Humanism requires us to connect with other people one-to-one, without the illusion of a unified message from the world. The author doesn’t have to be confessional for you to get a glimpse into her mind. When you read a book, in many ways it’s just you and the author. This mass of minds that fills our days in the age of information makes for an inconsistent hodgepodge of contradictory thoughts. We are dizzy and confused from sensory overload. But our brains do need a break from the smoke and mirrors. One need not think there is something special or sacred about the written word that raises us to the heights of human excellence in a way that other media can’t. One need not be a bibliophile to appreciate how sickening our captivation with spectacle has become. And some more platitudes, because things really suck right now. We have ridden the entertainment wagon into the end times. As the order of that world unravels, both the audience and the managers begin to share a lack of control, which makes for a beautiful finaleĬherie: It’s time to turn off the television. Like the managers of park, the audience engages with a fabricated world of enormous, perfect complexity. From start to finish, every name, detail, and plot point fits together, and that might be what is most confusing about it. What is more, the hosts literally have a false consciousness, but some of them start to see past the intricate mechanisms of their exploitation.What makes Westworld unique, though, is its brain-bending wholeness. The equal indulgence of guests’ cruelty and kindness carries the ethos of the service industry to its logical extreme. It is almost impossible to not view this show as a critique of neoliberalism. Answering “no” indicates that a host’s artificial intelligence is functioning without any problems. Will: Westworld. “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” The engineers who maintain the lifelike robots that host this show’s titular theme park ask this question as part of a routine diagnostic. Joel: I’m on the final season The Sopranos. It’s really bad and really shouldn’t be on TV, yet my repulsion breeds intrigue because it’s hard to contemplate how a single show can have so much wrong with it. If “coming of age sitcom” makes you retch at the thought of Friends or Girls, it’s all the more reason to watch this unpretentious, surprisingly honest show, created by comedian Josh Thomas, with its head-on takes on coming out and mental health and a cast that are actually friends and behave like actual friends, instead of “friends” in a reality show. The 2016 connection here is tenuous, because Season 4 of the show dropped in Australia but the US provider, Pivot, folded in October, but whatever: Seasons 1 and 2 are on Hulu, and they’re sweet, funny, and quietly brilliant. Nick: Please Like Me, the best little Australian coming-of-age sitcom you’ve never heard of. Both programs mix up moralistic ideas about sex and promiscuity with a feminist sensibility about women’s desires and agency, with truly funny results. Both explore women’s sexuality with a welcome frankness and willingness to embrace the ridiculous and embarrassing aspects of life: British performer Michaela Cole’s painfully hilarious sitcom Chewing Gum, about a young woman from a conservative Ghanaian family trying to lose her virginity in the grimy council estate where she lives and Australia’s Laid, in which star Allison Bell tries, with brilliant comic timing, to solve the mystery of why all the men she has slept with are dying. Two other shows also brought a lot of light into 2016, recently available to American audiences via Netflix though they were released a while back in their home countries. We may have had fascism in 2016, but we also had beans, greens, potatoes, tomatoes… you name it!ĪSC: Easily Atlanta–wunderkind creator Donald Glover’s take on life in the A combined verité realism with the occasional touch of the brilliantly absurd to capture the wonderful weirdness of the city it chronicles. Finally, we wind down our retrospective of the “anus horribilis” with the rest of the responses to our annual survey of contributors: the stuff that moved us, surprised us, made us laugh and (most definitely) made us cry this year.
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