would explode. All the desks in the room were facing her but not for long. It was a peer review day. Janice Michaels had passed out her three thousand word short story last class, and now the rest of the vultures would spend forty-eight minutes picking it apart.

She put her feet up on the desk, held her coffee in one hand, and mindlessly scrolled through her phone with the other. Recipes. Knitting patterns. Reels of people doing some bullshit with their bullshit friends. It all washed over her, none of it sinking in.

How did she ever end up as a adjunct professor at some bullshit community college in the middle of nowhere? It didn’t make any sense. Actually, it made perfect sense, and that was the part that didn’t make any fucking sense.

All kids think adults have their shit together. She had thought her own teachers, elementary school, middle, high, all of them, had become teachers because that’s what they wanted to do. Her father was an accountant because that was the path he set himself on, her mother a lawyer for the same reason. Decisions, decisions, one after the other, and then people ended up where they wanted to be.

Bullshit, so much bullshit. Bullshit she clung to until she was twenty-five, had graduated with an English degree, kicked around various writing jobs, and then just sort of ended up as an adjunct professor at some bullshit community college in the middle of nowhere. She’d never chosen to be here. It turned out life was a lot less something you did, and more something that happened to you. Over and over.

The kids started coming in, dribs and drabs. First class of the day, barely eight o’clock. They shuffled like zombies who only went to bed four hours ago as they moved the desks and chairs around. Reluctantly she put her phone away and made idle small talk until the class actually started.

When she had taken the job…no, that indicated too much choice on her own part. When the job was given to her and then accepted on her behalf, she had secretly feared only one thing: that her class would hold the next author of the Great American Novel. That she would read a short story that would make every word she had ever written look like grease stains in a parking lot, something that would make her weep, and she would understand why she had never achieved the things she had been sure she could achieve as long as she wanted them. She had been afraid she would be proven a hack, a fraud, all of her works would be retroactively shown to be grammatically incorrect and not even interesting.

Nothing of the sort had ever happened. Ten years. No, fuck, shit, eleven. Eleven years of teaching in this same damn freezing cold room and not once had everyone ever submitted something worthing of weeping over. It had all ranged from confusingly terrible to good. A few greats, even. But nothing ever great. And no one she had ever taught had gone on to get published. She kept track. Kept a list of names. Nothing, nothing, fucking nothing. Life did to them what it had done to her. Made choices for them. Pushed them around. One of them was very successful running a chain of car washes. Another one died.

She sipped the dregs of her coffee as the kids around her argued about whether Janice’s use of metaphor was effective or over the top and stupid. She probably should have stopped the word ‘stupid’ except she agreed with that half of the argument so she kept her mouth shut.

Pre-Streaming Era TV Shows That Would Have Been Cancelled by Netflix

I think whether people want to binge a show or watch it weekly is up to personal preference at this point but apparently a lot of streaming services don’t agree with me and need at least 80% of the global population to watch all twelve one-hour episodes of their brand new show in the first forty minutes of release or they decide the show is a complete, utter failure and send out the kill squad to cancel the show and destroy the sets and kill the actors.

There’s so much more nuance to whatever the living fuck is going on with television today but I don’t have time for all that, I need to talk about old beloved shows that would have been cancelled in less than a week in today’s system.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Sometimes, even in the old system of broadcast television, a show is so terrible, and does so poorly in ratings, that a network decides to dump it before it can even finish a full season. This leaves an uncomfortable opening on the schedule, so networks usually had a short-list of shows ready to go as a mid-season replacement. These were shows that the network wasn’t completely confident in, but, you know, fuck it. Whatever the show was it was better than dead air, and if it also sucked nuts so what, you were only committed to about half a season of it and then you could cancel that one, too.

Such is the humble beginnings of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It replaced another show on The WB called Savannah, a show I couldn’t tell you a single thing about. Buffy’s first season was only twelve episodes, and none of them are particularly good as a whole. There’s the one with the substitute teacher who infatuates all the high school boys and then whoops! She’s a giant praying mantis for some reason. And then there’s the one where Xander gets possessed by the spirit of a hyena and eats a live pig. For some reason. Or how about the one where they scan a magic book into the computer which somehow sticks a demon into the world wide web. For some reason. You get it. It wasn’t a great time.

But it wasn’t a terrible time, either. There were some genuinely funny and heartwarming moments, the actors mostly managed to stick out the worst of the dialogue, and by the end of the season you actually cared about these characters and wanted to see more. And thankfully The WB was like, well, what the hell else do we have going on? And we got seven total seasons. Oh, and also Angel, which we wouldn’t have gotten at all if Buffy was cancelled and also that first season was pretty rocky, too, but The WB knew they already had a locked in audience so fuck it. Vampires with bumpy faces for everyone!

Supernatural

Once The WB had Buffy and Angel and Smallville and Gilmore Girls and Charmed all up and running they took a look around and went, ‘Ewwwwwww, this place is filled with gross girls.’ Wanting that sweet, sweet dick money, they decided to engineer a show that would be a hit specifically with the boys. The manliest show you’ve ever fucking seen, just like dicks and taints everywhere, featuring cool cars and a classic rock soundtrack and two brothers in their mid-twenties played by incredibly attractive softboy actors who had each already been featured on one of the aforementioned girly shows and they had Dad Angst and Mommy Angst and Dean said in the first episode there would be no chick flick moments and the show went on to be, like, 73% chick flick moments and I’ve just never seen a clearer example of how little middle aged men understand what teenage girls – or boys, for that matter – actually want, which is fucking hilarious when you’re in the Entertaining Teenagers business.

The first season of Supernatural primarily sucked, and was only held aloft by the burning lust of millions of teenage girls across the globe who all immediately took to the internet to write their smutty self-insert fan fictions where one and/or both of the brothers either saved her, or needed her to save them, and also there was a bunch of people shipping the brothers together, which, ew, so to stop this later on the creators tossed a bunch of new female characters at the brothers, and again: you people do not understand what the fangirlies want. Castiel was a fucking accident.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had a very specific vision for his futuristic space-faring civilization, and famously one specific rule that gave later showrunners headaches: the future is a utopia and humanity has risen above the tendency to be motivated by stupid little things like ‘greed,’ ‘lust,’ and ‘power’ and the entire main cast are Best Friends Forever and aren’t allowed to get into stupid petty fights because they’ve outgrown that shit, damn it, and if you can’t write the episodes like that I’m getting my lawyers.

To be fair to Roddenberry, it shouldn’t have been that hard to write plots with the team against some outside force. To be equally fair to the writers, television is and always has been, the Petty Squabbles Box. People be getting into the stupidest fights you’ve ever seen since television was just radio was just stage plays was just runes carved into stone.

Also, none of the Big Three networks wanted the show carnally enough for Roddenberry so Paramount ended up doing this wacky thing of selling directly to independent local stations across the country whose programming mostly consisted of Public Access, local news, and reruns, so getting first run syndication on a brand new Star Trek was most likely the easiest decision any of these people ever made in their entire lives. The equivalent today, I guess, would be if all the major streaming services turned your show down so you just end up posting all that shit to YouTube. Except I doubt you’d make one million dollars per episode from advertising with SquareSpace or whoever.

Parks & Recreation

Almost every sitcom ever made starts out basically terrible while the actors and writers figure out who the characters are and the funniest ways for them to interact, but Parks & Rec is one of the most blatant examples of the creators realizing they were doing everything wrong in the first season and immediately course correcting before the second.

Another mid-season replacement, initially Dan Schur was brought on specifically to make a spin-off to The Office. While this was no longer the plan long before the show became what it is, the influences are still there. Leslie Knope is sort of a female Michael Scott, there’s a heavy lean on interactions being weird and awkward, Mark Brendanawicz is there doing his best/worst Jim Halpert impression, and everyone just sort of sucks and hates each other. Is that an accurate description of The Office? I’ve literally never seen an episode.

Anyway, all of that sucked nuts and the team realized they needed to change basically everything and they fixed the characters and changed the tone and fired Mark Brendanawicz into the sun and the remaining show was Good to Great and that never would have happened if Netflix had been the one to pick it up.

Maybe You Should Watch The Acolyte

I’d been thinking about writing this since around the third or fourth episode, but as I think I’ve previously mentioned my husband and I don’t binge shows, and on top of that summers are really hectic for us so we barely watched any television at all, and now that we’ve finally finished the show it’s been cancelled and just a little bit of hell has broken loose.

I was pissed at the announcement, but for some reason I didn’t think others had become particularly invested. Probably because all summer I felt like I was hearing: a) nothing, b) vaguely negative criticisms about the pacing or the writing, or c) the (sadly) typical braying from the ‘go woke, go broke’ crowd about how dare a Star Wars show feature a mostly non-white cast and lesbians and space witches??? Don’t they know Star Wars is for straight white cis men only?

I don’t know if the cancellation had anything to do with Disney listening to these racist, misogynist, homophobic Musk humpers – reportedly the cost was upwards of 180 million and there simply weren’t enough eyes on the show for that price to make Disney happy, and I think chronically online people have a distorted idea of how influential their voice on online spaces actually is in the real world – but they certainly were celebrating the cancellation like they had been listened to, which is a message unto itself, honestly. Rolling Stone has a great article about the worst Star Wars fans ruining it for everyone else (I’m trying to keep this article spoiler free in case someone who can wants to go in blind, but that article and most articles talking about the cancellation are absolutely not so keep that in mind).

But once the cancellation was announced there was a lot more angry reactions than I suspected. It probably shocked Disney, too. Where was all the support for the show before they decided to can it? Honestly, the seemingly out-of-nowhere backlash bothers me more than the cancellation on its own, because this once again feels like streaming and binge culture ruining everything. And I know, The Acolyte was dropped weekly, but that doesn’t make it immune. These streaming services need their shows to be immediate hits. Massive hits. Everybody who has a television is watching the show at the same time. It’s all anyone can talk about. It’s the summer event of the year. It’s getting parodied in SNL every other week. The memes, they have to have the memes!

And if it’s not? Fuck it. Cancel it. Replace it with something else looking for that same high. And, in the absolute worst cases, delete it off your streaming service completely and pretend it never happened. Willow who?

The Acolyte wasn’t that massive hit. It also wasn’t anywhere near as bad as Willow (not that I think Willow deserved to be memory-holed). I’d say on average it’s a solid B with some A+ moments scattered throughout. If this were Ye Olden Days of television and The Acolyte was airing on the WB it would have gotten, like, ten fucking seasons. If it were on Fox it would still have been cancelled after one season but then have gathered a cult following who would mourn it’s ‘brilliant but cancelled’ status online for the rest of their lives.

This is supposed to be a recommendation post but all this minor bullshit got in the way. To that point, even though it got cancelled and even though I just called it a B show, here’s a bunch of reasons why you might want to check out The Acolyte anyway. Do it fast before Disney decides to pretend it never happened!

There’s No “Homework”

Not really a Star Wars fan? Have a vague, general sense of what’s going on through cultural osmosis but otherwise haven’t actually seen anything since you got dragged to The Phantom Menace by your parents because your little brother wanted to go? No problem! The Acolyte takes place in a time period not explored by any previous movie or television show: the High Republic. Specifically one hundred years before any of our usual cast of assholes was even born. There’s two very minor references to other Star Wars-y things that you may or may not recognize, and if you don’t it does not matter. They are true easter eggs, fun little things for people who recognize them but not crucial to understanding the current story. Of course people and places you aren’t familiar with are going to be talked about, but it’s expected you don’t know those things because they’re all new, so no on is going to valiantly walk through a door and pause a few seconds for applause while you’re sitting there thinking, ‘who the fuck is this dork?’

It Explores How Fucked Up the Jedi Order Is

I don’t think the Jedi order was supposed to be as completely deranged and unhealthy as George Lucas made them out to be in the prequels, but I also think George implied a lot of things without realizing it in those movies and it doesn’t matter what he meant to do, what matters is that the Jedi Order he designed is somehow a worse facility for children than Hogwarts.

Basically little kids – and I’m talking little kids – are tested to see if they are Force sensitive and if they are they are taken away from their families to train. And I mean fully taken away – this isn’t a summer camp or boarding school and there’s no annual Family Day. The Jedi see the Force – the power they train their entire lives in – as split down the middle into the Light Side and the Dark Side, and then they spend their entire lives not “giving in” to the Dark Side, and apparently the best way to do that is to cut off all emotions and personal relationships. Like, how the hell does a person learn to work through negative emotions when they’re taught from a very young age to suppress them all? And at the same time are built up to be basically space cops? Can that person even recognize when they’ve gone completely off the rails?

While this is not the main focus of the story, nor is it a complete deconstruction of the Jedi Order, it’s the closest popular Star Wars media has ever come to even acknowledging that the system is fucked to the max.

The Lightsaber Fights Are Fucking Rad

You ever watch a lightsaber fight in a Star War and think, “Why do these people never remember they are also telekinetic?” Well, so did whoever worked on these fights. There’s real creativity in the choreography on display, and it feels like they were made by people who actually wanted to see new and interesting thing in a lightsaber fight instead of just someone inserting one into the movie because it had been the regulated seventeen point eight minutes since we had last seen one.

The Sith is Actually Cool and Scary

This one is potentially just me because I think every single asshole we’ve seen swinging around a red lightsaber has ultimately been a sad sack wet noodle with the exception of Darth Maul who has honestly been wasted up until this point and needs his own movie where he goes around killing stray Jedi while shirtless.

The Stranger is the next best thing. His first altercation with our Jedi heroes is essentially shot like a horror movie, and you can get a sense of how freaked out the Jedi are about this guy because he knows their moves, he knows what they won’t be expecting, and the Jedi have gotten so powerful and up their own ass they barely even remember what a ‘sith’ is.

There’s a lot more I want to say about it but their identity is one of the main mysteries of the show so please just take my word for it that this guy fucks severely.

The Show Does Not End on an Actual Cliffhanger

I’ve seen this complaint getting bandied about the internet and it’s not true. There are plot threads that are set up for the next season that will obviously never be resolved now, but the show is not cut off in the middle of some death defying feat or mystery, and most of the questions set up at the beginning of the show are answered.

Whether you should watch this show is entirely up to you but if any of what I listed is of interest to you I suggest you go check it out. Like I said, it’s B Tier and as much as people want to blame the bigots for this one I think it ultimately just wasn’t what Disney wanted. But if you’re anything like me and you’ve spent way too many of your precious few hours watching Charmed and Supernatural back in the day then you need to get the fuck in here because this thing is way better than either of those two.

That should be my tagline. The Acolyte: Better Than the CW.