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The Janet Wood and Chrissy Snow of newsletters is back with hot (well, warm?) TV recs, generational discord, and gross-out comedy galore.
Welcome to Spreadlandia, where two veteran editors read it ALL to winnow out only the best: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, and hot goss—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
Spreadbuds,
We are not the first to declare this moment in television to be highly mid. But we just might be among the first to admit to ostentatiously basking in the mid? (Midness? Midity?) To occasionally even prefer the mid? While, yeah, we’d love for one or two A-grade programs to spring from the ashes, the current slate of shockingly okay limited series scratches a real itch—one that allows us to run to the bathroom without pausing the action, and even occasionally close our eyes and enjoy the proceedings as an audio story. Can’t say that for The Night Of or Angels in America1 or even the 2017 version of Howard’s End (we’re always looking for an excuse to highly recommend Matthew Macfadyen in Darcy mode as Henry Wilcox)!
Herewith, the Spreadiest middlings of the moment, ranked in order from mid-mid up to warm-mid. May they ease your descent into the shortest days of the year.
5. Death by Lightning (Netflix): Betty Gilpin sprinkles a hint of Spreadiness on the story of James Garfield’s (Michael Shannon) rise to the presidency in 1881 and the damn fool that shot him (Macfadyen with a screw loose).
4. Down Cemetery Road (Apple+): Will the storyline ever fully make sense? Seemingly not! But we can still enjoy Ruth Wilson’s color palette (sunflower yellow + cobalt) and Emma Thompson’s voluminous quiff and not-shy-about-it sex drive in this thriller about a London art conservator who stumbles upon a government cover-up.
3. The Girlfriend (Prime Video): Who’s worse—the adult son’s social-climbing, meat-cutting girlfriend (Olivia Cooke) or his obsessive, art-dealing mother (Robin Wright)? We’re in it for the she-said/she-said switcheroos, the enviable interiors in London and Italy, and the tragically Gen Z outfits Cooke’s Cherry chooses to meet the parents.
2. All Her Fault (Peacock): Shiv Roy—sorry, Sarah Snook—and Dakota Fanning elevate a twisty, movie-of-the-week-like kidnapping thriller with a Big Little Lies veneer. (Before we watched, we googled whether or not the kid was returned to his mama in the end—recommend!)
1. The Beast in Me (Netflix): In a modern version of The Journalist and the Murderer, Claire Danes does all her usual facial contortions as a grieving Carrie Mathisonian scribe, while Matthew Rhys thrives as a Robert Durstian killer with a Hannibal Lecter twist. (This Doreen St. Félix review nails it.)
Wallow proud, friends,
Rachel & Maggie
Talkin’ Bout Our, Our, Our Ge-ge-generatiooooons
One of your Spreaditors is a late-Gen Xer, the other an elder millennial, which has led to some spicy debates over the years about what Rachel loves to refer to as our “microgenerational differences.” Let it be said that for every theory that groups people together in age-related cohorts, there’s a separate theory that generations aren’t even a thing—and those “generational myth” types are gonna be busy churning out their rebuttals in what we’re calling Generations Week in Media. (Catchy, no?) First comes Amanda Fortini with a banger of an issue theme for T: The Times Style Magazine: “Is Gen X Actually the Greatest Generation?” Its core argument is that all the characteristics that Gen X was once derided for—alienation, irony, slacker-ism, the benign neglect of our parents—were actually great conditions for creating establishment-shaking artists (and also exactly what’s lacking in “kids today,” hence their abiding fascination with all things Gen X). In the Cut, the message for millennials is significantly less uplifting: Dinner Party “host” and poster girl for the avocado sandwich (née toast) generation Emily Gould—DRINK!—goes long on the aging cliff, a term we all came to know and love last year via All Fours, and that science apparently bears out: At certain times in our lives, we age faster, starting with the cute age of 44. As “luck” would have it, Spread copy chief extraordinaire Allison Wright is the star of the show: Allison had a grueling entrée to her fourth decade with a battery of hip issues that just reading about will make your hindquarters ache. Allison, thank you for sharing your story for the sake of journalism!
Read Fortini on the Xers here, and Gould’s “Young Old Person” here.
Knives Out
On cue last week, a handful of women thinkers—including some well-known Spreaders—came out in defense of Olivia Nuzzi2, objecting to the slut-shaming tone of the attacks on her3. Perhaps most impassioned (and, sadly for her cause, least cogent) was Lisa Taddeo, who called the “attempted patriarchal mass murder of [Nuzzi’s] career and her personhood… a freakish lynching, the likes of which we will look back upon with a daze” in an Air Mail screed that, like American Canto itself, could have used a little more time on the stove and a heavier edit. In the Nation, Joan Walsh—a veteran who knows all the players involved—offers a more complex take that calls out Nuzzi, Lizza, RFK, and Keith Olbermann (seriously, what a tool) for their sins, but still holds space for empathy for Nuzzi, child of an alcoholic mother who has been “preyed upon by older men” at least since she was 19 or 20.
Fun holiday party drinking game for the number crunchers out there in medialand: How many employees of the Nation, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the New Yorker, etc, have expensed their subscriptions to Lizza’s Substack this month? It’s almost like he’s still on the mainstream media payroll! (On that note, insiders tell us that a paid subscription to the Spread is a Strunk and White-level professional tool that no modern journalist should be without, hint hint.)
Maybe it’s piling on, but we cannot stop replaying this mesmerizing and possibly medicated (?) clip of Nuzzi musing on the curse of beauty via JonBenét Ramsey in the audiobook….
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