Hi,
Welcome back to Continue Watching! LISTEN. We know what you’re thinking—are these girls not over The Slap? The more mature one out of us is “totally over it”, whereas the person who writes this intro needs a hobby because she is still obsessed. It was the thing that woke her up on that Monday morning, and she has since not slept or stopped talking about it.
Another thing we haven’t stopped talking about? Bridgerton. We have a lot of opinions on it, and you should see our WhatsApp chats from last weekend, when we exchanged at least 10937432097 messages about it. Actually, yes, you should.
We’re not telling you who is green and who is white between the two of us, but your guesses are more than welcome. Since we still haven’t stopped thinking about KATHANI SHYAMA, we’re dedicating this entire issue to the show, and it will be full of spoilers, so beware!
But before that, something incredible (and slightly scary)! One of our favourite books in the whole world (lol, remember reading?), The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, has been turned into a TV show starring Rose Leslie and Theo James. If they do not do right by the book, we might set the world on fire. The show releases in May and will hopefully be on Disney+ Hotstar.
Somehow, Only Murders in the Building is back with a trailer for season two already. It releases in June but we feel like it was only yesterday when we were confused by it.
Another thing that is happening is that the first Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon, is releasing in August. To be honest, we remember zero (0) things about GoT and couldn’t care less. But, closer to the date, if we start to feel some FOMO, we might watch it and complain here!
So, before we get to the Bridgerton stuff, here’s what we’re watching right now and it’s mostly Korean. SPEAKING OF WHICH, both of us passed our Level 1 Korean exams so talk to us in Korean, bitch! (But only in simple present and/or simple past tense with just one verb in a sentence, thank you very much.)
CURRENTLY WATCHING
Kashika
Thirty-Nine: Listen, I want to sue Son Ye-jin (congratulations to her and Crash Landing On You co-star Hyun Bin on their wedding yesterday!) for emotional distress. I have not wailed like this over a TV show in a while. Shahana already wrote in the last issue that this is a show that begins a certain way and then takes a turn and I don’t want to spoil it for anyone but it’s A LOT. SYJ sobs and weeps a minimum of three times in every episode and it is so realistic that I have to wash my face after crying with her in solidarity. I cannot write anything else here because of spoilers but please watch this only if everything else in your life is peachy, otherwise you will feel unhinged. Streaming on Netflix.
The Dropout: After the disappointment that was Inventing Anna, I was worried that every scammer show would be a letdown, but The Dropout has proven me wrong. Based on the lies of Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes, who claimed to have developed a new healthcare technology that, in reality, put patients at risk, the show captures the fascinating way in which smart, experienced, older white men just fall for Elizabeth’s con without asking too many questions. I feel bad for the people working for her and the patients affected in this story, but that scumbag boyfriend of hers gives me a rage headache. Amanda Seyfried is great as Elizabeth, and I am so into it that I ended up watching the documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley on Hotstar as well! Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
—
Shahana
The Courtship: I have discovered the greatest reality show of all time (lying, Love is Blind is the best)—it’s a reality dating show with the exact same concept as The Bachelor/Bachelorette. There is a TWIST—it’s set in Regency era England, so everyone gets to live out their Bridgerton fantasies?? Everyone is dressed in Regency-era clothes, and the lead (whose “heart the suitors have to win”) has to flirt and get to know the men with her PARENTS in attendance. Her parents, sister, and best friend (did everyone take time off from work??) all watch while she gets hit on by multiple men and somehow no one is embarrassed (if I had to flirt with a man with Kashika watching I would legit not be able to, let alone my parents and sibling). At the end of every episode, the lead has to do this weird choreographed dance routine thing with all the guys INDIVIDUALLY while she says things like “I’m attracted to you, but what I want from you is more flirting,” and her parents are just…watching? It is also boring, but because I love pain, I’m going to watch a few more episodes before I decide if I’m giving it up. Tragically, not streaming anywhere.
Pachinko: Adapted from Min Jin Lee’s novel of the same name, Pachinko is the story of one Korean woman, Sunja, and her family, and the aftermath of Japan’s 1910 occupation of Korea, which left Koreans displaced all over the world. Pachinko goes back-and-forth between multiple points of Sunja’s life: as a little girl who lives in Japanese-occupied Korea, a young woman who lives in Japan, and as a grandmother who has made a home in Japan, while maintaining her Korean roots. The timeline switching isn’t jarring at all and based on the first three episodes, the show seems very well-paced; Sunja’s story being told this way still creates a flawless narrative, showing us a cheerful young girl, a defiant woman whose spirit catches one’s eye immediately, and then the sharp-tongued old grandmother—I can’t wait to see how she goes from one to the other. Streaming on Apple TV+.
We just realised that it’s a Friday! The gift of the weekend is within our reach, we just have to persevere for eight(ish) more hours. You (we) can do it!
Continue Watching (and reading!),
Kashika and Shahana
Six Things about Bridgerton S2 I’m Confused By, and Three Things I Loved
By Shahana
[Everything is a spoiler]
The Sharmas are not okay
Okay, so Edwina and Kate apparently grew up in Bombay, but they can’t pronounce Sharma. They say Shyaa-ma, like all the other English people. Maybe they’re trying to fit in?
They speak Marathi, but call their father appa and amma?
Edwina calls Kate didi, and Kate calls Edwina bon. For the longest time, I thought it was a nickname, like, “Oh my little sister is as sweet as a bonbon,” but apparently it’s bon, as in sister, in Bengali! Are they Bengali? Are they Tamil? Are they ALL of India?
Why does Edwina call Ghalib GHUH-LEEB? Why do this?
Why is Kate’s name KATHANI? Where is this name from? Guys, I looked it up and found nothing. I want to be wrong about this, I want someone to tell me that I didn’t look hard enough and that Kathani is an actual Indian name. Maybe they meant to say Katyayani (Kashika’s note: They didn’t! They’re FOOLS)? I don’t even know.
What is this tea and why is it so pheeka?
Kate makes this huge deal about how she hates English tea, and then she makes masala chai just so some NRIs can be like “hell yeah, India represent!”
The spices didn’t even steep! Why is she adding that much milk? What is this? Kathani, tumko kuchh nahi aata!
Where is the yearning?
In every romance, the two leads always have to go through a period of yearning. For an enemies-to-lovers scenario, such as the one between Antony and Kate, the bickering is meant to cover up the fact that the two want each other, and the fighting serves as a form of foreplay. Their behaviour is meant to look odd to everyone else who watches them, because the leads behave differently in each others’ presence because that’s what love and lust do. I don’t know about anyone else, but I did not think the actors had any chemistry, and most importantly, there’s nothing to suggest that Kate and Antony were even thinking of each other when they weren’t fighting.
Where’s the scene of Antony asking some woman to dance but thinking of Kate? Where’s Kate watching him do it and wishing it was her? Where’s the shot of their eyes meeting as this happens and holding eye contact for longer than is appropriate because they just can’t look away? And then thinking about it later when they’re alone because they're supposed to dislike that person, so why can’t they get them out of their mind? Where is my yearning?
Where is the sexual tension?
Look, period television is perfect for sexual tension coupled with intense yearning, because two people with potential romantic feelings are not allowed to be alone without a chaperone, any flirting or conversation has to be had in a ballroom or a park where the whole world can see and hear you, and couples have to steal moments away from others just to be alone for a few minutes, or else it will all lead to moral, social, and financial ruin. Do you see the amount of potential there? While Kate and Antony’s story was designed for insane sexual tension, so heavy you can cut it with a knife, there was none here. None, whatsoever. I’m going to chalk that up to the actors having zero chemistry, and it might be a personal opinion, but look at this.
Exhibit A:
He just saw her thigh, and he looks like he realised he needs to go to the loo and there isn’t one nearby. I have looked at other people’s French fries with more lust.
Exhibit B:
He looks like he’s asking if she knows all the ways a potato can be cooked, not hinting at the ways he’d ruin her if he could.
Exhibit C:
He’s currently watching her laugh at a joke some other man has made, and is realising that he wants to be only man making her laugh like that. Antony Bridgerton, my friend, I have looked at people taking my French fry with more emotion that you are displaying right now.
All I want is some electrifying chemistry that makes you want to look away because it feels like you’ve walked in on something.
Where is the trauma?
What Bridgerton’s second season has failed in doing most of all, is to fundamentally understand Antony’s motivation for what he does. Antony witnessed his father, Edmund, die, and then watched his mother absolutely fall to pieces after the death. He’s also filled with the irrational fear that he too will die young, just like his father. He spends his entire adult life preparing for his own death, ensuring the estate’s finances and affairs are not only in order, but also easy to decipher once he’s gone. He refuses to marry someone he could fall in love with and who could fall in love with him in return, because he doesn’t want to leave someone in the kind of pain he watched his mother struggle with: “Edmund was the air I breathed. And now there is no air.” And then along comes Kate, who changes everything. For over a decade, Antony Bridgerton lived with a sense of near-constant doom, convincing himself he wouldn’t live very long, withdrew from his family, fostered no close relationships, took on being the father figure for all his siblings, and Kate walks in and knocks him off his axis.
Book Antony had valid, intense reasons for denying and fighting his feelings while show Antony just keeps saying “Honour and duty to this family” like Amitabh Bachchan with his “Parampara, pratishtha, anushasan,” and expects it to mean something. Show Antony agonises over nothing—not his feelings for Kate, not having to maintain a distance from his family so they won’t grieve too much when he dies, and not being able to grow old with his wife and children. Show Antony is just a cad who decides to marry a woman he finds convenient.
How did Kate and Antony fall in love?
How did they go from fighting to straight up love? There is no development, whatsoever. Book Kate and Antony start out disliking each other—Kate dislikes him because she doesn’t want her sister in a loveless marriage and Antony dislikes Kate because she clearly doesn’t approve of him. This dislike grows into a sort of friendship, and then develops into love; Kate is just generally a lovely person who’s been overshadowed by her sister, so Antony can’t find anything to actually dislike. Kate watches how protective, loving, and affectionate Antony is with his family and then watches him defend Penelope when she’s being made fun of by Cressida Cowper, and then grudgingly starts to like him (I wish they’d shown this so more men will know that you can get people to like you by just genuinely being a decent person in life).
To digress a little, let’s recall Darcy’s iconic hand flex. For those who don’t, in Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride and Prejudice adaptation, Elizabeth walks up to the carriage to leave, and we see a second of surprise on her face—turns out, Darcy has taken her hand to help her into the carriage. There’s another split second of eye contact, then Darcy turns away. The camera pans to his hand—it’s pale against the black of his coat—and there’s a quick flex of his hand, like he’s remembering what Lizzie’s hand felt like, like he wants to forget what Lizzie’s hand felt like; now that he knows what it feels like to hold Lizzie’s hand, what can he do to un-know it?
There’s so much hand porn in Bridgerton, but none come close to emoting the desire simmering under Kate and Antony’s relationship because there simply isn’t any. We’re watching this in a post-Covid world, a world that has been afraid of touch, so trust me, watching a Regency romance should have reminded us what dating has felt like these last two years. But no gesture on Bridgerton comes close to conveying the emotion being felt by our two leads, at no point do their hands tell us the truth about their unexpressed feelings, because outside of the caresses, there’s absolutely nothing.
Violet Bridgerton is perhaps one of the most realistic moms on television
Violet is a good mother, but also fails her children in ways that depart from the super-mother trope. She fails Daphne in the first season by not telling her about sex, and failed Antony by simply collapsing and leaving him to become a parent when he was barely 19, which led to him internalising all his trauma. I don’t blame her for any of it, but I do love the fact that her children throw it back in her face and she recognises and admits her mistakes and apologises for it. Maybe watching Violet apologise for messing up her kids will undo the damage Baghban caused.
p.s: Watching Violet wailing in labour to explain to her doctor why her 19-year-old son with no understanding of childbirth should not be making decisions about her body really broke my heart. That was over a hundred years ago, and doctors still routinely ignore women when we talk about our illnesses. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Kate’s very obvious oldest-daughter-in-an-Asian-household energy
Book Kate also deals with childhood trauma, and that’s one of the things that draws Antony towards her—her absolute determination to deal with it alone and not let her family know. It didn’t make sense to remove any of that, because show Kate’s very obvious fix-it energy would’ve lent to it. Kate’s loneliness within her family, the fact that she doesn’t want to deal with what she’s feeling until she’s far away from Edwina and Mary, the way she puts her entire life on hold for her sister—I wish they’d given it a bit more time instead of the boring and unnecessary Featherington plot.
Penelope, I love you, and I see you
Penelope Featherington is A+ wallflower representation and I am here for it. No one truly notices me either, so I too have all the gossip.
Shows mentioned:
Bridgerton- Netflix ⭐
Five Thoughts On Bridgerton From Someone Who Hates Old-Timey Shows
By Kashika
[Everything is a spoiler]
Look, I have MANY thoughts. I can go on and on (but won’t, it’s 1.24am) but I also understand that as an old-timey show-hater, I was not the intended audience. However, as a romance/enemies-to-lovers trope superfan, I feel like I have earned the right to tell you about the five things I cannot stop thinking about a week after I finished season two of Bridgerton.
1) I felt like I was watching a bad Hindi daily soap.
You know what happens in a daily soap? Endless angst with one minute of happiness, and then angst again. Also, when the lead couple comes within an inch of each other, they breathe heavy and weird. Anthony and Kate were NEVER happy or even very playful with each other. Their love story was all over the place. They kept fighting and bickering for no real reason and while I understand that their backstory in the books makes this believable, I have not read the book (nor will I ever) so I had no understanding of this. Their happy ending seemed like an afterthought in a finale stuffed with the most idiotic subplots. Which brings me to my next point.
2) Who gives a single fuck about the Featheringtons?
No, really. Show yourself. Every time the new Lord Featherington came on the screen, I forwarded the episode (don’t worry, I UNFORTUNATELY saw the entire first two episodes so I had enough background to know that he did not deserve my time). I understand that they are setting up all this nonsense with Eloise and Penelope for their eventual season, but do it well?????
3) Why waste the K3G title track?
Listen to me. That song is SO GOOD. Why would you waste it on a haldi ceremony with three people, one of whom is the actual bride? Also, it is not a haldi or even a wedding song! Shondaland capitalised on their South Asian casting but did not do the basic research of understanding what music they were choosing. It seemed like a stupid choice made purely to add an ‘exotic’ factor. SPEAKING OF WHICH.
4) Kathani is not a name.
I feel like one of those super online, jobless people who write emails to journalists when they don’t agree with a published opinion. BUT I NEED TO SPEAK TO THE AUTHORITIES ABOUT THIS. I am so upset!!!!!!!!!!! You named her Kate, right? Okay. She is fully Indian but she doesn’t have an Indian accent even though she grew up in Bombay, that’s fine. Okay, no worries. But then. You thought that Kate has to be short for something. It has to be short for an INDIAN name. And then you did not even Google a single Indian name and just made one up. Look. I too have a made up Indian name, but I’m not on Netflix???? And my dazzling personality makes up for it. And I do not have an annoying husband whose baseless trauma derailed my entire life. DO BETTER.
5) If you speak to me about Benedict and his art school plot, I will die.
Shows mentioned:
Bridgerton- Netflix (see below image for rating)
RECOMMENDATIONS
We get so many requests for TV show recs from our subscribers, so we’ll get to them here in every issue.
I binged Bridgerton on the weekend and I’m now looking forward to seeing what you guys have to say about it! Watching it reminded me how much I enjoy period shows, so please suggest a good one; it doesn’t have to be fun and frothy like Bridgerton, I’m okay with it being a little serious.
We will give you a period show that is both fun and frothy, and also serious. Dickinson, with three complete seasons, tells the story of the enigmatic 19th century American poet, Emily Dickinson, but redoes it as a contemporary young adult show, with a soundtrack and lingo so modern it doesn’t seem to belong. Sounds weird—but it works, and it works so well. Dickinson, who most of us only know if we studied her in school or college, might seem like a boring, staid old woman who wrote serious poetry, comes to life as a young woman with feelings and passions so fervent that it inspired poetry that must make its way out of her. Dickinson’s world seems anachronistic in a way that is so risky that it could go one of two ways—but the risk pays off, and it creates an origin story that takes Dickinson the poet very seriously, but not Dickinson the show.
Emily Dickinson (Hailee Steinfeld) is introduced in her twenties, young and full of emotion, chafing against the restraints placed on her by virtue of being a woman, and painfully in love with the idea of Death (Wiz Khalifa) and her best friend and brother’s fiancée, Sue (Ella Hunt). Plenty of literary figures show up, Louisa May Alcott (Zosia Mamet) and Henry David Thoreau (John Mulaney) among them, and help Emily along in her quest to understand what her poetry means to her and to those around her, the nature of fame and if it helps or hinder her work, desire and if there is place for it in her life, and whether her solitary and withdrawn life was a choice or circumstance—if Emily the poet can contend with her choices as Emily the person.
Streaming on Apple TV+.
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