Didn’t think I’d actually watch Netflix’s new 8-part Quarterback miniseries, but I got sucked in. The series follows Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins, and Marcus Mariota throughout the 2022 season both on and off the field. I haven’t seen Hard Knocks so I don’t know how it compares in terms of tone or content, but this felt like a comprehensive and revelatory look at the many challenges of being an NFL quarterback.
Being able to follow these men into their personal lives let us see the human side of their commodified, cloistered personas. Fighting through injury. Getting benched. Reckoning with losses and legacy. Subjecting themselves to a brutally physical game then going right home to do bedtime with their young kids. It’s stuff we know happens but don’t see when they’re on a fantasy football roster.
It also provided a stark contrast with another quarterback-centric Netflix documentary I watched while in the midst of it. Johnny Football charts the rise and fall of Johnny Manziel from a high school phenom to high-drafted NFL bust. Manziel’s sudden college stardom masked a lot of problems with his behavior and work ethic—things Manziel now rather candidly owns up to.
Watching his process (or lack thereof) compared to the other Netflix QBs revealed just how rarified the air is for successful NFL players. Mariota and Cousins are statistically rather middling compared to their peers, but compared to Manziel they’re like elite, MVP-level performers. (Like… Patrick Mahomes.)
My relationship to football has changed a lot over the years. I’ve gone from dutiful Packers follower and fantasy league commissioner to barely having watched the playoffs. I enjoy a good game as much as any other sports fan, but I’ve moved past them having any influence on my life. Quarterback scratched the itch of appreciating the game while also learning more about its participants. Whether a second season will remain as illuminating now that the novelty has worn off is TBD.
I don’t have to go looking for synchronicity because it always finds me. This time it was on Netflix.
The other day I watched Netflix’s new docu-drama The Social Dilemma (trailer) based on the recommendation from a friend and a lively text thread about its implications.
The film’s thesis is that social networks are engineered to hack human psychology and prey upon our attention as a means to serve advertisers, which is detrimental to humans specifically and society generally. We learn this from the talking heads of former Silicon Valley executives, whose firsthand experience with the dark side of social media have motivated them to speak out against their former employers and advocate for reform.
Interwoven with the talking heads is the drama part of the film, which depict a family wrestling with the many ways technology can negatively affect our lives: the son slowly being radicalized by extremist propaganda, the tween daughter tormented by insecurity and social media bullying, the mother witnessing the fraying of family cohesion.
Though the dramatized storyline sometimes felt a little “anti-smoking PSA” to me, as a morality tale it was an effective companion to the talking heads. (This interview with Tristan Harris, one of the subjects and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, gives some needed context to his contributions.)
The documentary stimulated a valuable discussion between my wife and I about social media’s role in our family. But it wasn’t until later that night when its lessons sank into my consciousness in a tangible way.
Diving into the divine milieu
Later that same night, I decided to watch My Octopus Teacher, another new Netflix documentary featuring freediver and filmmaker Craig Foster. The banal description (“A filmmaker forges an unusual friendship with an octopus living in a South African kelp forest, learning as the animal shares the mysteries of her world”) belies the transcendent richness of what we see develop on screen—both between Foster and the octopus and between Foster and the underwater environment.
He describes how diving in the cold seawater makes you “come alive to the world” and focuses your mind intently on your surroundings. I’ve written about freediving before, and how the “divine milieu” of the sea—or any uncivilized landscape—can open us to transformation.
Foster’s own transformation happens over the course of a year as he encounters and befriends a common octopus. And thanks to his abundant underwater footage, we get to witness a series of moments—surprises, scares, sorrows, and simplicities—that teach so much about a reclusive and otherworldly creature. Due to Foster’s soothing narration, the gentle piano score, and the meditative quality of being immersed underwater, it’s a beautiful and emotional story that shows the stunning possibilities of what being present in nature can offer.
That also makes it a fascinating contrast to The Social Dilemma, chiefly in how it offers an antidote to all the ails social media can create. If we feel distracted, we should seek focus. If we feel fragmented, we should seek embodiment. (Brené Brown: “We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands”—a lesson I have to constantly relearn.)
Being in nature, in silence, or at least away from screens allow for both of those things if you let it. And recently I did.
My toddler teacher
A few days after watching both of these films, for undetermined reasons Mr. 19 Months was refusing to fall asleep. I brought him out to his play area and he started tinkering with a wooden train set we recently put into toy circulation. He usually doesn’t focus on one activity for very long, yet for at least 15 minutes he sat there quietly exploring and experimenting with this new contraption.
Usually my phone is with me in our living room post-bedtime, but it wasn’t that night. I could have retrieved it, but I didn’t want to break this spell as I knew he’d either want to follow me or jump to another activity. I soon realized that if I did have my phone, I would have missed so much.
I would have missed his subtle gestures as he figured out how to put the cylindrical blocks into their corresponding holes in the train car.
I would have missed trying to decipher his thought process of how to slot the various discs onto their poles.
I would have missed out on pondering how toddlers can be ferocious one moment and beautifully serene the next—not unlike octopuses.
Similarly, Foster’s unique story wouldn’t have happened if he didn’t dedicate himself to visiting the kelp forest every day, and if he hadn’t noticed the octopus beneath its camouflaged hideout, and if he didn’t intentionally seek to cultivate trust with a marvelous and mysterious creature.
My own marvelous and mysterious creature has taught me a lot in his short time on Earth. (See his tag for the continuing journey.) Just by living out his full self—and toddlers can’t do anything else—he demonstrates the rewards of using your attention wisely, whether it’s for a glowing screen or a wooden train set or an inquisitive toddler or a reclusive cephalopod.
You don’t have to choose one, but you do have to choose.
Pretty much inhaled the Michael Jordan docuseries The Last Dance on Netflix. As I was a mere lad during the Chicago Bulls’ extended championship run in the ‘90s, the series really added color and context to the on- and off-court happenings I wouldn’t have understood at the time.
Though a Wisconsinite, I didn’t feel any loyalty to the Milwaukee Bucks back then as they were bad and Jordan’s Bulls were so much more entertaining. (The opposite was true in football—Go Pack Go.) My only personal brush with the Bulls dynasty was briefly seeing Tony Kukoc outside of FAO Schwarz in downtown Chicago when visiting with family friends.
The whole Michael Jordan phenomenon can really be summed up in one GIF, and it doesn’t even include Jordan:
That’s Larry Bird, another NBA legend and Hall of Famer, as coach of the Indiana Pacers after retiring as a player. The Pacers are playing the Bulls in Game 4 of the 1998 semifinals and Reggie Miller just nailed a shot over Jordan to put the Pacers up by 2 with 0.7 seconds left. But as you can see, while the rest of the stadium erupts with elation, the only thing on Bird’s mind is: That’s too much time for MJ.
That the Bulls lost that game after Jordan barely missed his subsequent 3-point shot is beside the point. Bird’s respect for Jordan as a fellow legendary clutch performer indicates just how dominant he was, even in his later years.
The Last Dance does a great job navigating several stories at once. The through-line is the 1998 season, which was captured in behind-the-scenes video detail thanks to deep access granted to a camera crew. Each episode interweaves that arc with Jordan’s life and career taken chronologically through interviews with him and other players, coaches, and figures that were instrumental along the way.
One of the funny motifs throughout the series is how many times they make note of another player or coach talking trash about the notoriously vindictive and competitive Jordan, either directly or in the press, and then modern-day Jordan is like, “That’s all I needed,” and then we see vintage Jordan annihilate them in the next game.
Despite having many more personal memories watching and admiring LeBron James’s ascent to NBA Mount Rushmore status, this series reaffirms to me that Jordan is still #1. Different stats, different styles, different eras, etc., but that’s where I’m at now.
It’s good to know that even in quarantine, my old friend synchronicity can still visit me.
I watched the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox after reading the review from Vox‘s Alissa Wilkinson and am so glad I did. Based on the true story of a young ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman fleeing her community in Williamsburg, it’s just four episodes but packs a powerful punch.
(Spoilers ahead. Just go watch Unorthodox.)
Esty, the young woman, is 19 and married to Yanky, an equally young ultra-orthodox Jew who’s serious and withdrawn. When they don’t immediately conceive a child—as is the expectation in their religious and cultural milieu—their marriage strains to the point where Esty begins secretly orchestrating an escape.
One of the leitmotifs in the series is Esty’s relationship with music. Since in her community it’s considered immodest for women to perform in public, she hasn’t been able to live out her passion for music except through the memory of listening to her grandmother’s favorite choral music, and then only through taking piano lessons in secret with a neighbor.
When she does get the chance to perform later in the series, at an audition for a music academy, she first sings a Schubert piece that was a favorite of her grandmother. When asked to sing another, she digs for something even more personal. In The Thrillist, Esther Zuckerman describes this powerful moment:
In a strong chest voice, she starts to sing in Hebrew. The tune, which is never identified by name, is “Mi Bon Siach,” heard at weddings when the bride and groom are under the chuppah. It’s a melody that played when Esty and Yanky were getting married in the second episode, and Esty’s choice of it resonates with both rebellion and irony. It’s a song that should signify her bond to a man, but she’s turning it into something that can extricate her from that bond, using a voice that she wouldn’t have been able to use in her former world where women’s singing is prohibited.
And this is where synchronicity arrives. The day before starting Unorthodox I read the article “Contrapuntal Order: Music Illuminates Social Harmony” by John Ahern in First Things. A doctoral candidate in musicology at Princeton, Ahern writes about how the musical concepts of counterpoint and harmony relate to marriage and relationships. Counterpoint, he writes,
is the accumulation of multiple melodies. It is like Louis Armstrong playing an improvised tune on his trumpet at the same time as Ella Fitzgerald sings “La Vie en Rose”—two different melodies simultaneously. Neither is subordinate to the other, or, if there is subordination (perhaps we listen a little more to Ella’s voice than the trumpet), they are both melodies, a status that the piano, plunking out chords in the background, does not share. In true counterpoint, all the sound created is produced by people singing or playing melodies. If we lived several hundred years ago, we would say that “harmony” is what joins and holds together those melodies, their counterpoint, in a pleasing fashion.
I’ve always loved counterpoints in music. They’re a great way to juice up a final chorus, like in the climax of “Non-Stop” from Hamilton. [Update: turns out the official term for this is quodlibet!] And they are the perfect metaphor for the relationship between Esty and Yanky, and between the competing “melodies” within Esty during her time of personal and spiritual upheaval.
As Ahern writes, “when two melodies coexist, the glory is their coexistence. But there is no harmony among things that are too dissimilar. The melodies must have an awareness of and reliance on each other in order to live in concord.” However, “if the two melodies resemble each other too closely, they lose their identity. The glory of harmony, of concord, is that the elements are different.”
Having grown up in the same cloistered culture with a shared worldview, Esty and Yanky were arguably too similar to inhabit true harmony. Especially since as a woman in a severely conservative milieu, Esty had no true autonomy and no identity outside of being a baby-maker (which she says explicit in the show).
Unorthodox is the story of how that changes. Esty’s journey from passivity to power—paralleled by Yanky’s own existential awakening—mirrors the counterpoint view of marriage, which creates harmony in its original sense by allowing and even demanding coexistent voices. This contrasts with the more conservative “complementarian” model of marriage, with one spouse (usually the wife) filling in around whatever space the other (husband) inhabits. In the older sense of harmony, writes Ahern:
one person singing is no threat at all to another person singing. Sounds are not quantities or physical objects; for one to exist in the same space as one another is not only possible but desirable. The challenge is to get them to sound good together. This requires some chronological hierarchy—one party needs to lead and the other follow—but this, as we discovered above, does not mean that one party will sacrifice more autonomy than another. Both must sacrifice independence for the sake of symmetry.
Perhaps you can see now why this article spoke (or sang) to me while watching Unorthodox. Competing melodies in music and marriage can work only if they are composed with intention and care within a shared song. How Esty’s melodies do or do not harmonize within herself and with Yanky are what make Unorthodox so compelling, and I encourage you to seek it out.
(I also recommend reading Ahern’s article in full for a much richer explication of the counterpoint theory.)
Karamo Brown of Queer Eye recently gave a free talk nearby, so I availed myself of the opportunity to see him in the flesh. He was the same as you see on the show, except this time he made himself cry. He got emotional as soon as the talk began because an old college friend of his was in the audience, someone who reminded him of how far he’d come in life. He then briefly told stories from the show and about being a dad.
Unsurprisingly, he was very open with feelings and implored us not to make fear-based decisions. His sons probably do not appreciate when they bring girls home and Karamo pulls them aside and asks “Have you done anything out of fear lately?” But that’s something youths can only appreciate in hindsight (and something only a therapist/motivational speaker like Karamo could get away with).
I never watched the original Queer Eye, though vaguely remember its cultural impact. But while I was in Denver for a wedding last fall, my straight-dude friends were effusive in their praise for the new version. It’s so much more than fashion, they said. They were right. It’s fun to see the Fab Five work their magic: Bobby remodeling homes and Jonathan transforming hair and Antoni inspiring cooking and Tan remaking wardrobes and Karamo shepherding the show’s “heroes” to a new self-awareness.
But, like Karamo, I think I’m most interested in seeing what makes the subjects cry, or at least be vulnerable. Those moments are water wells, openings to the deep reserves of emotional underground that’s usually in darkness. Drawing from that space, for me anyway, involves work and risk but almost always reward. It happened for me that weekend in Denver, which is why I’ll always associate that time with the show. The ability to be vulnerable among friends—straight male friends, no less—and to do it so easily when it’s otherwise so daunting, meant it was good in the richest sense of the word.
That inspiring of goodness is one of my takeaways from the show. The Fab Five dedicate themselves to new and challenging experiences around Georgia for the first two seasons, and in doing so demonstrate their goodness to everyone. Being willing to share their expertise for the betterment of strangers, prodding when necessary but remaining open to being changed themselves—that’s good. That takes guts, and vulnerability. And that’s what I look forward to seeing even more of in season 3.
My wife and I recently binged season 2 of Big Mouth and season 1 of Big LittleLies, and I noticed a key bit of thematic overlap between the two.
Big Mouth, Netflix’s obscene, irreverent, gut-bustingly funny cartoon about kids going through puberty, introduced the Shame Wizard character in season 2. Voiced by a slithery David Thewlis, he creeps among the kids whispering shame-inducing accusations and judgments. He even has a (NSFW) song:
Oh, I hate to be a bummer
But, my dear, I’ve got your number
And I’ll whisper it forever in your ear
Bringing the shame, shame
You’ve got no one but yourself to blame
You thought no one was watching
But I’m right here in your brain
It takes a while for each of the kids to realize that they aren’t the Wizard’s only victim. Each had separately internalized the shame and let it negatively influence their self-image and behavior.
The Shame Wizard would have fit well in Big Little Lies, the HBO series based on Liane Moriarty’s excellent book. Wealthy parents with kids in a public school deal with an accusation of bullying as they struggle with the ripple effects of domestic violence, infidelity, divorce, and trauma. What’s kept hidden from others by kids and adults, lovers and friends, because of their own version of the Shame Wizard really propels the story.
When things finally get out in the open in the final episode is when many of the characters finally experience freedom—even if, like a bandage being ripped off, it hurts like hell getting there.
As a patriotic American, I am against the British monarchy on principle. That hasn’t stopped me from loving Netflix’s The Crown. I’m here to echo all the good things you’ve heard about it, specifically the performances of Claire Foy as the Queen and Matt Smith as Phillip. That said, I think swapping in a new cast for the next two seasons is a great idea. Much better than trying to falsely age younger actors with makeup.
After years of hype and speculation, Arrested Development is back thanks to the tireless work of Mitch Hurwitz and the show’s writers. Watching these characters again has been surreal. I had the same feeling when I saw Toy Story 3 and The Hobbit: I’d watched the previous installments (the LOTR trilogy in the case of The Hobbit) so many times that seeing the same characters in new situations was delightful yet a bit disorienting. Which is how I can best describe the new fourth season of Arrested. The narrative Hurwitz and his writers have created is so labyrinthine and arcane that it will certainly require repeated viewings to fully grasp, just like the show’s first three seasons.
After one run through the season, my main critique is that unlike the original run, the new season lacks a core. Instead of focusing on the family unit throughout the narrative, each episode centers on one main character, with the others coming and going while engaged in their own overlapping story. It’s hard to fall back in love with the family when we only see them in bits and pieces over fifteen episodes. When the story falters, it’s because it upended the show’s tried-and-true structure of Michael being the reliable straight-man, the eye of the Bluth storm. He held the show together — sometimes only barely — so that the rest of the ensemble could wig out. However, with this new season’s decentralized narrative and Michael’s uncharacteristic recklessness, there is no reliable foundation; the inmates are now running the asylum. Whenever we’re following a new wacky non-Bluth character (and there are many of them this season) instead of the family we’ve come to love (or at least be amused by), the show almost always lags. This, combined with the fact that episodes are now 30-35 minutes long instead of their network TV-sanctioned 22, makes for an Arrested Development that doesn’t quite feel like the Arrested Development of yore.
I realize this (lack of) structure was largely a logistical one; they had to film it in discrete pieces simply because it was so hard to get the full cast together at one time. But that challenge turned into a net positive for the show. Its brand of postmodern meta-comedy is perfectly equipped to handle the structureless vacuum season four has created, as NPR’s interactive guide of the show’s running gags illustrates. When so much of the show’s humor is derived from its interconnected meta-jokes, allusions (or illusions), and sight gags, the central storyline — if there even is one this season — is often irrelevant.
In fact, I sometimes found myself disengaging with the main story of each episode with the hope of catching the many in-jokes, callbacks, and other background tidbits that zoom by. One critic found this meta-humor distracting, saying the season “trades far too easily on callbacks to the early seasons, a sort of unpleasant fan service that is depressing to watch.” Indeed, there are a lot of callbacks, but that’s nothing unique to this season. As the aforementioned guide points out, even season one was making callbacks and allusions to itself on dozens of jokes. I’m sure the in-jokes this season felt like a fan service because the fans are essentially why this season exists at all, but they have been the show’s lifeblood since its infancy and almost always impress rather than depress.
And that’s why you always leave a note I’ve attested to the new season development and give a hearty Huzzah! to Mitch Hurwitz & Co. for giving in to the Internet’s collective conch call to bring the gang back together and for going all-out on it. Often I stared at Netflix in wonder, wanting to slow-clap the writers for what they have attempted with this season. While it might have a slightly lower batting average than in the first three, it was a swing for the fences. And like Maeby this season, I think they made it home.
