Hi,
Welcome back to Continue Watching! Since this is our first issue in 2023, can we still wish you a happy new year? Considering it was January until a week ago, it doesn’t feel that idiotic. We hope that in the past 62 days, your life has been eventful but calm, because we’ve had a WILD time. So wild that we couldn’t even write about it here. But one can only stay away from their true calling for this long. Now we’re back in time to SCREAM about a show we’ve both been looking forward to ever since we read the book, Daisy Jones & The Six. This book is so good that Kashika found a loophole in her rule against reading/watching old-timey things. The show dropped yesterday on Amazon Prime Video, and we’re hoping to retain enough mojo this month that we can come back and talk to you about it. Here’s the trailer if you need more convincing.
Don’t tell us you didn’t think this was a real band and these two tortured, broken people needed to just… get down to business immediately.
Succession is also coming back later this month for its fourth and final season, and if you need to catch-up on that jaw-dropping finale from last season, look no further than Shahana’s essay that broke one of our lovely subscribers’ brain.
With Daisy Jones reigniting something in us that we are desperately chasing, we decided to dedicate this issue to book to TV adaptations. Apart from the intense feeling of inadequateness that it brought for Kashika for not having read much in the last two years, this exercise made us realise how much we love storytelling and why we’re obsessed with TV. We would love to know which books to TV adaptations you’re obsessed with, and which book you’d love to see on screen one day. But before that, here’s what we’re watching these days:
CURRENTLY WATCHING
Kashika
Single Drunk Female: I love stories where a woman, after a series of bad decisions, completely blows up her life and has to move back home to start from scratch. Both the shows I’m currently watching are exactly this. In Single Drunk Female, Sam is an alcoholic who gets fired for maiming her boss. She’s put on probation and has to go to AA meetings for a year. Between living with her ‘sMother’, running into ex-best friends and ex-boyfriends, and trying to figure out who she is when she’s not drinking, Sam tries to build her life back bit by bit, cautiously optimistic and a little bit proud of herself. Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
Not Dead Yet: Gina Rodriguez is endlessly watchable. She was amazing in Jane the Virgin and she’s amazing as Nell in Not Dead Yet, where she plays a newly single and broke journalist who blew up her life for a boy only to fall flat on her face. When she comes back home and asks for her job back, she’s given the obituaries beat… but there’s a twist. Every time she writes an obituary, the dead person haunts her until she’s done with their story. It sounds like an extremely mawkish premise, but Gina makes it work and the dead people have genuinely sweet things to say. Every episode ends with a small but important life lesson which is only palatable to me in a TV show. If, in real life, someone tries to explain the value of family or whatever to me, I’d laugh in their face. Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
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Shahana
Perfect Match: This show…I don’t understand it. The premise is this: Hot (their words not mine) single men and women from other reality shows come on the show to find their perfect match, and at the end of the show the most perfect Perfect Match wins. Every episode, the matches compete in bizarre compatibility games, and whichever couple wins gets the power to force other people to go on dates with other people. The games themselves have less to do with compatibility and more to do with..I don’t actually know what those games were for. One game needed everyone to kiss everyone (and some people were really going at it—hands everywhere, tongues straight in), and another game required everyone to paste sponges on their body and then squeeze water out of it. And then everyone is shocked that the men who were manipulative assholes on the previous reality shows were manipulative assholes on this new one. Everyone seems stupid, but I’m clearly the most stupid, because I’m watching it. Streaming on Netflix.
Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches: Let me start with saying, Anne Rice’s books are not for the fainthearted. There’s a lot of really kinky sex, incest, violence, death—so I was curious to see how they’d adapt this one, especially since Interview with the Vampire was done so well. Mayfair Witches follows Dr Rowan Fielding (Alexandra Daddario) who discovers she’s from an ancient line of witches, haunted by Lasher (Jack Huston), a spirit who may or may not be malevolent. No tale about a lineage of witches can ever be free from their encounters with entitled, condescending men, encounters that stretch across time and age, and Mayfair Witches has plenty of it—but the show overall just falls flat. A story about a woman learning about her witch ancestry, one whose ties with power are intrinsically linked to sex, secret societies, evil spirits, shouldn’t be this dull. While it’s been renewed for a second season, I don’t know if I’ll continue watching it. Not streaming anywhere.
Talk to us and tell us you love us even when we go MIA for a while. Until then…
Continue Watching (and reading!),
Kashika and Shahana
Kashika & Shahana’s Top 3 Books to TV Adaptations To Look Forward to in 2023
KASHIKA
One Day
Every time I talk about this book, I have to take a deep breath. One Day is the story of two college friends, Emma and Dexter, who meet on their graduation day. For the next 20 years, we revisit their life on this one day to see if they’re still friends or lovers or even on speaking terms or somewhere in between. One Day takes me back to 2011, when I was 21 and read this for the first time, shook by the urgency and intensity of the connection between these two people. They made a fairly average movie based on this book starring Anne Hathaway, but a movie cannot do justice to the love and friendship of Emma and Dexter. You need 10 episodes (or more) to fully capture the magic and terribleness of two people who are often not friends and not lovers, but calling them strangers or acquaintances would be like putting a dagger in their heart. So now they’re making a British TV show based on the book starring Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall (the ‘nephew’ of the gays from The White Lotus 2), and while I’m not holding my breath because of what the Brits did to my other favourite novel, The Time Traveller’s Wife, I’m definitely watching it.
The Last Thing He Told Me
I’m a big fan of suspicious husbands as a genre and Jennifer Garner as a person. The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave is the story of a woman who teams up with her 16-year-old stepdaughter to search for her missing husband. In doing so, OF COURSE she realises that the husband wasn’t who he said he was. They never are. Julia Roberts was set to play this role earlier, and I cannot explain it but I feel like Jen is the better choice.
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SHAHANA
Three Women
Based on Lisa Taddeo’s novel of the same name, Three Women is about “three women on a crash course to radically overturn their lives.” The book itself is about female desire and sexuality, but not an exploration of their own. One woman lives by rules her teacher prescribes, another sleeps with men her husband chooses for her, and the third chooses to take charge of her sex life by leaving an unfulfilling relationship. Look, the book was a little clunky, and Taddeo spent many hours with her subjects to simply tell their stories, but with no clear sense of what she wanted to say with their stories. I’m cautiously curious about the adaptation; a different format might just be what thes stories needed. We’ll find out.
The Fall of the House of Usher
Mike Flanagan, who was behind some of the best horror shows in the last few years, is returning to Netflix for his final project. The Fall of the House of Usher is based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, and stars actors Flanagan has worked with before. I have loved almost every show Flanagan did for Netflix, and in his hands, stories that started out as macabre turn into something so moving and haunting, it stays with you for days after you’ve finished the show. And if you’re a fan of horror, you know Poe. Poe and Flanagan together? I expect nothing but genius.
The Three-Body Problem
Okay, I’m going to be honest, I really liked the premise of the book, but I could not finish it. A friend who absolutely LOVES this book recommended it to me, and was shocked that I was bored by it. I haven’t met another person who has read this book who didn’t love it, so I want to watch the show in the hopes that it’ll be good enough that I’ll want to give the book another try? Based on the book of the same name by Chinese writer Liu Cixin, the plot follows Wang Miao, a detective enlisted to investigate a case of what appears to be a series of suicides in the scientific community. During his investigation, Wang Miao discovers a video game with an alien world which somehow connects both these suicides with the fate of the world.
Kashika and Shahana’s Top 3 Books They Want To See as TV Shows
KASHIKA
I'll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson
Listen. I love this book so much and it broke my heart so much that even though I keep it on my bedside table at all times, I’ve only ever read it once. I’m worried anyone who touches it will ruin it but I want to watch this story on screen. I don’t think I have the courage to read it again. Told alternatively in two timelines, one where twins Jude and Noah are inseparable and one in which they can’t stand each other, I’ll Give You The Sun is the kind of story that never leaves you. Sibling stories are my Achilles heel, and this one’s for the ages.
Batshit by Kritika Kapoor
Right from the first page, Batshit draws you in and you cannot look away from Pia and her demons. Is she just a Delhi girl who wants to lose weight, get married, and win her mother’s approval, or is she fucking insane? Kapoor takes the simple concept of how far one can go to get what they want and elevates it into a terrifying, thoughtful tale. The mom character, written with so much love and biting precision, will make for one of the greatest television characters of all time. The fact that the book is set in Delhi but doesn’t fall for the easy stereotypes without adding some insight into them makes it the perfect candidate for a Netflix or Hotstar original.
We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
This book is 10% of why I will never have kids. Kevin has murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a teacher. He’s now in jail but his mother is in hell. Even though she was never sure if she wanted to be a mother, she loved Kevin and gave him the best life. So then what happened? That’s what she tries to figure out in this insane, horrifying, terrifying book. There’s a super creepy movie starring Ezra Miller based on this book, but like One Day, it needs more airtime.
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SHAHANA
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
“The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”
I read The Night Circus over a decade ago, and I remember distinctly thinking this book would make a gorgeous television show. The book follows two rival magicians, who further said rivalry by using their proteges to participate in a magical duel. The proteges, Celia and Marco, compete by displaying their magical abilities in fantastical exhibits at a wandering, mysterious circus called the Cirque des Rêves, the Circus of Dreams. Celia and Marco soon learn that this duel isn’t just a competition being played for bragger’s rights, but has stakes much higher than they could’ve imagined. The Night Circus has everything a good television show needs—magic, a romance that covers both the enemies-to-lovers and star-crossed lovers tropes, excellent style choices by all protagonists, and secrets. Lots of secrets.
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
“We reached for each other and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake in this room loving him in silence.”
A retelling of the Greek myth The Iliad, The Song of Achilles is told from Patroclus’s eyes. According to most adaptations, Patroclus is a minor character whose decisions ultimately decide the outcome of the Trojan War. Madeline Miller writes Patroclus and Achilles as lovers, with every tender, yearning moment between the two always tinged with a sense of impending tragedy. Achilles is the kind of hero prophecies are written about. Everyone, including him, knows he will never return from Troy. Patroclus, too minor for the Fates to care about, spends his time imagining the emptiness of his life without Achilles. We know otherwise. I’m envisioning a lot of wistful glances, constant eyefucking, good looking men in very little clothes, and some really good sex. And the yearning. Oh my god, the yearning.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”
As first lines go, this one’s a banger. The Secret History was published in 1992, and has lost absolutely none of its appeal since. In fact, if you don’t know where the dark academia aesthetic came from, this book is probably where it started. The story follows a group of college friends with a dark secret and the lengths they go to keep it. Told from the perspective of an outsider who is inducted into this group, there’s plenty of action as well as character development to keep you on the edge—there’s sex, murder, drugs, a Bacchanal. I did wonder whether I should put this on this list, because The Secret History is one of those books that has a very specific vibe and tone, and there’s no middle ground with it—you either really love it or you just can’t take the characters seriously. There’s a sense of unease that pervades every scene, and the characters all have a sort of impenetrable quality to them; it would take a cast and crew of incredible talent to really translate that to screen. Maybe some things really are better left in the medium they were originally created for.
RECOMMENDATIONS
We get so many requests for TV show recs from friends, so we’ll get to them here in every issue.
I just finished watching all of Brooklyn 99 and now, at the cost of sounding dramatic, there’s a void in my heart I need to fill. Are they not making good sitcoms anymore? I can’t find anything.
So you’re looking for a workplace comedy—have you tried Emily in Paris? France-obsessed Emily moves to Paris to work and everything is a joke, so that should do the trick!
Just kidding.
Created by Quinta Brunson, best known for A Black Lady Sketch Show, Abbott Elementary is centered around her character, Janine Teagues, an ambitious and idealistic teacher who loves her job and wants the best for her students. Shot mockumentary-style, like Parks and Recreation and The Office, the show follows Janine’s colleagues at a predominantly Black Philadelphia school, all trying to do their job as educators in less-than-ideal conditions.
Abbott Elementary brings back the traditional sitcom format with each episode focusing on a different situation that crops up at the school, and though we’re laughing, we can’t help but think about the fact that these challenges are caused by a severe lack of funding. We recommend looking up how much the US spends on the military every year for context.
The writing is tight, the pacing never lags, and the ensemble cast elevates every line they’re given with impeccable comic timing. Abbott Elementary has all the hallmarks of a great sitcom— a sense of community, heart, charm, and a story unlike anything else on television.
Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
We hope you enjoyed reading this issue as much as we loved writing it. Please write to us if you have any feedback. We look forward to your emails, comments, tweets, and DMs with requests, criticism, recommendations, and anything else that you want to tell us. You can also follow us on Instagram here. And if you haven’t already, do subscribe!