Issue #6: It's okay to not be okay
Hi,
Welcome back to Continue Watching and happy Friday! Only 8ish more hours until you can shut your work laptop for two whole days. And if you’re working tomorrow (like one of us is), please know that we are rooting for you!
We’re excited to talk to you about this issue, but before that, we have a BIG announcement. We’re now on Instagram! This is super special but also a little nerve-wracking, because until today we were just struggling to meet our essay deadlines and now we have to think about posts, make stories, write captions, and also keep the page alive and engaging. The only thing we know for sure is that it’s going to be worth it because we love talking to you! Every time we get an email from you, it carries us through the day. So please follow us and give us a shoutout on your handle, and help Continue Watching grow and expand into a full-blown TV community!
The ANTICIPATION is making it difficult to type but let’s keep going, lol. This issue is heavy, because it’s about living with grief. Two very different shows in two different languages—The Haunting of Bly Manor and It’s Okay to Not Be Okay—made us think about the demons we live with and what it means to go through life with that burden. Can someone live with their grief, their trauma, and still thrive? Can someone heal from their trauma and yet carry it in their heart every single day? Can a TV show make you confront your grief? Can it help you heal from it? It sounds bleak but talking about it helps, so let’s do that.
Speaking of grief that colours every aspect of your life, This Is Us is back! We haven’t been able to watch the two-part premiere yet, but we’re avoiding spoilers and saving it for the weekend. This is a tearjerker because no one likes to think about Jack Pearson in the past tense, but the show was quite uneven last season, so we don’t know what to expect.
The first look of Shonda Rhimes’ new Netflix show Bridgerton is also out, and even though in Shonda we trust, her last show Still Star-Crossed (which was also old-timey like Bridgerton) was a snoozefest. We’re still really looking forward to it because of the old Grey’s Anatomy charm, but if you’ve read the books it’s based on, tell us what to expect?
Now let’s get to our fave section, Currently Watching:
CURRENTLY WATCHING
Kashika
Mrs. America: When this show was first released in May, my brain had no capacity to consume anything that required critical thinking. It’s not much better now but I couldn’t wait to watch Mrs. America any longer. This is the somewhat dramatised depiction of the women's rights movement of the ’70s, when second-wave feminists, led by Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, and Shirley Chisholm tried to get the Equal Rights Amendment ratified, only to be met with intense opposition from homemakers, led by conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly. Watching this show makes me want to burn everything to the ground. I cannot even imagine what someone like Gloria Steinem must feel looking at the state of the world right now. Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
Something In The Rain: This is supposed to be a mushy, feel-good Korean drama, but I have just started it so I cannot vouch for the feel-goodness of it. It does, however, have an unmarried woman in her mid 30s as the protagonist, who is described as a ‘single career woman’, so it should be interesting. Streaming on Netflix.
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Shahana
Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story: I didn’t think a show about finance and the stock market would be this exciting, but I’m really enjoying it. It’s not a straightforward bad-guy-gets-caught-doing-bad-stuff story, and every character has the chance to be layered and multi-dimensional. Just be forewarned, this is not a show you watch while you scroll through Instagram—the finance stuff can get a little difficult to follow if you don’t pay attention. Streaming on SonyLiv.
The Bachelorette: Listen, this franchise promises “the most explosive season ever” every year, but this season probably is the most explosive. Rumours say that bachelorette Clare Crowley fell in love with suitor Dale at first sight, and refused to go on dates and meet the other men “out of respect for them” after a few episodes. This left producers with a bunch of irate suitors and no bachelorette, so the show had to bring in another bachelorette. Drama level 100. What a time to be barely alive! Not streaming anywhere.
Have a great weekend and please reach out to us or someone you trust if reading our essays makes you feel some type of way. Remember, it might feel like we’re dealing with it alone but we’re all in this together. Together in our grief and together in our healing.
Continue Watching (and reading!),
Kashika and Shahana
The Real Ghost In The Haunting Of Bly Manor Is The Grief We Carry Within Us
By Shahana
[Trigger Warning for thoughts of suicide]
[Spoilers ahead]
Sometime last year, while watching the finale of season four of The Magicians, I felt the wind get knocked out of me for a few minutes. The Magicians was a show I loved because of the way it subverted the concept of the hero and how it portrayed mental health (and that’s a discussion for another day), but what it did in that episode was truly something else. Quentin Coldwater, a primary character who spent multiple seasons struggling with severe mental health issues, died after sacrificing his life to save his friends. After he died, he wondered aloud (it’s a show about magic, and one of the most dramatic and tense scenes involved the entire cast singing Under Pressure; being able to talk after death is not a bizarre thing in this universe), “Did I do something brave to save my friends? Or did I finally find a way to kill myself?” I had to rewind the show because for a while after he said that, I was unable to focus. For the first time, I was watching a character on television talk aloud about not being attached to the act of living. Not actively contemplating death or so depressed that it colours every experience and action, but just passively carrying it around, so that at times the thought “What if it all just ended?” comes unbidden into one’s mind, with the same level of listless intensity as the thought “Oranges would be nice right now.”
A couple of weeks ago, as I watched Dani Clayton go about her life in the final episode of The Haunting of Bly Manor, I felt echoes of the same. In The Haunting Of Hill House, the first in the Haunting anthology series by Mike Flanagan, Stephen Crain says, “Ghosts are guilt, ghosts are secrets, ghosts are regrets and failings. But most times, a ghost is a wish.” And while the stories in Hill House and Bly Manor are completely different, the ghosts in the latter often turn out to be a physical embodiment of an unrealised and unspoken wish.
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The immediate premise of Bly Manor is this: Based on Henry James’ The Turn Of The Screw, a young American au pair is hired by Henry Wingrave, (Henry Thomas) to look after his niece and nephew, Flora and Miles (Amelie Bea Smith and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), who alternate between creepy and cute. The au pair, Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti), moves to a large, isolated manor with three other people in attendance: the housekeeper Hannah (T'Nia Miller), the groundskeeper Jamie (Amelia Eve), and the chef Owen (Rahul Kohli). Soon, we see ghosts around the house—the spirits of the kids’ former governess, Rebecca Jessel (Tahirah Sharif) and Henry’s secretary Peter Quint (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), as well as a few more literal and metaphorical ones.
Dani is haunted by the ghost of her dead fiance—a man she loved, just not in the way he wanted her to. Dani is haunted by the knowledge that his last few moments were spent in agony, of knowing that the woman he loved did not and could not love him back the same way he did. Owen is haunted by the ghost of a life he could’ve had, if he wasn’t stuck in Bly taking care of a sick mother—a mother he loves, but who he feels guilty for resenting. The first time he meets Dani, he says, “This whole town is one big gravity well. And it’s easy to get stuck.” Henry Wingrave cannot escape the phantom that haunts him, the part of him that had an affair with his brother’s wife; an affair that directly sets into motion the events that cause the death of said brother and wife. Hannah is haunted by her death itself, the truth of which she will not come to terms with. As Flora says, “Dead doesn’t mean gone.”
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Then there’s Viola. And there’s the source of the real horror lurking within Bly Manor. When life gets too hard for people like Quentin Coldwater and me, we’re visited by that tiny voice passively saying, “Oh well, it’ll be over at some point,” and we rest knowing that there is an out. We may not ever pay heed to that side of us that isn’t really attached to life, but there is a comfort in knowing there is an exit, always. But Bly Manor takes that source of comfort, and wrenches it away; it tells us that we could spend our entire life trapped by the ghosts of our wishes, our guilt, our regrets, and our secrets—and we could spend eternity stuck in that same stifling moment long after death. Just as Viola does, day after day we too “would wake, (we) would walk, (we) would sleep.”
In the final episode, Dani saves the two kids by performing an act that invites Viola’s spirit inside of her. Bly Manor doesn’t explain what that means immediately, except to tell us that Dani’s selfless act saves the two young kids from death, and frees scores of other souls who have been existing in a sort-of purgatory within the gates of Bly Manor. Everyone leaves Bly to go on and live a happy, peaceful life, finding love, success, and a measure of peace. Everyone, except Dani.
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Dani moves to a town in Vermont with the love of her life, Jamie, and together, they build a peaceful, idyllic life together. And despite the happiness, Dani can never quite get away from Viola; the thought that Viola will someday win comes to her uninvited and unprompted every day. And these were these moments that I identified the most with Dani. Every time she looked at a surface that should simply show her a reflection of her face, but where she saw Viola’s blank, nebulous face staring back at her. Dani’s exhaustion at having to shove Viola away when she’s trying to enjoy a happy moment reminded me of the same weariness I feel every time I am forced to think of what now seems like a permanent weight inside me. Dani’s desperate desire for a normal life reminds me of how I feel on bad days; “She’s so close I can feel her,” I think, a version of me that can stand on a balcony and laugh with a friend and not suddenly wonder what would happen if I went closer to the edge.
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Of course, I’m not literally haunted by a ghost who will force me to jump into a lake. I’m closer to the happy version of me than Dani is to the life she yearns for. After years of living with suicidal ideation, my ghost resembles the one Jamie keeps alive. It’s one I live with, on days when the sun shines bright, days when the sun peeks out from behind a cloud, and on days when it doesn’t come out at all. As Stephen Crain said, “A ghost is a wish;” Jamie sends out a wish into the universe of a happier life that could’ve been every night when she imagines Dani’s hands on her shoulder as she falls asleep, and I do the same. We may both be haunted by ghosts we dreamed up, but as Flora reminds us, “Dead doesn’t mean gone.”
If you’re thinking about suicide or need someone to talk to right now, you can find support from these resources below.
iCall: +91 9152987821
Aasra: +91 9820466726
Fortis Stress Helpline: +91 8376804102
Shows mentioned:
The Magicians - Amazon Prime Video ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Haunting of Hill House - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Haunting of Bly Manor - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐
It’s Okay To Not Be Okay: A Korean Show That’ll Tear Your Heart Out & Help You Live Through It
By Kashika
[Trigger Warning for mentions of eating disorder behaviours]
As long as it’s not a boy, I love anything that makes me cry my eyes out at 2am. If I’m watching or reading something in the middle of the night and it’s making me cry, it’s a win for me. When I was watching It’s Okay to Not Be Okay in September, I used to have a sobfest every night. That week, my brother made it a habit to come to my room every night to look at me and laugh. When I watched the finale (which is typically when everything is resolved in K-dramas and everyone is all smiles), I cried so hard that my facial oil got washed off. Over a month later, I cannot stop thinking about this show.
IOTNBO is the story of Moon Gang-tae, who not only works as the caretaker in a psychiatric hospital, but is also the sole caretaker of his autistic older brother, Moon Sang-tae. Sang-tae witnessed their mother get murdered when he was a teen, and that led to an unexplained but severe phobia of butterflies. Every spring, he says that the butterflies are coming for him, and they move. It is when the brothers meet Ko Mun-young, a very successful children’s author who people think is a sociopath, that their lives change and the truth about their past starts to unravel.
When you meet these three characters, they are broken. They are sad and angry and scared. Gang-tae is tired of moving, Sang-tae is sick of being scared of the butterflies and Mun-young is just bored of everyone around her. Each of the 16 episodes is named after a children’s story (if you consider Coraline a children’s story), and slowly you start to realise what a shitty hand these people have been dealt. You start to become sad and angry and scared for them, and before you know it, you want to hug them for three months straight.
Source: Tumblr
The grief of these characters - along with the many others we meet in the hospital - is a character in itself. It colours every aspect of their lives. It also makes them come up with coping mechanisms that will wreck you. Gang-tae is resentful of his brother, and hates himself for this resentment, so he tries to do good by everyone and completely disregards his own needs. People tell him that when he smiles, he looks scary. Sang-tae doesn’t say it, but he knows his brother hates him, so he becomes fiercely possessive of him while trying to keep the butterflies away. Mun-young has never been shown love, so she rejects all emotions and comes across as manipulative and cold-hearted. But, at the end of the day, all these three want is for someone to tell them that they deserve to be loved. They deserve to have a family. They deserve happiness. And that they are not alone.
But they have lived like this for so long that they do not know any better. The story often flashes back to their childhood, which is where it all started, and the three are constantly plagued with memories of the past, which is full of pain and violence. Does that mean they will never get better? It is at the exact moment of their lives when they (and we) feel like they’re a lost cause that the Moon brothers meet Mun-young. And something about these three utterly broken people coming together and instantly wanting to keep each other safe turns the tide. It makes them care, it makes them want to live for each other, it makes them want to be happy. It is the start of their journey of healing, which ultimately culminates into a literal journey when they take a trip together as a family.
Source: Tumblr
Family, a word that doesn’t mean much to these three because of how they’ve been hurt by their own blood. It’s the reason they don’t easily accept someone in their life and the reason the finale is so satisfying. For instance, it takes Gang-tae 16 episodes and several years to call his best friend ‘hyung’ - which means older brother - even though this friend has followed the brothers from town to town, looking out for them and finding their happiness in them.
The show tells us, over and over, that a true family is one that shows up, not necessarily one that you’re born into. In one scene, Mun-young tells Gang-tae that she doesn’t know when to stop eating. No matter how much I eat, she says, I am always hungry (as an aside, I’ve never seen a show allude to eating disorder behaviours so offhandedly and still leave an impact). Later in the show, an older character, who becomes a sort of de-facto mom of the group, tells Gang-tae that she once had Mun-young over for a meal when she was a child, and the way she ate made it clear that she had never been given a hot meal before.
Source: Tumblr
Food is an important metaphor in K-dramas, but it is also an important metaphor in our lives. Every second meme on Instagram is about food and how it affects our mood, our day, our relationships. When the Moon brothers start living with Mun-young halfway through the show, they make breakfast for her on day one and her face lights up. No one has ever done this for her, and that moment marks the beginning of her seeing them as her family.
But these little kind gestures are nothing in front of the big reveal of the show, which is the truth about how their childhoods are intertwined and their fates sealed because of their mothers. When they find out that they are the source of the biggest trauma in each other’s lives, Gang-tae and Mun-young, who have come to love each other fiercely, become overcome with guilt. With just a couple of episodes left to go, you feel like this relationship cannot be saved and this family will remain broken.
But that is not what the show is trying to say. Because when you’re broken, you can heal. The brothers can heal from their mother’s death and from their simmering resentment towards each other. Mun-young can heal from the abuse she had to suffer in her childhood. And while healing in their case, and in many other cases, does not mean that they will forget about their past and live a happy life, it means that they will thrive and live a happy life in spite of their grief. They are whole people despite what happened when they were kids and their love for each other will carry them through whatever else life throws at them.
Another thing I took away from the show is, who are you when you are not surrounded by people? When I’m not a daughter, a sister, a friend, a colleague, do I have an identity? Am I a writer, am I a person, am I a woman? I am whatever I choose to be, because I belong to myself. Moon Gang-tae belongs to Moon Gang-tae, the younger son spits at his mother in a fight where she’s saying that he has to always be around to take care of his brother. Moon Sang-tae belongs to Moon Sang-tae, the older brother screams at his younger brother when the latter won’t let them move in with Mun-young. And, finally, in the last episode, Sang-tae tells his brother, “Moon Gang-tae belongs to Moon Gang-tae. You belong to yourself and I belong to myself,” when he’s telling him that he will leave their trip midway to go back to work, but that Gang-tae doesn’t have to accompany him because he needs to live his own life.
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I belong to me. It’s such a simple sentiment, almost laughable in its simplicity, and yet I have never said it out loud, and I sure as hell haven’t practised it. Yes, I am a daughter who is currently disappointing her parents, a sister who worries for her brother, a team lead who sometimes demands too much, an employee who sometimes misses deadlines, but I do not belong to any of these people.
I belong to me, and my grief belongs to me and my eating disorder behaviours belong to me, and, ultimately, my healing also belongs to me. That is why It’s Okay to Not Be Okay lives in my head rent-free, because it didn’t just try to heal its characters, it tried to heal me.
Shows mentioned:
It’s Okay to Not Be Okay - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Recommendations
We get so many requests for TV show recs from friends, so we’ll get to them here in every issue.
I recently binge-watched all three seasons of Killing Eve, and I loved it. I want something like that, with complex and well-written female characters and a really compelling plot.
You need to start watching The Fall right now. Set in Ireland, The Fall follows Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson), a detective called in to investigate the search for Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan [listen, don’t write this off because of Fifty Shades; he’s very good here]), a serial killer who stalks, tortures, and murders young, attractive women. The serial killer’s identity is revealed within the first few minutes of the show, and you realise at the end of the first episode that this isn’t a whodunit, but about pairing a misogynistic villain against a woman. The Fall’s brilliance lies in the fact that Gibson is good at this job because she’s a woman, not in spite of it. Her ability to understand Spector’s mind and methods hinges on her being a woman and Gillian Anderson plays Gibson to steely perfection. This is a cat-and-mouse game where it’s hard to understand who the cat and mouse are meant to be, and watching Gibson and Spector being played off as two sides of the same coin—both charismatic individuals who seem to attract young people—is fascinating, to say the least.
The Fall is streaming on Netflix.
Shout-Outs
Kashika
Shonda Rhimes is a powerhouse. She is the creator of some of the most lucrative and popular shows on TV. And yet she was humiliated at her workplace, which ultimately made her decide to leave the ABC network for Netflix three years ago. Now she’s the highest-paid showrunner in television. Read The Hollywood Reporter cover story where she talks about why she left ABC, how she felt when she first started at Netflix, and what it means to finally be able to enjoy one’s success.
Shahana
This isn’t something to read, but Adele was on SNL last week, and this sketch combines two things I love—The Bachelor and Adele, and it’s amazing. Please watch.
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