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It’s a truly mid time to be a TV fan. For every The Lowdown (have you watched yet? fantastic!), there’s an All’s Fair; for every season 1 and 2 of The Bear, there’s seasons 3 and 4 of The Bear. The incentives right now are all steering TV toward a serviceable sameness: storylines that go down easy, watched with one eye as you scroll through your phone with the other. And as Kyndall Cunningham points out, the convergence at meh means that we’re losing out on one of TV’s great pleasures: iconic protagonists who can become pop cultural icons.

The prestige TV era from which we recently emerged was rich in character-based storytelling. Tony Soprano, Carrie Bradshaw, and the Roys of Succession became iconic because they were such specific, precisely-defined characters: Their stories arose from their weaknesses. But Kyndall argues that today’s TV is largely written with an eye toward memeable quips that will cut through the phone haze and have a chance to go viral — and that means the characters have become a lot less interesting and a lot more flat. Read the full piece to see Kyndall’s smart, thorough analysis of how we got here, and where we’re finding our favorite characters now — outside of narrative TV.

—Constance Grady, senior correspondent

HBOMax

Though it’s still early in its first season, I Love LA is already being compared to previous character-driven sitcoms about aimless young people in big cities, namely Girls — only there’s an element of that show that’s noticeably missing from this new one.

I Love LA follows aspiring talent manager Maia (Rachel Sennott) and her tight-knit group of friends, including her formerly estranged, influencer bestie Tallulah (Odessa A’zion), whom she represents as a client. Right off the bat, it’s clear the show wants to establish the sort of relatable, “which one are you?” type of TV ensemble. However, their personalities, aside from Maia’s straight-man boyfriend, aren’t all that distinguishable. Maia, in particular, is an oddly nonspecific protagonist whose voice resembles Twitter more than an actual person. Everyone speaks in the same dry, “cool-girl” tone. Maybe this is an accurate depiction of Gen-Z Angelenos nowadays, but it doesn’t really work for a show that’s aiming to make you invested in its characters.

This could very well change as the season progresses. Still, sitting through I Love LA brings to mind a larger question: Are we in a TV character drought? Will we ever have someone as iconic and knowable as Carrie Bradshaw or Don Draper on our screens again?

Read the full story »

Do not bring your child to a child-free wedding. They don’t want to go.

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Over the river and through the woods to a Friendsgiving feast we go.

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