THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup January 2025

“What are you watching?” is pretty much the automatic question I get when I tell people what I do for a living. Usually I lie to people so I don’t get into a massive debate about the police while I’m trying to hang out. But to you, dear patron, I shall never lie!

January’s been a rough combo of being sick with the flu and also America being sick with fascism, but here’s what we got:

Squid Game (Season 2) — Netflix
CW: lots of gun-related violence

A lot of people, understandably, were not excited for season 2 of Squid Game. While the first had been a cultural phenomenon, the way it had been turned into a brand by Netflix and willfully misread by bad faith commentators. Plus, it’s basically been completely stripped of its commentary by the fact that infamous YouTuber Mr. Beast has launched his own reality show on Amazon that is virtually indistinguishable from the show—a glass case of money hanging from the ceiling and Mr. Beast himself dressed in an eerily similar costume to that on the show.

But all of that is exactly why I was interested in the second season of Squid Game. The creator, Hwang Dong-hyuk, who famously received no residuals or IP ownership in his contract with Netflix, certainly had tried to make a show critiquing capitalism. Perhaps this would be an interesting reflection on the ways in which capitalism is so adept at co-opting criticism and dissent into itself. Perhaps there would be some kind of grappling with the role of art and entertainment and the limitations of those mediums to change the world.

Instead, the second season of Squid Game was close to a beat-for-beat remake of the first, which is still interesting in its own way. Its message was largely the same—economic desperation will make people do anything to survive and that is exploited by the rich and powerful under the illusion of choice and freedom—but so was the way in which that message was packaged. Despite being rampantly misunderstood and having a chance to correct the record, the creator ultimately tried to say the same things in the same way. 

The very existence of a second season is likely because Hwang was screwed over so hard on the first season economically, rather than out of any artistic impulse. Yet, I still can’t help but think that Hwang missed an opportunity here to address how even though he had “won” as a filmmaker—creating a commercial and critical global success—he was still forced into more labor, exploited by the very system that promised salvation.

Like Hwang, the main character of Squid Game, Gi-hun, reluctantly returns to the games, but their motivations couldn’t be more different. Gi-hun seeks to upend the entire structure of the games, while Hwang seeks to get some of that “blood money” Gi-hun rejects. 

A third and final season is coming this summer, and while I’m not holding my breath, I am interested to see how Hwang squares his own experience of exploitation (first with the 2009 financial crisis and now with Netflix) with his role within it.

The Diplomat (Season 1) — Netflix
CW: west wing adjacent

When I first got sick, I thought “Hey this is perfect, I can just finally finish the last season of The West Wing!” Unfortunately, the next week was a complete fever dream and I was unable to watch as closely as I wanted to, so I had to settle for The Diplomat—the Netflix show created by Debora Cahn, former writer for the post-Sorkin West Wing seasons and showrunner for the final two seasons of Homeland. In preparing my end of 2024 lists, The Diplomat kept coming up, and given how much I loved Keri Russell in The Americans, I was down to give it a shot.

Revolving around the American ambassador to the UK, the show positions itself as more progressive than either of Cahn’s former shows, painting Russell’s central character as someone who holds a significant amount of anger over being drawn into the Iraq War, especially given that it was sold as a lie. She gets it, you see. She doesn’t want to do the American Imperialism™ thing. For example, she clashes frequently with the British Prime Minister as she attempts to stop a military intervention in Iran.

But ultimately, the show is kind of the worst of both worlds, combining the elitism of The West Wing with the casual imperialism of Homeland. For the show, world peace is a web of interpersonal relationships between career professionals. It can only be upheld by this diplomat caste, with little to no thought concerning democratic input. Despite a history of geopolitical fuck-ups the show is willing to acknowledge, it purely portrays the Americans as the rational actors, cautioning against intervention, and positioning them as benevolent, paternalistic actors.

The Expanse (Seasons 1-4) — Amazon Prime
CW: some space violence, based beltalowdas

This is the first time I’ve revisited the series since it ended, and my first time rewatching the first couple of seasons since I made a video about the show way back in the before-times.

I’ve often thought of The Expanse as the show most like The Wire, focused on viewing complicated systems through as many different perspectives as possible, and then depicting how disruptions and conflict can metastasize through that interconnectedness. To me, it’s the kind of story that can only be told in a series, where you have the time to explore combined with the human urge to empathize with whoever we see on our screens.

The Expanse remains one of the best explorations of class I’ve seen on TV, abstracting it just enough to be accessible to a lay audience, while remaining true to that mission throughout. It is often easy to see where each faction is coming from, even when you may disagree or outwardly oppose the actions and aims of some factions. And by some factions I mostly mean the Inners.

Watching the Belter struggle for freedom and independence from their oppressors has also been interesting (and much more fun to think about) in the context of both the Israeli campaign in Gaza and having just recently finished Say Nothing and reading more about the Irish Republican Army. Hmm I wonder why I’m so drawn to stories about resistance groups recently….