Issue #22: You just want attention, you don't want my heart
Ft. Succession & Mindy Kaling's new show
Hi,
Welcome back to Continue Watching! If you noticed that we’re landing in your inbox a day later than usual, then we’d like to give you a hug because 1) we love that you were waiting for us, and 2) we DESPERATELY need a hug. It’s December? It’s 2022? There’s another variant? Big is DEAD? What is happening?
As you can tell from all the existential angst, we’re on the verge of a breakdown. Or we’re in the middle of one. It’s hard to tell. But that has had no impact on our TV watching. It has, in fact, intensified how strongly we are projecting our feelings on every show because we’re incapable of doing anything in moderation.
Too many things are happening at the same time anyway—the new season of Emily in Paris is dropping on the 22nd, more seasons of the bonkers And Just Like That… are coming up, Insecure is ending, and a new Gong Yoo show is releasing on Netflix on Christmas Eve (send us an email if you want to discuss the slapping from Squid Game or the crying from Goblin/Guardian, we are obsessed with BOTH).
While we’re still trying to fit all this in our calendars and come up with an end-of-the-year issue for you that justifies the insane year we’ve all had, we absolutely cannot stop thinking about the shows we’ve just finished watching. Which is why one of the essays you’re getting in this issue is about how watching two shows from two very different cultures is evoking the same feeling in Kashika—an unsettling yearning that makes her want to go back to a college that never existed and make mistakes that feel life-defining but in reality are not even decade-defining. Shahana, on the other hand, was so blown away by the finale of Succession season three that even though Kashika doesn’t watch it, she gave her a play-by-play of that explosive last scene and then decided to write an essay about it.
Before you get to that though, here’s what we’re watching right now (congratulations to Kashika for having two shows in this section again!).
CURRENTLY WATCHING
Kashika
And Just Like That…: The only reason I’m putting it in this section is so I can SCREAM ABOUT IT SOME MORE. I am a Sex and the City devotee, so I was going to watch the reboot no matter what. But watching Big die was not part of the plan. And while I cannot stop thinking about how Carrie could have saved him, the thing I am angrier about is how they did Samantha dirty. They should have just killed her instead of making it seem like she cut Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte out of her life because flaky Carrie fired her as her publicist. Samantha was doing Carrie a FAVOUR, repping her as an author. Carrie went to Abu Dhabi in a flight that seemed like a hotel room because of Samantha’s PR connections, so she didn’t need whatever pittance, if anything, she was getting from repping Carrie. Also, Samantha Jones would not send flowers when one of her (ex) best friends’ husband dies with a card that says, ‘Love, Samantha’. Samantha would be the one holding the fort. Also, something doesn’t add up in the kids’ ages. How are they still teens while their parents are so old they can’t stop talking about how old they are? Make it make sense. It feels like someone who never watched SATC looked up a bunch of GIFs online and then created these characters. Streaming nowhere, so you know the drill.
Dil Bekaraar: Anuja Chauhan's Those Pricey Thakur Girls is one of my favourite books. In 2015, it was adapted into a Hindi show called Dilli Wali Thakur Gurls, which was insufferable and downright disrespectful to the source. So, I was very cautious about Dil Bekaraar, which is a web series based on the same book. I decided to give it a shot because Anuja herself was actively promoting it. Five episodes in, I understand why. It is as faithful an adaptation as can be, and the four Thakur girls are perfectly cast. Even the secondary characters like Bhudevi and BJ feel very real, and setting it in the 80s was a smart move, because the sense of nostalgia it evokes for simpler times is something else. If I had to pick a problem, it would be Dylan. The male lead of the book is too charming to be true, so I understand why the makers couldn’t find anyone to live up to book-Dylan. Dil Bekaraar’s Dylan is certainly not bad, but he’s not even close. It’s only 10 episodes so I am hopeful that the show doesn’t lose steam in the second half. Very watchable, very fun. Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
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Shahana
Work Later, Drink Now: Look, shows revolving around a group of female friends doing ordinary things is my jam. This is a K-drama I randomly discovered, and it’s about three young women—Ahn So-hee (Lee Sun-bin), head writer on a variety show, Han Ji-yeon (Han Sun-hwa), a yoga teacher, and Kang Ji-goo (Jeong Eun-ji), an origami YouTuber. They meet up most nights, eat a lot of very tasty looking Korean food, drink a lot of soju, and get up to a lot of shenanigans. Very ordinary shenanigans, stuff you and I could get up to (if you want to, please email me), and it’s a lot of fun to watch. Streaming on Dramacool.
Hawkeye: This Hawkeye is based on the Matt Fraction graphic novel run, which is one of my favourites. Hawkeye is the most ordinary Avenger, so his life is automatically the most intriguing, and while Marvel messes up sometimes, Clint Barton’s relationship with his wife is the best thing. Laura Barton is an equal partner, like a marriage should be; she always knows what’s going on, no matter how dangerous, Clint talks to her about things and even asks for advice, and Laura is always supportive—because she married him knowing what his job was and chose this. Man, I love it. Also the show introduces Kate Bishop who is amazing. And Lucky the Pizza Dog, who is the best thing. Don’t sleep on it. Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
Tell us how you’re dealing with the year-end angst. Tell us what you’re watching. Tell us we’ll be fine (lol). Until then…
Continue Watching (and reading!),
Kashika and Shahana
Succession Tells the Same Story Every Season—That Is the Point
By Shahana
[Some spoilers ahead]
[Mentions of emotional abuse, suicide, depression]
In the penultimate episode of Succession’s latest season, Caroline (Harriet Walter), Logan Roy’s ex-wife says to their daughter Shiv (Sarah Snook), “[Logan] never saw anything he loved that he didn’t want to kick, just to see if it would still come back.” That, if you’ve never seen it, is the show.
Succession’s title might suggest that the show is actually about who takes over media conglomerate Waystar RoyCo. after patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) retires or dies. And plenty of critics have said the show felt like we were watching the same thing over and over again every season—and they’re right. We have been watching the same thing for the last three seasons, but we haven’t been watching a show about kids fighting for a metaphorical throne; we’ve been watching a show about abuse. The reason Succession feels repetitive is because that’s the nature of abuse. It’s cyclical, and until you break free, it happens over and over again, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Every other theme in the show, whether it’s money, corruption, bigotry, family, infidelity—it all winds back to the same thing, that Logan Roy is an abusive man who has emotionally abused his four children, which stems from the fact that Logan himself faced the same thing when he was a child.
In the season three finale, as Logan’s kids beg him to reconsider screwing them out of the company, he tells them he wasn’t doing it with the intent to screw them over, but because he wanted to teach them something. Logan clearly resents his kids because they grew up rich and financially secure, unlike him. But the wealth and security was what he gave them, and to suddenly suggest that now he was yanking away the security blanket to teach them how to deal with reality and the fact that no one would look out for them seems cruel and bizarre. It is cruel, and Logan uses the most unnecessarily cruel ways to pull the rug out of his children’s feet. Because that’s who Logan is, and he’s been doing the exact same thing for the children’s entire life. And he’s been doing it for so long, that even as his kids have tried to get out of it, they’re always suckered right back in. It’s happened for so long, that this is all his children know, so it’s what they mete out to the people in their lives—which is what ultimately takes them down.
If the cycle of abuse is this pervasive, is there even a point to watching Succession, and if this is what keeps happening every season, why even bother watching the show, right? But this time, this finale does something slightly different, and with it, it might offer the Roy siblings a way out of the perennial abuse.
All through season three, we’ve watched Kendall (Jeremy Strong) slowly but surely careen towards a depressive episode. Without giving too much away, Kendall goes through a series of setbacks that culminates in a horrific dinner where he begs Logan to let him go because he insists that if he stays, he’d turn out exactly like Logan, and Kendall was better than Logan. Logan, in true Logan style, pushes Kendall over the edge by reminding him that he killed a man, an incident that Logan covered up. All of this finally results in a near-death incident, which is handled not particularly well by Kendall’s siblings. They hold an awkward intervention where they remind him that they love him and then proceed to mock him, as is a usual day at the Roy’s.
At their mother’s wedding, as Shiv and Roman find out about their father trying to screw them out of the company, the siblings realise they need Kendall on their side and whatever depressive episode he’s on can wait. While Shiv and Roman interpret Kendall’s ennui as perhaps having an angle, Kendall simply scoffs. This is a man who nearly drowned in a pool two days ago, and it’s never made entirely clear to anyone if it really was an accident, and Kendall simply sinks to the ground, white clay sullying his dark pants. In a visually stunning and emotionally fraught scene, Kendall finally comes clean to his siblings about having killed a waiter at Shiv’s wedding. Even though Roman’s reaction to this is to make jokes, there is finally something that reveals an actual emotional connection between the siblings. Roman and Shiv never stop being who they are (assholes) and never stop losing sight of what they’re there to do (figure out what’s going with their father’s business deal), but through it, they still somehow manage to get through to Kendall and show him the barest hint of empathy—just enough that he was able to spur himself into action.
The three of them get together to try and stop Logan. As Shiv’s husband Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) says to Kendall mid-season, “My hunch is that you’re going to get fucked, and I’ve never seen Logan get fucked,” all the Roy kids get fucked, and Logan, well, doesn’t. This is how the last two seasons ended, with Logan’s kids trying to take him down and failing. However, this time, there’s a small change; for the first time, the kids put up a united front. For the first time since they were kids, since Logan taught them that the only way to win daddy’s love was to constantly fight each other, his children have found some form of solidarity with each other. It’s not much, but it’s just enough to keep them firm in the face of their father’s relentless abuse.
Logan has spent his entire life pitting his kids against each other, and for the first time, it doesn’t work. He wheedles Roman into abandoning his siblings, he mocks Shiv, he ignores Kendall, he yells—and still, it doesn’t work. Whatever tense and fraught alliance the siblings wrought sitting in the clay holds firm in the face of their father’s manipulation. Logan, realising there’s nothing more he can do, abandons all pretence of caring for them, and mocks Roman for believing that their father would come through for them, for the sake of love.
One of the most basic things we all believe in is the unconditional love of a parent—even the Roys, who have grown up with an absentee mother and an abusive father, can’t disabuse themselves of that notion. We know that this isn’t true; parents can and often do not love their children. A parent’s love can be conditional; it’s often dependent on good grades, good behaviour, the right job, the right partner, living life on their terms. And yet, we continue to hope for and believe in the myth. Succession takes that idea, puts us in the shoes of the abused kids, terrible people though they may be, and makes us hope just as they do, that Logan might just come through for them. Just this once. He doesn’t, and he won’t. Because the nature of abuse is cyclical and continues to turn the same way.
Season four will reveal if this fragile partnership between the siblings will last—it probably won’t—but perhaps, the nature of Logan’s relationship with his kids is finally out in the open. Maybe, that’s all they need to finally get out.
Shows mentioned:
Succession - Disney+ Hotstar ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Nevertheless, I Miss College
By Kashika
[Mild spoilers ahead for Nevertheless and The Sex Lives of College Girls]
“On episode six and very worried about every single one of the girls,” read my text to a friend at 3am. I was watching The Sex Lives of College Girls and betraying my age, which was deeply upsetting. Instead of cheering for the girl who was very obviously falling for the fuckboi, I wanted to hug her and give her advice. Gross.
A very important thing to know about me is that every decision I made between the ages of 16 to 22 was about a boy. Not the same boy, but always a boy. So when the female lead of my latest K-drama Nevertheless said, “And just like that, the gates of hell opened,” after the first time she slept with the flaky male lead, I cringed harder than usual because I would have been exactly this dramatic a decade ago (God I’m old).
When I was 17, I wanted to enroll in Delhi University for two reasons. One, I wanted to live the college life I had seen on TV, most specifically in a show called Love Story, which was set in Hindu College. But, more importantly, my boyfriend was in Delhi. It didn’t matter, because my parents weren’t onboard with me moving out, and I ended up going to a college in my hometown. My biggest complaint with that place—and there were many—was that it was not coed.
When I was 19, I broke up with that boyfriend. Then, at the age of 20, I finally moved to Delhi for journalism school. In the eight months that followed, I lived every single experience that I had seen in my (non-American) TV shows because that place, and I, was the hottest mess there ever was. Some of my friends from there still read this newsletter (hi guys!) so I will not get into the details of that controversial year, but suffice to say that I made up for the three boring, all-girls, no-drama years. Almost.
Because I was 21, and because I was told that my career was on the line (it wasn’t), there was a sense of responsibility that was hard to shake off even in the most throw-caution-to-the-wind moments. We had to show up for internships the next morning. We had to take tests to get selected as trainees in national newspapers. We had to get married. We were all over the place, but we were not 18. We were what the world called adults. So I always feel like I missed out on the college experience that my friends who went to DU or JU always go on about.
But never have I felt that as strongly as when I ended up watching The Sex Lives of College Girls (TSLOCG from hereon because come ON) and Nevertheless within a week of each other. Nevertheless is a Korean drama about two art students who have the sort of electrifying chemistry that forces you to look away from the screen. They meet and feel an instant connection, and while the girl, called Na-bi (meaning butterfly) falls for tattooed Jae-on immediately, he is a fuckboi of the highest order. They become friends with benefits but you can see it’s killing Na-bi inside. Of course, the moment she starts to pull away and another prospective love interest (the most boring, dough ball of a man) enters the picture, Jae-on shows up at her doorstop, sloppy drunk and with puppy eyes, asking her to be his girlfriend.
TSLOCG is Mindy Kaling’s new show where four very different young women become roommates in college and try to juggle classes, boys, and most importantly, their newfound freedom. Kimberly wants to do well at school, Whitney is a soccer star with a famous mom, Bela wants to get into a comedy club so she can become the next SNL writer, and Leighton just wants to get away from them. Of course they become sisters. Of course shit happens. Of course it’s already been renewed for season two.
Both shows are extremely run-of-the-mill. The premise is not groundbreaking. They’re well-acted but not without their pitfalls, but there is a certain vibe in both that made something in my heart catch. Everything Na-bi does in Nevertheless is borderline pathetic, and like a true lovestruck lunatic, she calls herself out on it nonstop. And that is as upsetting as it is endearing, because who among us has not fallen for the college hottie with a bad reputation and over-styled hair but a heart of gold that is just riddled with abandonment issues? Who among us has not completely abandoned friends the moment we started dating someone new? Who among us has not refused to choose the nicer, safer boy with a stable life path and gone with the tortured artist instead only to forever wonder ‘what if’?
Na-bi and Jae-on are part of the same friend circle in college, and you can immediately tell that everyone in the group wants to hook up with everyone else. That sort of sexual tension, masked with jokes and group hangs that end up in drinking games, is a specifically college experience because never before and never again do you feel that free and fearless. Where Nevertheless shines is in its soundtrack, because every single song is either a makeout track or something a boy would put on a playlist for you that is supposed to tell you that he likes you.
Exhibit A:
You don’t even need to know what the lyrics mean to understand the vibe of the show. Every song amplifies the mood (and the bad choices) of the characters. And while of course it would have made for more pathbreaking television to have Na-bi walk away from all the dysfunctional men in her life to focus on her dreams and her career and her heart, that’s not what college is about and that’s not what this show was about. It was disappointingly relatable because I used to be a slightly more empowered Na-bi when I was her age, and watching her sit alone in her pretty flat, eating takeout and waiting for the damn phone to ring, made me miss 20-year-old Kashika fiercely.
TSLOCG, on the other hand, made me miss my college friends. While the friendships in Nevertheless felt flimsy and momentary, the ones in TSLOCG felt real and rooted. You just knew that these girls would be each other’s bridesmaids 10 years down the line (or have an explosive, epic break-up level falling out). I hated every single day of the three years of my college life but came out of it with a best friend I would do it all over again for. The reason she and I became friends? Our shared disgust of everything to do with college and our then truly trash boyfriends. The shit we went through at 18 and 19 bonded us in a way that friends from no other era of our life will ever understand. The best part? Even though our life was full of drama, there was never any between us or the larger group we were part of then.
That is why I liked TSLOCG. Even though Kimberly, Whitney, Bela, and Leighton were very different and very new to being in each other’s life, there was no conflict between them. They were unconditionally supportive of each other even as they rolled their eyes at each other’s antics. When Leighton finds out that Kimberly has been sleeping with her brother and lying about it, she doesn’t waste a second getting mad at Kimberly and instead supports her when the truth about the brother already having a girlfriend comes out. When Bela tells them about being assaulted, they believe her immediately and stand by her. Even when Whitney tells her soccer team that she was having an affair with their married coach, they are quick to cuss him out and tell her it’s not her fault. Pure, unquestioning friendships like these are the hallmark of a college life lived well.
All my college friends—from the three years of hell and that one year of depravity—are now married or married with kids. All exes from that era are also married with kids. I rarely, if ever, miss the half-a-person I was at 19 or 20. Unsurprisingly, only friendships and no relationships have survived from then to now. If I knew then, what I know now, would I have still poured all of myself into those relationships? Everyone knows the answer to that. That is why I loved these two shows, because they let an older, hopefully wiser Kashika cringe at and laugh with someone who reminded her so much of a younger, spunkier version of herself.
Shows mentioned:
Nevertheless - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐1/2
The Sex Lives of College Girls - You’ll have to get creative to find it ⭐⭐⭐1/2
RECOMMENDATIONS
We get so many requests for TV show recs from friends, so we’ll get to them here in every issue.
So I just discovered Aarya, and I literally raced through both seasons, and now I want to watch a few good Indian shows. Most of what I’ve seen seems to focus on men’s stories, and I’m wondering if there are any good shows that place women front and center? I don’t need these shows to be prestige drama level; as long as they’re not like those Alt Balaji soft porn type shows, I’m happy. A friend told me you guys watch a lot of TV, so please help.
Your friend was right, we do watch a lot of television, and we can help you with your problem.
Start with Churails. It’s a Pakistani show that primarily revolves around four women: Sara (Sarwat Gilani), who gave up a promising career to become a homemaker and then finds out her husband cheated on her, Jugnu (Yasra Rizvi), a wedding planner, Zubaida (Mehar Bano), a boxer looking for independence from her overbearing and regressive family, and Batool (Nimra Bucha), an ex-convict who was sentenced to twenty years in prison for murdering her abusive husband. The women’s lives intertwine when Sara decides to start a covert agency in Karachi that catches and punishes cheating husbands, and runs it under the cover of a burqa store. One of the women they hire goes missing, and as the titular churails set out to look for her, they chance upon something far more sinister, run under the patronage of Karachi’s most rich and powerful men.
We’ll warn you, not every episode holds up very well; there’s constant time skips to tell the story of a murder that can get a little confusing, men in animal masks attending shady parties, abductions—and it’s not always consistent. One minute the women are arming themselves with hockey sticks to take down cheating husbands, and the next, they’re trying to take down a ring of armed men who’ve managed to turn their misogyny into a cruel sport, and the show seems to get a little off kilter. However, despite it all, it’s watching the women be there for each other when one of them really needs solidarity and each other’s strength where Churails really shines. The show treats the women, their relationships, their pain, and their stories with empathy and compassion, never pitting one kind of pain against the other. It might be easier to cry in a big house on luxurious sheets than on the street, but it definitely helps when you have a friend to hold you through it—that’s what Churails seems to say.
Streaming on Zee5.
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