Issue #18: Please give Sandra Oh a worthy man to love!
Ft Wynonna Earp, which gets it right.
Hi,
Welcome back to Continue Watching! We have had a slightly frantic August, with too much activity and too little time to process anything, but that never means that we are not watching television. We watched a bunch of new shows and kept going back to old favourites for comfort, which is the ideal kind of TV watching!
Only Murders In The Building drops tomorrow and we’re ready to let Selena Gomez, the actor, win us over again! But we know that if you’re a Succession fan, you only care about October!
In the meantime, we’re certain that this issue will give you something to watch while you wait for it, because that is how lovingly Shahana has made the case for Wynonna Earp, a show about a demon fighter who has a big heart but also a self-destructive streak (also a show that, according to Kashika, has managed to take away the sex appeal of Mutt from Schitt’s Creek). Wynonna Earp is brilliant, which is what happens when a show decides to let every character have their own arc and focus on themselves instead of relationships. This is the complete opposite of what The Chair does, a show Kashika spent this week watching and debating. In her essay for this issue, she writes about her frustration with writers letting average men bring down brilliant women, prompted by watching Sandra Oh love yet another unworthy man on TV.
But before you can read these two very passionate pieces, here’s what’s keeping us busy right now!
CURRENTLY WATCHING
Kashika
Grace and Frankie: Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin return as the eponymous Grace and Frankie in the seventh season of a show that I watch religiously every year. But the moment I finish a season, I forget everything about it. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a more low-impact show in my life. Before I started this season, I watched the entire four-minute-long recap and was shocked that I had forgotten basically everything except for the fact that Peter Gallagher starred in it. If you watch it, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, this is the perfect show to play in the background while you’re folding clothes or cleaning your room. The story revolves around Grace and Frankie, who start living together when they find out that their husbands are in love with each other. It has an epic enemies to besties arc, but I’d like to place it on record that if I had a friend like Frankie I’d have murdered her in her sleep. Streaming on Netflix.
Doom at Your Service: I wanted to watch this show for two reasons: 1) It stars Park Bo-young, who is in my all time fave K-drama, Strong Woman Do Bong-soon, and 2) The plot revolves around a terminally-ill woman who falls in love with Doom. Like, literal doom. The deity that IS Doom. I was so pumped about this plot but let’s not spend any time focusing on what that says about me, okay? K-dramas are obsessed with love stories between humans and deities, and I’ve seen almost all iterations of it. A deity runs into a human who can somehow see them and talk to them like no one else can, they get intrigued, fall in love, and ultimately have to choose between their existence or letting the human live. It’s all the same and it’s getting boring. The only variable, and it’s a big one, is that sometimes there is no happy ending. I’ve been forcing myself to finish this one because I’m already at the ninth episode and I want to see if they end up together, but I’m not very impressed. Not streaming anywhere.
—
Shahana
The Empire: I decided I would make an effort to watch more Indian TV shows this year, and I’m still staying strong on my agenda to watch every period show ever. I started watching The Empire, which is based on Alex Rutherford’s Empire of the Moghul series, but as of now I’m not really enjoying this. The series is about Babur and the rise of the Mughal empire, but what I’ve seen feels substandard. Scenes seem lifted from Game of Thrones, Dino Morea plays Muhammad Shaybani like Khilji from Padmaavat, Drashti Dhami’s Khanzada Begum always talks with her eyes wide open, and Kunal Kapoor, who plays Babur, is forgettable. Maybe it’ll get better, I don’t know yet. Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
Nine Perfect Strangers: The next entrant in the long line of lets-watch-rich-people-mess-up-and-get-messed-up genre of shows, Nine Perfect Strangers is an adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s novel of the same name, about nine strangers in a health resort where yoga and meditation isn’t exactly how they get treated. Nicole Kidman, Melissa McCarthy, Manny Jacinto, Luke Evans, and a bunch of other big names star. It’s not Mare of Easttown or Big Little Lies-good, and honestly, the first four episodes are out and it seems like the show’s going to be bad, but it’s something to run in the background while I scroll through Instagram, so I’m going to watch all of it, I guess. Streaming on Netflix.
We hope you’re having a manageable Monday and the rest of your week is easy-breezy. We’re about to enter the ninth month of the year and though none of us know how that happened, at least we’re in this together.
Continue Watching (and reading!),
Kashika and Shahana
Why Are So Many Brilliant Women Saddled With Mediocre Manbabies On TV?
By Kashika
[Spoilers for The Chair & The White Lotus]
Sandra Oh is a gift that keeps on giving. When I fell for her as the brilliant Dr Cristina Yang on Grey’s Anatomy, I modelled my entire career on how passionate Cristina was about medicine (I write about celebrities). It bothered me that her longest romantic relationship on that show was with Dr Owen Hunt, who made her feel bad about her choices repeatedly, but I let it go. When she came back on TV as Eve Polastri in Killing Eve, I was similarly bewitched. Eve was married to Niko, the most boring man in a show brimming with interesting characters. Killing Eve has done everyone dirty after Phoebe Waller-Bridge stopped writing it, so I cannot complain much there. Which is why I was happy to see Sandra back as the lead in a new show, The Chair, where she played Kim Ji-yoon, the eponymous first female chair of the English department of a liberal arts college.
Ji-yoon is the titular character and the show seemed primed to take full advantage of it, so I was surprised when her colleague Bill Dobson was introduced, played by Jay Duplass, whom I hated on sight. This man is grieving the death of his wife, which is very sad, but it seems that he has decided that it gives him a free pass on, well, everything, including but not limited to showering, shaving, showing up to work, respecting Ji-yoon’s authority and being a decent person.
When he was introduced, I could immediately tell that he will have sexual tension with Ji-yoon because I have a trained eye for this sort of thing. What I didn’t realise was that the show would continue to centre his story and ultimately make it more important than Ji-yoon’s.
TV shows often want us to root for a couple that may look mismatched in the beginning. The rich person-poor person or opposites attract tropes are very popular and satisfying to watch when you know that ultimately the two people are good for each other (or at least meant for each other if they’re both somewhat deranged, like Eve and Villanelle). But sometimes, a show comes along where you can just tell that the woman will be so much better off if the man were not pulling her down. Average men have been bringing brilliant women down on TV since Miranda married Steve in Sex and the City, and then stayed with him despite the cheating.
We have seen, over and over, how curious, multidimensional women fall for manbabies who add no value to their life. What I’m about to say now is a VERY unpopular opinion but I will die on this hill - Jess deserved better than Nick and Amy deserves better than Jake in two shows that I love dearly, New Girl and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. We are meant to believe that Nick and Jake loosen up Jess and Amy, who are shown as high-strung and type-A, which somehow means that they need someone to come show them how to have fun. But the reality is that both Jess and Amy are capable, ambitious women who very much love their lives and do not deserve to have to babysit their boyfriends who are bad with money, don’t like to do taxes or listen to their supervisors. Both Nick and Jake showed tremendous growth in their shows over the seasons but it was never enough.
One of the most infuriating TV leads of our time, Ted from How I Met Your Mother, almost hated Robin for her ambition and infringed upon her independence time and again. He stalked her, didn’t take no for an answer, was overbearing and MADE HER GET RID OF HER DOGS. Yet the show kept trying to convince us that they belonged together. When that ended, they set her up with Barney, and the less said about that the better. Ultimately, in an idiotic twist, Ted and Robin were back together in the finale and we were supposed to be okay with that.
In The Chair, one of Ji-yoon’s biggest allies is Joan (Holland Taylor). She’s dealing with some administrative crap so Ji-yoon promises to help her, but ultimately couldn’t show up for the meeting because she was quite literally tying Bill’s shoelaces. I don’t know if the show meant for this scene to come across as a damning indictment of why she needs to get rid of him, but it sealed the deal for me.
The Chair, a show supposedly about Ji-yoon, also wastes no time in becoming entirely about Bill and the shoddily done ‘cancel culture’ storyline. One day in class, Bill ends a random passionate speech with a Sieg Heil salute. The students take a video and his very unfunny ‘joke’ makes him a meme, with students asking if he is a Nazi. Ji-yoon, who has had to already defend Bill in faculty meetings and in front of the dean, tells him that he needs to work with the PR department and apologise immediately. He dismisses her, ignores all her advice, and speaks directly to the students and makes it an even bigger disaster. She tells him repeatedly to take ownership of his mistake, and he continues to joke about it because he’s an arrogant prick. When it all blows up in his face eventually, he has the nerve to lash out at her for not having his back, even though her job is also in jeopardy because of him. Ji-yoon has the good sense to tell him to shove it, but not for long. Eventually, in a supremely disappointing finale, Ji-yoon stands up for him and while she doesn’t manage to save his job, she loses hers too. She is no longer The Chair, a position that seems like a death trap but was her dream job nonetheless.
It makes sense in the world of this show that she did this. They’re besties, they’re obviously in love with each other, and while she weakly asks him to back off when he asks her out because she knows it’s a bad idea, she wants him. If you watch enough TV, you’d know that the writers always come for the ambitious woman with the clichés. Ji-yoon is driven at work so her personal life is in shambles. She has an adopted daughter JuJu who (at least currently) hates her. As Ji-yoon’s parenting struggles make up for a large part of the show, there are no points for guessing who comes to her rescue - Bill. The idea that Bill is a wonderful parent to even her daughter while she struggles constantly is maddening because it feels like this is written with the express purpose of making you feel like she needs him.
TV shows often make the decision to pair up a smart woman with a mediocre man to make her seem relatable. If she’s thriving at work and at home, apparently instead of aspiring to it we will feel like it’s unrealistic to watch her kick ass everywhere, which is the opposite of true. I want to see Sandra Oh and every other woman be her best self everywhere all the time. Instead, I get Bill condescendingly telling her “I like when you act like you’re my boss” when she actually is his boss.
Ji-yoon is dealing with a lot in these six episodes. She’s trying to be there for everyone at work and at home, she’s balancing being likeable and effective, she’s trying to be an ally to female colleagues, she’s teaching, and every single one of those storylines deserved more screen time than Bill. He takes up too much energy and time of not just Ji-yoon but also the show (and in an ironic turn of events, this essay).
In The White Lotus, another show that was recently the subject of many thinkpieces, one of the main plots revolved around newlyweds Rachel and Shane, who married after dating for just a few months. Rachel is a freelance journalist and Shane comes from money , and right off the bat you can see her struggle to accept her new reality as the trophy wife. It doesn’t help that Shane is a dick and constantly dismisses Rachel and shuts down any talk about her career and ambition. Over the course of six episodes, Rachel realises that she’s made a huge mistake marrying this manbaby (her words) and tells him that she wants out.
Now, Rachel is not as empowered as Ji-yoon and she’s clearly a mediocre journalist. She has always had to hustle and worry about money. She is too young to realise that mostly men ain’t shit. She is insecure and unsure of what she wants, so in a sense she’s the antithesis of Ji-yoon, who is older, wiser and has a richer life than Rachel. She also has a daughter and father to care for, while Rachel has none of those limitations and can theoretically take a risk. But after gathering the courage to tell Shane that she wants to leave him and having him lash out at her that she’s nothing but an insecure baby herself, Rachel makes the exact same choice as Ji-yoon and goes back to him. “I promise I’ll be happy,” she tearfully tells him as he hugs her.
Rachel and Ji-yoon are at different stages in life and career but they end up making the choice to stand by and sacrifice their happiness for their self-absorbed, whiny men because that is what we expect our women to do. Or at least that is what our TV shows are telling us we should do. Ji-yoon loves Bill too much and is easily swayed by his crappy speech during his dismissal hearing. Rachel just wants somehow to tell her what she should do. Both are saddled with these sorry excuses for men. The White Lotus perhaps made the realistic choice by having her come back to Shane but the more satisfying choice might have been to see her walk. It may feel like Ji-yoon has more agency, we might feel like she will make the more empowered choice, but ultimately, regardless of whatever shit is happening in their life, these women just furthered the men’s stories or their agendas.
“Not being chair suits you,” Bill says to Ji-yoon in the last episode after she’s lost her job as a direct result of his actions. I have never wanted to punch a man on TV so hard. Please, the powers that be, if you’re making Sandra Oh straight and giving her a love life in your show, give her a man who is worthy of her.
Shows mentioned:
The Chair - Netflix ⭐⭐1/2
Grey’s Anatomy - Disney+ Hotstar ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Killing Eve - Amazon Prime Video⭐⭐⭐⭐ (for the first season only, ⭐⭐ for the rest)
The White Lotus - Disney+ Hotstar ⭐⭐⭐1/2
New Girl - Disney+ Hotstar ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Brooklyn Nine-Nine - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐1/2
How I Met Your Mother - Disney+ Hotstar ⭐⭐
There Will Never Be Another TV Show Like Wynonna Earp
By Shahana
[Extremely mild spoilers ahead]
We live in the age of peak TV and that might sound like a good thing, but it really isn’t. There’s too many things to watch, and a lot of time is wasted watching things that, in theory, should be good but end up being middling (Gossip Girl reboot) or just plain bad (looking at you, The Undoing). Good shows, with neither the star power or the budget, often just end up flying under the radar or get cancelled (no, I will never get over Good Girls Revolt getting cancelled), and this is a tragedy. Thanks to this phenomenon, I had to live through years watching Wynonna Earp, a show no one I knew was watching, but should’ve been.
The basic premise of Wynonna Earp is simple. Adapted by Emily Andras from a comic series of the same name, the show follows the titular Wynonna Earp (Melanie Scrofano), a descendant of the legendary Wild West gunslinger and lawman Wyatt Earp. The show begins with Wynonna reluctantly returning home to her hometown, Purgatory, to step into her role as the wisecracking, demon-killing Earp heir. She’s the latest in a long line of cursed heirs, and what Wynonna must do is hunt down and kill the demonic revenants of the 77 outlaws her great-great-grandfather, Wyatt Earp, had killed in his time. Assisting Wynonna in her fight was her little sister Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley), Black Badge special agent Xavier Dolls (Shamier Anderson), Wyatt Earp’s immortal best friend and Wynonna’s love interest Doc Holliday (Tim Rozon), Deputy Nicole Haught (Katherine Barrell), Sheriff Randy Nedley (Greg Lawson), and nerdy Black Badge scientist Jeremy Chetri (Varun Saranga). This family of demon-fighters as well as the demons they fought changed over the course of Wynonna Earp’s five seasons, but what set the show apart was that it never deviated from its central themes of who is allowed to be a hero, what being a hero means and does to a person, and the ideas of love, family, duty, and home.
Wynonna Earp is nothing like your typical Captain America-esque hero; she’s quite far from perfect. In fact, Wynonna is literally a hot mess. She has no desire to have this curse foisted on her, and the fact that she has no choice but to be the heir weighs heavily on her. Wynonna is always cognizant of the reality that the demon revenants can only be killed with Wyatt Earp’s gun, and that gun will only work for the heir, which she is. Wynonna doesn’t bother to be stoic about being forced to shoulder this unwanted burden; she drinks whiskey the way an extremely hydrated person drinks water and makes dirty jokes while whinging about the job. She doesn’t have super strength and she’s not even an excellent fighter, and the constant killing and fighting have left a toll on her mental health; she’s funny, but her inability to take anything seriously grates on those who live and work with her.
Wynonna Earp admits early on that Waverly is perhaps better suited and more prepared to be the heir, and in a lesser show, might have used this to create friction between the sisters. What it does do, however, is cement the fact that Wynonna might be flippant about things in general, but she is anything but that when it comes to her family. It’s her love and unwillingness to disappoint Waverly that makes Wynonna stay and go on with a job she really doesn’t want to do, that allows her to find her way back to the home she wants nothing to do with. On Wynonna Earp, there’s never any doubt about the characters' interpersonal relationships—Waverly is Wynonna’s little sister, and Wynonna will burn down the world if it means keeping Waverly safe.
Love and family, however, doesn’t mean the characters are always forgiven no matter what they do. Wynonna is a deeply broken person, and while her destructive habits are usually aimed at herself, they often hurt those close to her. While Wynonna makes an effort to keep Waverly from the fallout, it falls to Doc to bear the brunt. While it may seem like Doc and Wynonna have a will-they-won’t-they relationship, there is never any doubt about their feelings. Through multiple fights, betrayals, literal trips to hell and back, it is always clear that Doc and Wynonna are in love. Wynonna Earp could’ve done the traditional thing and written Doc and Wynonna to be the kind of couple that fixes each other, but that’s not really how things work in real life, and it doesn’t here either. Despite how obvious their feelings are to them and to everyone around them, Doc and Wynonna aren’t together because neither is capable of being in a relationship with anyone. Both Wynonna and Doc have led lives filled with self-loathing and trust issues, which leads to rash and cruel decisions and selfish choices; choices they know will hurt themselves, but choices they make because they truly believe they don’t deserve happiness. The story has to move forward, and instead of using a relationship to do so, Wynonna Earp uses bad timing. When Doc tries to be and is better, it’s Wynonna who messes things up. Without giving too much away, the final season shows us a Wynonna so warped by the losses and trials of the previous seasons, she refuses to believe in peace, one brokered by Doc who is tired of violence and has tried to fix something he started. Her refusal to change leads to her making a decision that is decidedly unheroic and cowardly and to Doc walking away from her.
We are, however, watching television, and no couple with the kind of chemistry WynDoc had is ever going to stay apart for too long. Instead of using the typical will-they-won’t-they trope, Wynonna Earp subtly subverts it by using their relationship as a way to demonstrate that the obstacles that keep them from being together are essentially issues that they struggle with individually, and by fixing that, they not only help themselves but also find a way towards each other. It’s compelling storytelling, that within a show that has literal demons and supernatural creatures, the things keeping two hopelessly-in love people apart are things that plague the rest of us too; that the issues keeping them apart have nothing to do with their relationship, that love does not and cannot conquer all. Wynonna and Doc, just like the rest of us, have to work on who they are before they can be together. Theirs isn’t a story about whether they will or won’t get together, it’s about how they’re able to do so in light of the circumstances they’ve put themselves in.
While Doc and Wynonna’s arcs revolve around allowing themselves to be loved just as desperately as they love those around them, Waverly’s story was about finding her way to her own happiness and to finally be happy with the woman she loved. Arguably the most popular part of Wynonna Earp, Nicole Haught and Waverly start dating fairly soon, and end up becoming the most stable and loving relationship in television history. And if Wynonna Earp decided to gently subvert the romantic trope with WynDoc, the show used WayHaught to right every wrong the Bury Your Gays trope has made in decades of television. It’s impossible not to see the naked longing in Nicole’s eyes every time she looks at Waverly, or the obvious passion they both share when they kiss. WayHaught is a relationship filled with a lot of affection and passion, but not a single scene they’re in is shot with the kind of voyeuristic male gaze many queer characters are shot in. Season 4 sees the couple reuniting after a long separation, that culminates in a long, steamy sex scene that is erotic but not sleazy at all. The characters are in danger often, but unlike the long-running history of television where queer characters are killed off by the most random events, WayHaught survive. Waverly and Nicole go through their fair share of relationship problems, both earthly and supernatural, but death will not be one of them.
Wynonna Earp was campy and kitschy, often foregoing seriousness in favour of quips and wisecracks. It was also extremely self-aware and knew that the situations it put its characters in were absolutely ridiculous and had no pretensions about it—but at its core is a show with so much heart (This Is Us could never, you can’t change my mind). In the middle of absurd storylines about haunted wedding dresses and genies who attack school reunions, Wynonna Earp managed to create a happy ending for its characters who were just so painfully human. If that isn’t a show one shouldn’t be sleeping on, I don’t know what is. After all, clear eyes, full bra, can't lose.
Shows mentioned:
Wynonna Earp - PLEASE get creative and find it ⭐⭐⭐⭐
RECOMMENDATIONS
We get so many requests for TV show recs from friends, so we’ll get to them here in every issue.
Nothing too specific, just give me a good science fiction show to watch. Only request, make it easy to find (I mean something I can stream, please don’t make me “get creative to find it”).
In that case, watch Sense8. The show is about a new species of humans who have evolved to become Sensates. Sensates are people who develop an intense psychic connection with each other. Imagine you and your core group of friends being able to do and experience everything telepathically—emotions, skills, thoughts, knowledge, memories. So if one sensate knows how to drive, the entire cluster (the skills are shared between one group called clusters) will know how to, and if one person speaks 15 languages, the entire cluster will know too. The sensates in Sense8 are spread all over the world—Kenya, India, Mexico, South Korea, USA, UK, Germany—so we have an ensemble cast that spans nationalities, sexualities, gender identities, locations, occupations, politics, and personality traits. While our sensates are trying to figure out what’s happening to them and why, as well as how to navigate their lives with this new connection, they discover an organisation called Biologic Preservation Organization (BPO) and a sensate who works with BPO is trying to hunt them down.
Created and written by Lana and Lilly Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynski, Sense8 is an absolute treat. Sense8 isn’t afraid to be honest, whether it’s about the struggles and realities of being a trans-person, being bisexual, being gay, living in a third-world country, the pressures and expectations that come with being a woman, or the concept of family and duty in East Asian counties. Visually, Sense8 is stunning, because everything was shot on location, so whether it’s a temple in Mumbai or a nightclub in Berlin, everything is authentic. Every character has their own strengths, and Sense8 drives home the fact that while knowing how to fight and hack are great skills, having empathy, kindness, and being a source of emotional support is vital. The show was cancelled after its second season, probably because it was too expensive to shoot on location all over the world, and there simply weren’t enough fans. But Sense8 was a cult favourite, so thankfully, the series finale is a 2.5 hour special that wraps things up.
Streaming on Netflix.
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thank you for this!! absolutely hated bill dobson so much in the chair and Sandra oh's character DEFINITELY deserved better