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This month Gormandize with A-dizzle and K-bobo has been featuring vegan recipes inspired by Cambodian cuisine. Cambodian cuisine is a delicious and elegant food, based upon combining simple and fresh ingredients in just the right amounts to create an exceptional burst of flavour in each mouthful! Here is a summary of what I shared this month. I hope you enjoyed it and if you've been following along (or even if you haven't), drop me a comment below and let me know what you thought looked the most delicious!
Also - check out down the bottom of this post for news on next month!
|Hot and Sour Mushroom Soup
I highly recommend this soup. It's ready in about 10 minutes, the mushrooms make it a light but substantial lunch and it's absolutely delicious. This one is going into my regular lunch rotation! Check out the recipe here!
|Kho Manor Nung To Hu
This wonderfully simple dish of marinated chunks of tofu cooked with fresh pineapple has a rich caramelised flavour. It went down very well with all my dinner guests - including those who professed themselves as being anti-tofu, so it's a good one to introduce those who think they don't like tofu to it's many delights! Check out the recipe here!
|Spiced Eggplant
Asian countries really know what they're doing with eggplant. It takes a bit of skill to get eggplant just right - not too oily but it has to be properly cooked. This recipe resulted in the perfect consistency eggplant, with just the perfect combination of spices. Served as part of a dinner party or potluck it it a treat. Check out the recipe here!
|Khmer Lemon grass Vegetable Curry
|Nem To-hu Sap
These delicious summer rolls are filled with tofu which has been marinated in garlic and ginger, vermicelli, cucumber, fresh herbs and shredded lettuce. They're simple but very satisfying and perfectly delicious when combined with the sweet soy dipping sauce. These make very impressive and easy appetisers or an easy and special lunch. Check out the recipe here!
|Borbo Skor La-Pov
|Num Chet Chien
Next Month....
Next month will be slightly different! I'm spending most of it travelling around Sri Lanka (many delicious food photos and anecdotes to come), so will be taking a month off featuring the cuisine of different countries. I'll be starting up again in August though, and featuring the incredible delights of Swedish cuisine (starting August 1st)! I'm excited about Sweden, from what I have read I think it will be a special month! If anybody knows anything about Swedish cuisine and wants to make some suggestions or give me any tips than I would be so happy to hear from you!
Happy gormandizing!


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Quote:Fair point, Cord, but boxers generally train for strength over fitness.
Quote:I'm only comparing him to the average butter tub I see walking about on a daily basis.
Quote: I want to be compared to bit fat butter tubs!!
Quote:WORRY ABOUT YOURSELF NOT WHAT BRUCE DIS IT YOUR PRSONAL DEVELOPMENT COME FIRST,. U SPEND TOO MUCH TIME WORRYING ABOUT WHATHER A DEAD GUY TOOK DRUGS~~
Artifacts from the Ryukyu Kingdom missing since WWII.
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Asylum Images
Book presents photo tour of the Trans-Allegany Lunatic Asylum. A must if you're going to take a ghost tour!

subset: commoncrawl


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Platinum Games head laments studio's weak sales, wants renewed focus going forward
Platinum Games president Tatsuya Minami has rated his team's performance over the past five years in a new interview, and has expressed disappointment in the studio's sales. He has also laid bare aims to expand the company's focus moving forward.
MadWorld videos
MadWorld headlines
A little story time video, from Anarchy Reigns
If you take Max from MadWorld and put him into a game with Leo the cyborg, and get the creator of Bayonetta to smoosh them all together, you'll end up with Anarchy Reigns. And it's just as bizarre (and brilliant) as you'd expect. In today's new trailer, SEGA shows off a few bits of the […]
Madworld director leaves Platinum to join Mikami upstart
Madworld director Shigenori Nishikawa has left developer Platinum Games, according to Shinji Mikami.
Sega not finished with mature Wii titles after all - just more casual-focused
No mature games on the Wii? Puh-leeease. Sega catered to your every limb-severing whim with The Conduit, Madworld, and House of the Dead: Overkill, but you were too busy petting Poniez and partying with Babiez to notice. So Sega cleaned up its blood-spattered act and swore off mature Wii games forever. Except that, turns out, […]
Sega: Madworld on Wii was a "mismatch"
Head of Sega in the west Mike Hayes has said Madworld was a "mismatch" on Wii.
SEGA says it needs to do a better job with PS3 and 360
SEGA has said that it will no longer permit it's classic IPs to be used in sub-par games as it tries to gain popularity on PS3 and Xbox 360.
Sega to release mature Wii triple pack
Sega's announced it's releasing a triple pack of three of its mature titles for Wii in Australia.
Next Platinum title to be revealed on this week's GTTV, says Keighley
Platinum Games is to reveal its next project in the newest episode of GameTrailers TV, according to host Geoff Keighley.
Sega finished with mature Wii titles
Sega's revealed in the latest 4 Guys 1UP podcast that it is done with developing mature Wii titles. Never saw that coming.
Sega: "We want to crack core gaming"
Sega's UK managing director John Clark has gone on record with GI, saying he wants the company to "crack core gaming". It comes as the developer released hardcore games like House of the Dead: Overkill and Madworld earlier this year on the Wii with critical success, but sales on both were mediocre at best. Clark […]
Mizuguchi: Okami and MadWorld deserved more attention
Platinum's Okami and MadWorld should have been better received, Qs Tetsuya Mizuguchi has told 1UP. "It's actually a coincidence that I mention two games by Clover/Platinum, but it's a shame that unique games like this aren't embraced by the public more," said the Japanese dev stalwart. Madworld's wince-inducing sales were closely watched as the game […]
Sega plans more hardcore games on Wii despite MadWorld sales
Sega President and COO Mike Hayes has said that the company will back more hardcore games, despite the lackluster sales of Platinum's MadWorld. Speaking with Wired, Hayes stated that Sega is also still researching why it flopped at retail. "It's difficult because it was a critically acclaimed title; it was extreme but good," he said. […]
NOA's Kaigler unsure why core titles are not doing well on Wii
NOA's Denise Kaigler has admitted she's unsure why Wii titles like MadWorld and The Conduit along with other games aimed at the core audience are not selling at retail. However, she said that she is hopeful that things will start picking up soon, and that Nintendo will continue to support core players as well as […]
Sega says mature titles on Wii show long-term success
Sega has said that mature titles are showing long-term success and has budgeted more adult content for the console. "House of the Dead: Overkill was a profitable title for us," Gary Dunn, MD of Sega Europe told GI.biz. "Whilst it had a rather sharp tail at full price, they do bubble away at a lower […]
Sega to integrate its eastern and western divisions
Sega's Takayuki Kawagoe says the firm is looking at changing its current management structure in order to integrate the eastern and western divisions "We need more integration so projects and initiatives on both sides can benefit from everyone's experience and expertise," said the head of Sega's CS division. Citing the recent ups and downs of […]
March NPD: MadWorld sells 66,000 units
Sega's MadWorld managed a paltry 66,000 units in the US last month, according to this Gama report. The Wii game has been well-received in general, hitting 82 percent on Metacritic. Rockstar's GTA Chinatown Wars, the big "core" DS game of last month, only managed 89,000 units in the US. More through there. Thanks, Blerk.
UK shops dropping MadWorld price below £20
According to reports, UK shops are already dropping the price of Madworld to below the £20 mark. It's only been out two weeks, and suggested retail price is £34.99. Gameplay's selling it for £16.99, GameStation £17.99 and GAME for £19.99. MadWorld debuted at number 34 on the all-format Top 40 at launch and quickly fell […]
GDC: We're "broader" than mature-rated content, says Nintendo
Why do M-rated games lack success on Nintendo platforms? Because Nintendo's "broader than that," apparently. Sega and Rockstar must be thrilled. "I'm not going to make an argument for why certain M-rated games, as you say, don't achieve a certain amount of momentum on the Nintendo platform," NoA corporate affairs VP Denise Kaigler told IGN […]
Platinum Games: MadWorld is a "reason to buy a Wii"
Platinums' Atsushi Inaba has said that MadWorld's a Wii system seller. "We've had positive feedback online from users who've said that this is a must-buy, that it's a reason to buy a Wii," he told Kikizo. Why Wii? It all boils down to "pick up and play" ability, apparently. "The main reason is we wanted […]
First MadWorld review is a 9/10 [Update]
Update: EG's given it 7/10. Thanks, Blerk. IGN's posted the first MadWorld review, giving the Platinum Wii actioner a straight 9/10. Snip: I realize that not everybody will find MadWorld's unique visual and aural presentation appealing, but to me, the game is an instant collector's item and a Wii showpiece, not just for its amazing […]
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MadWorld latest
Platinum Games head laments studio's weak sales, wants renewed focus going forward
Sega not finished with mature Wii titles after all – just more casual-focused
Next Platinum title to be revealed on this week's GTTV, says Keighley
Sega plans more hardcore games on Wii despite MadWorld sales
NOA's Kaigler unsure why core titles are not doing well on Wii
GDC: We're "broader" than mature-rated content, says Nintendo
MadWorld creator: "Western developers are superior to those in Japan"


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The Lulworth Office Double Pedestal Desk
Product Description
The Lulworth range has been designed to fit in with modern and classic décor alike, and will remain timeless throughout life's changes. The comprehensive selection of furniture has solutions for dining, living, bedroom and office.
• Solid & engineered wax oiled oak
• Craftsmen built quality cabinets using high end man made boards
• No flat pack (some items are designed to be disassembled for access)
• Double roller catches
• Stylish handles & knob options
• Traditional style butt hinges
Wood:Oak, Painted
Dimensions:Height: 78cm
Width: 150cm
Depth: 53cm
Barcode: LULODP-S
This product is available to order (allow 4 to 5 weeks for delivery)
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Lou Ann Laws Grover was the first of the five children of Harry and Marva Laws, born February 7, 1943 in Blanding, UT.
Lou Ann and her mom lived with Grandpa Tom Jones while Harry served in World War II.
After his return, they lived at the ranch on Mustang until their family moved to town for her to start school.
Lou Ann said, "Growing up, we did a lot of things in neighborhood groups, had a lot of bonfires, played night games, hide and seek, kick-the-can, rode horses and played basketball. We had freedom to roam and miles to ride in. What a wonderful childhood I had."
She enjoyed high school. She said, "Our grade was small enough that we knew and were friends with everyone."
In late September of her Junior year, she was diagnosed with hepatitis. She was only able to attend a few weeks of school that year. Merlin would pick up schoolwork from her teachers and return the completed work each day.
Lou Ann and Merlin were engaged in September of her senior year. They were married in June, 1961 in the Logan Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The first part of their married life, they would move in the fall to continue Merlin's schooling, then move home to Blanding for the summer.
In March of 1968, Lou Ann's dad, Harry, was killed in an accident while working for the San Juan County Road Department. They continued helping Grandma Laws with the farm/ranch.
They finished up schooling in Salt Lake City and then moved back to Blanding for good in 1969.
When her youngest child started school, Lou Ann went back to school. She spent about five years as an EMT, completed her associates degree and went on to complete both her LPN and RN, finishing in 1987.
She had many types of nursing experiences working at San Juan Hospital, Blanding Clinic, Home Health and the Birthing Center. She retired from nursing in 1996 to help take care of her mom.
Lou Ann and Merlin were involved with numerous foster children and a foreign exchange program, both sending a child and caring for students that came from Mexico as a result of Dee Ann going on exchange to Mexico and staying with the Sepulveda family.
Lou Ann and Merlin gained an additional daughter, Ileana. Senor Sepulveda told them that when Ileana was in the United States, she was a Grover. When Ileana was in Mexico, she was a Sepulveda.
Lou Ann loved mountains! She spent many years on the Blue Mountain at the Allen Canyon cabin. She sewed on a treadle sewing machine and cooked on a wood-fueled stove. Many great meals were prepared there.
When the permits on the Blue Mountain were sold and the cows went to Colorado with the Ivins, she quickly grew to love the Disappointment Valley and Lone Cone area.
She has been instrumental in restoring and preserving the history of the area and the Lavendar and Nash cemeteries.
She loved taking the grandkids with her to "Colorado". She loved all history and had a great memory, especially keeping facts straight. Her ancestors were very important to her.
She loved and admired the pioneers. She wanted all of us to know their stories and gain a love for them also.
She was a great seamstress. If she didn't have a pattern, she would make one. She sewed drill team outfits, clothes, costumes, chaps, vests and quilts. Many people benefitted from this talent.
While we don't have an exact count, Merlin says there have been over 1,000 quilts made and given away with love. All the grandkids have helped tie quilts and lots have completed their own quilts with her supervision.
She loved to travel and see new places. Lou Ann and Merlin went on cruises to Alaska, the Caribbean and Mexico, to San Francisco, Nauvoo and early church sites.
She loved watching sports, whether it was the kids or grandkids or watching them on TV while working on projects. She also took tickets at many sporting events at the high school, made quilts for raffles, and supported the local teams however she could.
Lou Ann and Merlin loved being surrounded by family and friends. Her greatest treasures are the gospel and her family. While she served in all the church auxiliaries, she served in the nursery for over 18 years!
She was diagnosed, in March of 2014, with Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma at the Huntsman Center. We have watched Dad take such good care of her. Whatever she needed or wanted he did his best to get it for her and make her comfortable.
She had a very positive attitude. She put on a brave face and went forward, always making plans for the future. She said she wanted to live as long as she could do the things she wanted to and as long as she could take care of herself. When she couldn't do those things anymore, she wanted to go.
We all feel very blessed that she got her wish. While Lou Ann might not be here with us now, she taught all of us how to live, how to serve, to make sure everyone is warm and fed. The world will always be a brighter place because she was here!!
Lou Ann passed from this life on August 8, 2014 surrounded by her family. She lived a life of service and compassion.
She is survived by siblings; Boyd (Sandy) Laws, Norma (Karl) Child, sweetheart Merlin, children Lou Jean (Gene) Cressler, Dee Ann (Carl) Hunt, Ileana (Doyle) Harris, Erik (Janalee) Grover, Jo Lyn (Dennis) Rickords, Mar Dawn (Preston) Palmer, B. J. (Jeanna) Grover, Kayela (JJ) Bradford and Preston (Tara) Grover, 36 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.
Preceded in death by her parents, siblings; Marlene, Robert and Renae, and a granddaughter, Lisa Ann Hunt.
Card of thanks
We express a sincere thank you for the generous outpouring of love, many acts of service, food, thoughts, prayers, cards, flowers and visits during her sickness and at the time of her passing.
Thank you for your patience and understanding during the wait at the mortuary and the delayed start of the funeral.
A special thank you to Dee Street, Dana Nielson, for their love and service.
Lou Jean (Gene) Cressler,
Dee Ann (Carl) Hunt,
Ileana (Doyle) Harris,
Erik (Janalee) Grover,
Jo Lyn (Dennis) Rickords,
Mar Dawn (Preston) Palmer,
B. J. (Jeanna) Grover,
Kayela (JJ) Bradford,
Preston (Tara) Grover


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60.00€ 168.00€
We want to make sure that you feel comfortable in your clothes, so when measuring yourself there is no need to pull your tape measure too tight. It is often easier to use a friend to take your measurements. Measurements in the chart are body measures. If you are still wondering about your size, do not hesitate to contact us firstname.lastname@example.com or +358 41 432 6985, because we do want to assist you!


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Greenwich's Seahawk psyched for Super Bowl
GREENWICH -- Not many people who will attend Super Bowl XLVIII at MetLife Stadium can say they played against Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning.
Greenwich resident Patrick Kerney can.
A former defensive end for the Seattle Seahawks and Atlanta Falcons, Kerney remembers what it was like to try to slow down a Manning-led offense, and no, it wasn't fun.
"Playing against Peyton Manning's offense is a humbling experience," said Kerney, who has lived in the Riverside section of Greenwich for three years. "I played against all the great quarterbacks -- Tom Brady, Brett Favre, Drew Brees -- but when you play against Peyton, it's a different type of feeling and I tell you, it's not a good one. It's not just what he does in the pocket, it's his ability to change plays and his overall awareness on the field."
On Sunday, Kerney will be rooting for one of his former teams, the Seahawks, to stop Manning's high-powered Broncos and win its first Super Bowl.
"Watching the Seahawks make the Super Bowl, I couldn't be happier," Kerney said. "They were a wonderful organization to play for and as the whole country has seen, their fans are great. I was very fortunate to play for two outstanding organizations and I'm happy that since I left, they have both had success."
A graduate of The Taft School in Watertown and the University of Virginia, Kerney retired from the NFL in 2009 as a member of the Seahawks. The 6-foot-5 Kerney, who amassed 82½ sacks during his distinguished 11-year career, is still involved in the NFL on a daily basis. He was hired as NFL vice president of player benefits and NFL Legends operations in October. In his role, Kerney oversees player benefits and the Legends Program, which helps former NFL players stay in touch with each other and their former teams. Helping prepare players for their future is also among Kerney's many responsibilities.
"We want to help players create lifelong opportunities from their NFL experience," Kerney said. "I am excited to help them with that. It's been very rewarding."
As far as athletics, football wasn't a priority for Kerney when he entered Taft. Playing hockey was.
"I went up there trying to become a Division I hockey player, but my junior year I realized I wasn't going to be good enough, so that idea went out the window," Kerney said.
He was a football, wrestling and lacrosse standout at Taft, however, and he went to the University of Virginia -- as a lacrosse player. A defenseman on the Virginia squad that advanced to the NCAA championship game in 1996, Kerney opted to try out for the Cavaliers' football team as a walk-on.
"I impressed the coaches my freshman year," Kerney said. "My coach pulled me aside and said, `Next year, you will be on scholarship if you spend enough time in the weight room.' I was a little skeptical, but I gave it my all. Before I knew it, I was a starter."
After registering 15 sacks and earning All-America honors in his senior season for Virginia in 1998, Kerney was drafted by the Atlanta Falcons in the first round of the 1999 NFL draft.
"Spending eight years in Atlanta was great, the Southwest football fans are rabid, which made it so much fun," said Kerney, who played with the Falcons until 2007. "I had a chance to play with Michael Vick, who was the best athlete I have ever seen in my life."
Signed as a free agent by the Seattle Seahawks in 2007, Kerney was named All-Pro after posting an NFC-best 14½ sacks that season. During his NFL career, Kerney was known for using some unconventional methods to prepare himself for battle on the gridiron. While with the Seahawks, he routinely climbed into a hyperbaric chamber (which he had at his house) to infuse his body with oxygen.
"The way I looked at it, the margin of error was so even that if I could do something that would make me half a percent or a tenth of a percent better than my opponent I would try it," Kerney said. "People saw it as strange, but they weren't saying so when I was leading the league in sacks."
Kerney plans on being decked out in Seahawks gear at Sunday's Super Bowl at MetLife Stadium with his wife Lisa Gangel, who will soon join ESPN as a host on SportsCenter. Lisa, who plans on donning Kerney's No. 97 jersey, recently concluded her tenure as a sports anchor for CBS New York.
"I'm really looking forward to it," Kerney said. "They (the Seahawks) are a fun team to watch and it's been a blast watching them advance to the Super Bowl. The Seahawks and Broncos have been the best teams all season, which is why I think people will really embrace this Super Bowl because you have the two best teams in the world in it."
firstname.lastname@example.com; 203-625-4423.


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Dinner: Impossible is a show on The Food Network.
On the October 21, 2009 episode Sesame Street Scramble, the show celebrates Sesame Street's 40th Anniversary in Sesame Place. Sonia Manzano (playing Maria), Elmo and Cookie Monster help host Robert Irvine prepare a dish.
The team is challenged with preparing foods that start with the letter B (who also appears, voiced by Carmen Osbahr, at the beginning of the episode) for 250 of the park's guests. Elmo and Cookie Monster try to help in the kitchen, but after Cookie tries to chop lettuce with a karate chop, the monsters are "banished" from the kitchen. Later they try to get Irvine to make some food in certain shapes. Irvine is trying to beat a deadline and asks why they're trying to make his job so difficult. When he threatens Cookie and Elmo with a cucumber, Cookie protects Elmo and says, "Me take a bullet for you, Elmo!"
External links
- Official Site -- The Food Network's official site for the episode


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Availability: In stock
The Kidsongs Kids™ are swept off to SillyDillyVille and the silliness begins! A walk "Down By The Bay" finds a llama in pajamas, a pet pig who wears a wig and a whale with a polka dotted tail! The kids are charmed when they meet "Jim Along Josie", a marvelous orangutan who has 20 different ways to make you laugh! It gets even sillier when the very cute "Purple People Eater" comes to earth and announces his intention to be a rock star! The catchy upbeat songs will make you want to sing and dance along with this giggle filled music video story.
Running time: approximately 30 minutes.
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has been added to your cart.


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I think of myself as a pretty flexible guy. I do my best to roll with the punches. Agility in all aspects of my life is a firm goal, but sometimes things get out of control.
A significant facet of my life has become less and less stable. Things change at a moment's notice. Priorities vary one minute to the next. What I was sure of an hour ago is now vague and hazy. What was steady and reliable is now shifting and incoherent. After too much of this, I just shut down. Focus is not possible. I get depressed. I stop caring. I drift. The storm takes me, and there is little I can do about it.
I remember feeling this same way in school. The first few weeks were almost always fine, but as time went on and I procrastinated doing homework and failed to complete assignments the apprehension rose. After a while, I felt so overwhelmed I would just give up. I would surrender to the fact that I was in so deep over my head that I could never swim to the surface. This was usually accompanied by a sour-faced teacher or counselor who, with their mock concern, would tell me that I needed to "buckle-down" and "try harder." None of these short-sighted boobs ever realized that they were the ones who were failing me. None of these "professionals" gave me what I needed to succeed. Like I've mentioned before, when you have ADD/ADHD, you have a need for direction.
Have you ever felt that way? Like you are overwhelmed, in over your head or just plain hopeless?
I'll bet a lot of us have.


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Suppose $M$ and $N$ are smooth manifolds. An immersion is a smooth map $f: M \rightarrow N$ whose pushforward is injective at each point.
Is a smooth injective map an immersion?
We can actually simplify the question further.
Suppose $f : M \rightarrow N$ is a smooth injective map. Suppose $(U, \phi)$ and $(V, \psi)$ are smooth charts for $M$ and $N$ respectively. Fix $p \in U$. Then
$$ f_\ast = ( \psi^{-1}\circ \psi \circ f \circ \phi^{-1} \circ \phi)_{\ast} = (\psi^{-1})_\ast \circ (\psi \circ f \circ \phi^{-1})_\ast \circ \phi_\ast $$
As $\phi$ and $\psi$ are diffeomorphisms, $\phi_\ast$ and $(\psi^{-1})_\ast$ are linear isomorphisms.
Therefore, if $(\psi \circ f \circ \phi^{-1})_\ast$ is injective then $f_\ast$ is injective.
This shows that if every smooth injective map between open subsets of euclidean space is an immersion, then every smooth injective map between smooth manifolds is an immersion.


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Do you want to make a difference in the lives of those dealing with serious illness? Sprenger Hospice is looking for pet therapy volunteers for patient visits. Volunteers add purpose to the lives of terminally ill patients and their families Pets must be certified through TDI or Delta. Volunteers commit to a minimum of one hour a month, and to the hours that are most convenient for them to visit. Most visits are made in a nursing home setting.. No special skills needed, we will train you free of charge.
Please, if you have had a death in the last year, wait a minimum of 1 year before volunteering to allow yourself to heal and be ready to assist others.


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Great Strides
Important! The billing address listed below must match the billing address associated with your credit card.
When making a donation, you agree to the Privacy Policy
The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
has unrestricted financial reserves of about 15 times its budgeted annual
expenses, following a one-time royalty sale in 2014. These funds, along
with the public's continuing support, are needed to help
accelerate our efforts to pursue a lifelong cure for this fatal disease,
develop lifesaving new therapies and help all people with CF live full,
productive lives. To request a copy of our Strategic Plan, email firstname.lastname@example.com or call 800 FIGHT-CF.
© 2020 Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Legal Terms & Conditions | Privacy Policy


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Insulated track Prewar American Flyer Standard Gauge Wide Radius for Accessories
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NAIROBI, Kenya - Police on the island nation of Seychelles say that two former U.S. Navy SEALs found dead aboard the ship Maersk Alabama died of respiratory failure and were suspected to have had heart attacks, possibly from drug use.
The police said Monday that a syringe and traces of heroin were found in their cabin. Police said samples are being sent to Mauritius for analysis to establish if the men had consumed "a substance" that could have caused the health failures.
The ship the men worked on, the Maersk Alabama, was the focus of a 2009 hijacking dramatized in the movie "Captain Phillips."
Officials named the two men as Mark Daniel Kennedy, 43, and Jeffrey Keith Reynolds, 44. They worked for the Virginia Beach, Virginia-based maritime security firm The Trident Group.


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American Gods Recap: Season 1, Episode 1, "The Bone Orchard"
Like many pilot episodes, the premiere of American Gods mows through a wealth of exposition.
While reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods, I was often stopped in the street by people who saw it in my hands and wanted to have an impromptu pow-wow about its greatness. I often have a book in my hands, and I've never before encountered such reactions, which I enjoyed more than the novel. Gaiman's narrative is imaginatively conceived, but it's composed of hundreds of pages of exposition preceding a battle that never commences. Gaiman tells a long shaggy-dog joke, in which humankind's various gods across the ages are revealed to be as gullible as their worshipers, subject to the manipulations of a rigged society that distracts us from our subservience with a trumped war between cultural factions that serve the same leader. It's quite resonant politically, but the novel is all theme. There's barely a plot, the characters are ciphers, and Gaiman's prose is lean and studiously workmanlike. The notion of gods as scared and foolish projections of their scared and foolish creators (for we are their gods) is poignant though, and it's this idea that's ostensibly captured readers' imaginations.
In the opening minutes of "The Bone Orchard," the first episode of Starz's American Gods, it's evident that this adaptation is going to decisively evade criticism of a workmanlike style. We're clearly in the world of co-creator Bryan Fuller, who oversaw NBC's Hannibal, as a man on screen dips a quill pen into ink, drawing his arm back in a rapturous slow-mo arc that's a little much given the smallness of the scene and awesome precisely for being too much. The writer tells us of a time when Erik the Red's ancestors first landed on North America, and we see the ocean gleaming in the writer's eyes as he concocts the image. Then we're off with the Vikings in a flashback.
The Vikings land on the shore and one of them is expressionistically riddled with hundreds of arrows—so many that he resembles a humanoid porcupine. The Vikings decide to leave, but there's no wind to power their boat across the ocean, and so they pray to the All-Father, their god of war, offering him sacrifices that culminate in their slaughtering of their own, dramatized in a splattery Grand Guignol bloodbath. Gallons of blood flood the screen while limbs fly around with willy-nilly abandon. During this sequence, we can practically hear Fuller cackling with relief at the freedom afforded by cable programming. (It might also occur to you that, if the Vikings had to slay themselves, then they might as well have stayed on land and fought their enemies. Such is the illogic of indoctrinated faith.)
Flash-forwarding to the present day, the improbably named Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) is finishing the final stretch of a three-year prison sentence, lifting weights with his bunk mate, Low Key Lyesmith (Jonathan Tucker). (Hint: Say "Low Key" real fast to yourself.) Low Key memorably advises Shadow not to piss off those "bitches" at the airport counter when he flies home, because that's a sure way to wind up back in prison. Shadow is testy by the time he reaches the airport anyway, because his wife, Laura (Emily Browning), has died in a car crash. But when he gets to the terminal and encounters the usual shit that one encounters in such places, he keeps his cool and notices a man who's running an amusingly obvious sympathy grift so as to get himself a first class ticket. Shadow sits in first class next to this man, who calls himself Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane), and they commence in a supernatural adventure that will presumably span the series, as it did the book.
Like many pilot episodes, "The Bone Orchard" mows through a wealth of exposition, though people who haven't read the book are likely to find it bewildering—a possibility that Fuller, co-creator Michael Green, and director David Slade milk so as to go wild on moody and free-associative imagery. What does the Viking prologue have to do with anything? Why does Shadow dream of a buffalo person with a fiery snout, and of a bone orchard, and of trees with mystical powers? And what about the scene where a beautiful woman, Bilquis (Yetide Badaki), swallows a man whole with her vagina at the climax of a ritual in which she pleads for the man to worship her? Fuller and Green dress their figurative chess board with a few of the requisite pieces, but newcomers to this story will not yet know how they move.
Gaiman was so obsessed with mapping the relationships between various Norse and North American gods, both ancient and contemporary, that he could hardly be bothered with tending to dramatic niceties such as suspense and convincing character relationships. (A problem with a story about gods: deus ex machinas inherently run rampant.) In "The Bone Orchard," Fuller and Green compensate for the busy plot with a lurid irreverence that serves as a startling contrast from the book's tonal nondescription. In the book, Wednesday and Shadow's meeting on the plane is treated by Gaiman as a straightforward mystery scene with strands of dark comedy, while "The Bone Orchard" pumps this moment up with horny aggression and delightfully obscene, plot-foreshadowing one-liners, reveling in the way that McShane chews his dialogue like spicy cud.
There was sex and violence in Gaiman's novel (the man-eating vagina is his invention), but it's almost as if the author viewed those textures as necessary evils. He's drawn to the power of his gods, and to the legacy of oppression they reveal to be endemic to the human species. So far, Fuller and Green are fascinated with the sex and violence, getting off on exploitive, hallucinatory sensationalism. Every moment of their American Gods is pitched at a melodramatic register of 10, and the set design explodes with stifled machismo, most amusingly in a bar that resembles a neon alligator snout. In the book, Shadow's meeting with Audrey (Betty Gilpin) at Laura's funeral was perfunctorily drawn as a scene to be gotten out of the way as quickly as possible, so as to get Shadow back on the road with Wednesday. In "The Bone Orchard," however, Audrey is operatically bitter and grief-stricken, trying to screw Shadow atop Laura's grave as revenge for Laura's affair with her own husband. It's a vividly sad and weird moment, embodying the emotional chaos that Fuller and Green prize.
So far, though, American Gods lacks the emotional gravitas of the astonishing Hannibal. There's a sense that Fuller and Green read Gaiman's novel and saw a prime opportunity to apply the aesthetic that was honed on Hannibal with only a cursory consideration as to what it means in this context. "The Bone Orchard" bears more than whiff of formal masturbation, though it reminds me of how much I missed Fuller's flamboyantly decadent sensibility. It remains to be seen whether this American Gods will manage to be its own thing, or serve as an indirect encore to a greater series.
Review: Netflix's I Am Not Okay with This Mostly Transcends Its Familiar Concept
The series at its best when characters are hanging out, doing nothing, or struggling with feeling trapped.2.5
Seventeen-year-old Sydney Novak (Sophia Lillis) has powers that she can't quite control. In Netflix's adaptation of Charles Forsman's graphic novel I Am Not Okay with This, those powers become a metaphor for such stock things as mental illness, social discomfort, emotional repression, body changes, sexual discovery, and adolescence in general. Even putting aside the obvious superhero comparisons, there are other parallels, to Carrie and, in turn, Netflix's own Stranger Things, which shares some producers with this series. But by focusing on the emotional turmoil deftly conveyed by its cast and leaning on a wicked sense of humor, I Am Not Okay with This mostly transcends its pat concept.
Some of the credit goes to Lillis, who spends much of the series glowering in the camera's general direction. She's expressive without ever losing that root of discontent and exasperation, as you can always see things like anxiety, bemusement, and concern poking through her disaffected exterior. Even before Sydney develops wayward telekinesis, she has a lot to contend with, such as her mother, Maggie (Kathleen Rose Perkins), having to work long hours at a diner in order to keep the lights on. Sydney is also infatuated with her best friend and only real confidante, Dina (Sofia Bryant), and the two have drifted apart as the latter has begun spending more time with her douchey boyfriend, Brad (Richard Ellis).
And so, Sydney starts hanging out with her eccentric neighbor and local weed dealer, Stan (Wyatt Olef), whose weird outfits and ever-pining ways recall Ducky from Pretty in Pink. But the show's wry tone ends up closer to that of Heathers than that of the John Hughes classic: Though the '80s-teen-movie-plus-superpowers mash-up is almost certainly the intended hook for I Am Not Okay with This, what resonates most is its general sense of ennui. Sydney and Stan in particular are low-income kids in a town that's far from well-to-do; when Maggie works late, she leaves enough money behind for Sydney and her little brother, Liam (Aidan Wojtak-Hissong), to subsist on convenience store hot dogs. Beyond have sex, do drugs, and listen to music, there's little to do in this town but head to the school and listlessly watch the football games. For Sydney and Stan, their hometown is a trap that's slowly snapping shut.
Forsman's source material is quite bleak, with a spare style of simple character designs and roomy panels sprinkled with snappy, abrasive snippets of dialogue and narration. Though series creators Jonathan Entwistle (who also worked on another adaptation of a Forsman graphic novel, The End of the F***ing World) and Christy Hall depart significantly from the comic at times, they nevertheless maintain its feel, especially in those moments when characters are hanging out and leave so many things unspoken. Sydney's surly narration moves things along at a wonderfully brisk pace that's faithful to the original material. Of the seven episodes, most of them clock in at around 20 minutes; they leave plenty of space to suggest angst and disillusionment around the edges without simply wallowing in misery.
Unfortunately, I Am Not Okay with This is so good at establishing character and place that the rumblings of a larger plot feel extraneous. Sydney thinks somebody might be following her, and there are some lingering questions and mysteries meant to carry over into a future season. But the series never feels like it needs these threads; most of the moments where it sets up higher-stakes conflicts, particularly where Brad is concerned, sputter into silly romantic melodrama. It's at its best when the characters are hanging out, doing nothing, or struggling with feeling trapped or bottling up what they want to say to each other. It's disappointing to see the first season wrap up with an apparent attempt to chase the shadow of Stranger Things, as its atmosphere and rich characters are what set this otherwise familiar story apart.
Cast: Sophia Lillis, Wyatt Oleff, Sofia Bryant, Kathleen Rose Perkins, Richard Ellis, Aidan Wojtak-Hissong Network: Netflix
Review: Amazon's Hunters Blends Comedy and Violence to Diminishing Returns
The series is so ploddingly manufactured from familiar parts that it feels like it was spat out by an algorithm.1
Following a group of vigilantes in hot pursuit of Nazis living in 1977 New York, Amazon's Hunters is so ploddingly manufactured from familiar parts that it feels like it was spat out by an algorithm. The show's setting provides no shortage of bright, hokey Americana and ironic needle drops set to bloody violence. The late '70s is long enough ago to evoke nostalgia while simultaneously nodding toward our enduring obsessions, as the characters make reference to Star Wars and rarely shut up about various superheroes.
Comic store clerk Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman) has that most time-tested of motivations for seeking vengeance: avenging a dead woman. Unbeknownst to Jonah, his grandmother, Ruth (Jeannie Berlin), worked in a Nazi-hunting crew with her fellow Holocaust refugee, Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino). After Granny is mysteriously murdered, Jonah learns of her double life and joins up with Meyer's ragtag band of vigilantes in pursuit of justice.
Meyer's crew is a diverse bunch, made up of young and old alike. As the youngest, 19-year-old Jonah is considered something of a liability due to his inexperience, as well as his tendency to let his emotions run high. So begins the usual adjustment period for the proverbial hothead, in which he learns to fight while doing the expected bits of soul-searching once he discovers that killing people is, in fact, a messy business. More excruciatingly predictable flourishes follow: Somebody tells him relationships are baggage, someone else refers to Meyer's group as "judge, jury, and executioner," and an F.B.I. agent (Jerrika Hinton) naturally sniffs around, potentially mucking up the works of their well-oiled Nazi-hunting machine.
None of this is a jumping-off point for some complex meditation on vengeance, as the series largely consists of scenes of ironical Nazi comeuppance sandwiched between the sort of uninspired character drama where people wash blood off their hands while discussing the powers of good and evil. The show's investigative segments are so obvious that they border on laughable, since the Nazis leave things like their medals and trophies of Jewish children's teeth lying around (there's even a jovial photo of one character hanging out with Adolf Hitler).
At certain points, Hunters seems like it's trying to evoke the comparatively simple storytelling of early comic books or exploitation films of the '70s era like, say, Death Wish. Cutaways place the characters in fake movie trailers with superhero-esque names, using bursts of comedy and karmic violence to create a somewhat heightened tone. But the series never reconciles these rather sporadic moments of levity with its default mode of turgid drama, where Jonah broods about what he's done or how he's affecting the people closest to him.
Though the series doesn't shy away from depicting how Nazis dehumanized Jews, it also feels the bizarre need to cartoonishly heighten those atrocities. In flashbacks, we see concentration camp prisoners forced to serve as literal pawns in a human chess game, stabbing one another to capture a "piece." Another camp broadcasts a live singing contest over the speakers, with losers eliminated one by one. Where Inglourious Basterds and even the recent Wolfenstein games manage to ground their flights of fancy in unexpected sincerity and tragedy, Hunters traffics in insipid dramatic cliché. The result is by-the-numbers drama that veers every so often into baffling pulp, as though the series is cobbled together from mismatched parts.
Hunters clearly aims to be subversive and of the moment, but its every element feels so calculated as to be nauseatingly safe. Its villains are broadly acceptable targets, its moral conflict feels obligatory, and its forward-facing monologues about diversity seem designed only to mark off a checklist. The series makes the occasional gesture to present-day politics, as when one character incongruously name-checks "false news," but it's otherwise content merely to skim the surface of these parallels in service of an easily marketable premise. Though clearly gifted with more time and money than any of the exploitation films it references, Hunters has only a fraction of the things to say.
Cast: Logan Lerman, Al Pacino, Jerrika Hinton, Lena Olin, Saul Rubinek, Carol Kane, Josh Radnor, Greg Austin, Tiffany Boone, Louis Ozawa, Kate Mulvany, Dylan Baker, Jeannie Berlin Network: Amazon
Every BoJack Horseman Episode, Ranked
As the series comes to a conclusion, we take a look back and rank all 77 episodes.
Netflix's BoJack Horseman is about many things. How we make sense of a senseless world. How we find happiness amid constant crisis. How we assert and give others power. That's a lot for any show, let alone the animated misadventures of a famous horseman, one whose life stands on the razor's edge of celebrity privilege and deeply internalized emotional self-abuse. Contending with BoJack Horseman, now as it comes to its conclusion, has meant contending with my own life these past six years, which have been made markedly better by this series. This exercise would have been much more difficult had the final episodes failed to deliver. (Spoiler alert: They don't.)
77. "BoJack Hates the Troops," Season 1, Episode 2
First, let me be clear: I love this episode, which feels like an early performance by a beloved artist who went on to greater and more daring things. Maybe there's a note or two out of place. Maybe they aren't stretching their talent as much as you think they can. BoJack's (Will Arnett) profound pettiness makes him an asshole to many—here, it's the contested dibs over a box of muffins at the grocery store that lands our remorseful horse in the national spotlight—and it's admirable how this episode leads the charge in painting that fact unambiguously. In a way, it feels like a foundation stone of sorts (one of several), featuring as it does BoJack's decision to open up to Diane (Alison Brie) for his memoir. Full truth: From here, mountains are made.
76. "Sabrina's Christmas Wish"
The mere existence of this holiday episode made it unambiguous that BoJack Horseman was created out of love. Further enriching the world so thoughtfully laid out in the first season, this metatextual holiday episode, in which BoJack and Todd (Aaron Paul) watch one of the Christmas episodes from Horsin' Around, came as an unannounced Christmas gift in 2014. It also, hopefully, satisfies those who will inevitably be curious about what a proper episode of the show-within-the-show looks like, and Todd's four-word refutation ("I can't, can't I?") of BoJack's faulty logic stands with the funniest moments of the series.
75. "The BoJack Horseman Show," Season 3, Episode 2
A novel exposition dump, this episode goes back to 2007, when BoJack and Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris), a cat, first slept together. Its title refers to the name of BoJack's sophomore TV series, a vulgar satire that tanked and was promptly canceled. This episode also lays general groundwork for episodes and seasons to come. Lots of obvious references abound—e.g., Princess Carolyn pitches scripts for No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, though films actually being shopped around at that time instead of those just arriving in theaters might've been a better touch—not unlike a Trojan horse for the ongoing world building. The highlight herein is an updated version of the show's end credits song, adapted to underscore BoJack's much less successful follow-up to Horsin' Around.
74. "The BoJack Horseman Story, Chapter One," Season 1, Episode 1
This first episode doesn't get its due. Brilliantly juxtaposing scenes from BoJack's interview on The Charlie Rose Show with a gotcha shot from this world's version of Maury, this first look at BoJack's anxiety-ridden existence had the difficult task of establishing the show's very particular tone (think Chuck Jones meets Don Hertzfeldt meets Albert Brooks) while also making blatant the sadness beneath it. The serious and silly rub shoulders here, like travelers on a crowded bus trip. It's subversive, too, in warning against the dangers of over-binging; BoJack re-watches his old show obsessively, including the finale in which his character dies, at the expense of almost everything else in his life. This episode features Patton Oswalt in three parts, a Sellers-esque stunt that will prove to be one of the show's regular hat tricks, while the closing gag exhibits the raw confidence required to deploy both guffaws and sobs with such simultaneous precision. In hindsight, it's no surprise.
73. "Zoës and Zeldas," Season 1, Episode 4
It was a small stroke of genius to introduce early in the series a pop-cultural dichotomy specific to this world. Leonard Cohen sang of a bird on a wire, and here the either/or stems from characters on Mister Peanutbutter's House, a knockoff of BoJack's sitcom in which the eponymous canine raised two little girls: Zelda, a fun extrovert, and Zoë, a cynical introvert. This episode features some of BoJack's funniest quips and nastiest deeds. As for Todd's rock opera, I'd be lying if I suggested that I didn't want to see it brought to greater fruition. This episode does a lot of prep work for the season and the series, and does it well, while Wyatt Cenac's performance as one of Diane's exes provides a weary vantage point, effectively underscoring what makes this world feel so emotionally real in the first place.
72. "BoJack Kills," Season 3, Episode 3
Plot-wise, this is a lowkey key episode in the series, establishing the source of the heroin that ultimately causes Sarah Lynn's death. That would be Richie Osborne (Fred Savage), former Horsin' Around cast member and current proprietor of Whale World, a family-friendly strip club that doubles as a drug front. BoJack and Diane get to catch up and establish a greater understanding of themselves ("I can't keep asking myself if I'm happy, it just makes me more miserable," says Diane, summarizing my 30s so far in 14 words), but my favorite moment is probably the chef's-kiss perfection of Mister Peanutbutter's LL Cool J reference (a close second is Angela Bassett's line delivery on "you betcha").
71. "Our A-Story Is a 'D' Story," Season 1, Episode 6
If BoJack Horseman's flair for wordplay wasn't already clear, this episode is tantamount to a flag planted on the moon for all to see. Hollywood becomes Hollywoo when BoJack steals the "D" from the Hollywood sign in a drunken stupor, all in the hopes of impressing Diane after squaring off with Mister Peanutbutter—and buying the restaurant Elefante in the process. Todd, having found himself in prison at the end of the previous episode, navigates the various gangs courting him in sublimely naïve fashion, while BoJack's backup plan to fix the "D" situation results in a tragedy befalling Beyoncé and, relatedly, one of the very best verbal gags in the entire series.
Review: Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet Takes Aim at the Gaming Industry
The series dives into megalomania and workplace chaos with eccentric, frenzied energy.3
The titular video game in Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet is a phenomenal success. Mythic Quest boasts tens of millions of players and, perhaps more impressive, the invaluable endorsement of Pootie Shoe (Elisha Henig), a young streamer with tremendous clout. Pootie praises the game in delectably over-the-top live streams; he's both crudely inclusive (he shouts out LGBTQ fans, or "Pootie Fruities") and just crude (he rates games on a "b-hole" scale, four being outstanding). Even Rachel (Ashly Burch) and Dana (Imani Hakim), the studio's quality assurance testers, steadfastly love the game, despite the fact that they spend all day, every day cooped up in a small room playing it to discover bugs.
One could be forgiven for assuming that Mythic Quest's universal acclaim has been earned by a diligent, well-oiled, in-sync team of creatives and business people. But the studio behind the game, it turns out, is a site of enormous turbulence. The mayhem trickles down from the top: Mythic Quest's creator, the vainglorious auteur Ian Grimm (Rob McElhenney), whose every whim is sacrosanct. When lead engineer Poppy Li (Charlotte Nicdao) designs a shovel with which players can exert unprecedented influence over their environments in the game (by digging), Ian isn't satisfied. The shovel, he says, should also be able to kill things—and his desire to get the feature just right threatens to push back the release date for the game's imminent expansion, to the ire of Poppy and others in Ian's orbit.
The Apple TV+ show, co-created by Rob McElhenney and his It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia co-star Charlie and executive producer Megan Ganz, often resembles the FXX series in its energy. Minor issues escalate feverishly, as characters cross wires and talk at rather than with each other. Some of the studio's higher-ups are unbothered by the dysfunction, like soulless monetizer Brad Bakshi (Danny Pudi) and writer C.W. Longbottom (F. Murray Abraham), a slimy, old-timey fantasy author. But Poppy is consistently exasperated, as is David Brittlesbee (David Hornsby), the game's meek executive producer. Others thrive on the chaos, like Ian (it seems to foster his creativity) and Jo (Jessie Ennis), David's mercurial assistant. Conflict brings the worst out of her, to uproarious effect. When the studio's coders threaten to unionize, she shouts, "The workers are grist for the mill!"
The first half of the season leverages these characters less as nuanced people than as bundles of eccentricities. The most notable exceptions are Poppy, Rachel, and Dana, who prove more humane and grounded than the megalomaniacal or otherwise maladjusted men around them. The video game industry is as tenaciously male-dominated here as it is in reality, and by dialing up the worst tendencies of the men in the studio—C.W.'s casual sexism, David's faux man-of-the-people shtick, Ian's remarkable ability to hear whatever he wants when Poppy speaks to him—the series smartly satirizes a world in desperate need of overhaul.
The second half of the season more deeply examines the ambitions and fears of its characters, as well as the video game industry's power dynamics. Poppy's frustration builds as she's constantly spoken over and ignored not only by Ian, but also by the other men she works with, and C.W. wonders if the development of A.I. writing has rendered him obsolete. Eventually, Ian meets with a long-estranged family member in a scene that's equally poignant and hilarious. But not all of these arcs are sufficiently thought out. When the coders prepare to strike for overtime pay, which infuriates Jo, Grimm secures their demands in an off-screen call to corporate. The conclusion serves to convey Grimm's cachet but feels reductive, particularly given how widespread and entrenched abusive labor practices continue to be in the industry.
Separating the two halves of the season is its best episode, "A Dark Quiet Death." Directed by McElhenney, it's a significant tonal shift that centers on understated rather than exaggerated characters. The episode follows two video game developers (Cristin Milioti and Jake Johnson) with no apparent connection to Ian or anyone else in the series, beginning with their meeting in 1993 and extending through their work on an indie passion project. This isn't an uninspired entry in the expanding genre of "watching Jake Johnson fall in love with people"; Johnson and Milioti's chemistry is wildly charming, and their relationship grows increasingly gripping as the duo navigates questions of artistic integrity and corporate oversight.
The episode's virtuosity is a bit awkward, in that the season's apex is the piece that least fits in with the whole. But the intermission, of sorts, comes to feel like the crux of the matter: It's the necessary historical context for Ian and Poppy's working relationship, for Ian's unwavering devotion to the product of his vision, for the stakes of his call to corporate on behalf of his employees. Though the episode is self-contained, it infuses the rest of the season with subtle weight and sympathy. It suggests that, by virtue of their striving for lasting art and legacy, Mythic Quest's borderline sociopaths are, if barely, on the right side of irredeemable.
Cast: Rob McElhenney, Charlotte Nicdao, David Hornsby, F. Murray Abraham, Jessie Ennis, Danny Pudi, Elisha Henig, Imani Hakim, Ashly Burch, Caitlin McGee Network: Apple TV+
Review: The New Pope Depicts the Church with a Graceful Cynicism
Despite the sordid, festering material that the series explores, what ultimately emerges is sheer beauty.3
Having collapsed at the end of The Young Pope, Lenny Belardo (Jude Law), also known as Pope Pius XIII, is in a coma at the start of The New Pope. He's being looked over by a nun and illuminated by a bright, neon cross straight out of David Fincher's Seven. His involuntary sighs and twitches are fraught with meaning; at one point, a usually pragmatic man (Mark Ivanir) claims that the pope killed someone with the quiver of a finger. Idolatrous followers stand vigil in the square outside his chambers, donning sweatshirts with his face on them. The pope's wild charisma survives the apparent death of his consciousness.
Seeing no improvement in Belardo's condition after nine months, the cardinals decide to elect a successor, whose fleeting, radical papacy briefly opens the Vatican to refugees and risks bankrupting it. The cardinals then opt for a more moderate replacement: Sir John Brannox (John Malkovich), an oft-depressed priest who wears eyeliner and lives on his family's sprawling English estate. With Belardo on a respirator and Brannox headed to Rome, the series imagines a world with two popes—setting up a compelling conflict over legitimacy, poised to erupt if Belardo wakes up, of the kind unseen since the Western Schism ended 600 years ago.
Brannox is less charismatic than seductive. Fond of poetry, he speaks haltingly, as if waiting for words to come to and flow through him. He's haunted by an evident pain, communicated in flashbacks of the twin brother he lost long ago and across lonely nights spent struggling to fall asleep. Malkovich, his eyes at times hollow, at others alight with a furtive spark, imbues the character with profound vulnerability and depth.
Beyond the issue of what to do with the pope on life support, the Holy See faces numerous challenges: ongoing sexual abuse scandals; the so-called "caliph," who issues anti-Christian threats in videotaped messages; the cataclysmic prospect that Italy will begin retroactively taxing the Vatican; nuns who go on strike to demand equal rights; and more. If anyone is capable of restoring order, it's Angelo Voiello (Silvio Orlando), the Vatican's alternatingly ruthless, patronizing, and surprisingly tender—and regularly hilarious—cardinal secretary of state, who's a singular presence throughout the series.
Most of the cardinals wrestle with personal demons and try to lead virtuous lives, like Voiello—whose harshness is a function of his office—and the supremely empathetic Gutierrez (Javier Cámara). Others, though, are unapologetically vile: They have sex with minors and snort cocaine and blackmail and blaspheme. The irreverence with which the series portrays the church results in not only bleak cynicism, but also unexpected images of feverish, dreamy splendidness. The first episode's opening credits depict relatively scantily clad nuns dancing to a song by electronic duo Sofi Tukker in a dark room while a cross-turned-strobe light pulses, a slow zoom-in building momentum that culminates in an explosive bass drop.
The nuns play a not-insignificant role in The New Pope, but its treatment of them and other female characters is shallow at best. The series often dehumanizes women in scenes that lean on needless nudity—of which there's no shortage here—or with imagery that prioritizes symbolism over personality. At times, The New Pope manages to incorporate both nakedness and perfunctory iconography in the same shot: In one instance, a bare woman is juxtaposed with a statue of the Madonna. Even key figures who carry over from The Young Pope suffer from halfhearted characterization, including savvy marketer Sofia (Cécile de France) and Esther (Ludivine Sagnier), the woman whose pregnancy may have been the result of a miracle performed by Belardo. (The New Pope also leaves the caliph's antagonism underdeveloped, causing terrorism and nudity to resemble one another: stimuli deployed to elicit cheap reactions.)
Despite these failings, and despite the sordid, festering material that the series explores, what ultimately emerges from The New Pope is sheer beauty. It's an understated grace, one that director Paolo Sorrentino and cinematographer Luca Bigazzi effect with an eye to intimacy. In a late scene, the camera cuts between tight profiles of Brannox, dressed in white, and Belardo, dressed in black, as they face each other in front of a painting whose background is a black-and-white swirl. The dichromatic canvas envelops Brannox and Belardo, seemingly transporting the pair to an abyss, or the cosmos, or some other otherworldly space. Perhaps it's easier to find God there, away from the Earth, the Vatican, and the depravity plaguing them. The sequence is an obliterating burst of pathos that pierces and lingers.
Cast: Jude Law, John Malkovich, Silvio Orlando, Javier Cámara, Cécile de France, Ludivine Sagnier, Mark Ivanir, Maurizio Lombardi, Antonio Petrocelli, Jessica Piccolo Valerani, Kiruna Stamell, Ulrich Thomsen, Yulia Snigir Network: HBO
The 50 Best TV Shows of the 2010s
The decade proved that the future of TV lies in its ability to democractize via technological expansion.
We will likely look back at the 2010s as a simpler time, when sea levels remained relatively stable, Disney hadn't decimated the last remaining movie houses, and there were only three networks: Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. Two thousand and nineteen was a watershed year for the expansion of streaming, so it seems like a fitting moment to reflect on the events that led to the Great War.
If the aughts represented a new golden age of television, then the following decade proved that the future of the medium lies in its ability to democractize via technological growth. Event television has replaced appointment television, as the sheer volume of content continues to balloon and more viewers shift to on-demand viewing. Our expectations, too, have evolved as the format bends and morphs to adapt to its new environment, with years-long gaps between ever-shorter seasons and shows once thought dead resurrected like zombies from our salad days.
And yet, humans crave familiarity: Game of Thrones reinvented the viewing party; networks rebooted or revived well-known properties, albeit to varying degrees of success; and we've replaced our old cable bill with an à la carte menu of streaming options that add up to more or less the same price. More importantly, as we venture out into the proverbial Wild West, and as the boundaries between TV and film continue to vanish, one thing remains constant: our desire for stories that reflect who we are, what we fear, what we treasure, and what we find side-splittingly funny. But then, even those lines have begun to blur. Sal Cinquemani
50. Portlandia
The array of archetypes portrayed by Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen on Portlandia aren't impressive in their scope so much as their narrow specificity, each one delicately carving Portland's milieu into a well-observed sub-niche. Armisen plays multiple variations of the emasculated goof while Brownstein portrays a bevy of self-righteous killjoys with great aplomb. Yet Portlandia is so much greater than the sum of its caricatures. That the show's humor is entirely derived from its two co-creators gives it a winning constancy, while the improvisational aspect adds an almost surreal element to much of the dialogue. In fact, the bizarre obsession with food (a mixologist crafts a cocktail with rotten banana and eggshells, 911 dispatchers are inundated with calls from beet-eaters) suggests the fever dream of a very hungry hipster. Peter Goldberg
49. House of Cards
House of Cards allowed David Fincher's seductive aesthetic sway to carry on well beyond the inaugural diptych he helmed, despite TV's well-noted preference for story over artistic signature, but that's almost besides the point. The scheming exploits of Kevin Spacey's silver-tongued congressman-devil provide a galvanic shock of political satire and thrillingly modern melodrama, but the real hook is Robin Wright's stirring performance as the politician's better half—and worse half in the show's botched final season. In the thick of it, this addictive series convincingly depicts a shifting political landscape, wherein an ascending class of strong and brilliant women retools man's ruthless personal and professional strategies to better advance a contentious, testosterone-weary nation. Chris Cabin
48. Marvel's Jessica Jones
Marvel's Jessica Jones breaks so many molds, and with such brio, that it feels almost super-heroic. In immediately denying us Jessica's (Krysten Ritter) origin story, it keeps her at arm's length—a masterstroke because the series understands that it's a story Jessica isn't ready to give yet, freely and under her own terms. If the violence on Marvel's Daredevil, no matter how kinetic and operatic in its brushstrokes, is primed to excite, the violence on Jessica Jones seeks to disarm our pleasure centers. And if this violence is so discomforting, it's because of how hauntingly, stubbornly, necessarily it's rooted in the traumas that connect the victims of the ominous Kilgrave (David Tennant). The aesthete in me wishes the series exhibited a more uncommon visual style. At the same time, maybe the show's portrait of abuse, of heroes and villains whose shows of strength and mind control are so recognizably human, wouldn't exert half the chill that it does it didn't approach us so unassumingly. Ed Gonzalez
47. Killing Eve
With Killing Eve—which Phoebe Waller-Bridge adapted from author Luke Jennings's Villanelle series—she uses the whip-smart voice she employed in Fleabag to explore women whose bad behavior extends beyond the limits of rapacious sexuality and crass humor: specifically, to murderous psychopaths. The series suggests a delightfully demented, considerably more violent spin on Broad City, Insecure, and Fleabag. Those shows are wryly comical and sexually frank, with complex female relationships at their center, and Killing Eve brings us all those attributes in the guise of a crackerjack mystery. The series combines a dry comedy's affection for the mundane with the slick look and tone of a psychosexual thriller, and the result is something wholly original, suspenseful, and caustically funny. Julia Selinger
46. Sherlock
Sherlock has always shown a keen but loving disregard for its source material. Despite serving up a bevy of classical crime-solving tropes, its fluid aesthetic and modern-day realism eschew the stuffy reverence of countless other re-toolings of Arthur Conan Doyle's celebrated series. Instead, co-creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat have allowed Benedict Cumberbatch to chart his own course as a character who's become a landmark of fiction. The actor effortlessly owns the role with his ice-cold stares and burly voice, and yet what makes the series such a distinct interpretation is how it envisions the complicated relationship between Sherlock Holmes and his partner, John Watson (Martin Freeman), whose everyman humanity serves as a spiritual contrast to the impenetrable title character's isolated genius. Ted Pigeon
45. Ramy
It's the tension between Ramy's (Ramy Youssef) secular and spiritual leanings that serves as the thrust of the Hulu series that bears his name, as he considers what kind of person—what kind of Muslim, son, and man—he wants to be. Intensely critical of himself, Ramy recognizes that he's done much self-mythologizing, mostly in regard to his religious observance, and acutely feels his lapses in judgment, and Ramy derives its soulfulness from the ruins of the myths that Ramy and his family and friends tell themselves and those around them. There's profound pain to be found amid the rubble. And, maybe, peace. Niv M. Sultan
44. Treme
David Simon and Eric Overmeyer's abbreviated fade-out on post-Katrina New Orleans is tattered yet hopeful, perfect in its soulful imperfections. Decisions in the Big Easy are slowed down by good booze and better boogie, and by the time the Big Chief (Clark Peters) bows out, very little about this intoxicating menagerie of musicians and other truth-seekers has been convincingly settled on. Life's not tidy in the Treme and the show's creators let all the bad omens hang out, including the impending birth of Delmond's (Rob Brown) first child and Janette's (Kim Dickens) third restaurant opening. Of course, all the trouble made the music sound all the sweeter, as careers begin to congeal and legacies found (temporary) footing amid the city's riotous buzz. The fat lady is singing for Treme, and she's belting it out loud, if not for long. Cabin
43. The Handmaid's Tale
Few television shows can match the commitment of The Handmaid's Tale to withholding catharsis from audiences. The series, which maintains a visual lyricism that both clashes with and magnifies the brutality on screen, is most heartbreaking during moments of doubt, when Elisabeth Moss's June appears resigned to her fate. Yet it consistently obscures her true motivation, mining mystery from her submissiveness: Is it genuine, or another tactic? When she's able to seize, however briefly, the upper hand from her tormentors, the series offers tantalizing glimpses of their chagrin. For a moment, we're prompted to envision that chagrin morphing into sorrow, shame, maybe even fear. That would spell some kind of catharsis, but until it actually arrives, The Handmaid's Tale remains intellectually nourishing, easy to admire, and difficult to endure. It's a beautiful test of stamina, offering only small reprieves from June's suffering. It embeds us alongside her, and remains dedicated to illustrating how exactly the villains can win. Michael Haigis
42. High Maintenance
High Maintenance more than made good on its transition from the Internet to HBO. Its intimacy has been retained, and yet the narrative strands have grown more thoughtfully variable and distinct in their reflection of the adult rituals, wild yearning, and long-overdue release that power the denizens of New York City's boroughs, revealing their neuroses, deep-seated fears, self-delusions, and artful exercises. More than ever, the show's tapestry of unexpected connections and backstories reach deeper into the quotidian experiences of city life. Cabin
41. Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal
Genndy Tartakovsky's work as an animator is most striking for its embrace of silence. Even in the cacophonous realm of children's cartoons, the Samurai Jack creator favors wordless moments that lean on the flapping of cloth in the wind or the exaggerated sounds of a clenching fist. Adult Swim's Primal, then, feels like something Tartakovsky has been building to for much of his career, a dialogue-free miniseries following a caveman and his T. rex partner fighting to survive in a violent, unforgiving world. The show's violence is a reflection of its characters' existence, a cycle from which there's no escape. Children are swallowed whole, prey is devoured on the spot, eyeballs are smashed in by rocks, and dino jaws are smeared in vivid red blood. The story of the caveman and T. rex's survival, in Tartakovsky's hands, is totally enthralling, as terrible as it is beautiful. Steven Scaife
Review: HBO's The Outsider Conjures Mysterious Tableaux of Dread
The series preserves Stephen King novel's ingenious plot while entirely altering its tone.3
HBO's The Outsider represents a merging of two singular writers: Richard Price, the lively and profoundly detailed and precise crime novelist and screenwriter, and Stephen King, the one-man pop-culture industry who specializes in horror novels. Price adapted the series from King's 2018 novel and wrote five of the six episodes that were screened for press. Immediately one feels the sense of freedom that separates this from many other King adaptations. A colossus in his own right, Price doesn't feel the need to court King's approval in the tradition of the many young filmmakers who've grown up on the author's novels, dreaming of an opportunity to take a crack at his work. As a showrunner, Price makes bold moves, preserving King's ingenious plot while entirely altering the novel's tone.
The Outsider is a mystery with a crackerjack hook: Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman) is accused of raping and murdering a young boy, and he appears to have been at two places at once, with each location abounding in concrete proof of his presence. Maitland is a pillar of Flint City, Oklahoma, an English teacher and little league coach who's arrested in a ballfield in the middle of a game by detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendolsohn). Price and Bateman, who directed the first two episodes, alternate between the arrest and Anderson's discovery of the little boy and the gathering of evidence. Multiple witnesses saw Terry speaking with the boy and driving a van that would later be found drenched in the child's blood.
This opening displays the novel's surgical attention detail, as in Anderson's pointed order that Terry be arrested in public and handcuffed with his hands in front of his body. Sure that he's got his man, Ralph launches a brutal character assassination, which Bateman stages in long, foreboding takes that capture the weight of a community curdling on an individual.
As in many crime shows, especially Law & Order, the first arrest is fraudulent. Aided by his attorney, Howie Gold (Bill Camp), Terry springs a startling alibi while in prison: that he was attending a literary conference out of town on the day of the boy's murder. Besides video proof supporting his alibi, there's dozens of witnesses and a fingerprint he left on a book in a hotel lobby. Ralph's certainty, cemented by his grief over his own son's death a year earlier, begins to crack, and then something terrible happens that convinces him to look further into the Maitland case. Unexpectedly working with Howie and a private investigator, Alec Pelley (Jeremy Bobb), who in turn hires another private investigator, Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo), Ralph and his team uncover a chain of child murders across the country that are characterized simultaneously by iron-clad proof of guilt and innocence. Gibney, a socially awkward eccentric genius, eventually comes to believe that they're dealing with a shapeshifter who feeds on grief.
This narrative business comes from King's novel and is quite redolent of his 1986 opus It, but Price alters the story's mood and speed. King's signature sensibility—his interest in the quotidian of small-town average people facing otherworldly nightmares—has been pruned away, and not always for the better. In the series, many of the characters are smoldering, movie-ready badasses reminiscent of the protagonists of countless prestige crime dramas, and who utter clipped, chicly tortured dialogue in the key of the characters in Price's own film scripts. This tendency is especially evident in Price's conception of Holly. In the novel, she's a thin, young white woman on the spectrum who's poignantly possessed of no confidence except when piecing together evidence; for Price, however, Holly is a sexy woman of color fending off the advances of men, whose anti-sociality is offered up, a la Hugh Laurie's character in House, as yet another element of her supreme agency. Collectively, such character changes make the narrative feel less eccentric and personal than that of King's novel.
On the other hand, Price also throws out King's bad habits—gimmicky character shtick, embarrassingly contrived dialogue, certain routine plotting—fashioning a mood piece that gradually becomes less about the investigation of the murders than the paralysis of grief. The Outsider's title has multiple meanings. The notion of grief and trauma divorcing people from society, turning them into outsiders, is in King's book, but Price and the show's directors—Bateman, Andrew Bernstein, and Karyn Kusama—bring that theme to fuller bloom. Certain characters feel functional at first but gain a surprising pathos, such as Ralph's wife, Jeannie, whom Mare Winningham invests with a hauntingly inquisitive ruefulness. Holly also grows in stature, as Erivo transcends an initial stock type, imbuing her character with a tremulous unease, a fragility that becomes more and more moving as the series progresses.
The Outsider also features wonderful tableaux of dread. Bateman sets the stage early on, utilizing the various planes of the widescreen image for unmooring flourishes, such as when a woman jogs toward the camera as a man attempting suicide crashes through the window of a house in the middle ground of the frame. Subsequent episodes physicalize grief by emphasizing the emptiness of farmhouses, the undersides of bridges, and the condemned homes of the damned, suggesting a hellish netherworld that exists just out of plain sight. The cinematography, heavily indebted to the work of David Fincher, is awash in eerie grays and blues, as well as negative space that might potentially obscure the shapeshifter.
Given the wildness of the story, The Outsider sometimes feels ludicrously tony, but it's undeniably gripping—a beach read rendered by real artists. The series is so clever that it might take you a while to realize that it's essentially Dracula, what with all the Renfield types and secret nesting sites, only dressed up as a police procedural. Or, perhaps even more fitting, The Outsider suggests a merging of Kolchak with Price's The Night Of.
Cast: Ben Mendelsohn, Cynthia Erivo, Bill Camp, Jason Bateman, Mare Winningham, Paddy Considine, Julianne Nicholson, Yul Vazquez, Jeremy Bobb, Marc Menchaca, Frank Deal, Hettienne Park, Derek Cecil, Summer Fontana
Review: BBC and Netflix's Dracula Is a Gory but Banal Adaptation of a Classic
The series feels tiresome in its relentless pleading with us to be impressed.1.5
The first episode of BBC One and Netflix's Dracula finds sickly Jonathan Harker (John Hefferman) interred at a convent. Gesturing toward the pile of pages in front of her, the chipper, irreverent Sister Agatha (Dolly Wells) says that Jonathan's account of his imprisonment in Dracula's (Claes Bang) castle may have left out some relevant information. Then she asks him if he had sex with the vampire. With this, Sherlock creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat announce their intent to push the expected boundaries of Bram Stoker's oft-adapted novel by bringing a lot of the subtext to the forefront. But the bizarrely passionless scenes that ultimately follow in no way match those performative declarations.
It's not that Bang's hammy Dracula fails to do suggestive things throughout the entirety of the 90-minute episode made available to press. It's that when he hovers over Jonathan and tries to get him to write a letter with a pen that they're both holding, there's no palpable sexual tension. The actors' rigid body language seems fundamentally at odds with the proceedings, though that impression may stem from the cinematography. Indeed, the characters are constantly framed from unflattering angles or cut off from one another altogether, and despite being far more vocal about the subtext of Stoker's novel than almost any adaptation before it, the series isn't half as provocative as something like Bryan Fuller's Hannibal.
Whether he's sharing space with Jonathan or even Sister Agatha, Bang's handsome, domineering Dracula radiates no lust or desire. When the vampire calls his guest things like "Johnny" or his "bride," the pronounced eroticism feels forced and artificial. In one scene, Dracula stands naked before Agatha and licks a bloody knife, but the camera conceals everything below his neck and cuts to a more obscure angle from the moment he touches his tongue to the blade, effectively dialing back the moment's camp factor.
Some of Dracula's images might sound gross on the page—a fly crawling across an eyeball, a mangled body shoved into a box, a peeled fingernail—but these moments pass by so quickly and with such visible fuss, courtesy of the jittering camera and clanging soundtrack, that they're robbed of any horror. Dracula's groan-inducing wordplay ("You look drained") only further saps the gothic atmosphere of any dread. The series is as ostentatious with its apparent sexual overtones as its horror, displaying a showiness that comes off more like a substitute for real depravity, a cry for help in the notable absence of any writer or director capable of teasing out the material's sensuality.
All that's left of Dracula is its declaration of cleverness, as it bobs and weaves through expectations as Sister Agatha does the whole fast-talking genius shtick. Did you think crucifixes repel vampires? Well, the series makes sure to tell us they don't. And then, suddenly, they do, with Dracula all but goading viewers into guessing why. In multiple scenes, characters drag out their introduction of a problem and then badger others for input and theories like an irritatingly persistent street performer. Whether it's introducing farcical, overwritten solutions to things like navigating Dracula's mazelike castle or miniature plot twists that are easy to guess, the series simply feels tiresome in its relentless pleading with us to be impressed.
Cast: Claes Bang, Dolly Wells, John Heffernan, Corrina Wilson, Matthew Beard, Morfydd Clark, Lyndsey Marshal Network: Netflix
Review: The Witcher Favors Fierce Fight Scenes Over World-Building
The series taps into violence like a lifespring, finding its footing with energetic fight sequences.2.5
Henry Cavill's character in The Witcher, Netflix's adaptation of the series of fantasy novels and short stories by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, could scan as a spin on the actor's most notable prior role. Monster hunter Geralt of Rivia resembles a reclusive medieval Superman—all principle, brawn, and jawline—clad in a white wig and cat-like contact lenses. But rather than reheating the Man of Steel, Cavill quickly melts into Geralt, capturing his aloof yet winsome confidence with sardonic one-liners and baritone grunts.
Geralt roams a land known as the Continent, sniffing out fantastical happenings and dealing with the responsible entities like a sword-swinging private eye. It's how he makes a living as a witcher: a rare, highly trained beast slayer both blessed with and cursed by enigmatic mutations. These mutations afford witchers preternatural strength and litheness, night vision, and a host of other powers—as well as the scorn of countless villagers who've heard vile tales of witchers' supposed inhumanity. The series uses the hate directed toward Geralt to offer intriguing, if inconsistently fleshed-out, reflections on discrimination.
The Witcher's two female principal characters also face oppressive difficulties. Sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra), who undergoes a vicious education in the art of magic, navigates the challenges of dysmorphism and her part-Elven heritage in a sexist and racist society, and young princess Ciri (Freya Allan) turns runaway after her home gets razed by the mysterious Nilfgaardian Empire. While the empire—the Continent's strongest political and military force—is eager to track down Ciri, its aims beyond territorial growth are shadowy.
Geralt, Yen, and Ciri spend most of the season isolated from each other. When Geralt and Yen finally meet, they share a warm, sexually charged bath, in a nod to a similar moment in the 2015 video game adaptation The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. But bath time offers more than cheap fan service here, as the scene also delivers the lighthearted charm that The Witcher's various manifestations insist upon amid their overall bleakness. Geralt and Yen's banter moves briskly, propelled by Yen's playful aggression and Geralt's wry half-smiles.
The three protagonists' narratives momentously and giddily merge near the end of the season, but what comes before sometimes feels like a stretched-out primer. Many conversations proceed lifelessly, purely to provide exposition, doing a disservice to the show's thoughtful exploration of gender, free will, and classism. The laziness accompanies another storytelling flaw: The series is often too slow to elucidate the logic at play in its world. This first season pays welcome attention to Yen's history and psyche but chooses not to concretely explain what it means to be a witcher, granting the audience little insight into Geralt's origins, the reasons for his itinerance, or the nature of his otherness.
In contrast to its halfhearted approach to exposition, The Witcher finds its footing in the graphic depiction of violence. The show's energetic battle scenes, set to a stirring score by composers Sonya Belousova and Giona Ostinelli, create the impression that the burly, snow-caked background actors of Game of Thrones were moving at three-quarters speed. An early duel between Geralt and a rogue princess (Emma Appleton)—there are many princesses—escalates with breakneck cuts and tight shots of the warriors. Later, as the ghastly spawn of a cursed woman stalks a victim, the creature's still-attached umbilical cord flashes at the edge of the frame, smartly giving shape to the specter of loss and grief.
However enthralling it is to watch him in action, Geralt is central to relatively few fight sequences throughout the season. He generally refrains from involving himself in the conflicts of others, less out of a commitment to neutrality than out of what appears to be an overwhelming indifference. And by avoiding excessive bloodshed early on, The Witcher demarcates the stakes necessary for Geralt to unsheathe his blade—gradually revealing his motivations and making the scattered moments of butchery all the more alluring.
Cast: Henry Cavill, Anya Chalotra, Freya Allan, Jodhi May, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson, Adam Levy, MyAnna Buring, Emma Appleton, Joey Batey, Anna Shaffer, Mimi Ndiweni, Royce Pierreson, Wilson Radjou-Pujalte, Eamon Farren Network: Netflix
Review: Work in Progress Confronts Mental Illness with Heart and Barbs
The series never loses sight of its premise, though it remains bleak without beating you over the head.3
Abby (Abby McEnany) is planning to kill herself. She's 45, a devoted journaler, and quite miserable. Her first line of dialogue in Showtime's Work in Progress is a comically extended shout of "Wazzup!," and she buys her nephew a megaphone for his birthday, but being loud and fun masks her inner turmoil. She feels totally unaccomplished as a self-described "fat, queer dyke" with OCD. And though she has yet to decide on a suicide method, 180 almonds are key. They're a "gift" from an insipid co-worker as a commentary on her weight, and Abby decides to use them to mark time: Throw out one almond per day until there are none left, and if things haven't gotten better, then it's time to pack it all in.
McEnany is an improv comic and the series, created with director Tim Mason and produced by co-showrunner Lilly Wachowski, is semi-autobiographical. Scenes are often broken up by title cards that list everything from the day of the week to the almond count to a public bathroom's capacity, with frequent detours into flashbacks of past relationships and confrontations. These situations are heightened, laced with humor that's both frank and self-deprecating. In one sequence, Abby insists on having sex in total darkness despite multiple resulting injuries, and we see her cycle through various slings and bandages over various body parts.
Work in Progress never loses sight of its premise, though it remains bleak without beating you over the head. After all, Abby copes through humor and, often, by yelling at people. She has boxes upon boxes of journals packed in a barricaded closet, expressing her feelings almost in spite of herself, and to the point where she speaks to a cellphone wallpaper pic of her dead therapist. McEnany is such an immediately gripping comedic presence because she's unwilling to back down even when confrontations spiral out of control or she initially faints from the stress. Her suicide scheme, for example, is meant to continue for months while building slowly to a direct, hilariously petty response to her almond-purveying co-worker: "In my note, I'm gonna tell that woman that the almonds were what pushed me over the edge."
Things do seem to get better for Abby. She finds unexpected romance with Chris (Theo Germaine), a trans man half her age. He pushes her into situations where she isn't totally comfortable, like going to a nightclub or confronting SNL alum Julia Sweeney (playing herself), whose most famous character on that show, the androgynous Pat, became a reference point for bullying gender non-conforming people like Abby. The first few episodes of the season don't yet characterize Chris beyond some catalyst for Abby's change, but the two have such a charming chemistry that their connection feels believable.
More than the considerable pain at the center of Work in Progress, you can feel the joy of new love, of potentially moving past the baggage of the past. But all the while, the almonds loom in the background, at first spread out on a table and later consigned to a jar but never truly gone. It's a sobering, subtle way to tackle mental illness because Abby doesn't throw out her whole plan upon meeting Chris; the possibility of death is still there like a backup, due to her uncertainty. Things may be better, but how long will they last? Like the flashbacks and all those journals stored away in Abby's closet, the baggage is never totally gone.
Cast: Abby McEnany, Karin Anglin, Celeste Pechous, Julia Sweeney, Theo Germaine, Armand Fields Network: Showtime
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text:
Young people with inflammatory bowel diseases are at increased risk of fracture
A team of scientists from the University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne have shown that young people with inflammatory bowel diseases have low bone mass and poor bone architecture compared to healthy people of the same age, placing them at increased risk of fracture.
Inflammatory bowel disease is a general term referring to any disease characterized by inflammation of the bowel. Two of the most common disorders are Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Patients with these disorders are at increased risk for bone loss and osteoporotic fractures, due to a variety of factors including poor absorption of nutrients by the damaged intestine (including calcium, vitamin D, protein) and treatment with glucocorticoid medications.
The findings presented at the World Congress on Osteoporosis 2010 (IOF WCO-ECCEO10), currently taking place in Florence, Italy until May 8, 2010, show that the increased fracture risk during growth is due not just to lower BMD, but to changes in the microarchitecture of the trabecular bone tissue. Trabecular bone (also known as cancellous or 'spongy' bone) is the less dense and stiff part of bone that typically occurs at the ends of long bones, close to joints and within the interior of the spine. Doctors treating younger people with inflammatory bowel diseases need to include prevention measures in the overall care strategy, including ensuring an adequate calcium and vitamin D intake either through diet or supplements, and attention to adequate weight-bearing exercise.
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