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Fargo, Watchmen, and the New Television History of America
The first episode of this new season of Fargo, now airing on FX and Hulu, begins with a history lesson. It’s not the sort of lesson you’d find in a high school history textbook. It concerns the growth and changing leadership of the Kansas City underworld from the very start of the twentieth century up to 1950, when the main body of the show takes place. It shows how the criminal elements of that city were initially under the control of a Jewish crime syndicate until the Irish came to town and made a deal straight out of Feudalism. This deal results, inevitably from the tone of the show, in…
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Archer is the Middle Child of Adult Animation. I’m So Happy He’s Finally Awake.
Archer’s back. And he’s funnier than he’s been in at least five years. It’s honestly a relief to see. After three coma seasons, a mixed PI season that also involved an abrupt (and quickly forgotten) relocation to Los Angeles, and an oddly bitter return to the spy formula in Season 6; Archer in Season 11 is finally awake and (way more important) finally having fun again. Archer, as a television show, occupies an interesting middle ground in adult animation. It came in 2009, after the initial wave in the 90s and early 2000s that created the titans of the genre like The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, Futurama, and King…
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A Brightness Long Ago Says Magic isn’t Required for Fantasy. It May Be Right.
What makes a fantasy novel a fantasy novel? I know, and I apologize. What a stupid, pretentious question, right? We all know what makes a fantasy novel different from a work of historical fiction or science fiction or a standard coming-of-age tale/YA novel. We all read Harry Potter. It’s magic. Magic is what makes a fantasy novel truly a fantasy novel. Whether that magic is produced via wands and boarding schools like the aforementioned Harry Potter, or through color and light absorbed from the sun like the Lightbringer Series, or through the many complex rules of Brandon Sanderson’s various ‘hard-magic systems’, or through the strange mix of geothermal energy and…
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The Boys Will Show You the Truth: Superheroes are Terrifying.
Imagine you are a criminal. I know, I know. You’re not. You’re a good person with hopes and dreams and you pay your taxes on time. You never speed in school zones. But, just for a second, imagine it. Let’s say you and your crew (cause of course you have a crew) have decided to commit a standard starter-crime in a comic book universe. You’re going to rob a bank. The reasons why you choose to rob a bank, or even why that particular bank on that particular day in that particular part of Metropolis/Gotham/Spiderman’s New York; don’t particularly matter. They matter to you of course. Maybe you are simply…
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Bill & Ted Face the Music is the Sequel America Needs Now
Sometimes a movie just turns out better than it should. The premise is tired, or it’s a sequel to a series that everyone (probably rightly) thought was long dead, or it’s made by a director or studio that you have deservedly lost all confidence in. Yet it works. Something about it, the writing, the way all the main actors commit to their roles, the fact that updated effects actually managed to make a difference. It just works. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a great example of this; a pointless cash-grab decades-late sequel that’s somehow hilarious and just plain enjoyable to watch. The first Pirates of the Caribbean; a movie…
