THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup February 2025

“What are you watching?” is pretty much the automatic question I get when I tell people what I do for a living. Usually I lie to people so I don’t get into a massive debate about the police while I’m trying to hang out. But to you, dear patron, I shall never lie!

February was a short month but after a pretty down 2024, I think TV might actually be back! I’m going to save Severance for a lil skippy this week, once I’ve gotten closer to catching up. I put Yellowjackets last on this roundup because there are some spoilers.

The White Lotus (Season 3) — Max
CW: language, nudity, cringe

Mike White might be the best writer on TV right now, especially when it comes to dialogue. While TV dialogue is never going to exactly resemble how people talk in real life, The White Lotus is the closest you can get. White has an incredible ability to capture the awkwardness and anxiety of his characters in ways that are all too familiar. Take episode 2’s rotating conversations between the group of longtime female friends. I have personally witnessed so many conversations that feel that way—the backhanded compliments, the performance of friendship, and the barely veiled competition for whose life is going the best.

Every season has included some cringelord guy like the one Patrick Schwarzenegger’s Saxon Ratliff (Jake Lacy in season 1 and Adam DiMarco in season 2), and while it can be incredibly hard to not shield your eyes while he’s on screen, I think that’s because we’ve all met a guy like him before, someone who is clearly guzzling manosphere podcasts and casually harassing women.

While I don’t pretend to have any idea where this season is going yet, every scene has been completely engaging for me because of this realistic writing that expertly blends drama, comedy, shame, and schadenfreude. The vibes are so weird, in the best and realest way possible. I await the inevitable incest storyline in the Ratliff family with the same nervous anticipation I feel when I see this gif:

The Pitt (Season 1) — Max
CW: medical gore

While I’ve only seen the first two episodes, the premise is so good I almost can’t believe it hasn’t been done before. From John Wells, the creator of ER and second showrunner of The West Wing, The Pitt is like ER meets 24, following a single emergency room shift, hour by hour in realish time. Like with 24, there are some liberties taken with just how fast things can happen (how was Jack Bauer never stuck in LA traffic?), but it’s easy to see why the style was so successful in the mid-2000s.

But instead of hyping up Islamophobia and fear to do some shameless PR for the military industrial complex, The Pitt uses this real-time style to really highlight how limited the resources of the hospital are. Doctors are constantly running from one problem to the next at breakneck speed in a way that is firmly rooted in our actual reality, highlighting the limited resources and challenges American healthcare faces, all under the backdrop of Covid-19.

Most medical shows are procedural in that they focus on fixing a sick patient neatly in a single episode. They are often structured similarly to police procedurals, presenting that process as a mystery or investigation. That can often feel a little contrived to me, like in House or The Good Doctor, but the doctors on The Pitt feel infinitely more real. You have no idea when a patient will get better or worse, or what will happen next. You just have to roll with the punches.

Invincible (Season 3) — Amazon Prime
CW: cartoon violence

In 2025, I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a certain amount of superhero fatigue. I was going to name them all, but I don’t need to pad my word count that badly. And I think more annoying than the number of superhero TV media is that it all feels roughly the same. There might be some kind of grappling with the legitimacy or efficacy of vigilantes, or a nod to the imperfect systems that these superheroes stand to protect, but for the most part they’re presented as 

What I appreciate about Invincible is the way it approaches ethics and power together. Of course this isn’t exactly new either (with great power comes great responsibility), but I do think that because of the incredibly unbalanced power dynamics, this conversation is more interesting in Invincible, especially as Mark tries to raise his half-brother to be a hero and not their father.

Cecil represents a kind of “ends justify the means” thinking that feels difficult to dismiss when looking down the barrel of a Viltrumite fist. Ethics are a luxury he feels he can’t afford, so he’s happy to use the supervillains they’ve stopped, even if that means human experimentation. But at the same time, you can’t build a team with brute force. Ethics aren’t just for philosophy majors, because if you lose your team because they disagree with those decisions, you end up even weaker than before. 

It’d be like if you were coaching the Denver Nuggets and decided to hire a team doctor who slaughters horses. Yeah maybe he’s a great doctor and maybe you can rehabilitate him, but if the way you handle that alienates your star player because he loves horses so much, probably not worth it.

Yellowjackets (Season 3) — Showtime
CW: violence, disturbing images

*SPOILERS*

Here’s another show where I have no idea where they’re going, but it doesn’t feel quite as good this time around. Yellowjackets has always been a show that keeps its audience on its toes through genre-bending and ambiguous mysteries. But at this point in the series, it feels like we’re running low on dramatic tension. We have a pretty good idea of “what happened” out in the wilderness, of who lives and who dies, and most of the future storylines feel directionless. 

Before, Shauna was fighting a darkness inside of her that drove her to murder a man she was having an affair with, but now she seems like she’s pretty much settled back into her housewife role. Misty doesn’t seem to have a mystery to investigate, whether it’s Travis’s death or Lottie’s cult. 

I find the wilderness storyline much more engaging, because although we know which characters are largely going to make it out alive, there’s still quite a bit of mystery when it comes to the sounds they’re hearing and visions they’re seeing. But I can’t help but feel like a decent chunk of the show’s conflict has dissipated and I’m left wondering how it can pivot to recapture the magic the show has had at its peak.