Second verse, same as the first: It’s another New Year’s Eve in pandemic times, which means quite a lot of us are choosing to spend the night sensibly on the couch, inhaling quality television. There’s a lot from which to choose!
Keep It Light
The rom-com isn’t dead; it’s just migrated to television. The best one of the year was Starstruck, a bouncy six-episode HBO Max series co-written by and starring New Zealand comedian Rose Matafeo (also worth seeking out on series 9 of the addictive comedy panel game show Taskmaster). She plays a hapless twentysomething in London who hooks up with a famous actor (Nikesh Patel, from the Four Weddings and a Funeral reboot)… Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman’s The Chair (Netflix) also contained itself to six episodes; a gently antic spirit animates this light satire about academia starring Sandra Oh and Jay Duplass… If you’ve got more time to invest, the seriously underrated British dramedy This Way Up (Hulu), starring Aisling Bea and Sharon Horgan, dropped its second season in July. It taps some of the same themes as Fleabag in its exploration of a very funny thirtysomething woman struggling with clinical depression, her love life, and a complicated relationship with her family. No hot priest, but would you settle for Tobias Menzies as a sourpuss single dad?… And if you want to devote the whole day and night to a binge, then The Great will get you nearly 20 hours of entertainment. (The second season debuted in late November.) Showrunner Tony McNamara, co-writer of the similarly biting The Favourite, reimagines Catherine the Great’s grab for power of Russia from her dim-witted husband into a fanciful, foul-mouthed romp starring Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult.
All Is Darkness
The world is a terrible place, and maybe you want to carry that energy over to your fictional entertainments, too. You do you! In which case, there’s no shortage of the-end-is-nigh fantasy miniseries to choose from: Amazon’s big-budget gamble The Wheel of Time just wrapped its first season while the better-reviewed The Witcher (Netflix) just dropped its second season. Netflix’s adaptation of Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone came and went with far less fanfare, but I was thoroughly seduced by its melding of magic with Russian history and iconography, a mash-up Bardugo has dubbed “Tsarpunk”… Not dark enough for ya? Then consider catching up with Station Eleven, the HBO Max miniseries that has the audacity/creative chutzpah to tell the story of a pandemic during an actual pandemic. (At press time, seven episodes have been released; two more appear Jan. 6, with the finale arriving Jan. 13.) Based on Emily St. John Mandel’s award-winning 2014 novel, the fictionalized pandemic here is much more devastating than our own (so far); still, the first episode hits chillingly close to home, with its unblinking picture of societal norms dropping off as panic rises. But don’t let that put that off you Patrick Somerville’s deeply moving, beautifully put-together series, which jumps between the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, 15 years in the future, and multiple storylines that connect in surprising ways. The biggest surprise is how something so bleak can also buoy the spirit.
Binge the New Year
A version of this article appeared in print on Dec 31, 2021 with the headline: Binge the New Year
This article appears in December 31 • 2021.
