Hi,
Welcome back to Continue Watching! This is our 30th issue, which is simultaneously so many and so few issues. You may have also noticed that we’re not hitting your inbox as frequently these days, and that is because we are both dealing with too many grown-up life things and either cannot find the time to consistently watch everything we want to write about or cannot sit down long enough to write essays every fortnight. Having said that, this newsletter is one of the most fulfilling parts of our personal lives, so we’ve decided to send them out monthly instead of fortnightly. We do feel some type of way about this, but we’re in very different places in our life than we were in 2020 when we started Continue Watching, so this will have to do for now.
But this also means we have so much to talk to you about! Did you guys finish the second season of Only Murders in the Building? Are you watching House of the Dragon? Are you going to be watching The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power? Are you as excited as we are to see Aubrey Plaza and Meghann Fahy in the teaser of the second season of The White Lotus? Were you, like us, once again underwhelmed with Never Have I Ever? Were you also shocked by how much the clothes from Masaba Masaba cost IRL? Did you watch the second season of Indian Matchmaking? (Neither one of us has the time or energy to watch anything cringe right now so even though it sparked some level of FOMO, we gave it a pass.) Are you also watching every single episode of Koffee with Karan, only to complain about how bloody boring it’s become? SERIOUSLY. Evolve the format! Did you also scream when you found out that Taylor Swift’s new album Midnights comes out in less than two months?
That’s a lot of questions but please write to us and tell us what’s been happening in your life, TV-wise or otherwise! Speaking of which, a big, BIG shout out to Sarita for sending us the literal best DMs and making our day, week, month, and year. Thank you for investing your time in not just our newsletter but also in sending us your thoughts about it, Sarita!
Okay, now that we have caught up, let us tell you what this issue has in store for you. First of all, if you haven’t watched The Bear on Disney+ Hotstar, you need to do that right away! And not just because that show sparked the ideas for the two essays in this issue. The Bear is the story of how one man, after the death of his brother, takes over his restaurant and has to navigate this unexpected new challenge while still grieving every day. And he does that through food. Only Shahana can do justice to an idea like that, so she carefully, with love, takes you on this journey. Kashika, forever pulled towards stories about siblings, wonders what it is about them that makes them so compelling to watch. Fittingly, this idea came to her while watching a show about murderous sisters.
But before we get to the essays, here’s what we’re watching these days!
CURRENTLY WATCHING
Kashika
Bad Sisters: Ten minutes into the first episode of Bad Sisters, I texted my friends that I have found the perfect new show, a cross between Pretty Little Liars and Big Little Lies. Five close-knit sisters are living their lives in Ireland until one of the brothers-in-law dies, and it doesn’t take us long to realise that the sisters were somehow responsible. Did one or all of them kill him? Did they want to? Why would they do that? It is sweet, funny and well-paced, but it also makes my blood boil because one of the characters is THE ABSOLUTE WORST. Please watch it so we can predict who the murderer might be together. Streaming on Apple TV+.
The Patient: Who, among us, has not had the idea of locking up their therapist in a room and screaming FIX MEEEEE at them? It’s a joke! Chill, you guys. But it’s not a joke for a patient of Steve Carell (I can’t remember his character’s name), who kidnaps and locks him up because he wants him to help the guy stop… murdering people! Yes, dude is a serial killer and wants Steve to make him stop. I hope no therapist watches this show because it is objectively terrifying, even though it’s not shot in the dark and doesn’t try to scare you. Just that the whole atmosphere of the show is eerie. Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
—
Shahana
Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin: Way before Riverdale, the greatest substitute to drugs, entered my life, I tripped out on Pretty Little Liars, a show known for its bonkers plots. How bonkers, you ask? Once, one character tried to drown one of the leads and then those two ended up dating, the drowning attempt never spoken of again. Another time, a woman decided to bury Daughter 1 in her backyard because she thought Daughter 2 killed Daughter 1—but never bothered to check if Daughter 1 was actually dead. You can read about all these plots here, from when I did a roundup. The reason I digressed so much is because PLL was so popular, it had multiple spinoffs, all of which failed. But they’re making another one, ominously titled Original Sin. Something is obviously wrong with me, because I started watching it. Basic plot point is: many years ago, a group of girls were mean to this one girl who threw herself off the building at a party and she died. Many years later, the non-mean daughters of the mean girls are thrown together by a blonde mean girl being mean to them (there’s some sins of the mother Biblical thing happening here), and then someone dies the same way (I’m assuming that’s what they mean by original sin? It’s better than the other spinoffs, but is also a timepass show. Streaming on Amazon Prime.
Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons: In a post MeToo world, it’s a little hard to understand exactly why the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was such a big deal. Models, all of them the exact same unrealistic body type, strutted down the runway in lingerie and outrageous outfits, while popular singers serenaded them—it sounds gauche and ridiculous, and if you never watched it in its heyday, I’m not sure how to explain why people, including me, lapped it up. Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons is a three-part documentary that aims to explain why and how it became such a phenomenon, and how Victoria’s Secret the company was able to coast along on the “sexy is empowering” branding and use it to become a commercial trailblazer. It also chronicles the mistakes the brand made that ultimately led to its downfall. Even though they were selling to women and believed they were creating a fantasy aimed at women, every decision was made only by men, who decided that the brand’s narrow and absurd definition of sexy and feminine would not change. It also delves into how VS’s owner—just like nearly every rich, powerful American man—is connected to the late Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier charged with sex trafficking underage girls.I’m two episodes in, and while the subject is extremely compelling, the structure of the documentary itself feels a little scattered. Some issues are raised briefly and then left, and there’s a section featuring the man who designed wings for Victoria’s Secret’s runway shows which adds nothing to the overall story. Streaming on Lionsgate Play.
It’s the start of another month, the NINTH month of the year. We hope it’s kind to you and you’re kinder to yourself. Until then…
Continue Watching (and reading!),
Kashika and Shahana
The Bear: A Haunting Exploration Of Grief Through The Language Of Food
By Shahana
When The Bear opens, our main character Carmen ‘Carmy’ Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) has just left behind a promising career in food. He worked at a high-end New York restaurant, where the food is the price of a journalist’s first salary and the size of a peanut, was nominated for the James Beard Foundation’s Rising Star award, been a Food & Wine Best New Chef, and left it all to come back to Chicago, to run his family’s Italian beef sandwich shop after his older brother Mikey died by suicide, leaving behind a $300,000 debt and no explanation. He is trying to keep Original Beef of Chicagoland afloat, convince old employees to stay, hire new ones, reimagine the restaurant’s existing menu and make good food, and somehow, also mourn his brother.
The Bear has received praise on all sides for its supposedly realistic depiction of what working in a kitchen feels like. It is by no means a soothing show, as one might imagine a show that revolves around food might be—the characters all live and work in a high-stress environment. There is none of the geniality of Masterchef Australia or the warmth of The Great British Bake Off—the kitchen here is a place of chaos, as a place with sharp knives and hot utensils should be. Cooking for pleasure may be therapeutic, but cooking in a restaurant kitchen? Far from it.
One might believe The Bear is about running a restaurant, but I believe the show is about loss and grief—grief for the people, lives, dreams, and potential lost—and learning to live through it and with it. Watching Carmy feels like looking at a pressure cooker ready to explode; he’s trying to contend with his obvious talent and strength in the kitchen as well as his insecurities. Mikey didn’t want him in The Beef’s kitchen, and that combination of hurt, anger, and resentment gets bigger every time he stops to think about it. Carmy ran off to prove himself in a bigger, fancier kitchen, in an effort to do two things; one, show his brother he belonged in The Beef right next to him, and two help Carmy rid himself of his demons.
Spite and anger, however, are fair weather friends, and pain, no matter how far you push it down, will always rear its head. Everything Carmy does, everything he touches, it is all tinged with the weight of his unresolved and unfelt grief and its unrelenting grip. Carmy is full of pain he can’t put into words and an anger whose origin he doesn’t understand; he is constantly reminded of it by surreal nightmares, including a meta one where a massive bear tries to kill him.
When Carmy comes back to Chicago, the disconnect between the two brothers still lies at the core of everything he does, as well as in the restaurant that still connects them. He tries to instill his fine dining training into a group of cooks who have an existing system they’ve perfected over years of simply working together, and obviously meets resistance. Instead of supervising trained chefs who use tweezers to daintily place herbs on perfectly cooked two-inch pieces of meat, Carmy is now overseeing a group of people dicing carrots and onions, and braising hunks of beef for sandwiches. Instead of deferential young cooks ready to jump if he so much as snaps his fingers, he inherits a snarky crew, loyal to how his brother did things, and almost adamant in their refusal to do any different. It may look like all Carmy is doing is trying to upgrade The Beef—but he isn’t simply trying to change the spaghetti recipe his brother was partial to, he’s trying to heal two dysfunctional units in mourning—himself and the restaurant.
What connects both units is how food, for them, is their way of communicating love. When Carmy tries to reconcile The Beef with his vision for what it could be instead of what it is while doing everything in his power (including selling his vintage denim collection to buy supplies) to keep the restaurant open and running, it’s his attempt to move on from and within the grief. It’s an impossible challenge, and Carmy fumbles, repeatedly and badly. In the years since the pandemic, it’s something most of us can relate to—the painful realisation that our personal loss and pain doesn’t mean the world stops. That if we wake up in the morning, we have to go to work. That grief is greedy, but so are bills. Everyone in The Bear is grieving Mikey’s death, and everyone shows up. There was a piece of the restaurant everyone pivoted around, the person that brought and kept them together, and now he’s dead.
I felt that, often, after my father’s death. Every evening, my father would wake up after his customary afternoon nap and make us all a cup of tea. After he started working from home, he made tea for us in the morning, and for him and me, multiple times a day. It was something we shared, our love for tea—I loved drinking it, and he loved making it. The way everyone in The Bear talks about Mikey and his spaghetti, is how people would tell me they remembered my father’s “Ek cup cha cholbe naki? (how about a cup of tea?)” Carmy’s reluctance to make the spaghetti mirrored my distaste for tea in the months following my father’s death. Every cup I made, every cup someone else made, it only served to remind me that it tasted different to how my father made it, and that I would never drink a cup of tea that would taste the way his did. Every cup of tea I drink, and every plate of spaghetti Carmy makes only serves to underscore the absence of the people who didn’t make them. They died, but they’re not gone; they continue to haunt us as long as they choose.
The Bear is a show set in a restaurant, but it’s really about struggling to find a way to hope for something better. Everyone has their struggles; new entrant Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) tries to get over her failed catering business and imbibe her entrepreneurial spirit to revive The Beef, line cook Ebraheim’s (Edwin Lee Gibson) yearning for his own country as he remembers the war that forced him to flee Somalia, Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) who is unmoored in his rage, dealing with the death of his best friend and the end of his marriage.
Carmy is haunted by his brother in a way I could recognise. In one scene, he answers a call asking for his brother, and says to another character, clutching his chest, “I felt like Michael was alive for a second.” The Bear’s heart is the relationship between Carmy and Mikey, and though the latter is in the show for one scene, his spectre looms over the entire show. Carmy tries to reconcile his feelings for the restaurant and his brother, and through it, learns that there is no moving on till he comes to terms with all of it—Mikey’s place in the restaurant and in his own life. The Beef can retain Mikey’s heart, and still be something new.
Shows mentioned:
The Bear - Disney+ Hotstar ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Love, Duty & Family: Why Sibling Stories On TV Hit Different
By Kashika
In the first episode of Bad Sisters, a show where five sisters have maybe-almost-definitely gotten together to kill one of their brothers-in-law, the sisters are discussing something extremely serious, when one of them notices that the other has borrowed her scarf. “That’s my scarf. I want that scarf back, Becka! She always keeps my shit.” Even in the face of a life-altering tragedy, the sister couldn’t keep her mouth shut about this. That’s the side only a sibling can bring out in you.
This might be a bit of a hot take, but you can tell when you’re talking to the oldest child in a family. And if you happen to meet their younger sibling in the same interaction, so much about their personality starts to make sense. Firstborns are almost always more responsible, more stubborn, more willing to share, more obsessed with success, and in my case, more likely to remember their parents’ birthdays and anniversary. If you disagree with this, you’re definitely the youngest! And no matter how old you get, around your sibling you always resort to whatever dynamics you had when you were growing up. For example, when I am around my parents, especially in arguments, I instantly become a surly teenager. When I’m around my brother, I become less selfish and more responsible by definition, no matter how selfishly or irresponsibly I’ve been living my life independently.
Shows like Parenthood, Good trouble, Fleabag, This is Us, The OC, The Vampire Diaries, The Bear, and now Bad Sisters have used this dynamic to their advantage to make some of the most compelling and emotionally-charged television episodes. It’s a simple recipe: throw a bunch of adult siblings who love each other but cannot always stand each other in a room, watch them revert to their teenage selves, add a parent or two for extra trauma, and let it burn. There is no other relationship where you can go from ‘I will kill you’ to ‘I will kill for you’ to back in seconds. There is no other relationship where apologies are conveyed but never said out loud (“are you hungry”). There is no person other than your sibling who knows the exact reason you’re about to burst into tears after your mother tells you she thinks your outfit for a family wedding is “perfectly nice”. There is no one else who will look at you and know exactly what you’re thinking when you see your parents take an extra second to get up from the bed.
A lot has been written about epic love stories on TV, but there is so much to explore in a sibling relationship on TV as well, especially in dramas. Because you can always get a new love interest, but how will you grow a new brother? As morbid as that sounds, the scope for tragedy when you’re telling a sibling story is immense and intense. My favourite book of all time (yes, I have one), The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson, begins with a 17-year-old girl grieving for her 19-year-old sister. It is one of the saddest, most beautiful things I’ve ever read in my life and it made me sob so much that I ended up with a headache. The shared history and cosmic proximity can lead to storylines with more emotional depth and authenticity than a romance always leaves space for.
After all, what was Parenthood if not four siblings helping each other be the best version of their parents while avoiding their worst mistakes? What is Good Trouble if not Callie and Mariana be each other’s definition of home? What was Fleabag if not Fleabag and Claire realising they’d only run through the airport for each other? What was This is Us if not The Big Three telling each other, over and over again, that their dead dad would be proud of them? What was The OC if not proof that there was hope for Ryan the minute Seth saw him as his brother? What was The Vampire Diaries if not Stefan and Damon choosing each other every single time across centuries? What was The Bear if not Carmy being unable to grieve properly for Mikey because of how much he loved and resented him? And, finally, what is Bad Sisters if not five sisters literally willing to commit murder for each other?
Even Keeping Up with the Kardashians knew that we came back to it every week for the sisters and their drama. Because the men could come and go, the kids would always keep coming, but these sisters who possibly hate each other more than 50% of the time are always ready to stand with each other, in a way only sisters can.
K-dramas sometimes do this better than Western shows. The overpowering and oftentimes impractical sense of responsibility siblings feel towards each other is more deep-rooted in Asian cultures. Here, people rarely talk of cutting their sibling off or turning away from them in the time of need. Hindi shows get this too but in a mawkish way. Korean shows get this in a sentimental, devastating way. I can write an entirely separate essay on this, on sobbing until my brother had to get me a glass of water while watching Tale of the Nine Tailed, where one brother sacrificed his life for another, on watching Sang-tae tell his brother in It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, “Moon Gang-tae belongs to Moon Gang-tae. You belong to yourself and I belong to myself,” while wiping his tears, on Bo-ra fighting with her siblings through the entire show but being the first to hug them when their grandmother died in Reply 1988.
When my brother and I were teens, perhaps the only time we weren’t at each other’s throats was when we would watch TV together. Specifically, Roadies and Splitsvilla. My parents were livid. “What are you teaching him? Is this something he should be watching?” I’d always say that they could ask him to leave the room if they were so worried. “You know he’ll do whatever you do, you’re not setting a good example.”
In 2020, after we moved back in with our parents during the pandemic as adults — me at 30 and my brother at 26, my father once told me, “Why are you watching Netflix for six hours on Friday nights with your brother? You’re brainwashing him!” ME! Brainwashing a 26-year-old man! By binge-watching Money Heist with him! I always wanted to ask them — aren’t you worried if I should be watching this as a teenager? If I should be binge-watching Netflix for six hours? Why are you only worried about him?
When we were younger and my mother would ask me to take my brother to the park or a friend’s house with me, I would get very angry. “An older sister is almost like a mother, you have to do this,” she would say. I hated that. But now that I think about how my brother has never known a life without me, that I knew his name before he knew it, that I have known him since before he was born, it makes me want to go back to being four years old and raise him all over again. But because I can’t, I obsessively watch siblings on TV do it in ways big and small, but always full of love.
Shows mentioned:
Parenthood - You’ll have to get creative to find it⭐⭐⭐⭐
Good Trouble - You’ll have to get creative to find it⭐⭐⭐⭐
Fleabag - Amazon Prime Video⭐⭐⭐⭐
This is Us - Disney+ Hotstar⭐⭐⭐⭐
The OC - Netflix⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Vampire Diaries - Netflix⭐⭐⭐1/2
The Bear - Disney+ Hotstar⭐⭐⭐1/2
Keeping Up with the Kardashians - Netflix/Prime⭐⭐⭐
Tale of the Nine Tailed - Netflix⭐⭐⭐1/2
It’s Okay to Not Be Okay - Netflix⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2
Reply 1988 - Netflix⭐⭐⭐⭐
RECOMMENDATIONS
We get so many requests for TV show recs from friends, so we’ll get to them here in every issue.
I’ve just quit my job and will be taking a month-long break before I start my next gig. I plan to use this break to do nothing productive so I intend to lie in bed, eat junk, and make my way through my watchlist. My list, however, is only made of very popular English-language shows, nothing offbeat. I want to know if you guys can suggest something that’s very good, but not too obvious, you know what I mean? The only non-English-language show I’ve watched is Narcos, so I’m open to anything.
Prepare to have your mind melted. The plot synopsis reads: A family saga with a supernatural twist, set in a German town where the disappearance of two young children exposes the relationships among four families. However, it is so much more. Having watched Dark in its entirety, we can say that it succeeds where most other sci-fi shows often fail, balancing an intricate tightrope of characters and plots right up to the very end of its three seasons.
Dark juggles multiple concurrent parallel timelines and paradoxes, and it seems like there’s no way you’ll be able to keep up with these worlds, all of them featuring multiple versions of the same characters. Dark is not a show for a casual watcher, it demands your attention—every detail is important; Dark’s story moves forward balancing a careful mixture of precision and patience, making every payoff feel earned.
Without giving too much away, Dark raises multiple philosophical questions—about fate and free will, about love, joy, and pain—and it sets it amid multiple family dramas, romance, intrigue that involves constantly shifting allegiances, and characters trying (and often failing) to avoid their fate.
Streaming on Netflix.
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!