Cinemorphosis

Blog

  • WALTER CRONKITE AND FRANK SINATRA WERE THE TRUSTED PROPHETS OF MY YOUTH

    WALTER CRONKITE AND FRANK SINATRA WERE THE TRUSTED PROPHETS OF MY YOUTH

    At four years old, a pocket-sized philosopher in footie pajamas, I’d often find myself stationed in the living room like a tiny sentinel, transfixed by the glow of our hulking television set. The air was thick with the comforting aroma of my mother’s lasagna or spaghetti, a scent that promised warmth and stability, while my father and I tuned in to the evening sermon of Walter Cronkite. Cronkite, that square-jawed oracle of truth, delivered the news with the gravitas of a benevolent yet exhausted deity. His voice—measured, slightly weary—wrapped around the day’s events like a woolen blanket, equal parts reassurance and obligation, as necessary as a nightly dose of cod liver oil or a reluctant gulp of Ovaltine.

    But Cronkite, for all his journalistic divinity, did not hold the title of Supreme Voice in our household. That honor belonged to Frank Sinatra, whose velvet baritone floated from our Fischer Hi-Fi console stereo with the omnipresence of a household deity. Sinatra wasn’t merely a singer—he was a prophet, a sage in a sharp suit, the Cronkite of melody, issuing dispatches on love, loss, and longing with a conviction that made it clear: this was the stuff of life. His voice had the eerie authority of a celestial news anchor, forewarning me of adulthood’s looming weather patterns—storms of responsibility, gales of regret, hurricanes of heartbreak.

    At an age when my greatest concern should have been whether I got the last Nilla Wafer, I found myself drowning in premature nostalgia, gripped by the weight of Sinatra’s melancholic musings. “It Was a Very Good Year” hit my preschool psyche like an existential anvil—suddenly, I was an ancient soul trapped in a toddler’s body, debating whether to pair my Triscuits with a port wine cheddar spread or just give in and sip on some prune juice like a man resigned to his fate. Sinatra had me feeling so prematurely adult, I half-expected a cigar to materialize in my hand or to receive a personal invitation to an exclusive stockholder’s meeting.

    I wasn’t just waiting for dinner. I was reckoning with life’s grand metaphysical dilemmas, wrestling with the realization that the world was vast, unknowable, and, worst of all, drenched in longing. And yet, as I sat there, absorbing the gospel of Ol’ Blue Eyes, I couldn’t help but suspect that Sinatra had the answers—the ones I wouldn’t fully understand until I was old enough to toast my regrets with a stiff drink and a knowing smirk.

  • LARRY SANDERS: WHEN YOUR ONLY MEASURE OF SELF-WORTH IS THE NIELSEN RATING

    LARRY SANDERS: WHEN YOUR ONLY MEASURE OF SELF-WORTH IS THE NIELSEN RATING

    The Larry Sanders Show is, at its core, a study in impoverishment—not financial, mind you, but emotional, existential, and spiritual. It’s a bleak yet hilarious portrait of men so starved for validation that their only measure of self-worth is the Nielsen rating. Without it, they might as well not exist. The three principals—Larry Sanders, Hank Kingsley, and Artie the producer—are all flailing in different shades of desperation, their egos so fragile they make pre-teen TikTok influencers look well-adjusted.

    What’s astonishing is that these men are emotional dumpster fires in a pre-social media era. Had they been forced to navigate Instagram, they’d have suffered full mental collapse long before season six. Larry, in particular, embodies this fragile insecurity perfectly: there he is, night after night, lying in bed with some beautiful woman, but his true lover is the TV screen, where he watches his own performance with a mix of self-loathing and obsessive scrutiny. His actual partner—flesh, blood, and pleading for his attention—might as well be a houseplant.

    Hank Kingsley, meanwhile, is a slow-motion trainwreck of envy and delusion. He loathes Larry with the fire of a thousand suns, seeing his role as sidekick as a cosmic insult to a man of his alleged grandeur. His existence is a never-ending, one-man King Lear, with far more Rogaine and far less dignity.

    Then there’s Artie, the producer, the closest thing the show has to a functional adult. He wrangles chaos with a cigarette in one hand and a whiskey in the other, managing to keep the circus running even as its ringleader is in freefall. But Artie, too, is an emotional casualty. He can juggle Larry’s neuroses and Hank’s tantrums with military precision, yet his own life is a shipwreck, his ability to maintain order confined strictly to the world of late-night television.

    Yet for all its cynicism, the show doesn’t just leave us gawking at these wrecked souls—it makes us care. We want them to wake up, to claw their way out of their vanity-driven stupor, to abandon the mirage of celebrity and seek something real. But they won’t. They can’t. They are too drunk on the high of public approval, too lost in the spectacle of show business, too incapable of self-awareness to change course. And so we watch them burn out in real time, laughing through the tragedy, absorbing its lessons like a cautionary tale wrapped in razor-sharp wit.

    In the end, The Larry Sanders Show is the perfect showbiz fable: hilarious, cutting, deeply sad, and just self-aware enough to let us laugh at the madness while secretly wondering if we, too, are addicted to the same empty validation.

  • NOT THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO

    NOT THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO

    When I was a nineteen-year-old bodybuilder in Northern California, I stumbled into a gig at UPS, where they transformed the likes of me into over-caffeinated parcel gladiators. Picture this: UPS, the coliseum of cardboard where bubble wrap is revered like a deity. My mission? To load 1,200 boxes an hour, stacking them into trailer walls so precise you’d think I was defending a Tetris championship title. Five nights a week, from eleven p.m. to three a.m., I morphed into a nocturnal legend of the loading dock. Unintentionally, I shed ten pounds and saw my muscles morph into something straight out of a comic book—like the ones where the hero’s biceps could bench-press a car.

    I had a chance to redeem myself from the embarrassment of two previous bodybuilding fiascos. At sixteen, I competed in the Mr. Teenage Golden State in Sacramento, appearing as smooth as a marble statue without the necessary cuts. I repeated the folly a year later at the Mr. Teenage California in San Jose. I refused to let my early bodybuilding career be tarnished by these debacles. With a major competition looming, I noticed my cuts sharpening from the relentless cardio at UPS. Redemption seemed not only possible but inevitable.

    Naturally, I did what any self-respecting bodybuilder would do: I slashed my carbs to near starvation levels and set my sights on the 1981 Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest at Mission High School. My physique transformed into a sculpted masterpiece—180 pounds of perfectly bronzed beefcake. The downside? My clothes draped off me like a sad, deflated costume. Cue an emergency shopping trip to a Pleasanton mall, where I found myself in a fitting room that felt like a shrine to Joey Scarbury’s “Theme from The Greatest American Hero,” the ultimate heroic anthem of 1981.

    As I tried on pants behind a curtain so flimsy it could’ve been mistaken for a fogged-up windshield, I overheard two young women employees outside arguing about which one should ask me out. Their voices escalated, each vying for the honor of basking in my bronzed splendor. As I slid a tanned, shaved calf through a pants leg, I pictured the cute young women outside my dressing room engaged in a WWE smackdown right there on the store floor, complete with body slams and flying elbows, all for a dinner date with me. This was it—the ultimate validation of my sweat-drenched hours in the gym. And what did I do? I froze like a deer in headlights, donning an aloof expression so potent it was like tossing a wet blanket on a fireworks show. They scattered, muttering about my stuck-up demeanor, while I stood there in my Calvin Kleins, paralyzed by the attention I had so craved.

    For a brief, shining moment—from my mid-teens to my early twenties—I possessed the kind of looks that could make a Cosmopolitan “Bachelor of the Month” seem like the “Before” picture in a self-help book. But my personality? Stuck in the same developmental phase as a slab of walking protein powder with the social finesse of a half-melted wax figure.

    I had sculpted the body of a Greek god but inhabited it with the poise of a toddler wearing his dad’s shoes. In this regrettable state, I found that dozens of attractive women threw themselves at me, and I responded with the enthusiasm of a tax auditor on Xanax. Look past the Herculean exterior, and you’d find a hollow shell—a construction site abandoned mid-project, complete with rusted scaffolding and a sign that said, “Sorry, we’re closed.”

  • TRAINING WITH THE WRESTLING STARS ON TV FELT LIKE A FEVER DREAM

    TRAINING WITH THE WRESTLING STARS ON TV FELT LIKE A FEVER DREAM

    Training at Walt’s Gym in the mid-70s wasn’t just about lifting weights—it was an unfiltered, sweat-drenched fever dream where my adolescent reality collided head first with the muscle-bound mythology of Big Time Wrestling. For two years in the early 70s, I had religiously watched Big Time Wrestling on Channel 44, glued to my TV screen, captivated by the larger-than-life personas of Pat Patterson, Rocky Johnson, Kinji Shibuya, Pedro Morales, and Hector Cruz. Then, as if fate had decided to prank me, a few years later I found myself sharing dumbbells with these very same legends as a clueless, starstruck thirteen-year-old Olympic weightlifter.

    At first, it was thrilling—until my big mouth turned the dream into a farce. Despite carrying a respectable amount of muscle for my age, I had the survival instincts of a gazelle on tranquilizers. Take, for example, the time I was doing cable lat rows next to Hector Cruz, a man whose forehead looked like a war zone of scar tissue. In a stunning act of idiocy, I casually mentioned that I’d heard rumors that wrestling might, gasp, be fake.

    Cruz, mid-rep, snapped his head toward me with the kind of stare that could curdle milk. “Look at these scars on my face! Do they look fake to you?” he growled, his voice carrying the weight of a man who had spent years being thrown into turnbuckles for a living. I nodded solemnly, silently wondering if plastic surgery had advanced to the point of replicating decades of chair shots and steel cage matches.

    Then there was the Great Towel Incident, in which my ignorance of gym etiquette nearly got me suplexed into another dimension. Spotting a towel draped over the calf raise machine, I assumed—like a naive idiot—that it was communal property, perfect for mopping my sweat-drenched forehead. A fraction of a second later, a mountain of muscle erupted from a nearby bench press, veins bulging, eyes locked onto me like a heat-seeking missile.

    “That YOUR towel, kid?” he snarled, his biceps twitching in a way that suggested he resolved most disputes with his fists. Before I could sputter out an excuse, he made it abundantly clear that swiping another man’s gym towel was the equivalent of stealing his car, his wife, and his dog in one fell swoop. Lesson learned: gym towels are sacred artifacts, and touching one without permission is an offense punishable by immediate death or, worse, public humiliation.

    But the crowning jewel of my social missteps at Walt’s Gym was my commitment to primal, theatrical grunting—a misguided attempt to add some dramatic flair to my workouts. I thought my earth-shaking screams made me sound like a warrior; in reality, they made me sound like someone having an exorcism mid-bench press.

    One day, my sound effects finally pushed a competitive bodybuilder—who looked like a bronze statue of vengeance—to his breaking point. He pulled me aside, his stare filled with enough hostility to burn a hole through my skull. “Kid,” he said, his voice dangerously low, “if you don’t cut the screaming, someone’s going to shut you up permanently. And trust me, they’ll get a standing ovation for it.”

    That was my wake-up call. Surviving Walt’s Gym wasn’t just about lifting heavy—it was about mastering the unspoken social codes that separated the seasoned warriors from the clueless rookies. The iron jungle had rules, and I was learning them one near-death experience at a time.

  • LIZA TREYGER BELONGS ON STAGE

    LIZA TREYGER BELONGS ON STAGE

    In her Netflix stand-up special Night Owl, Liza Treyger unleashes an hour of manic brilliance, slicing through life’s absurdities with the gleeful energy of a woman who has long accepted—if not fully embraced—her own chaos. Smiling, effervescent, and naturally sarcastic, she delivers a rapid-fire confessional that feels less like a polished comedy routine and more like an open mic night inside her own hyperactive brain.

    She tells us she was born near the Chernobyl meltdown and now has a lifelong thyroid condition, that her attention span has been obliterated by her smartphone, that she’s forfeited all privacy in exchange for algorithm-curated animal videos, and that her Russian father has an uncanny ability to humiliate her by showing up to formal events in wildly inappropriate T-shirts. She doubts she has the temperament for marriage, children, or any relationship that lasts longer than a Bravo reality show season. She adores living in New York, even though she’s been mugged three times. She got an oversized butterfly tattoo—not because she wanted one, but because she was avoiding the soul-crushing task of changing her printer’s toner cartridge. She’s hungry for applause about losing forty pounds, even though she’s gained it all back. She’s openly critical of her therapist for being judgmental, yet she happily judges everyone around her. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of The Real Housewives franchise, capable of reciting random episodes in disturbingly granular detail. And, above all, she might be a bit of a misfit—too addicted to salacious gossip to maintain deep, lasting friendships.

    Treyger is intimidatingly sharp. I like to think I have a respectable level of intelligence, but I’m fairly certain she would find me basic and tedious—a conclusion I’ve already reached about myself, so no harm done. Watching Night Owl felt like a vacation from my own dullness, a thrilling rollercoaster ride through the mind of someone far wittier, sharper, and quicker than I could ever hope to be.

    For someone who claims to be a misfit, she fits perfectly on a comedy stage. The very qualities that alienate her in real life—her inability to stop talking, her obsession with gossip, her unfiltered, razor-sharp takes—are her greatest gifts in front of an audience. I’d listen to her anywhere.

  • ANDREW SCHULZ IS NOSTALGIC FOR A BYGONE ERA OF STREETWISE AMERICANA

    ANDREW SCHULZ IS NOSTALGIC FOR A BYGONE ERA OF STREETWISE AMERICANA

    Andrew Schulz’s Netflix comedy special Life is a raw, ribald, and unfiltered chronicle of his and his wife’s grueling journey to have a child. It’s a ride that careens between lewd confessionals, streetwise swagger, and sentimental catharsis. For an hour, Schulz prowls the stage like a wisecracking, mustachioed throwback to an old-school gangster film, his booming presence equal parts stand-up comic and mob enforcer. At six-foot-two, broad-shouldered, and built like a guy who settles arguments with a left hook, he radiates a menace rarely seen in stand-up. This is not a comedian you heckle. You laugh, or you keep quiet.

    I had never seen Schulz’s stand-up before, but I knew him as a popular podcaster, so I figured I’d see what all the fuss was about. It didn’t take long to realize that the hype is well-earned. He’s a master wordsmith, a virtuoso of sarcasm, persona, and hyperbole, wielding his sharp tongue like a switchblade. But what really sets him apart is his ability to straddle two opposing forces: he is both a blistering satirist of the old-school street tough guy and a full-throated champion of it. Watching him, you feel like you’ve been dropped into a smoky Brooklyn steakhouse circa 1975, where the grizzled patriarch of a blue-collar family is holding court at the dinner table, explaining—with obscene embellishments—how the world really works.

    His comedy plays like a high-stakes game of verbal poker. As he launches into brutally unfiltered takes on relationships, sex, and masculinity, he flashes an ambiguous grin, as if daring you to figure out whether he’s mocking the persona or reveling in it. The joke is always half on him, half on you, and entirely in his control. But beneath all the bravado and shock humor, Schulz betrays a sentimental streak. He adores his wife. He’s obsessed with his newborn daughter. By the end, he ditches the swagger for a moment of sincerity, showing a video montage of his family and telling his audience that for all the struggles, the reward is worth it.

    Schulz isn’t just nostalgic for a bygone era of streetwise, no-nonsense Americana—he’s built his entire persona around it. And somehow, in a world of algorithm-driven, sanitized comedy, it works.

  • EVIL: WHERE SCIENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL BLEND TOGETHER

    EVIL: WHERE SCIENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL BLEND TOGETHER

    Evil follows the adventures of a tall, chiseled, impossibly handsome priest, David Acosta, who looks like he bench-presses church pews for fun. He’s got two sidekicks: Kristen Bouchard, a psychologist with the looks of a supermodel and the brains to match, and Ben Shakiv, a tech-savvy assistant who’s there to remind us that even in the battle against Satan, someone needs to handle the Wi-Fi. Together, they travel to the darkest corners of the earth—by which I mean upscale suburban homes—where they confront demonic activity with a cocktail of theology, piety, and science. It’s like Scooby-Doo for adults, only instead of unmasking Old Man Jenkins, they’re reporting back to the Diocese after wrestling with the forces of hell itself.

    Adding a spicy dash of drama to the mix is the forbidden love between our hunky priest and Kristen, who, let’s be honest, is only human, and no one can resist a priest with a jawline that sharp. Their missions are a delightful blend of exorcisms and scientific investigations, all while offering sly, not-so-subtle satire on social media, technology, and the big, bad world of power. It’s like watching The X-Files meet The Exorcist, with a dash of Project Runway thrown in for good measure.

    No battle between good and evil is complete without a proper villain, and Evil delivers one wrapped in a crisp suit and the smarmy charm of a man who’s never met a moral boundary he couldn’t slither past. Enter Leland Townsend, a pencil-necked agent of Satan who oozes the kind of slick, synthetic charm that makes used car salesmen look like monks. If you looked up unctuous in the dictionary, you’d find his face grinning back at you, practically dripping with synthetic sincerity. He’s less a mustache-twirling villain and more a corporate devil—HR-approved, disturbingly polite, and disturbingly effective.

    But the true stars of Evil? The fashion. The main characters strut through supernatural horrors in coats so exquisite they could be on loan from the Louvre, each one worth more than my first car. And let’s talk about the priest’s wrist game—a white-dial Patek Philippe that retails for the cost of a small house. Nothing says “vow of poverty” quite like a $50,000 timepiece. This isn’t just aesthetic indulgence; it’s a quiet, winking commentary from the writers: if you’re going to go toe-to-toe with the devil, you might as well do it in couture. After all, nothing repels demonic forces quite like the confidence of someone dressed like they just stepped out of a Milan runway show.

    Beyond the sartorial spectacle, what is Evil actually about? The show thrives on one central tension: the ambiguity of evil itself. Is it supernatural? Psychological? A fusion of both? The show refuses to let us settle comfortably on any single answer. Take the episode where Kristen Bouchard’s daughters are up at 3 a.m., faces glowing in the eerie blue light of an iPad running some unholy ghost-hunting software. They swear the house is haunted. Their mother, an atheist clinging to the comfort of logic, insists there’s a rational explanation. Evil dangles both possibilities in front of us and then, just when we think we’ve landed on an answer, it yanks the rug out. It never gives us the luxury of certainty, instead keeping us suspended in a deliciously maddening limbo where science and the supernatural blur together. And that’s its brilliance—an exquisite, unnerving dance on the knife’s edge of belief.

  • An Unexpected Love Story in The Great

    An Unexpected Love Story in The Great

    If you had told me to watch a period drama about the turbulent love life of Peter III and Catherine the Great—one mostly confined to the gilded chambers of a Russian palace—I would have laughed, pointed to my rain gutters, and insisted I had more pressing matters to attend to. And yet, The Great did something miraculous: it took that seemingly dreary premise and spun it into one of the sharpest, most unexpected love stories I’ve ever seen on television.

    Elle Fanning’s Catherine enters the series practically vibrating with resentment, married off to a narcissistic, gluttonous man-child of an emperor played by Nicholas Hoult, whose Peter III treats ruling Russia like an all-you-can-eat buffet of debauchery. He’s selfish, crude, and revels in excess, while she’s a self-serious, idealistic reformer, convinced she’s been cursed with a fool for a husband. On paper, theirs should be a tale of mutual disdain, and indeed, for a while, it is. But then something bizarre and wonderful happens: they fall in love—not with doe-eyed, saccharine declarations, but in a way that feels both tragic and inevitable. They fall in love despite themselves.

    Peter, the arrogant peacock, starts showing unexpected flashes of vulnerability, betraying an almost boyish need to be seen and understood. Catherine, the self-righteous revolutionary, finds herself drawn to his wit, his strange charm, and his surprising capacity for change. They spar like intellectual gladiators, their verbal fencing as much foreplay as it is battle. This is where The Great sets itself apart from every predictable romance that’s ever clogged up a TV screen: the dialogue—crafted with Tony McNamara’s signature razor-sharp wit—isn’t just ornamental, it’s the very foundation of their attraction. They fall in love through language, through their relentless, biting exchanges that crackle with intelligence, irony, and reluctant admiration.

    Over three seasons, The Great delivers the most gut-wrenching, wickedly funny, and beautifully tragic love story I’ve ever seen—a romance built on war, wit, and the deeply human, utterly irrational act of loving someone against your better judgment.

  • THE CHAOS OF THE ID IN THE WHITE LOTUS

    THE CHAOS OF THE ID IN THE WHITE LOTUS

    Mike White, the diabolically sharp mind behind The White Lotus, never hides his love for reality TV. In fact, watching his show, I can’t shake the feeling that Below Deck—Bravo’s floating social experiment where yacht crews try (and fail) to cater to the deranged whims of ultra-wealthy “charters”—is its spiritual ancestor. The second these rich guests step on board, it’s as if some invisible force dusts their brains with powdered entitlement, triggering every unresolved tantrum from their childhood. For three days, they spiral into meltdowns over the size of shrimp cocktails and the temperature of their jacuzzis, while the hapless crew scrambles to manage the chaos without committing crimes.

    Mike White, ever the genius, saw this carnival of privilege-induced insanity and thought: What if I made it fictional and added murder? Thus, The White Lotus was born—a show that turns the luxury vacation into a pressure cooker for human depravity. The premise is deceptively simple, yet devastatingly effective. In our day-to-day lives, our vices operate at a low hum, drowned out by the mundane grind of emails, commutes, and grocery lists. But place us in an opulent resort, force us to “relax” and “enjoy what we deserve,” and suddenly, our demons come roaring into focus. Every petty insecurity, buried resentment, and simmering entitlement explodes under the tropical sun.

    That’s the true brilliance of Mike White—his ability to hold human chaos under a magnifying glass, amplifying it until it’s so grotesque, so absurdly garish, that we can’t look away. The White Lotus isn’t just satire; it’s an exorcism of the American tourist soul, one infinity pool meltdown at a time.

  • WATCHING PRESTIGE TV IN THE PRE-ALGORITHM DAYS

    WATCHING PRESTIGE TV IN THE PRE-ALGORITHM DAYS

    Between 2002 and 2010, my wife and I lived in the golden age of unfiltered, algorithm-free television consumption—a fleeting, pre-social media era when discovery felt organic, unmanipulated by streaming services shoving their “curated” picks down our throats. We had no children yet, which meant our evenings weren’t dictated by bedtime battles or the soul-crushing exhaustion of parenting twins. Instead, we devoured TV with the kind of single-minded intensity usually reserved for law students cramming for the bar. This was our time, our indulgence, our untamed expedition into the wilderness of prestige television.

    The years between 2002 and 2010 had a peculiar aftertaste, like the lingering fizz of a decade that refused to fully dissolve. The glow of ’90s perpetual adolescence still clung to the air, a warm haze of dial-up nostalgia and post-ironic optimism. Blogs, those digital soapboxes for the unpublished and the deluded, sprouted like toadstools after a storm, each one feeding the fantasy that we were just one viral post away from literary immortality.

    Social media existed, but it had yet to metastasize into the roiling cesspool of disinformation and rage farming it would become. Back then, the Internet still wore the mask of a utopian dream—an egalitarian promised land where access to knowledge would liberate us all. The idea that democracy could be strengthened through connectivity wasn’t yet the punchline to a cruel joke.

    And then there was television, freshly anointed with the label of “prestige,” its best offerings treated like high art. To binge a drama wasn’t an act of sloth but a cultural event, akin to devouring a novel in a single fevered sitting. It was the golden age of TV, before algorithms herded us like cattle into the content farms of endless, joyless streaming. We watched with reverence, believing that television had finally transcended its popcorn past and entered the realm of literature. Little did we know, the binge model we worshipped would soon turn us all into passive, glassy-eyed gluttons, gorging on content as if it might fill the growing void.

    Back then, finding a new show felt like a voyage of discovery, an expedition guided not by an algorithm but by word-of-mouth and gut instinct. Watching TV was like perusing a farmer’s market, sampling the produce ourselves, choosing what looked freshest, most intriguing, most promising—rather than having some all-knowing digital overlord shove a preselected “Because You Watched” playlist in our faces. My wife and I felt like Magellan charting unknown waters, sailing into TV’s vast, uncharted depths, unsure if we would encounter sea monsters, mermaids, or islands teeming with enchantment. It was thrilling. It was dangerous. And most importantly, it was ours.

    Of all the shows we binged, three stood out as cultural gold mines we felt like we alone had unearthed: Six Feet Under, The Wire, and Lost. Each had its own gravitational pull. Six Feet Under wasn’t just about a dysfunctional funeral home—it was about risks of individual freedom in a family that disregarded societal conventions. The Wire was a sprawling, devastating essay on the fight for dignity in a rigged system. And Lost? It was Gilligan’s Island meets Sartrean nihilism, a fever dream of redemption and existential dread where the only certainty was uncertainty itself.

    Then came 2010—and with it, the seismic shift of having twins. Overnight, TV ceased to be a grand expedition and became a survival mechanism, a warm bath to sink into after the daily combat of child-rearing. Gone was the immersive, existential drama-watching experience. Now, TV became a battlefield medic, stitching us back together, offering temporary relief before the next round of exhaustion. We weren’t discovering new worlds anymore. We were licking our wounds, bracing for tomorrow.