Appointment Television

We're taking a week off! Pasted below are the original show notes for our 2017 episode about Netflix's A Christmas Prince.

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It's holiday time, so we dedicate the entire episode to a close reading of one of Netflix's forays into the wide world of dedicated Christmas programming: the Hallmark Christmas-style movie A Christmas Prince. Strap in for lying! Mothra! Negging! Jellied meats! Birther scandals! Romance! Tokenism! Constitutional crises! And so much more!

SHOW NOTES:

• Techies Still Think They're Good Guys. They're Not. https://www.wired.com/story/the-other-tech-bubble/
• Netflix's Creepy Tweet. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/netflix-christmas-prince-tweet-privacy-creepy-twitter-viewing-habits-2017-a8105351.html
• ION's A Christmas Cruise: https://iontelevision.com/holiday-movie/a-christmas-cruise
• Hallmark Channel as a balm for 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/we-cant-take-any-more-of-2017-so-weve-turned-to-the-hallmark-channel-in-desperation/2017/12/07/1ad3dab6-d6ca-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html?utm_term=.c42173792a12
• Spotify Reveals Its Users Habits in an Ad Campaign. https://www.boredpanda.com/spotify-reveals-its-users-most-embarrassing-listening-habits-on-giant-billboards/

Sadly they stopped making new Christmas Prince movies (BOO!) so we are celebrating the holidays with an installment of The Old Type. This time we're watching several Christmas episodes of The Bob Newhart Show, a '70s sitcom that led Andrew and Margaret to ask Kathryn "uh why are we watching this?"

This week, we're checking in with how TV is handling its uncomfortable task of depicting a pandemic that requires hot actors to cover 1/2 of their face. Spoiler: they aren't doing great! We start with a long, harrowing, collective look at the opening episode of Bull and its terrifying demon CGI baby and then continue on to touch upon: Black-ish, Super Store, The Good Doctor, and a handful of other programs. Obviously, Kathryn wrote about all of this really brilliantly. She also wrote astutely about the sexual harassment Eliza Dushku experienced on the set of Bull, a subject we touched upon at the beginning of the show.

All three of us definitely showed up this week having seen every minute of both of the shows we're discussing—Showtime's intriguing The Good Lord Bird, and HBO's weird-ass mystery box drama The Third Day.

SHOW NOTES

The Good Lord Bird: https://www.sho.com/the-good-lord-bird The Third Day: https://www.hbo.com/the-third-day

Let's check in with what's happening on network TV! Specifically, let's check in with unscripted network TV: the reboot of Supermarket Sweep and this high-drama season of The Bachelorette. We've asked our beloved games corresponded Craig Getting to return so he can weigh in on the Sweep update; in a shocking turn of events, everyone gets very animated.

In this episode, we discuss Andrew's Good One/Bad One pairing: AMC's Soulmates, which we all liked a little bit more than we were expecting and The Comey Rule, which was even worse than we could possibly have imagined. Along the way we discuss Sarah Snook and her acting partner, her butt, whether Andrew and Kathryn would soulmate test despite being married, whether Margaret is doing something remarkably unprofessional around minute 5, the propensity in American culture to confuse a man being tall with a man being possessed of character, just what can render one nostalgic for The Newsroom, and what Aaron Sorkin needs in order to climax sexually. IT'S A REAL ONE, Y'ALL! Enjoy!

For our belated good one/bad one episode week, we pull off what is known in podcasting circles as the Queen's gambit—by watching the show The Queen's Gambit on Netflix and then talking about it! We also watched Ratched, which is obviously the bad one.

SHOW NOTES:

THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT: https://www.netflix.com/title/80234304

RATCHED: https://www.netflix.com/title/80213445

Margaret definitely does not cry at all in this discussion of the conclusion of Never Have I Ever, a show that's really about grief and fathers who die and the kind of ripple effect that has for every member of the family. Nope! Zero crying. Also Kathryn definitely remembered to select the correct microphone, and that's why her audio sounds exactly as good as it always does.

On this week's episode, we introduce an important concept from Our Last Tapes: The Old Type, the official name for our periodic episodes where we open the creaky haunted vault of Ancient Television and bring forth a mummified TV corpse to examine. THIS WEEK, in honor of the SPOOKY TIMES in which we all live, we discuss The Addams Family (snap snap). Learn: what Kathryn's 6-year-old thinks of it, which joke of Andrew's makes Margaret bark with laughter while also saying "That's so dumb", and what piece of taxidermy Margaret most wishes she could have for herself. If you would like to sample some of the episodes discussed, they can be found on MGM's YouTube page and on one of those largely made-up streaming platforms that's called like Luna Network-- search on your Roku, it will know what I'm talking about. And, last but not least, please check out what the Addams family's living room looked like in color or the weird musical spoof on said family that Margaret listened to frequently as a child (start at 3:58).

We begin this episode by taking the opportunity to respond to one more item from the mailbag, a very thoughtful email that expands on some of our discussion from our previous conversation about the cultural context of Never Have I Ever (and notably, how ill-equipped we are to see some of it!) Then we jump back into the show, with our discussion of episodes 5, 6, and 7.