a DARK review: ROUGH CUT

hello and happy new year! sorry for the long absence, it's been an extraordinarily hectic few months (isn't it always?)

i bring good tidings on this february the second: a fully scripted video essay review of the netflix series DARK! this is just the first rough cut, mind you. ideally i'll be able to get this down to about 40 minutes (patron names/credits notwithstanding), and of course the final version will have a lot more on screen than just me.

my gf and i have been making our way through DARK over the last few months (we prefer to watch shows an episode or two a day while we eat dinner), and after many long conversations i wound up writing a whole script about it. this only started about two weeks ago, so it's been a quick turnaround on this one.

basically, after psyching myself into overthinking yet *another* video with my analysis of the Doctor Who 60th specials, i became deeply frustrated with myself and my process. so i took what i was thinking about re: DARK and turned it into a script. the last script i finished, for the TUNIC vid, took me six months. i love that video but it didn't make six-months-of-work money.

the thing with reviewing DARK is that it's the latest in a long line of shows that i feel like is in conversation with LOST. i've been thinking quite a lot lately about network television, writer's rooms, storytelling styles across genres, in part because i've been planning "Everyone Is Wrong About LOST" for such a long time now. Mrs. Davis, FROM, and Yellowjackets are just a few very recent examples. i didn't want to make videos about them at the time because, hahaha, "i should be working on the OTHER thing."

well, i've decided this IS the other thing. whether or not i believe it's relevant or important or even particularly of interest to anyone but me, television is what i'm thinking about right now. september 22nd of this year marks the 20 year anniversary (!!!!) of LOST's pilot episode, and if that's not The Right Time for this video then such a thing will never come. in preparation for that, i want to focus on a handful of videos that will lay some groundwork for that project, as well as cover certain topics that i can abbreviate in the final vid by saying "go watch this if you want to learn more."

so, at the risk of inflicting yet another curse upon myself: my aim is to get four videos out between now and the end of april. my review of DARK should be ready to go public in about a week. in the meantime i'm going to finish my Doctor Who 60th script, and hope to film that shortly after. then i'll be taking some time to work on godfeels. after that, i want to finish my review of Tears of the Kingdom and at least one other video that i haven't decided on yet. at that point, i'm going to shift gears into splitting full time between godfeels and "Everyone Is Wrong About LOST." other, likely related stuff will certainly come out in the meantime, but i don't want to overpromise or overbook. 

there are other, more emotional, more political video ideas that have been on my mind, but i can't do them right now. not yet. last year i suffered a huge crisis of confidence, and now that i'm (i think) mostly on the other side of that my takeaway is that i've gotten too scared and too lazy, and grown too convinced of my chosen medium's supposed importance. everything is just a piece of history. it isn't life or death, it's a day job, and i haven't been doing it very well. i have to remember how to do this job from the bare fundamentals, so here i am, trying to remind myself how this gig is done.

in any event, i hope you enjoy this review. i think it's turned out quite well! thank you, as always, for your support. take care of yourselves, and have a nice weekend!