Issue #5: Shows that feel like a big ol' hug
Hi,
Welcome back to Continue Watching! It’s Thursday morning so we’re not even going to ask how you’re doing. It’s somehow October 15th (weren’t we JUST doing the New Year countdown), the number of unread emails in your inbox is making you anxious, you have WAY too much work to wrap up if you want to enjoy your weekend, and the only good thing about your day is… this newsletter!
LOL, sorry about this shameless self-promotion, but we gotta tell you. We. Are. Exhausted. Depleted. Both of us are barely managing to be functional adults, there’s always too much we have to do and too little energy to do it, and the state of the world and our country is making us want to scream into our pillows 24/7. And yet, we have to do our jobs, do our chores, and write this newsletter that sometimes feels like the only alive, joyful thing in our lives.
Because of this funk that we’re in, and because we’re so tired that the idea of writing two full-fledged essays made us want to cry, we’re doing something a little different this time. While both of us have wildly different coping mechanisms (one of us likes to cook???), the one thing that makes both of us happy is TV. We have a list of shows that always cheer us up, that always make us feel like all is not lost, that always manage to save the day. In this issue, we’re sharing eight such shows with you.
Source 1, 2
If you feel like we’ve missed a show that makes you very happy, let us know. We’ll add it to the list! The idea is to grow it in such a way that all of us have a show to fall back upon.
Speaking of something all of us have in common, so many people watched Emily In Paris in the last week-and-a-half! What did you think of it? Escapist fantasy or boring mess? One of us enjoyed it as a harmless background watch while the other got very angry at its creator Darren Star. Now, A Suitable Boy is dropping on Netflix on October 23 and we’re ready to hate-watch it as well.
But before we do that, here’s stuff that’s keeping us busy right now.
CURRENTLY WATCHING
Kashika
Breaking Bad: This is not a rewatch, which might surprise some people. A Chemistry teacher who finds out he’s going to die in 18 months starts cooking meth with his junkie ex-student. This show is definitely not my scene, but my brother started watching it, and the only time we ever spend together is when we’re watching TV at night after work, so I’m watching it with him. We’re at season two, and I like it a lot more than I thought I would. Streaming on Netflix.
Bigg Boss: In case it wasn’t clear from the last issue, my life currently revolves around this show. This is a permanent part of the Currently Watching section of my life for the next three months. I am already irritated by parts of it, and it’s just begun. Airing on Colors, streaming on Voot.
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Shahana
PEN15: Thirty-one-year-old Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle play 13-year-old fictional versions of themselves and capture all the awkwardness of the age. Awkward haircuts, braces, mean girls, changing bodies—PEN15 understands and displays the trickiness of all of it. The episode I just watched had one character discovering masturbation and it was funny, realistic, and so awkward to watch—which was the point. Not streaming anywhere.
The Vow: Revolves around Nxivm, which marketed itself as a self-help organisation, but was basically a terrifying cult where the male founder, Keith Raniere, forced the female members to have sex with him and even branded them with his initials. The documentary series is following the rise and fall of the cult, and members who seem broken up and horrified when they realise they ended up joining a cult--we all think we’re smarter than this until we aren’t. Bonus: if you were a Smallville fan, you’ll find some familiar faces pop up. Not streaming anywhere.
Tell us what you’re watching and what you’re looking forward to. Fall TV is looking very different this year since a lot of our favourite shows couldn’t start shooting in time. Despite that, our TV calendar is full!
Continue Watching (and reading!),
Kashika and Shahana
Feel-Good Shows That Are Exactly What You Need Right Now
Shahana’s Top 4
Derry Girls
Derry Girls seems like it’s a show about a group of young Irish girls (and one English boy) growing up and the problems only a group of young teenage girls can have, but what sets Derry Girls apart from every other teen show that exists is when and where these girls live. The show is set in a very specific time period, when Ireland was living through The Troubles, a period of conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted from the 1960s to 1998. So everything these girls go through—gossip, detention, picnics, crushes, drinking, sex, drugs at a funeral—are all set against an ethnoreligious dispute. So while our parents might not let us go to a concert because they don’t approve of the music, the girls from Derry aren’t allowed because their parents fear a terrorist attack. And yet, the bleakness and violence of the times they live in don’t prevent these girls, their parents, and the greatest principal ever, Sister Michael, from finding humour in the mundane. If they can live through The Troubles and somehow find things to laugh about, we’ll live through a fascist regime and do the same.
American Vandal
Do you remember when people discovered Serial, an investigative journalism podcast, and suddenly everyone was apparently into true crime? American Vandal took that sudden interest in this genre and created a show with the same format. The premise, however? Combing through clues to figure out who painted dicks on teacher’s cars in season one and who spiked the lemonade in the cafeteria to give the school violent diarrhoea in season two—and why. But don’t let the ridiculousness of the crimes stop you from watching it. Our documentarians are extremely serious about their job—exonerating the falsely accused and figuring out who really did it—and the mysteries are genuinely intriguing. When they discover the smoking guns (“Ball hairs” in season one and “I keep coming back to the horchata” in season two), you will gasp. American Vandal is extremely entertaining, but just because its premise seems bizarre doesn’t mean it glosses over the realities of high school cliques and American suburbia. Bullying, stereotypes, misogyny, schools and their blatant favouritism of athletes, American Vandal finds a way to seamlessly tie it into the plots. You’ll come for the hilarity of the concept, you’ll stay for the compelling stories.
The Bold Type
I wrote an essay making fun of this show in our first-ever issue, but the simple truth is that The Bold Type is my comfort watch. It’s an extremely unrealistic show about three young girls, Kat, Jane, and Sutton, working at a magazine but somehow having the money and time to dress fabulously every single day. Their eyeliner is never smudged, their hair is never greasy, and their editor is an actual Nice Person. She’s a Mentor! She supports them, encourages them, looks out for them! There isn’t a single editor in an Indian magazine today who doesn’t believe she’s the successor to Miranda Priestley and they all seem determined to out bitch the OG bitch, so watching these three girls navigate a charmed life really makes my heart sing. While the show is set around a magazine, the core of the show is the friendship. If you’re having a bad day and missing your friends, just watch an episode of The Bold Type, where young women live together, work together, spend most of their waking hours together, and somehow, never get sick of each other. It’s an improbable scenario, but perhaps right now, we need exactly that.
Make It Or Break It
Make It Or Break is another teen show, but this one is set within the world of gymnastics. It follows a small group of elite gymnasts who train at The Rock, an elite gym known for getting its athletes to the Olympics. Is the show diverse? No, and considering it’s set in an America that saw Simone Biles and Gabby Douglas win medal upon medal, it’s a shame. But the show is addictive because it remembers that while its protagonists are meant to look like “model” young women, putting their bodies through hell and performing both death and physics-defying stunts, they are still teenagers with regular problems—boys, skin breaking out, wanting to party, wanting love and understanding from parents, and still keeping that single-minded focus on their sport. Make It Or Break It talks honestly about the pressures on these women—financial, social, emotional—and how that can lead to self-esteem and body-esteem issues, sometimes ending careers. And if you knew nothing about gymnastics history, I welcome you to a show that will show you Kerri Strug’s iconic one-foot vault landing in 1996, as well as the sexual assault of hundreds (yes, I said hundreds) of athletes Dr. Larry Nassar was convicted of (to know more about the assault, watch the documentary Athlete A on Netflix, but be warned, it is brutal). You’ll find yourself transfixed by the things these women do, marvel at the strength required, and the most compelling part of the show is that it knows and isn’t afraid to talk about how big the stakes are in this world.
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Kashika’s Top 4
Schitt’s Creek
This is a predictable, but very important entry in this list. I couldn’t be happier that the entire world has woken up to the delightful Rose family, who suddenly lose all their money and move to a town called Schitt’s Creek. I watched it primarily when I was stuck in my hometown, unable to work in the city of my choice, and even though Jaipur is no Schitt’s Creek, I am very dramatic and project my feelings on every single show I watch, so I felt like the Roses and I had something in common. Schitt’s Creek has such incredibly low stakes, and everyone is always so nice, that watching it makes me feel like the world is safe and nothing bad will ever happen to me. I introduced several close friends to this show, all of whom loved it, but I also introduced an ex to it, and honestly, I have very complicated feelings about that (I’m lying, I fully hate it).
Lovesick
A man finds out that he has chlamydia, so now he needs to contact all his sexual partners and break this unpleasant news to them. Not exactly low-stakes, but so heartwarming and funny. It is essentially the story of three friends who live together— Dylan (who has chlamydia), Luke (who’s a much more lovable Barney Stinson minus the creepiness), and Evie (whom I want to hug for a month straight for reasons that are spoilers). It is like a superlative How I Met Your Mother, if HIMYM had any redeeming qualities. It’s based in Scotland, so it’ll give you a break from the New York-ness of American TV. I love it because it feels so real and relatable, yet whimsical, and because I started watching it randomly with no expectations and was completely taken by it. I’ve watched it all twice, and I can easily watch it countless more times.
Gilmore Girls
So much has been written about this show about a woman who gets pregnant at 16, moves out of her house and raises the kid alone, and has a co-dependent, highly unrealistic relationship with her daughter. Gilmore Girls is my number one favourite show of all time, no questions asked. I have seen the whole thing probably thrice, and I have watched seasons two and three at least five times. When the revival, A Year In The Life, came out on Netflix, I lived for it and off it for months. It was the best thing that happened to me in 2016. It was the first American show I binged, and over the years many people and many pop culture writers have trashed it for being dated and/or irritating, but none of that has mattered to me. I watch this show for Lorelai, and Lauren Graham is my TV goddess. I watch everything she does and just her face makes me feel better. Gilmore Girls, and Stars Hollow, is my feel-good low-stakes alt-reality. Plus, before we had Jack Pearson, we had Jess Mariano. Never forget.
Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon
Hindi soaps are where my obsession with TV began, so how can any list of mine be complete without one of them? IPKKND is my number one favourite Hindi show. There is no way in which I can describe the plot that won’t sound idiotic, but it has the typical ‘hot rude rich guy falling in love with sweet and simple angel girl’ storyline that I’m a sucker for. There are many, many misunderstandings and several problematic elements, but this show gives me LIFE. I can watch the two leads staring at each other for hours while Rabba Ve plays in the background! Arnav and Khushi, and their love story, have cheered me up in the shittiest of times, so much so that when I don’t have the time to watch an entire episode, I just search for their hashtag on Instagram and watch a couple of clips to feel better on the worst days. This is one of the first shows I watched after I started living alone in Delhi and bought my own TV, and while that has nothing to do with anything, rewatching it always makes me feel like I’m 21, home alone and full of potential.
Shows mentioned:
Derry Girls - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐⭐
American Vandal - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Bold Type - You’ll have to get creative to find it ⭐⭐⭐
Make It Or Break It - You’ll have to get creative to find it ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Schitt’s Creek - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Lovesick - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Gilmore Girls - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon - Disney+ Hotstar ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Recommendations
We get so many requests for TV show recs from friends, so we’ll get to them here in every issue.
I can’t deal with the news right now. Work is also driving me nuts, and I just need something that will make me forget about everything else while I’m watching, something I can laugh at, something that doesn’t need me using my brain, you know what I mean?
While most are aware of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, not many know about the sitcom she wrote, titled Crashing. It follows a group of twentysomethings who live in an abandoned hospital in London as property guardians—which essentially allows people to rent empty buildings for very cheap. Very New Girl vibes, but with a lot of British humour. The show opens to free-spirited Lulu (Waller-Bridge) surprising her childhood friend Anthony (Damien Molony), who is engaged to Kate (Louise Ford), the exact opposite of Lulu. There’s also French artist Melody (Julie Dray) who convinces Kate’s recently divorced colleague to move in because she wants to paint his grief and will be “generous with his penis.” Is Crashing some pathbreaking show that says something very new? Nope. It’s essentially FRIENDS, minus the fancy apartments and lack of financial struggles. But the writing is still sharp, the comic timing of every actor is amazing, and there’s a song about orgasms in one episode that is such an earworm you’ll find yourself singing it while doing dishes one day.
Crashing is streaming on Netflix.
Shout-Outs
Kashika
We reserve this section for the sort of longer, in-depth pieces that you can immerse yourself in at the end of a long day. But my shout-out in this issue is not that, and that’s because I will always link to any new Gilmore Girls development. That’s the rule.
Shahana
I urge everyone to go quickly and figure out how you can watch PEN15. It’s difficult to explain how good this show is—it’s hilarious but also heartbreaking. This piece on Vox by Allegra Frank explains how the show somehow melds together the hilarity of being awkward middle-school kids with the heartbreaking realities of learning that your racial, sexual, and personal identities affect your social ones.
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!