Issue #1: Shows that make us sob v/s shows that make us rage (and yet we're obsessed)
Hi,
Welcome to the first issue of Continue Watching! Putting this together has been equally rewarding and harrowing, because we gave ourselves very optimistic deadlines and then went on to miss every single one of them. Doing this on the side with a fulltime job and in the middle of a raging pandemic is no joke. We’ll now be kinder to ourselves and work well in advance (lol no we won’t).
When we were coming up with ideas for what to include in this newsletter, we were torn between wanting to write for an audience (which is currently some of our friends and some very nice people who put their faith in us, hi guys!) and wanting to write for ourselves. After a lot of back and forth, we zeroed in on two pieces that are very close to our hearts and that we hope will also resonate with you. One is about letting an old TV show act as your home when you’re far away from your real one. The other is about the very real frustration that comes with watching a fun, sexy show dunk on your entire profession and lead people to believe that leaving office in the middle of the day with your two work wives will lead to absolutely zero real repercussions.
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In each piece of writing, we allude to way too many shows, so we’ve decided to rate them on a scale of one to five stars at the end. That way, you’ll get an idea about whether we think a show is worth your precious time and energy even when we don’t talk about it in detail. At the end of the newsletter, we included a more detailed recommendation for someone who wanted to watch a very specific kind of show. If you want us to include your request in our next newsletter, just reply to this or leave a comment. We’ve also linked to some of our fave articles about television from all over the internet for some extra reading, if that’s your jam.
We hope you have a great weekend! We’re planning to spend ours investigating why both of us thought that the new Netflix show Masaba Masaba would be a documentary and not the clearly scripted show that it turned out to be. Is it supposed to be based on her life? Inspired by it? Are you planning to watch it? Are you surprised by how effortless Masaba’s acting seems in the trailer?
Other shows on our mind this month are A Suitable Boy (the reviews have been lukewarm but we cannot pass on Tabu like this), which is inexplicably not on Netflix even though it has been released in the UK, and Churails (which is a GREAT name for a TV show).
Lastly, a huge shout out to Sid who left our very first comment at the end of the last post and made our week. We hope you’re enjoying The Sinner, Sid!
Continue Watching (and reading!),
Kashika and Shahana
Rewatching 'Parenthood': How A Show About Loving & Losing Your Parents Helped Me Survive Intense Homesickness In Lockdown
by Kashika
This is a strange piece to write right now, because while it is about missing my parents so much I thought the sky would fall down upon me, I am currently living with them and fighting with them on a daily basis.
But let’s start at the beginning. When the lockdown first began, it was still March. Earlier that month, my brother and I had decided to not go back home for Holi from our respective second home-cities because going home for a festival doesn’t always count. We wanted a long, relatives-free, chill week at home. So we were going to visit at the end of March. At the end of March, we couldn’t even visit the nearest mall. We were amused by this problem of our own making, but we were stuck. We’d be fine, we thought. We always are.
March turned into April, which turned into May. Everyone went from making fun Insta stories about afternoon naps and indoor date nights to realising that this is never getting over and cooking like they were in Julie and Julia. I went from doing a 10-step skincare routine to only sleeping from 7am to 9am every day. I would reassure my mother every day that I was eating and sleeping properly, only to hang up and walk defeatedly in my apartment, wondering if I could substitute another meal with an apple, a banana, maybe coffee?
Forty-five days into the lockdown, when it became very clear that I would have to solely keep myself alive for many more days and I wouldn’t be able to see my parents for possibly the entire year, I decided that I needed a coping mechanism.
Or this is what I think happened in retrospect. What really happened was that every day I would read the news about the coronavirus and worry about my parents. In every phone call, I would ask them if they were being cautious enough, trying to act nonchalant but feeling a sense of dread inside. “We’re fine,” my mother would tell me, “Of course we’re taking all the precautions.” She was not getting it. I wanted someone to get it. And then it hit me. Parenthood.
This little gem of a show was the true embodiment of the pre-Peak TV sentiment - the best TV show that no one is watching. I wouldn’t have watched it either, had it not been for Lauren Graham. When I first discovered Gilmore Girls in 2006, I had promised myself that I would watch everything Lauren Graham ever does. It’s why I watched Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist despite the shitty reviews (they were all wrong) and it’s why I watched Parenthood even though I hadn’t seen the original.
Parenthood is the story of the Braverman family: Zeek and Camille Braverman, their four kids - Adam, Sarah, Crosby and Julia - and their kids. The four kids are all grown up, with families and parenting struggles of their own, but the Braverman family perseveres and sticks together, despite differences, arguments, and other messiness that comes with being part of a family. It’s clear that I am not doing a very good job of explaining what this show is about, and that’s because a) it’s 2am and b) this is a show you have to experience. There is a plot but unless you’re immersed in their world you will not connect with the Bravermans. It’s the best kind of show to take over your life, a soapy, messy drama with smart dialogue and scenes that will make you sob so hard that you’d have to use a jade roller the next morning.
In short, Parenthood walked so This Is Us can run, but it’s still less manipulative than This Is Us.
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I had first watched Parenthood when it was airing, from 2010 to 2015. I was 20 and practically an entirely different person (lol, I wish). I sympathised more with the teenagers on the show, I didn’t understand a lot of the choices the older characters would make and I also watched it one episode at a time, which made the weeping that needed to be done per episode non-threatening.
When I thought about Parenthood in lockdown, I also remembered that it was on Amazon Prime, and I instantly knew that I had to rewatch it in its entirety. You need to understand that I am not a casual binge-watcher, so this meant watching hours of the show every day, after work and before I slept for those two hours, crying and worrying about the Bravermans and my own parents. I literally cried in every episode. I projected like nobody’s business. If someone on the show got sick, I’d think about how I’d deal with my parents getting sick. If someone on the show got turned down for something, I’d relive all my own rejections. It was intense and insane and kind of a miracle that I didn’t have a full-on breakdown while following this bonkers routine.
I was fully aware of my own privilege in the lockdown but that didn’t stop me from feeling sorry for myself and feeling like I couldn’t catch a break, something you can say for so many characters on the show, including my Lauren Graham’s Sarah Braverman. I felt a kinship with her and all the lost causes on the show. It didn’t make any sense but in that moment, it gave me comfort. In June, that was very important for me.
I must have finished the 103 episodes in less than 15 days. I don’t remember doing much else in that time apart from my actual job. Work and Parenthood, that was my day, which sounds unhealthy but was, in fact, the only thing that kept me sane.
Of course, a week after I finished it, I got an unexpected call which made it possible for me to travel to my home town. I had some reservations but I came regardless. And now here I am. Ungrateful, bratty, argumentative, basically the 16-year-old version of myself that I turn into every time I am around my parents. On my first day back home, feeling like I had come back from war, I was worried that I might not be able to sleep at all, like in Gurgaon, and would have to answer to my mother. But none of that happened. I took an afternoon nap and slept for 10 hours at a stretch at night after months. So it was not me, it was my brain craving some comfort and the permission to slow down. Made sense.
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Now that I think about it, what Parenthood did for me was give me a language for everything that I was feeling but was too scared to say out loud.
I did not want to think about how far away I was from my parents and how much that was affecting me, so I channeled all my energy into worrying about the family dynamics of the Bravermans. I was concerned about my brother but did not want to burden him with my worries so I found solace in the Braverman siblings getting snippy with each other at birthday parties. I was feeling lost, abandoned, stupid, and homesick, but I didn’t want to admit that, because that would make it real, so I watched fictional characters deal with all of these issues and somehow survive, which in turn made me feel like I could too. I am able to articulate this now but in that moment I knew none of this. In that moment, I was just rewatching an old favourite and letting it comfort me at a time when the only thing I wanted was to be home home but had no way of getting there.
I remember telling a friend as soon as June began that something had snapped inside of me. I had been doing this for three months and there was no end in sight. The central message of Parenthood, the theme that runs through all the ups and downs, is that no matter what happens, you can always go home. For 90 days I felt like, at least in 2020, I might not be able to. Parenthood helped me hold on to some semblance of hope. And now I’m home.
Bonus Feature: Jason Katims, who wrote and produced Parenthood, also made Friday Night Lights, an excellent show about the hopes and dreams of a close-knit community living in a small town in Texas that is obsessed with its football team. It also features the best TV marriage of all time. Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!
Shows mentioned:
Parenthood - Amazon Prime ⭐⭐⭐⭐
This Is Us - Hotstar ⭐⭐⭐
Gilmore Girls - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Friday Night Lights - Amazon Prime ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist - You’ll have to get creative to find it ⭐⭐⭐
'The Bold Type' Has No Idea What It’s Like To Actually Work In The Media
by Shahana
[Some spoilers ahead]
In the 90s and 2000s, thanks to popular culture, hundreds of women aspired to work at a magazine. Sex and the City, How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days, 13 Going on 30, and The Devil Wears Prada made sure every young girl was able to see herself as the plucky, young writer with lofty dreams of winning a Pulitzer who would have their hearts broken, learn a lesson, and then write The Story or get The Job. Freeform’s The Bold Type is an updated version of that genre of yore, starring a trio of young women living in New York and working at Scarlet, a fictionalised version of Cosmopolitan US.
The first season opens with Jane Sloan (Katie Stevens), who has recently been hired as a staff writer at the magazine, Kat Edison (Aisha Dee), the social media director, and Sutton Brady (Meghann Fahy), assistant to the executive editor who later goes on to work as an assistant to the head of the fashion department and then gets promoted to stylist.
The Bold Type hinges on an unrealistic, often bordering on absurd, premise—that a career in journalism was as simple as working at a magazine with no budget issues. A world where you could sit in a closet filled with thousands of dollars worth of couture and just wear them, understanding bosses who actually mentored you. Here, you could be a truly mediocre writer and still get assigned stories writers with decades of experience dream of writing, win awards, AND get your own vertical within a year.
One could forgive The Bold Type for being unrealistic—it is the writers’ prerogative to write a show that we could watch while getting drunk on cheap wine and crying about our hateful bosses—but the show denies that messaging. The Bold Type is based on the life of former Cosmo editor-in-chief Joanna Coles, who Melora Hardin’s Jacqueline Carlyle is supposed to stand in for, and the show frequently tackles issues of race, sexuality, gender binaries, sexism, gun control—so many issues that it often seems like the writers held an edit meeting to discuss what Big Issues they could have their characters go through. Please, watch this trailer and tell me it doesn’t scream #GirlBoss to you.
While I really enjoy The Bold Type, I often find myself rolling my eyes at the ludicrousness of the plots. I find myself wondering if the writers are aware of the world the magazine is set in—it dealt beautifully with the concept of the kind of pop feminism that women’s magazines preach but don’t actually practice—and then it just veered off into a direction that makes you wonder just who wrote it. Case in point, Jane and Jacqueline spent months reporting a story on models who had been abused by a powerful female photographer for years, and then realised they were as bad, considering Scarlet often hired underage models for their shoots and promoted them as an ideal of beauty, which ran completely opposite to the empowering messaging they ran. In Season 3, Episode 10, this led to Jacqueline’s decision to revamp the entire fall issue with 17 hours to go before it was due at the printer—something that promotes a flurry of activity and “We Can Do This!” energy that makes for great television but would give a real employee an anxiety attack. I remember yelling “NO” with so much horror in my voice my partner came running in to see if I was okay. In an ideal world, where Scarlet exists, every employee agrees and is 100% okay with staying all night to finish a new issue they’ve just spent a month creating (not ONE person complains or even has the human reaction to look a little upset that a month’s worth of work has just been vapourised), Editorial is able to come up with new ideas, get quotes and permissions, proof, finalise copy, Design is able to create new pages out of thin air and set them, and the fashion team is somehow able to conjure up ideas, models, a photographer, makeup artist, equipment, source clothes, in the MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT!
Considering how they show us the work at this magazine is done, this isn’t that bad, I suppose. Every idea is pitched straight to the editor-in-chief, who apparently reads your shittiest first draft too. What happened to all the editors in between who work with you on developing your ideas, proofing them, BEFORE they’re sent to the editor-in-chief? Kat seems to just walk around tweeting whatever comes to her mind, instead of the careful planning, scheduling, and executing that comes with an actual social media job. Jane and Kat often just leave work in the middle of the day whenever Sutton has an assignment to pick up or drop off clothes. There are no deadlines or any concept of urgency ever, and the three often spend so much of their time just sitting in the fashion closet, I’m surprised there’s not a single employee who got sick of these three never working and just went to HR.
But nothing could’ve prepared me for the introduction of the new head of digital, Patrick Duchand (Peter Vack), everyone referring to the website as The Dot Com (it has to be said in title caps, I don’t make the rules), and the sheer disdain nearly everyone had for it. First off, this show isn’t that old. It started in 2017, and the media industry was already in trouble. I’m not sure if it would really fly very well if a young writer announced with barely concealed scorn to the head of digital, “I don’t write for The Dot Com.” I worked at a print magazine for a year, and the only people who looked at digital that way were editors who’d worked in print for decades, had become dinosaurs, and refused to evolve. In their eyes, digital was only “clickbait” and “listicles,” because “21 Ways to Ensure Your Man Pleases You in Bed” on a magazine cover isn’t clickbait or a listicle. But young writers refusing to see the potential in digital? Bizarre. Also, Jane Sloan dislikes Patrick so much, she actively tries to write a hit piece on him! There is more supply for good writers than there is demand, Jane, what on earth! Vibe check, sis.
While we’re on the subject of Jane, let’s talk about how the writers really don’t know what they’re trying to do with her. Are they trying to show us how easy a mediocre white woman has it in the industry with her character? It takes years for writers to get assigned the kind of stories Jane does, and she gets them...why? Slate published this really wonderful article on Jane’s writing, and it’s just not...good. Jane writes a piece on how a politician uses fashion to project a certain kind of image, and suddenly, a different publication is trying to poach her! Things happen in between leading to Jane turning freelancer. Her pitches get accepted, she never has to borrow money, she even gets paid immediately! In fact, the worst thing that happened to her was that she annoyed a barista at a cafe by ordering a tiny biscotti while using the free WiFi to write (No, she wasn’t using their WiFi because she couldn’t pay for WiFi at home, she just needed a change of scene). One of my favourite storylines had such an unrealistic ending, it almost ruined it for me. Season 1 Episode 10, Carry The Weight, focuses on a performance artist named Mia, based on real-life performance artist Emma Sulkowicz who carried the mattress she was sexually assaulted on everywhere she went. Mia stands in a park holding a pair of scales all day as a reminder of the weight sexual assault survivors carry. The only time she takes a break is if someone offers to hold the scales for her; but the only ones who can must be survivors. [MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD] An early scene shows a young survivor quietly walking up to take the weight, and the show ends with a very powerful scene--our main trio stand by Mia so she doesn’t carry that weight alone, and another pair of hands break into the line. It’s Jacqueline; she stops for a few seconds, then steps up to Mia and takes the weight.
This is a BIG story, and no senior writer or editor is assigned this. Jane, who only got hired nine episodes ago and has done nothing to prove that she’s capable, is. Okay, sure.
The Bold Type completely glosses over the part that people from extremely privileged backgrounds can afford to work in magazines, and for a show that is set in and around the magazine, I don’t understand the decision to leave out the hows of the job. Kat has it relatively easy thanks to financial and social currency her family gave her, Sutton really struggled, while Jane just...is. But through all their struggles, whether they’re working full-time, freelancing, are assistants, writers, or team leads, they Uber to work, dress in outfits straight out of a catalogue, and go out for midweek cocktails at fancy, expensive-looking bars. It leans into the idea that life is shiny and happy if you work at a fashion magazine, and if you just believe in yourself, you too can win awards at 25! It even forces us to swallow that insidious idea that our jobs aren’t just to pay rent, it must also creatively satisfy us and be meaningful. Sutton’s brief foray into being a designer (listen, the clothes she makes are so boring; someone ask the Project Runway judges, see what they say) culminates in a fashion show with “real” bodies instead of models. Kat, after her brief stint into trying to be the next AOC teaches her how to promote marginalised voices in the community by creating a campaign to sell lipsticks which focuses on what these voices are saying while wearing pretty lipstick. And Jane tries too; she writes about freezing her eggs, equitable healthcare opportunities, breast cancer, and preventative mastectomies.
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The truth is that sometimes in this industry, you have to do things that pay your rent. Not every day is happy, sometimes a story you want to do goes to a more experienced and better writer, some days you’re promoting products you’d never use but must because they pay your salary, and you’re shooting with celebrities and models who have an attitude and will treat you badly. There is merit in writing quizzes titled “Which Potato Are You?” and treating your job as just a job.
And I say this from experience: some of my best performing pieces have been ones that took me 30 minutes to write and are about supposed frivolous things like “the perils of big boobs”, so clearly there are people who want to read them, who get a semblance of joy from reading them. So why misrepresent the industry to this extent? The grind doesn’t have to be Meaningful, the glossy jobs at Scarlet can still be idealised. The media industry is brutal, and you have to be really tough to hack it in the business, and if we’re calling it The “Bold” Type, let’s see some of the boldness?
The Bold Type - You’ll have to get creative to find it ⭐⭐⭐
Recommendations
We get so many requests for TV show recs from friends, so we’ll get to them here in every issue.
I'm looking for a sitcom like The Office and 30 Rock, but about a more modern and relatable workplace.
The perfect show for this is Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet. Created by Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day, and Megan Ganz (who also work together on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia), MQRB is set in a video game company that works on a very popular multiplayer role-playing game. Sharp, funny writing, well-rounded characters and interpersonal dynamics make this a really fun watch. And no, you don't need to be into video games to care. MQRB has all the hallmarks of an actual office—an egomaniac boss, the old person who simply doesn't understand technology, the workaholic who does the actual work, and the colleague whose primary job seems to be to keep the team together. Warning, the standalone episode, A Dark Quiet Death (Season 1, Episode 5), starring Jake Johnson and Cristin Milioti, of New Girl and HIMYM fame respectively, will break your heart.
Shout-Outs
Kashika
In the early days of lockdown (remember those?), I watched the glorious Zoë Kravitz finally get her due (looking at you Big Little Lies) as the lead in High Fidelity. I don’t usually enjoy shows about people obsessed with music (they’re insufferable!), but this one was smart, funny, sexy and Zoë (as the protagonist Rob) wore the hell out of every single outfit. The show was cancelled after one season (boooo!) but here’s an InStyle article gushing over Rob’s wardrobe that might give you the itch to go (online) shopping.
Shahana
I know everyone loved hate-watching Indian Matchmaking, and there’s been enough discussion around it, but my problems with it go beyond the show being boring. A show titled Indian Matchmaking didn’t have a single Muslim person, which as a Muslim woman in 2020, with everything the community is going through, didn’t sit right with me. And to watch a behemoth like Netflix think that it’s okay to have someone say “Similar backgrounds, but yeah caste is no issue,” and just not address it? Ridiculous. We might laugh at Pradyuman’s mother’s request that her daughter-in-law be “flexible,” but every woman who’s ever thought about putting a toe out of line knows exactly what that means. I haven’t had to go through the indignity of the rishta process myself, but female cousins and friends have, and to make a show about the dehumanisation of it, and not address that is, well, not cool. For more on this, please read this amazing piece by Yashica Dutt on how it glosses over a discriminatory system.
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 Twitter here and here. And if you haven’t already, do subscribe!