“What are you watching?” is pretty much the automatic question I get when I tell people what I do for a living. Usually I lie to people so I don’t get into a massive debate about the police while I’m trying to hang out. But to you, dear patron, I shall never lie!
Here’s what I watched in February (and January!) in order of how much I have to say.
Industry (Seasons 1-3) — HBOCW: nudity, excessive drug use, banking, sexual harassment
Someone in my bookclub recommended Industry, and because season 4 was currently airing, I decided to give it a go. I expected to not think much of this show, but for reasons I have a hard time explaining, I kind of like it a lot. Now that’s not to say this is some great TV show—there are plenty of holes and inconsistencies—but there is something weirdly refreshing about its psychotically cynical worldview.
Industry follows a number of stock brokers at the fictional investment bank Pierpoint, and makes it pretty clear right from the jump that every character is bought into its capitalist realist perspective. One character introduces himself by comparing Margaret Thatcher to Jesus (“One is the reason we’re all here, and the other was a carpenter"), and our main character claims to have written a totally serious essay arguing for the Moral Case for Capitalism™. So why do I, someone who constantly critiques shows for being too right wing, have a soft spot for Industry?
Well, I really like the music. It’s synth heavy and gives off both a surreal ethereal quality and a deep melancholy, kind of contrasting people who aspire to wealth and the nasty business of banking and investing. I really like a lot of the performances, especially from Ken Leung and Myha'la. Their scenes together are electric, and it’s very fun to watch each of them lie to each other’s face and try to figure each other out.
But I think what I really do find interesting about the show is that it absolutely embodies this idea that I’ve been bouncing around recently, which is that we’ve entered a stage of capitalism I’m calling the Cash Out Era. There is no interest anymore in building a sustainable future. Hell, there’s no interest in building a future of any kind. It’s all about maximizing short term profits by gambling other people’s pensions and retirement funds on stocks, which usually represent a company, but on Industry, kind of just exist as an illusion on a computer screen. Everything is about making that line go up (or down), regardless of ethics, personal feelings, laws, or anything else. Who cares if this company is going to crash out in 2 months? All we care about is boosting the stock price today so that we can cash out. Who cares if you were sexually assaulted by a client? We need them to make money. Who cares about being a good employee? All that matters is producing results.
There’s something refreshing about being this mask off, about not trying to pretend that investment banking and sales are actually about anything other than a short term con job, with everyone in the business fully aware of how cutthroat, amoral, and parasitic their position in that system is. While I’m sure many viewers could walk away from Industry feeling that it’s glorifying this world—what with the rampant excesses of drugs and sex—I can’t shake the feeling that the show sees this all as a cynical chase of increasingly higher highs, knowing that eventually we’ll overdose and die.
PONIES (Season 1) — PeacockCW: cold war propaganda, mild violence/drug use
PONIES is a 70s period piece starring Haley Lu Richardson and Emilia Clarke, two recently widowed women who had been married to CIA agents in Moscow. They decide to stick around in Moscow after their husbands die in order to find out what really happened to them and to maybe make a difference. For the most part this is a pretty conventional spy story without that much to differentiate it, aside from the performances from Richardson and Vic Michaelis in a supporting role.
But what I do find very interesting about PONIES is its relationship to history, and how incredibly absent the ideology of the Cold War is from the show. Characters never talk about communism or capitalism with any depth, there’s no conversation about freedom or censorship, and there’s honestly pretty little about the crimes of either the Soviet Union or United States. We do get characters talking about how the work they’re doing with the CIA is “doing good,” but it’s very unclear what they actually mean by that.
Instead the show operates on this very basic understanding of the conflict, which is that the Soviets and Americans are in a struggle (who cares why) and our main characters are on the American side so they’re against the Soviets. That’s it. The entire plot is very spy-vs-spy, with the main mission being to find kompromat on other spies, but it’s a story that could easily be told from either angle.
Compare this to one of my favorite shows of all time, The Americans. Of course it’s unfair to compare PONIES to one of the all-time greats, but I think a comparison is useful when they cover such similar ground. The Americans was about Soviet deep-cover spies in the US, who had been spying for their home country for some 20 years before the start of the series. Their work is brutal and unforgiving, and they constantly struggle with their reason for doing so. Elizabeth is a true believer in the communist cause and in opposing American imperialism across the world. Philip also believes in those things but is motivated more by his connection to Elizabeth, and this whole question of “why are we still doing this?” looms heavy over the series.
But on PONIES, Twila and Bea work for the CIA for purely self-interested reasons (to find out what happened to their husbands). I suppose you could read this as the most American reason possible, but I think it strips the conflict of much of its depth that makes it feel a bit anachronistic.
Fallout (Season 2) — AmazonCW: violence, gore
I was a big fan of season 1 of Fallout, and especially the way it approached the wasteland. The show didn’t try to sugarcoat the apocalypse, but it also resisted, at every turn, to paint humanity with too broad a brush. Our main character Lucy constantly refuses to be changed by the wasteland, to maintain her sense of humanity and civilization, insisting that we can choose not to be violent and evil and tribal. She doesn’t always succeed, but she refuses to compromise her own principles.
Season 2 carried on that question but also became quite a bit more interested in Cooper Howard (The Ghoul, played by Walton Goggins) and his backstory. This was a lore-heavy season of TV more invested in the development of the world than those central philosophical questions that surround post-apocalyptic fiction. That’s important work for a TV series that wants to carry on for multiple seasons to do, but I also can’t help but feel that it’s a bit of a gear shift. Seeing as the nuclear holocaust has already happened, I’m a bit more interested in how to survive or rebuild than I am in just who exactly is responsible for nuclear annihilation.
Still, the cast remains top notch. Justin Theroux was a fun addition to the cast in season 2, Ella Purnell is great at delivering layered performances, Goggins somehow makes me forget about how they shot all his scenes with his nose painted green, and Kyle MacLachlan is endlessly entertaining.
Scrubs 2026 (Season 1) — HuluCW: nostalgia
Scrubs was the first show made for adults that I truly loved and quoted endlessly, so it holds a pretty special place in my heart. I’ve seen every episode of the original 8 seasons many times, although I do feel that time has passed a lot of the humor behind. The original series had 3 episodes featuring blackface that were scrubbed from Hulu in 2020, and the show just had so many jokes about race and queerness that have not aged particularly well. While I like season 8 quite a bit, by the end of the series, the show had succumbed to flanderization, with all of its characters becoming more or less caricatures of themselves rather than fleshed out humans.
Scrubs has rebooted with most of its original cast (Zach Braff, Donald Faison, Sarah Chalke, and Judy Reyes), and it mostly feels the same as the later flanderized seasons of the show. JD and Turk continue their totally-not-gay bromance, JD and Elliot are back to their natural state of will-they-won’t-they, and the show’s hardest hitting emotional beats are a bit sanded down.
Many of the jokes in the first episode of the reboot are about the characters being old, but the show doesn’t really offer us a reason as to why it’s important to return to this world, despite the world of medicine having changed enormously over the past 15 years. Whereas the first series tried to balance the emotional toll on doctors, surrealist comedy for relief, and the ways in which medicine-as-business is fucked up, this version of Sacred Heart seems to have resigned itself to chasing profit, diminishing the emotional toll, and mainly focusing on surrealist daydreams that just don’t hit quite the same way they used to.
I’ll continue watching, largely because of the place this show has played in my life, but I don’t think this was a reboot that has a reason to exist.