Footnotes

1. Been seeing a lot of folks mad at this one for false advertising. The trailer’s cut to set you up for a horror film with jump scares, but the film itself is a fairly quiet supernatural drama. My advice is this: don’t watch the trailers!

   Most trailers these days try to do one of two things: 1) Some insinuate a different flavor of movie than the one you’ll actually end up seeing. This is what the trailer for Presence does. To a degree it’s what the trailer for A Quiet Place: Day One does by conveying all action and none of the drama. It’s also what the trailers for Wonka, The Color Purple (2023), and Mean Girls (2024) do by marketing the films as not musicals when, in fact, they are musicals. 2) Almost all other trailers reveal essentially every plot point, or enough of them that all you end up getting to actually enjoy of the film itself is the final third or fourth, to see how it concludes the premise it has set up.

   People love to point to The Social Network trailer as an example of how to set mood and tone while revealing little, but such cases are exceptional. Hollywood advertisers are generally too scared to do anything but steer potential moviegoers by the hand, and so you’re better off just batting their hand away. ↩

2. I still have a mission to watch less TV and more movies this year, but I thought I’d try Max’s new medical drama and just kept clicking through to the next episode and eventually found myself still awake at 2 a.m., at the tail end of a binge.

   You can absolutely slap The PItt with the “casual viewing” pejorative. Watch an episode while exercising. Put one on while making dinner. Throw another one on while unloading/loading the dishwasher. A constant background of rapid-fire medical terminology, somberly delivered diagnoses, and all manner of employee infighting/flirting.

   I have a thing for workplace dramas. I enjoy thinking about new systems, and that’s really all workplaces are, and the more into the weeds about a particular workplace a show can get, the better. Yes, I watched Mad Men for the boozy affairs, career meltdowns, and other soapy personal crises, but I was equally there to think about the ins and outs of account management in advertising!

   You take it all with a huge grain of salt, of course, ‘cuz at the end of the day the shows’ mission is to embellish and entertain, but there are still granular concerns about restaurant management to glean from The Bear, about the systemic failures of policing as an institution to glean from The Wire, etc.

   If anything, I wish there were more diversity in the sorts of workplaces depicted. Medical, cop, and legal dramas continue to glut the market. Give me an hour-long show about unionization efforts at some Whole Foods-esque grocery store. Put me at the desk with the dozen or so folks keeping an upstart news platform afloat as it tries to scoop legacy media outlets. Take me behind the scenes at an aging amusement park. Near-infinite possibilities, really. ↩

3. I hit the end of the line of The Pitt, and Max asked if I wanted to watch ER, and I said, “Lol, sure. Fifteen seasons. Why not?” I’m quite sure I’ll run out of steam with it, but I guess I wasn’t quite done watching fictional people apply themselves (mostly) competently to frequent, fresh problems. When it feels like everything in the real world is being pummeled by wave after wave of idiocy/lunacy, competence itself becomes a weird salve. ↩

4. This is great example of one of the worst kinds of news story. It looks for a wedge issue where there doesn’t need to be one. You can find value in both DEI policies and considerations and unionization. Even a number of people in the piece are clearly able to do this. Framing them as necessarily oppositional for the clicks is negligent. ↩

5. Somebody please stop me. ↩