Hi,
Welcome back to Continue Watching! Let’s take a moment to acknowledge that we’re in May, the fifth month of 2022, a year that has completely chipped away at any grasp of reality that we previously thought we had. Do you disagree? Then PLEASE EMAIL US RIGHT NOW. Tell us your ways, because this *gestures wildly* is taking a toll on us.
The only consistent thing in our lives right now is the deluge of new TV shows that we keep adding to our to-watch list, and that’s also making us feel a bit unhinged. Because who has the time? And who has the emotional range to watch everything from Shining Girls to the Korean Money Heist to the five scammer shows releasing every week? But we keep at it, for ourselves and for you, and for the only tangible evidence of the fact that we are still writers.
To that end, here’s an upcoming show that we’re both very excited about. Conversations with Friends is based on a Sally Rooney novel that Kashika hated and Shahana loved.
Another show that was announced recently is Modern Love: Mumbai, the Indian adaptation of the extremely underwhelming American Modern Love, which is an adaptation of the lovely Modern Love column in the NYT. We’d like to be cautiously optimistic about this one.
After that sombre introduction, I’m sure you’re worried that the rest of this newsletter will be just as depressing. But worry not! The first essay you’re getting today is about the cutest, warmest, nicest show on Netflix right now, Heartstopper. We’re serious. Kashika is convinced it healed her soul for about 20 minutes, which is a massive achievement! The second essay is about the sacrilegious finale of Killing Eve, where Shahana writes about the push and pull relationship between Eve and Villanelle so deliciously that you might have to stop to catch your breath.
But before we get to that, here’s what we’re watching right now.
CURRENTLY WATCHING
Kashika
Community: My first ever watch! Somehow this is the only show from the low-stakes comedy trifecta of Parks and Rec-The Office-Community that I never ended up watching. I’m still on the first season and I can tell that it’s trying to find its footing, which is fine. I plan on sticking with it because so many of my friends whose opinions I trust blindly are obsessed with the show and quote it every chance they get. Streaming on Netflix.
WeCrashed: Watching rich people go batshit insane is one of my favourite things because it always makes me think about how unhinged I’d be if I were a rich person. WeCrashed is based on the true story about the rapid rise and fall of the co-working space startup WeWork, but it centres on the love story between its co-founder Adam Neumann and his wife Rebekah Neumann, which was the initial spark that led to the existence of WeWork. I would anyway watch anything with Anne Hathaway in it, but this one seems like it’s going to be worth my while. Streaming on Apple TV+.
—
Shahana
Russian Doll S2: Season one followed Nadia (Natasha Lyonne), a chain smoking cynic who died and was then forced to relive the same night over and over again in a time loop, trying to figure out how to get out of it. A completely unnecessary second season has Nadia discover a wormhole in the NYC subway, which results in her being trapped in the body of her mother, who is also pregnant with Nadia. All the actors are excellent, but the story itself seems to be meandering, just plodding along trying to fill seven episodes. Streaming on Netflix.
Calls: Calls is odd. Do you remember those weird designs, and wavy things that you could see while listening to music on Windows Media Player? The visual element in Calls is essentially that, over audio of a series of phone conversations between different people. At first, it seems like each episode is a different story altogether, but there’s a common thread uniting them all, as each of these calls leads to some sort of alien or supernatural event. I’m not a podcast person; I lose focus easily, and I thought I’d get bored with this show—but strangely I want to keep going to find out exactly what is going on. Streaming on Apple TV+.
We hope you have a great week! This Monday will pass, like every other Monday, and we will all be okay. Until then,
Continue Watching (and reading!),
Kashika and Shahana
Heartstopper Is The Sweetest, Most Wholesome Show That Will Warm Your Cold, Dead Heart
By Kashika
[Mild spoilers ahead]
Picture this: you’ve just come back home from school where you had a great day because you stood next to your crush in the morning assembly and they smiled at you. You carried that high with you all day and no teacher was mean to you either. At home, you can smell your favourite food in the kitchen and there’s Rasna in the fridge. What is the feeling you get? That's the feeling Heartstopper will give you.
In the era of Euphoria and Elite, it can be difficult to remember that high school stories can also be sweet and wholesome, that everything is not always mystery-murder-death-drugs-sex-scandal. Having grown up on Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars, I understand the inclination towards shocking, fast-paced teen shows, but perhaps that is all the more reason a show like Heartstopper can come along and win you over with its sweetness.
Heartstopper is the love story between Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson, based on Alice Oseman’s graphic novel of the same name. It is the perfect teen romcom, because apart from the love story, it does a beautiful job of focusing on the friendships and identity struggles that make up so much of our adolescence. There is something about British television that makes it feel a lot less manufactured than American TV, and of course it helps that the leads are 18-year-olds playing 15 and 16-year-olds. The overall result is that you have a perfect little show of 30-minute-long eight episodes that are so full of light and laughter that it is impossible to not get invested.
Every scene is lit in the warmest light and the brightest of colours. There’s a lot of sunlight and very little of it is shot in the night, which might seem like a weird thing to point out but try to recall the last time you didn’t have to brave the dark to watch prestige TV. The effect is striking, you feel happy when you look at the screen, you smile every time Nick and Charlie pass each other in the school corridors and shyly say hi. You root for them to get together instantly, because how could you not?
This is not to say that the show exists in some sort of a utopia. There are enough indications that before this year, Charlie had a really tough time at school where he was severely bullied over his sexuality. When the show begins, he’s also in a situationship with another boy called Ben, whose face is the kind of smug good-looking that deserves to be punched and who treats Charlie like a dirty secret. One of Charlie’s best friends is Elle, a trans girl who transferred out of their all-boys school which was hell for her and is now much happier in an all-girls school.
All of these stories are given equal importance, but the extraordinary part is that you are not shown most of these struggles. Charlie is still bullied by some boys from Nick’s class and you see some of that in every episode, but overall there is not one scene that will make you want to cover your eyes. At many instances, I was worried for Charlie, ready to rage on his behalf if he was beaten up or abused or treated badly — because that is what I have come to expect from shows about LGBT+ teens — and every time I was pleasantly surprised that the show stood by him and did not let bad things happen to him for the sake of the plot.
Of course, your heart still hurts for Charlie when you see him pining over Nick, worrying about making life difficult for everyone around him, and there’s a scene between him and his older sister Tori that made me sob, as all scenes between older sisters and younger brothers do. You worry about Nick, who is so sweet and so confused about his sexuality. And yet, every time you expect him to be dismissive of Charlie or his feelings, he surprises you by doing the opposite. Charlie’s core friend group is so supportive, so worried for him that one of his best friends, Tao, starts to feel slighted when he doesn’t spend every waking moment with them. That conflict is given time to build, explode, and is resolved in the most endearing manner. Even the parents and the teachers do not say one unsupportive sentence in the entire series.
All of this is to say that Alice Oseman does a great job of creating a story that feels safe, gentle, and earnest without being boring or mawkish, and Netflix does a great job of trusting Alice to be the best person to bring the story to life on screen. So much so that this whole experience has made me want to read all her books (Heartstopper has four volumes), and I haven’t read a single book since 2020.
There is one scene where all the main characters of the show gather at some sort of a milkshake cafe in the park before an orchestra performance. Everyone is drinking milkshakes that look like unicorns in a glass and I’m sure they taste terrible. Everyone is also on edge because it’s a triple date but a lot of the parties involved are unaware of a lot of the dynamics within the group. There is an equal amount of tension and romance in the air, an elusive sweet spot the show has perfected.
Heartstopper is not what we have come to expect out of teen shows, and that’s precisely the reason everyone should be watching it, no matter how old they are. Right now, and forever, everyone can do with a show that feels like a hug.
Shows mentioned:
Heartstopper - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
In The End, ‘Killing Eve’ Went Out With A Whimper
By Shahana
[Spoilers ahead]
When Killing Eve dropped its first season in 2018, it was an instant favourite of regular TV-watchers and critics alike. On first glance, one could be fooled into thinking it would be another spy thriller, featuring a mysterious organisation that contracted assassins to kill their marks in extremely imaginative ways and a British intelligence organisation trying to find and catch them; or at least, a cat-and-mouse game between psychopathic assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and British intelligence investigator Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh).
A closer dive would reveal that Killing Eve, at its heart, was about desire.
When we speak of desire, what do we mean? When we say we want to be desired, do we mean that we want to be the object of someone’s affection and passion? Do we want to be wanted, and in what ways? When Killing Eve begins, that is the question showrunner Phoebe Waller-Bridge asks Eve and Villanelle—when they think of desire, what does it look like to them?
Watching Eve and Villanelle, after they meet and in every ensuing interaction, feels like walking into something meant for no eyes but their own; two people indulging in extremely skilful foreplay, circling each other, edging each other till they were desperate to slake their thirst, every move dripping with want for something—a something neither could quite name or understand. The more we find out about Eve’s life—loving husband with a teaching job, house with a picket fence, drinks with colleagues after work, all the trappings of a regular life—the more Eve feels off-kilter, like there’s something about her that’s just a little bit wrong, a tiny bit off. Eve’s obsession with Villanelle reveals what it is; what everyone thinks is the ideal life to Eve feels banal, and there’s a darkness always simmering under her skin that she’s never quite been able to shake off or sate. Season two, helmed by Emerald Fennell of Promising Young Woman fame, understood this, and even though the season itself felt like it lacked the airtight pacing and storytelling of the first season, it still addressed the ramifications of sensing complicated desires and wants and when that desire turns poisonous. Season three was forgettable, and season four will only be remembered for its travesty of an ending.
If seasons one and two are a clear example of what made Killing Eve such a delight to watch, there’s no trace of it in the final season. Where is the killer fashion used as a weapon, armour, or camouflage, whichever it needs to be? Where is the precision and clarity in Eve and Villanelle’s actions? Even if we were to forgive the lack of all that, where is the tense push-and-pull between Eve and Villanelle, the very thing that was the beating heart of Killing Eve? In place of the very thing the show was about, we have our leads changing what they believe in depending on what plot needs them to do, in favour of an espionage story that the show was its viewers never cared to be. The final season focuses on The Twelve, the shadowy organisation that created and employed Villanelle, and Eve and Villanelle’s pursuit of them. What Laura Neal, season four’s head writer, failed to grasp completely was that it was never about the hunt; their jobs and what they did was simply the vessel to take us to the central narrative—the naked yet barbed longing and desire that existed between Eve and Villanelle. In lieu of Eve coming to terms with her lack of revulsion for Villanelle’s violent, psychopathic tendencies and how Eve’s own preferences, sexual and otherwise, veered towards more deviant directions, we got an uninspired origin story of The Twelve and Eve’s elusive and steely boss, Carolyn (Fiona Shaw). Eve and Villanelle both end up on the periphery, with viewers forced to sit through a show about a narrative we didn’t care about—all while we kept waiting for Villanelle to slowly seduce Eve out of the shell she’s been living in. We go back to season one, when Villanelle dresses up to go meet Eve, like a power move—it’s distinctly sexual, and tells Eve who is decidedly in control in this situation, like being fully clothed while your partner is naked; it’s meant to fluster Eve and it’s meant to give Villanelle power. It’s further cemented when Villanelle gifts Eve perfume and a dress, a sexy black-and-white Roland Mouret number—as if to tell Eve this is who she is, this is who she could be, this is what she could have, if she only took the plunge and accepted what Villanelle wanted to give her. Villanelle all but tells Eve what it is that the latter really wants, if she chose to look behind the subtext. Eve exploring her psyche, who she was, what she wanted, how she wanted to be wanted, her examination of her own desire—that’s what Villanelle wanted, and it’s what viewers wanted.
In turning season four into a show about a spy organisation and taking them down, Eve and Villanelle’s wants take a backseat. Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer are exceptional, imbuing every interaction with sexual tension that has a menacing edge to it: are they going to fervently kiss each other or violently kill each other, we won’t know till the last second. But even Oh and Comer can’t put on screen what writers won’t put on the page. In the final episode of the series, Villanelle and Eve have found their way back to each other—Villanelle tenderly caresses the scars of a wound on Eve’s back, a wound that came from Villanelle’s hands. They pour their longing and the words unsaid into looks and touches—and then, finally, a kiss. A little later, as the two embrace after finally taking down The Twelve, Villanelle is shot in the shoulder. Villanelle and Eve jump into what is presumably the Thames to find cover, but Villanelle is shot over and over again. Eve swims frantically towards Villanelle, but fails to reach before Villannelle sinks to the bottom.
A show about two women fascinated and obsessed with each other chose to end with Burying Their Gays—an ending so frustrating and tired that even the writer of the books Killing Eve is based on couldn’t be on board with. Luke Jennings, who wrote Villanelle, wrote in The Guardian, “The season four ending was a bowing to convention. A punishing of Villanelle and Eve for the bloody, erotically impelled chaos they have caused.” One could argue that a show filled with as much blood and violence couldn’t possibly have ended any other way, but I would return to Jennings’ take here too: “How much more darkly satisfying, and true to Killing Eve’s original spirit, for the couple to walk off into the sunset together?”
In a 2018 interview, Phoebe Waller-Bridge said, “Every moment in this show exists so that these two women can end up alone in a room together. Really it would have been a betrayal to the audience if they didn’t come together in the end.” Perhaps, the writers’ room could’ve done a better job of remembering that.
Shows mentioned:
Killing Eve- Amazon Prime Video⭐⭐⭐
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