The Bests of 2024 (So Far)

I always put together some kind of half-year reflection. I thought I might cover a larger breadth this year than last and include more categories. These are my choices for the Best Songs, Album, Credit Sequence, Performance, New Series, and Movie this year (so far). I’m not trying to come up with any pretend objective nonsense. These are my choices, based on what most wowed me, what feels most needed in the world to me.

Best Song #1
“Meet the Grahams” by Kendrick Lamar

The defining musical moment of the year has arguably been Kendrick Lamar’s very one-sided rap feud against Drake, where calling out Drake’s grooming of girls finally seems to have stuck in the public consciousness.

Lamar’s “Not Like Us” is the most playable song that came out of it, and gave us the lasting description of Drake, “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A-minorrrrr”.

I slightly prefer “Meet the Grahams”. There are problematic elements in it, obviously. I get tired of derogatory language toward women, but thankfully that’s limited to one line. Even if I’d want one or two changes, I have to admit how surgical the song is as a whole.

It’s one of the most lyrical eviscerations of a human being imaginable, a piece of musical horror that sees Lamar reciting letters to Drake and his family members (including an alleged hidden daughter). It’s all placed over a driving minor chord that repeats to the point of hellishness. The result is relentlessly dark, and if not for Lamar’s unique delivery and the subtly jazzy production, it’s tonally something I’d much sooner expect from a group like clipping.

In other words, it’s not the kind of entry you’d ever expect from Kendrick Lamar, but it still demonstrates the precision of his lyrics, and it employs several meta-layers: the repeated minor chord, literalizing the epistolary nature of a modern rap feud, making the conversation larger by addressing the enablers of Drake, and having it prepared to drop a mere 20 minutes after Drake’s “Family Matters” – suggesting without the aid of any lyric that Drake’s own claims are simply projection.

Best Song #2
“Rouge” by YU-KA

And now for something lighter. I’m a huge fan of new jack, which is an R&B-swing-pop hybrid that loves walking bass lines and synth hits. It saw its heyday in the 80s and 90s with performers like Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul, whose “Straight Up” remains one of the clearest examples.

New jack has hung around without really having a ton of evolution. I’m not sure it needs it – its complex approach to syncopation keeps it sounding fresh and has a habit of fusing its disparate elements together in the same way vaporwave art does. It’s clearly of-a-time, but feels separated from the norms of that time. It sounds like 90s music imagining 2020s music for a future that never happened.

“Rouge” by YU-KA is ridiculously listenable – I’ve easily played it 20+ times. It’s classical new jack because of the push-and-pull between the vocalist, that anchor of a bass line, and the aggressively grouped synth hits. They strain to go in different directions during the chorus before slamming back together again when we get to the verse. Yet it also feels like a modernized take because of a driving rhythm, a more intense delivery, some video game-esque riffs, and the unexpected background vocals.

There’s probably a more accurate term for when it’s done on a bass, but one of the little details I love most is that early glissando the bassist does at the end of the first bridge – it sounds like a record scratching, and serves as a re-introduction of the walking bass line. It’s later echoed at half-speed by the backing vocal around 1:13 when the verse shifts away from the bass line and momentarily toward those backing vocals – that now grow in number for the next bridge.

It’s an incredibly clever way to signal backing changes that get a little introduction of their own before adding in with everything else again, and it makes the song feel like it’s escalating toward something as it goes. I love how this is written. It’s a fun bop, but it really demonstrates the nuance and complexity that makes new jack feel like future music from an alternate reality.

Best Album
Prelude to Ecstacy by The Last Dinner Party

This hooked me with “Burn Alive”, which starts out as this emotive, gothic, Marissa Nadler-esque dream pop but increasingly shifts into lead singer Abigail Morris absolutely belting out notes.

The comparisons are numerous – Florence + the Machine, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Kate Bush are popular ones, but I’d throw Queen and Anna Calvi in there, too. And it’s wacky that they’re all accurate, depending on whether a song is in a raw emotive phase, going dark and hedonistic art pop, hitting the brakes with sharp staccato choruses, or showing off Morris’ overpowering vocals.

Every song has these shifts. It’s not that this changes song to song, it’s that it changes as quickly as verse to verse in a way that still works. It treats chamber pop as if it were anthem rock designed to be played in a stadium, which: huh?

I also love that this entire first album has centered on celebratory queerness. That’s not exactly new in British music, but Prelude to Ecstacy combines that notion with the COVID experience of being conscious of mortality and finality. The unique result in tone seems not to just celebrate queerness, but to envision a Golden Age, an if-not-now-when, and that is a combination of themes that does feel very unique to the last few years.

CW: next entry contains imagery of genocide

Best Credit Sequence
Gyeongseong Creature

From the very opening, you can tell “Gyeongseong Creature” is something haunting and unique. It’s been a controversial show, setting realistic depictions of the Japanese genocide of Koreans in the 30s and 40s next to a pulpy supernatural mystery, beautiful fight scenes, and a schmaltzy love story. I understand the pushback on it, but I’ve also seen so many projects process and reflect on the Holocaust in part by folding it into other genres. It’s not always ideal, but many indigenous Central and South American experiences of colonialism are turned over through fantasy and horror. I’m not in a place to say whether that’s right or wrong for Korean work, but because those are the frameworks I have, I do have a hard time criticizing “Gyeongseong Creature” for this when it’s clearly still viewing inhumane actions as inhumane – much like Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” or “The Devil’s Backbone”.

This attempt at fusing the real to the genre is done exceptionally well in the unsettling opening credits. They veer from the supernatural to the historical and back in a way that reflects the show at its best. Part of what haunts in the show itself is the supernatural becoming easier to grasp than the real and inhumane. What really happened feels like the cosmic horror that the mind can’t fully comprehend, the part that doesn’t belong in this world. As horrifying as the supernatural images in the credits are, the one that hits hardest is the soldiers dragging the dead child – because that’s a horror we know exists, yet is the one we spend decades still trying to process.

Best Series Performance
Maya Erskine, Donald Glover, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

There’s no separating these two for me. There’s no saying one’s better than the other because they both do so much work to let the other shine. The complete rethink of the “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” premise gives us two of the rawest, most realistic performances of a troubled relationship. It just also happens to be taking place during clandestine missions for an agency neither one can trust.

There’s a scene where Erskine is opposite Parker Posey, and it feels like a genuine handing of the baton from one legendary indie comedy actress to another. It occurs as tension mounts, but toward what we haven’t learned yet. It’s emblematic of the show’s ability to layer dry humor over increasing tension to realize the unsettling unspoken as it careens toward disaster. We cringe away at the social awkwardness, and keep looking because we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Glover offers an incredibly realized character who’s exceptionally skilled in this trade, but probably doesn’t have the caution and self-preservation to survive long in it. He trusts too much, he’s honest too often, and he improvises too guiltily. It’s a complex portrayal that’s rare in the genre.

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” explores the morality of spies who aren’t always fully up to the task, especially when the tasks they carry out are so inexplicable. There’s no tracing their actions to an outcome, there are just actions and events detached from impact. Are they doing right for the world? Are they doing wrong for it? Who knows?

But it’s also exploring a relationship between a disaffected, emotionally numb woman who can’t connect and who compartmentalizes her morals away, and a deeply feeling man who knows exactly who he is but can’t compartmentalize anything enough to endure.

The combination of these two ideas shouldn’t work, but what comes out of it is something exceptionally human and utterly unique. That’s precisely because these are two actors whose versatility easily embraces such rangy concepts.

Best New Series
Fallout

Simply put, “Fallout” is an exceptional modern satire. Its use of Americana and kitsch in an apocalypse that’s largely business as usual lampoons corporate exploitation and the exceptionalist narratives we cling to just to get through the day. People and cockroaches and whatnot might survive the apocalypse, but what survives most intact is conflict and the exploitation that drives it.

It perfectly embodies the video game series on which it’s based, not only by capturing that dark and witty sense of satire and poking fun at moral ambiguity, but by centering itself on concepts of its characters’ agency. This is what the best video game adaptations – such as “The Last of Us” and “Arcane” – have grasped as they shift from movies to series formats.

Video games as a medium give players the ability to explore concepts of agency. Every play-through by every player is slightly different, even for a very linear game. That theme of choice, agency, the relationship between action and hesitation, being frozen by choice or making the wrong one but committing to it and making it work, these are the experiences that video game-to-screen adaptations completely dismissed for so long. They adapted stories alone and thought them thin, barely coming up with enough for 90-minute movies, instead of also adapting the act of exploring a world and the motivation for the choices you make inside of it. That’s what video game adaptation has finally gotten right in the last few years and why these 10-hour series adaptations are filled to bursting.

It’s a perfect time to see “Fallout” adapted because its themes are based on how individuals and entire communities can be manipulated, re-written, capitalized, and set against each other through both mythology and media narrative. The apocalypse as a setting means that our modern manipulations become their mythologized ones, ways of thinking that are then built upon with new manipulations. It’s an exploration of how norms are shifted, not just in the moment through shock doctrine, but how those big, immediate movements justify themselves through centuries of constantly re-written cultural mythology and the endless wars they birth. That might sound a little silly, but how’s Ukraine looking? How’s Sudan looking? How’s Gaza looking? The youngest of those conflicts traces back at least 100 years in cycles of eruption and preparation, the oldest at least 1,500 years.

“Fallout” as a franchise has always explored how these cycles endure, and satirizes our enabling of them. Yeah, there’s lots of action and the equivalent of a cool zombie cowboy – the show’s hilarious, but it manages through laughter to make us look at some of the most disturbing human mistakes we keep repeating. Its unique way of disarming you to make you look at that abyss can feel like being in a delirium, rapturous and disoriented.

Best Film
Love Lies Bleeding

“Monkey Man”. “Furiosa”. “Dune: Part 2”. It’s been a stellar year for vengeance. But the film that wowed me most was a dark, $10 million 80s noir starring Kristen Stewart. She plays Lou, a gym manager who falls for Jackie, a bodybuilder passing through town. They start a romance, complicated by steroids, an FBI investigation into Lou’s estranged father (Ed Harris), and the domestic violence her sister (Jena Malone) is suffering.

This is some of the best work those three have done, so it’s even more impressive that the standout is Katy O’Brian’s Jackie. We don’t get her backstory in any detail, but the writing and performance give us everything that’s resulted from it. It creates a kind of negative space, a silhouette of backstory that we can tell the shape of. She is anger in search of a target, desperate for agency in her own story, and the targets she chooses to topple are cathartic. I’d write a separate heading for best film performance, but I’d only write what I just did.

Director and co-writer Rose Glass is a name to watch. Her previous film was another A24 production, “Saint Maud”, which earned two BAFTA nominations. The setting, color, and tone of her first two films are wildly different, but she’s given us two visually audacious, confrontational pieces that are sometimes darkly funny and sometimes border nightmare. She’s written and directed riveting performances out of her ensembles in both, exploring mania, obsession, and self-destruction as metaphorical responses to generational systemic violence.

The wildest thing about “Love Lies Bleeding” is that I can write all that and then tell you it’s one of the sweetest movies I’ve ever seen about two people seeing each other for who they are, in large part because they’re able to do so unfettered by the harm the world wants for them. Its most violent moments are sometimes its most tender, because when the systems that hold them in place respond violently, they finally have in each other the strength to respond in kind. “Love Lies Bleeding” is an incredible film.

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New Shows + Movies by Women — The Year So Far

The ebb and flow of titles is always unpredictable, so I thought I’d do something a little different this week. Last week saw 13 new shows and movies by women. This week sees just one, “Past Lies” from Spain. It’s frustrating when that happens, but rather than just pitch a single title up here, I’ll take the opportunity to share some standout shows by women I’ve seen so far from this year. First, let’s tell you about “Past Lies”:

NEW SERIES

Past Lies (Hulu)
directed by Julia de Paz, Clara Roquet

A group of successful women are shaken when the 25-year-old remains of a missing high school classmate are found in Mallorca, where they shared their senior trip. Star Elena Anaya may be familiar to American audiences from her lead role in “The Skin I Live In”.

Director Clara Roquet won Best New Director and was nominated for Original Screenplay at the 2022 Goya Awards, Spain’s equivalent to the Oscars. Director and co-writer Julia de Paz was nominated for Adapted Screenplay the same year.

“Past Lies” premieres on Hulu tomorrow, Friday May 10.

THIS YEAR’S SHOWS SO FAR

Links go to my reviews, let’s get in:

“Fallout” (Amazon) is one of the best shows of the year. It’s an incredibly biting and visually beautiful post-apocalyptic dark comedy co-showrun by Geneva Robertson-Dworet. It works as an adventure, as action, as science-fiction, as character drama, and especially as a dark comedy. Watching it kind of broke me because as fun as it is, its retrofuturist satire bites deeply into modern anxieties.

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” (Amazon) is a spy comedy showrun by Francesca Sloane. Dry humor in an unsettling atmosphere makes for an incredibly unique feeling – the whole show is quirky but tense. There are multiple memorable guest stars, which is usually a feature I don’t care much about, but here it’s used very well and in ways that sometimes undermine the concept. Maya Erskine and Donald Glover star, and the pair act the hell out of it.

Those two are pretty intense. If you need something lighter but still very worthwhile, “Renegade Nell” (Disney+) is a really fun historical adventure/comedy about a woman forced to become a thief. It’s showrun by Sally Wainwright. I’d compare it to a period “Buffy” with much higher production values, or a series-level “Pirates of the Caribbean” without the baggage. If the first episode doesn’t hook you, you are unhookable.

“Death and Other Details” (Hulu) is fun if you can get along with its period-mystery-in-modern-times vibe. Mandy Patinkin plays the wacky detective. It’s co-showrun by Heidi Cole McAdams. Its quirk might come off as overly precious to some, but I ended up liking its diorama-esque stylization. It acts like a stage comedy, which is something I look for, but you’ll be able to tell pretty quickly if it’s your thing or not.

And of course, “Abbott Elementary” (Hulu) is still a great comedy co-showrun by Quinta Brunson. The writing has an incredibly good feel for its ensemble and where their strengths lie. Usually a sitcom gets its good writing in early seasons and the ensemble develop their timing in later ones, but “Abbott Elementary” has enjoyed both right off the bat.

I’m working on “Unnatural” (Netflix) right now. I loved Nogi Akiko’s police series “MIU404” because it presented a way that police can help people from a non-antagonistic perspective, and it focused on both large and small cases. Not everything was high drama, life-or-death stakes. Its sensibilities were completely different from an American cop show. “MIU404” is still on Netflix. I highly recommend it, and I’m thrilled Nogi’s prior series “Unnatural” – about a woman leading a forensics team investigating odd deaths – is now there, too.

On my watchlist are the second season of Tima Shomali’s Jordanian drama “AlRawabi School for Girls” (Netflix). The first season was incredibly salient, punctuating an intriguing interpersonal drama about bullying with some rattling scenes.

I also need to watch Korean vigilante mystery “A Killer Paradox” (Netflix) written by Kim Da Min, and I keep hearing really good things about Vivienne Medrano’s animated musical-in-hell series “Hazbin Hotel” (Amazon) so I’ll be checking that out.

In this feature, I limit the weekly coverage to series showrun or directed by women (or else I couldn’t do the amount of research I have to do weekly). But I do want to highlight how good of a year it’s been for anime written (or based on work written) by women:

“The Apothecary Diaries” (Crunchyroll) is the best mystery going for a second year in a row. It follows Maomao, the daughter of an apothecary in Imperial China. She wants to remain anonymous and live a quiet life of testing poisons on herself, but her knowledge of chemistry and medicine means she can make connections between clues others can’t. The mysteries are balanced between small and large, between incidental and intentional, and its protagonist is a unique blend of tenacious and lazy that you usually don’t see – especially for women characters. “The Apothecary Diaries” is based on a light novel series by Hyuuga Natsu.

“Delicious in Dungeon” (Netflix) is a rangy fantasy series that tells its story through cooking (of fantasy creatures), written by Ueno Kimiko and based on a manga series by Kui Ryouko. Its talented but sometimes bumbling adventuring party is a familiar anchor of fantasy, but done very well here. As they set out to resurrect one of the party’s sisters before a dragon fully digests her, what makes the show unique is how it world-builds. They’re broke, so they cook monsters along the way. Hunting and cooking requires knowledge of the dungeon’s ecology and environmental impacts, which in turn reveal complex relationships between the world and its magic. It’s deeply thought out and surprisingly engrossing. And while it’s not primarily an action series, its action scenes are phenomenal.

“7th Time Loop” (Crunchyroll) is one of the best uses of time loop fiction I’ve seen, about a woman who repeats five years, each time taking a different career. Every time, a war that envelops the world causes her death, and she restarts that five year chunk. She keeps the skills and knowledge she accumulates each go-round, and makes it her mission to use these to stop the war. It’s written by Machida Touko and based on a light novel series by Amekawa Touko. I would’ve preferred it got an extra episode to give the ending some more room to breathe, but it has such incredible character writing along the way that it’s a minor flaw. There are scenes here that are so literary and layered they should be studied if you’re even remotely interested in storytelling.

“A Sign of Affection” (Crunchyroll) is a superb and tranquil romance between a deaf woman and a man who learns sign language. What I like about it is that things don’t come easy – and I don’t mean the usual trope of dragging the will they-won’t they out. What I mean is that both characters question if they truly like each other or simply see in each other an idea they want to embody in themselves. Yuki’s been sheltered and likes that Itsuomi travels the world. Does she like him, or just that he represents a wider world out there? Itsuomi travels because he seeks out new experiences. Does he like her, or is she simply a new experience that will fade once familiar? The great gentleness and care for the other with which they figure this out already provides the answer, but even if the anime itself is pretty sentimental, it’s refreshing to see this realistic complexity and sense of responsibility be the core of the story. It’s also a really good view on a man doing the work to unlearn assumptions and understand someone else’s perspective. Itsuomi doesn’t automatically know how to understand and relate to someone who’s deaf, and he makes clear mistakes, but he does the work to unlearn bad habits and replace them with recognition and communication.

This last one is current season, so only halfway in, but “Train to the End of the World” (Crunchyroll) is a very hidden gem. It fuses wholesome with disturbing as four girls drive a train through an incredibly artistic and metaphorical post-apocalypse to find their lost friend. It’s cosmic horror if the power of very stubborn friendship was enough to fight your way through it, and holding onto that in the face of unprecedented weirdness has its own way of speaking to our times. It’s written by Yokote Michiko.

Take a look at new shows + movies by women from past weeks.

If you enjoy what I write, subscribe to my Patreon! It helps with the time and resources to write more features like this one.

The Wonderlands We Need — Fallout, Star Rail, Lethal Company

CW: discussion of suicide, domestic and workplace abuse
Spoiler Warning for a “Honkai Star Rail” sidequest

This morning I read about a stabbing massacre at an Australian mall. This evening I read about the Iranian drone strike on Israel, an escalation that shouldn’t happen in reaction to an escalation that shouldn’t have happened in reaction to an escalation that shouldn’t have happened ad nauseam, to which someone is likely to escalate. And to escape, I watched a show about the end of the world. “Fallout” is giddy. It’s cathartic. It’s simple to watch every fear transpire, and imagine that humanity will still have the capacity to laugh. Maybe that’s the American catharsis, laughter as a buffer against breaking. I find myself drawn to so much comedy these days. “Fallout” is a place to imagine we’ve already broken and yet still laugh.

The show’s great, funny, colorfully macabre, cynically absurd, a demented displacement of 60s kitsch into a wasteland so void that the kitsch is all that defines the survivors. Lucy’s grown up in a vault where the privileged paid to hide after the bomb dropped. Maximus is a hopeful aspirant in a religious order of mechanized soldiers. The Ghoul is woken up every few decades when there’s a bounty large enough to warrant it. All three search the wasteland for a fugitive scientist.

I’ll tell you about how I felt while watching it, but bear with me; I’ve never reviewed an existential crisis before.

Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass

photo by Kaelan Burkett, Art Forum

I once saw a contemporary art installation by Trenton Doyle Hancock called Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass. It featured towering mounds you could walk into and under, each built from decades of jettisoned trash. Toys and widgets and disused knick-knacks, furniture of bygone eras, out-of-date rugs and wallpaper, scrap all cleaned and well-maintained, organized on shelves inside, and the mounds echoed slightly. The colored walkway that led one to the next was interspersed with: a cut-out living room paused in mid-evening, rows and rows of boardgames, a picket fence front yard behind which self-standing Halloween costumes were caught frozen on their way to trick-or treat.

It felt like some alien archaeologist had stumbled on a dead planet, collected our discarded refuse, and organized it into a children’s museum, defining the footprint we once made by the landfill we produced. It felt like a slow loss of hope – instead of staring at the stars and feeling the peace and wonder of being infinitesimal, to stare at endless dolls and plastic balls and one-use discards and feel like each human life added up to our contribution to a chunk of landfill.

Between those two things, there is a tension. As a Millennial, we were taught to think we could change the world. The world tried to nip this in the bud early and often, in ways that repeatedly proved why we were taught that way. And yet the times when we do create a change, our impostor syndrome is so deeply ingrained that our first reaction is to take the credit that community efforts deserve and grant it instead to a celebrity or politician. We were taught to wonder, even as we stare at the world and feel that wonder slipping away bit by bit. We still know the right thing to do is to try to change things, even as we fear we’re tilting at windmills and become more isolated. Just getting to the starting point on every effort feels more deeply bogged in mud every year. We’ve spent eight years bolstering against waves of fascism and nearly triple that knowing that our futures were traded away for oil profits, private military contractors, and the militarization of police.

‘Envision a Rose Forthcoming’, “Honkai Star Rail”

There’s a quest in “Honkai Star Rail” I recently played. It’s called ‘Envision a Rose Forthcoming’. On a journey through the stars, you stop at a tourist destination called Penacony. It was once a prison, now repurposed as a hotel, where you come to participate in a dreamscape. You meet a shopgirl named Cocona, who works in the dream, underpaid, disillusioned, abused, ambition carved away. To learn about her past, you dive into her dreams within the dreamscape. There are two moments of choice within this quest:

The first is a false dialogue option where Cocona confronts her parents. You can choose her independence, to continue studying music, to take a risk…but it’s not a real option. The dialogue repeats. Cocona’s parents have a name to maintain, a history of abuse to keep her in line. They demand that she owes them. You can choose her independence again, but the option disappears. The dialogue repeats. The only choice left is to stay under thumb. Anything else was an illusion. She has other options for escape, but as they disappear and she slips behind at work, her boss and coworkers become abusive.

The second choice comes when she stands on the ledge of a building. You can grab Cocona or let her go. You’re in her dreamscape, itself inside of a constructed dreamscape, confused about what will happen either way. Words erupt physically out of the air around her, suggesting the choice is a metaphor you’ve misunderstood, questioning if the kinder thing is to just let go. I lost count of how many times it asks, of how many dialogue choices you have to make, of how many layers deep and re-phrasings try to confuse, convince, or outright trick you. Is letting go a metaphor about her feeling freedom that she’ll carry from the dream to reality, or is it just releasing the one thin tether of care that still connects her to life? Do we use that earlier false choice as a guide when we’re six layers deep, and guess that holding on is a false choice we should just give up on? Every mechanic in the game tries to convince you to let go. It captures how tenuous that moment is, however fair or unfair, to be that one thread a person has back to continuing. It captures how tenuous those choices are, how doing the right thing five times but not the sixth can be the hair’s breadth between someone living or dying.

The quest has two endings derived from how your actions in Cocona’s dream influence what she chooses to do in the real world. The sadder one is what you’d expect, and it happens even if you chose to hold on five times but failed the sixth. I’m glad I’m stubborn and get angry at games in these moments, choosing to do what I would do…or what I hope I would do. And yet, how often can any of us do the right thing six times in a row, or ten, or dozens, when the effort wears us down and our impostor syndrome’s already told us the choices we make have no consequence?

‘Envision a Rose Forthcoming’ is the most impactful moment I’ve played in a game. Something from it galvanized in me like a stone. It’s some strange melancholy housed in the middle of a game that balances Pratchett-esque humor and digging through trash cans against towering political trade-offs and somber reflections on those sacrificed to achieve them. From that bit of storytelling: the acknowledgment that if we do the right thing all but once or even all the time, or even perfectly and make no misstep, it still might not be enough, that if we change the world dozens of times and fail only the once, it still might be one step short.

I can’t write a review of “Fallout” properly because what it makes me feel is existential crisis. In its unreal, jokey vision of the post-apocalypse, there is also the crystallization of a sense of doom so ingrained and generational and ever-present that we treat it in the most realistic way we know – we practice laughing at it, not out of ignorance, but out of recognition, as if preparing for its inevitability, honing our coping mechanisms, leveling up what makes us endure the breaking. I can only write the shape of the things around it, the other pieces of art that shift in me as “Fallout” nestles down between them.

Misery Loves the Company – “Lethal Company”

“Lethal Company” was an out-of-nowhere hit last year, an indie multiplayer game about players hopping from moon to moon. They collect scrap for a company, to feed a voracious monster they must visit every three runs. The quota keeps on going up until it’s nearly impossible to hit in just three landings, and you’re charged by the company for every little piece of equipment, to travel to each moon, and for whenever a player goes missing. Fail a quota and the game is over. You restart the cycle from the beginning, and the only reward (thus far) is to achieve higher quotas and feel more stress about them.

There aren’t big spikes of unfairness; the game is just a massive plateau of it. The procedural generation means hundreds of thousands of level layouts are possible, including many unworkable ones. It may spawn a hallways full of landmines and monsters that cuts off access to an entire section of the facility you’re scavenging, essentially torpedoing that landing. The facilities are labyrinths, most scrap is deep inside them, and multiple monsters are far faster than you are.

It’s a game that intentionally uglies itself and is built around players being at an enormous disadvantage. So why did it become the most popular paid game at the end of 2023? “Lethal Company” speaks to the call of the void. There’s a strong possibility that people alive today will see a hard shift in how this planet lives – whether through economic crisis, the spark of nationalist fervor, or simply climate change proceeding apace if we can’t fully beat the first two. There’s a sense in us that what we do…may not ultimately matter much.

“Lethal Company” offers the call of the void as a toy. That may seem like a horrible idea at first. Why should we play with such a horrific concept that lurks at the backs of our minds? Yet play is coping. Play is practice. Play is anticipation. It’s a form of acknowledgment in us of something that’s very much there, that culturally and globally is there, yet that we don’t allow ourselves to recognize in many other mediums, let alone our daily life.

It’s refreshing to play something overwhelming that we can laugh at together when life is often overwhelming in ways that make us feel isolated. Being overwhelmed in “Lethal Company” is a feature, but as frightening as it can be, its special magic makes being overwhelmed frightening one minute and the chaos it causes utterly hilarious the next. Once, I turned around to find a snare flea crawling after me. It’s a relatively minor monster that attaches to your head and makes you drop your loot. It’s only dangerous when you’re alone, since you need someone else to get it off. I was alone, though. I was near a precipice, familiar with the layout of the space, and could see the flea was far enough away that it couldn’t jump quite yet. I had a second to think. Maybe I could give myself another second. I stepped back, and plummeted, loot and body disappeared forever. I was completely safe in that situation, even calm, and yet made the only decision that could have spelled doom. When my team left the planet, after we were fined for lost players, I waited for my teammate to tell his story about his equally dumb death and then told mine. Everyone shared the part of it they saw, on the map or watching me play after their own deaths. It didn’t matter whether we made quota or not. At some point, at some number, whether this one or another, the company would deem we’d failed and spit us out into space. It mattered that we had stories, experiences to share and identify with. If all of us were spinning uselessly down the drain, then at least we were doing it together.

That is cynical, but “Lethal Company” is a place to gather and satirize the way we’re asked to live. So too, similar games like “Content Warning”. As in life, we fail in ways that are ridiculous and nonsensical, where we do the right thing and fail, or make one wrong decision and fail. Even when we succeed, the quota keeps going up. There’s no such thing as a win state, there’s just a higher quota. The way to resist it, to set it aside for one brief minute, is to come away with stories, with experiences, with something to share, with tales of utter failure or shining moments of success, to have met an unfairness and loss we all understand, momentarily bond over our common experiences of them, and laugh at how ridiculous the whole thing can get. The developer promises endgame content in a future update. Perhaps it will make our toils amount to a way out of our fate. In the meantime, we work to keep that chance alive. We are overwhelmed because we’re human. The last part is what’s important.

Maybe I connect these things because artists and storytellers keep making wonderlands that tell us recognizing an existential crisis is not the same as personally having one. Sometimes that divide is lost. We act like the crisis in another or in the world is something we can choose to personally have or not. But the crisis isn’t ours to embody, it’s ours to respond to. If play is practice, and artists keep telling us this is what we need to practice, we really ought to be listening.

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New Shows + Movies by Women — Fallout, Meat, and Cold Cases

It’s a big week for new series, with seven showrun or directed by women. These cover post-apocalypse, near-future, slice-of-life, thriller, and a pair of mysteries. I’m always fascinated by what comes to us from other countries, and how streaming services choose to pursue certain markets. For instance, Hulu continues chasing Netflix’s lead in the burgeoning K-drama audience, as Netflix continues making deep inroads into producing and licensing Japanese live-action work.

There used to be a lot of competition for European shows between Max and Netflix, but since Discovery effectively took over Warner Bros. and HBO Max – and decided they didn’t want to pay European residuals – that area has been left for Netflix to farm. You’ll notice all three titles from continental Europe this week are on Netflix – that’s pretty usual these days. (The one from the U.K. is, too, but everyone tends to bring in British work.)

This week, new shows by women come from France, Japan, Korea, the U.K., and the U.S. New movies by women come from Spain and Sweden.

NEW SERIES

Fallout (Amazon)
co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet

Based on a beloved video game franchise filled with off-kilter humor, a woman who’s lived her life in an underground vault must trek a post-apocalyptic world filled with radiation and mutants.

Geneva Robertson-Dworet showruns with Graham Wagner. She also co-wrote the screenplays for “Captain Marvel” and the 2018 “Tomb Raider”.

All 8 episodes of “Fallout” are out on Amazon Prime immediately.

Blood Free (Hulu)
showrunner Lee Soo Yeon

Genetically engineered meat has replaced the consumption of animal meat, but the corporation that’s brought about this revolution is approaching turmoil. Rumors swirl about CEO Yoon Ja Yoo, and her bodyguard Chae Woon must engage a future world of industrial espionage.

Showrunner Lee Soo Yeon also wrote on “Stranger” and “Life”.

The two-episode premiere of “Blood Free” is out on Hulu. A new episodes arrives every Wednesday.

Anthracite (Netflix)
co-showrun by Fanny Robert

A reporter goes missing in the Alps, leading his daughter – a sleuth in her own right – to a remote and unsettling mountain town. The French series was filmed in Switzerland.

Fanny Robert showruns with Maxime Berthemy. Robert also wrote on “Profilage” and produced on “Passport to the World”.

All 5 episodes are out on Netflix.

Tonari no Yokai-san (Crunchyroll)
directed by Yamauchi Ami

A mountain town sees humans and supernatural beings living a cozy life side by side.

This is Yamauchi Ami’s second series as director after 2022’s “Ryman’s Club”.

“Tonari no Yokai-san” is on Crunchyroll. The premiere is out, with a new episode every Saturday.

Baby Reindeer (Netflix)
directed by Weronika Tofilska, Josephine Bornebusch

A stand-up comic is stalked from gig to gig and in his private life, forcing him to confront both his stalker and long-buried trauma. The series is based on Richard Gadd’s one-man play, and he writes the series.

Weronika Tofilska and Josephine Bornebursch direct. Tofilska co-wrote the exceptional “Love Lies Bleeding” and has directed on “The Irregulars”, “Hanna”, and “His Dark Materials”. Bornebusch wrote on “Love Me” and “Orca”.

All 8 episodes of “Baby Reindeer” are on Netflix immediately.

Mission: Yozakura Family (Hulu)
directed by Minato Mirai

Taiyo loses his family in a car crash. He’s comforted by his longtime friend Mutsumi. They eventually marry, but he must become a spy – just like every other member of the family.

Minato Mirai has also directed on “Bofuri” and “The Misfit of Demon King Academy”.

“Mission: Yozakura Family” has its premiere on Hulu, with a new episode every Sunday.

Destiny (Netflix)
showrunner Yoshida Noriko

(No embeddable trailer out, but you can see one on Netflix here.)

Kanade becomes a prosecutor, spurred on by the death of her prosecutor father. Years after she splintered from her friends in law school, she takes up the case that split them up…and it may reveal new information about her father’s death.

Yoshida Noriko showruns and writes.

The premiere of “Destiny” is on Netflix, with new episodes every Tuesday.

NEW MOVIES

Love, Divided (Netflix)
directed by Patricia Font

A young pianist named Valentina conflicts with – and falls for – David, a noisy inventor. I believe this is the feature film acting debut for Spanish singer-songwriter Aitana.

The Spanish comedy is helmed by Patricia Font and written by Marta Sanchez.

“Love, Divided” arrives on Netflix tomorrow, Friday April 12.

Stolen (Netflix)
directed by Ellke Marja Eira

A Saami woman tracks down a killer in a world where her culture is being choked out. The Swedish film is told in Saami and Swedish.

Elle Marja Eira directs.

“Stolen” is out on Netflix tomorrow, Friday April 12.

Take a look at new shows + movies by women from past weeks.

If you enjoy what I write, subscribe to my Patreon! It helps with the time and resources to write more features like this one.