Justice for Bunheads
What I've been watching: the weird, the cozy, and the Rick & Morty
I’ve been watching Bunheads (streaming on Hulu) for the first time.
It’s a sweet, quirky show that was canceled after one season. I’m enjoying watching it slowly, even though it’s bittersweet to start a show knowing that its characters will never get to realize their full potential. It’s also filling in some of the pieces I’ve been missing in the Amy Sherman-Palladino creative puzzle.
ASP is best known as the creator of beloved, seven-season-running mother/daughter comedy Gilmore Girls, but she burst back onto the TV scene with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon Prime) in 2017.
I’ve seen every episode of GG many times and I’ve watched the Netflix revival, A Year in the Life, also many times. It’s fascinating to be able to connect the dots throughout ASP’s body of work. You can see how ASP’s visions for her tall, funny, fast-talking brunette muses and the worlds they inhabit grew in scope, from the season 3 dance marathon episode of GG to the lavish Life and Death Brigade stunts of later seasons, to the stylized sequences in the Bunheads ballet studio, all the way to the lavish costumes and over-the-top production value of Mrs. Maisel.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how artists create a body of work over a lifetime. Sometimes an idea becomes a big successful project. Sometimes an idea becomes a show that’s canceled after one season. But either way, each project is also the thing you have to make in order to get to the next thing. ASP had to make Bunheads so she could create Mrs. Maisel almost half a decade later. Taylor Swift – an artist who is famously rerecording a decade’s worth of creative work – had to make reputation and Lover so she could give us folklore and evermore. And while we’re listing examples: a very young Jane Austen had to write a story called First Impressions so she could rewrite it as Pride and Prejudice fifteen years later.
you heard it here first, folks
Another artist I’ve had my eye on is comedian Iliza Shlesinger. She’s been creating her own body of work over at Netflix: five comedy specials, The Iliza Shlesinger Sketch Show, and – her newest project – the romantic comedy caper Good on Paper. Iliza wrote and starred in Good on Paper, a “rom con” based on her true story about a lying ex-boyfriend. Only such a dedicated and driven artist could have taken a truly horrible real-life story and used it to fuel her creativity.
I’ve been trying to fuel my own creativity by watching more movies. It’s been a pretty eclectic mix (no surprise there). Save Yourselves! (streaming on Hulu) was a fun, weird watch that didn’t quite work but was still entertaining. In this very millennial sci-fi-comedy, a Brooklyn couple decides to unplug from their phones to reconnect with each other – just in time to miss the news on their Twitter feeds about how the world is ending. Another Round, which won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film this year, was a quieter, more wistful watch about a group of friends in various stages of mid-life crisis who try an experiment: being a little bit under the influence all of the time.
Besides Bunheads, I’ve been watching … The X-Files. (Please don’t ask me what the kids are watching these days; I really don’t know.) In newer stories, the latest season ofRick and Morty has been a fun creative boost. It’s a show anchored with believable characters but powered by inventive, relentless story. I’m still not over the way the opening episode of season 5 piled fantastical concept on top of fantastical concept and somehow pulled it all together at the end.
I have no idea what this curious cocktail of movies and TV shows will fuel in my creative life, but I’m excited to find out.
In the meantime, I’ve been attempting another NaNoWriMo project (National Novel Writing Month, for the uninitiated) as part of their July “Summer Camp” event. If you haven’t done it before, the idea is simple: Sign up and write. You choose your goal and what you want to write, and NaNo’s dashboard lets you track your word counts with fun stats and virtual badges to reward your progress. I thought I’d share a look back at my word counts from the last couple of years. As you can see, some attempts were more successful than others.
Am I where I’d like to be (so far) for this month’s word count? No. But I’m still moving forward and showing up to write, so I’m counting it as a success.
I hope your summer continues to be full of weird and wonderful stories. Please reach out if you have recommendations for cozy TV shows, even if they were canceled after one season, and I’ll see you around the inbox.