New year, new habit. So begins my attempt to track the whole of my media diet, week to week.

“Why?” you ask. “What would possess you?”

Well, I don’t know, really. Read my previous post for a little clarity, if you’d like. I’m mostly looking to feel more engaged with everything I’m taking in, maybe find some connections, some patterns.

This first week also helped me come to a conclusion and an additional intention for 2025: I’d like to watch fewer television shows and more films in the coming year. Blame Yellowstone. I gave in to a long-growing curiosity and put on the first few episodes early in the week. I could see the soap opera they were setting up—what the big stakes were, who would generally be pitted against whom, etc.—and I realized I just couldn’t muster the will to care, at least not enough to binge.

The only interesting thesis I took away from those first episodes was that the trappings of bland, upper-middle-class gentrification (bougie indie coffee shops and wine bars, luxury condos, golf courses, and the like) can just as easily and insidiously invade the wilds of the West as they can the established neighborhoods of big cities. It’s a little harder to have much sympathy watching the takeover happen to a wealthy cattle rancher overseeing a vast acreage, though. Plus, the show’s a kind of gentrification of its own, adding to the streaming space yet another bloated Breaking Bad / Ozark-esque story of an expanding illegal empire, this one guiding the viewer by the hand so much it feels made to clean the kitchen or fold laundry to—which is quite possibly the only way I’ll end up watching more of it.

Or maybe I shouldn’t. A good piece worth your time that’s not listed here because I read it last week, just before I started tracking, is Will Tavlin’s n+1 essay “Casual Viewing,” which details the papering over of the streaming landscape with cardboard-cutout content, brought to you by Netflix and others (but especially Netflix). First they came for television, and now they’re coming for film production/distribution, until nary an original voice is heard.

Maybe that’s why I liked Hundreds of Beavers so much. Made for just $150,000 in the Wisconsin woods over the course of two winters, it’s a true wonder combining Silent Era slapstick with Looney Tunes-level sight gags in a way that still feels singular and energetic. It had my full attention, and as I was watching, I kept thinking, “Hollywood could never!”

Or better put, they would never. The six biggest production companies spent an estimated $126 billion on film and television in 2024. Imagine all that could be made if they handed off just a fraction of that in $1-2 million strings-free chunks to skeleton indie-filmmaking crews. Would they even miss it?

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Sunday

• Nightbitch
  
• Pride & Prejudice, p. 156-165
  
• Yellowstone, 1x01
  
• Yellowstone, 1x02
  
• Holiday Inn (LP), by Mt. Umbra

Monday

• “Interview: David Lynch & Naomi Watts,” Mulholland Drive DVD extra (Criterion)
  
• “Interview: Laura Harring, Johanna Ray, Justin Theroux, and Naomi Watts,” Mulholland Drive DVD extra (Criterion)
  
• “On-Set Footage,” Mulholland Drive DVD extra (Criterion)
  
• The Big Picture, “The Top Five Performances of 2024. Plus: The Amy Adams Hall of Fame and ‘Nightbitch.’”
  
• Nosferatu
  
• Yellowstone, 1x03

Tuesday

• The Big Picture, “‘Nosferatu’ and the Top Five Vampire Movies, With Robert Eggers!”
  
• The VVitch
  
• A Quiet Place: Day One
  
• The Last Picture Show
  
• Pride & Prejudice, p. 165-169

Wednesday

• Pride & Prejudice, p. 169-196
  
• The Beekeeper

Thursday

• Love Lies Bleeding
  
• Ferrari
  

Friday

• What We Do in the Shadows, 6x06
  
• What We Do in the Shadows, 6x07
  
• Here

Saturday

• The Big Picture, “The Robert Zemeckis Hall of Fame, and ‘Here’”
  
• Pride & Prejudice, p. 196-214
  
• Hundreds of Beavers