Absurd! Comic! Docu-series?
THIS IS A TIME of humdrum conformity in film and TV. Netflix, Disney, “prestige TV,” “indie film”: they all rely on established narratives, characters, and signifiers rather than originality to win audiences and critical praise.
Social and political discourse, once lively, are now similarly conformist. Once upon a time, complexity, nuance, sincerity, humour, modesty, and the like were treated as virtues. Now, at least in official media and cultural spheres, all issues are simplified, polarized, overheated. The volume and shrillness of the true believers obscure deeper realities of how people actually live; to wit, most people either don’t give a shit about politics or society at large, or hold a range of contradictory, heterodox beliefs unique to themselves.
It is this context that makes the three shows I want to discuss here so refreshing. Both with John are six-episode half-hour HBO shows that one might call documentaries strictly for lack of a better word; in each, it is more the voice of the show’s creator—anxious New York 30-something John Wilson and sexagenarian Lounge Lizard John Lurie, respectively—and their ability to sweep audiences along with their associative digressions, rather than any obvious narrative or theme, that gives the thing coherence. The other show, , is a YouTube (and Patreon) phenomenon of interview-based, staccato-paced gonzo journalism conducted by one Andrew Callaghan in provocative locales—a Proud Boys rally, a packed beach in the midst of COVID, a Black Lives Matter riot. More extroverted than How To and Painting, it shares with them a truth-telling impulse that would be naïve if it weren’t
