New Rule for Real Time with Bill Maher: When they run the same show two consecutive weeks perhaps they can call it a “repeat” instead of an "encore presentation.”
When looking for something to stream, Hania will always gravitate toward murder mysteries, while I much prefer spy stories. The other day, reading The Spectator, I came across a column by the English playwright David Hare who noted that Margaret Drabble once proclaimed that “boys like spy stories because they’re about derring-do” (I’m quoting Hare paraphrasing Drabble) while “girls prefer detective stories because they’re about psychology.”
I used to like awards shows but now they just remind me of how different my tastes are from those of most Americans. I watched a few episodes of The Bear (too over-the-top; nobody is that mad that consistently) and Bad Reindeer (too bizarre). Shogun I have no interest in. My favorite TV shows are/were My Brilliant Friend (which I assume wasn’t nominated because of the year break), Curb Your Enthusiasm (which at least got nominated), and Real Time with Bill Maher (nada).
The man behind Bad Reindeer, in one of his three acceptance speeches, praised the fact that the studios are taking risks on shows with unconventional premises. But the real risk, it seems, would be in backing a show about the everyday lives of ordinary people.
Catching up on my reading, I came across Richard Brody’s review in The New Yorker of Kevin Costner’s new western Horizon: An American Saga, and was struck by the critic’s description of one of the characters as a “sex worker.” It made me wonder if the saloon had a mixologist.
Last night I watched Bill Maher’s conversation with Jerry Seinfeld, on the former’s podcast Club Random, and there were two moments that I could really relate to. The first was when Maher talked about writing the New Rule that ends his show every week – how he loves “tinkering” with it until it’s exactly where he wants it to be – and the second was when he gave Seinfeld a map of the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, the layout of which I still have in my head, having attended five times as a kid. As Maher suggested, it was an age – and we were of an age – when corporations were still seen as forces for good.
Tuesday night I watched The Zone of Interest, the excellent film about the fictionalized home life of the commandant of Auschwitz, whose house abuts the wall of the concentration camp.
The next day, in The Spectator, I read in Charles Moore’s column that he too had recently watched the film. And he had wondered why, along with the warnings of “smoking" and "alcohol use,” the word “genocide” hadn’t been added.