PULP RECAP: Top 6 TV Shows of 2019
By Genevieve Couvret
6. You
“From every boy masquerading as a man that you let into your body, your heart, you learned you didn’t have whatever magic turns a beast into a prince.”
In the age of social media, people are not what they seem. Such an adage is an understatement for Joe, the protagonist of You. And in the age of hookup culture, a guy who seems genuine and sweet and interested in who you are makes for the perfect romantic pursuit for Beck, the object of Joe’s obsession. And so both Beck and Joe project their ideals onto one another - Beck’s of an everyday bookshop manager who is sweet and trustworthy and Joe’s of a woman longing to be a writer who satisfies his fantasy.
The show captures the male gaze and, with illuminating voiceovers of Joe’s internal monologue, explores the psychology of a man who is driven to darkness because of his warped ideals of women, and his desire to possess them. It reveals just how easy it is to stalk and deceive when everyone is accessible online and makes you wonder for your own safety and how much you share. It is an unsettling insight into norms of masculinity, misogyny and how what we perceive to be romance can be twisted.
In this show, it’s hard to know who and what to trust. It’s hard to tell if people are knowingly good or bad or if every villain is truly a hero in his own mind. The fallibility and scary relatability of both our protagonists challenges us to consider how we see people, how we construct narratives around them and insert ourselves into those stories.
5. Game of Thrones
“Do not become what you’ve always struggled to defeat.”
The final season of Game of Thrones was almost as criticised as it was anticipated, but was still undoubtedly some of the most magnificent television this year. Magnificent seems like a good way to describe it; in a world of dragons, kingdoms and magic, Game of Thrones almost can’t pull off its own fantasy or carry the weight of its fans’ expectations. But nevertheless, Season 8 sees your favourite characters all finally come together to live their last moments on screen together, die on screen together and fight in war sequences more visceral and expensive than ever before.
In Season 8, Winter has finally come to Westeros. The stakes could not be higher. Incestuous love creates some serious internal moral conflicts for Jon and Jaime, political allegiances to Dany, the Mother of Dragons worry Tyrion and Varys, not to mention the White Walkers have come down from beyond the Wall to pose an existential threat to the living. And that’s not even the half of it. Season 8 was admittedly rushed, but within those 6 episodes was unparalleled special effects, incredible acting, thrills, tears and the catharsis we crave from a world so unfamiliar to our own, from characters who somehow do feel so familiar. Maybe it’s because we’ve known and watched them for so long, maybe it’s because they remind us of ourselves but Game of Thrones gave us some of the most complex characters and rewarding character growth on television. And ultimately, it’s really hard for intersecting plotlines to all finally entwine, it’s hard for the dialogue when characters who finally meet or reunite to be rewarding, it’s hard to make everybody happy and it’s hard to watch things end. Game of Thrones suffered not in spite of the anticipation surrounding it, but because of it. And yet, that people were talking about it so much is, in a way, a testament to how good the show is. To care so much for something, even when it disappoints you, is to love it unconditionally. For 8 years, Game of Thrones captivated audience members who probably didn’t even think they liked the fantasy genre, probably didn’t want to watch a show with that much sex and gore and yet couldn’t wait for 2019 to finally give them the resolution that they both craved, and feared. Because the real shame is that Game of Thrones had to end. At the end of the day, it’s not about who ends up on the Iron Throne - what’s rewarding isn’t really who wins, it’s the game itself. And it truly was magnificent.
4. Chernobyl
“When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there.”
The Chernobyl disaster - a 1986 Nuclear accident in Ukrainian USSR - re-entered our contemplation this year with HBO’s Chernobyl, a harrowing look into the human cost of political suppression. The biggest nuclear disaster in history is portrayed through focused storylines, including those which follow real-life scientist Valery Legasov, who challenged his own oppressive state for the truth about what happened. And the truth that is explored (beyond the specificities of the science that we learn about), is that perhaps it is not science, progress or even nuclear power that we ought fear; it is how progress is politicised, science is bureaucratised and the risks of dangerous technologies lie in human abuses and ignorances of their power, rather than the technology itself.
The intangible and unascertainable amount of suffering - still unknown mainly due to censorship and the trouble of identifying causation relating to radiation - is given human faces, as we follow a firefighter and his wife, the power plant technicians from the night, and members of the investigative team dealing with the consequences. This begins as a visceral portrayal of how the events unfolded from inside the plant, to watching people recover (and not recover) from their injuries, and seeing how the ignorant interests of the state led to such a tragedy.
There are hints at commentary that revolve around the USSR through an American lens with the benefit of hindsight, but such commentary can be extrapolated so that we learn from our mistakes, and embrace that ignorance and abuse of power are not unique to certain times or places or peoples. The show is a gripping and edifying account of a part of history we mustn’t forget.
3. The Good Place
“It doesn’t matter whether humans are good or bad. What matters is that they’re trying to better today than yesterday.”
The Good Place is a good show. And I don’t just mean that it’s insightful, or heartwarming, or funny - it is all of those things - but when I say it’s good, I mean it in the moral sense. By so overtly positioning itself within the moral discourse and actively making the philosophy of ethics accessible, The Good Place rests on and represents the hope that we can be made better by the things we watch.
The Good Place follows a wonderfully diverse cast in a version of the afterlife. By Season 4, we’ve experienced lots of twists and turns - are they in the good place? Are they in the bad place? Are people inherently good or bad? Can human beings change, particularly without the incentive of the afterlife? All these questions are cushioned in this absurd world and plot line that sees us watching four archetypal people be deconstructed for all their quirks, and we become invested in their moral betterment as we watch them try and be worthy of heaven. That what we want to see, that the object of the narrative, is people succeeding in being ethical is truly an achievement, even if it doesn’t seem like it. The audience gets to escape into a reimagined heaven and in this heightened world of fantasy, we explore the most fundamental aspects of the human experience in a lighthearted way and imagine an afterlife where we get a second chance. Though it is important that in entertainment we frequently explore suffering, pain and the baseness of humanity, to have a show provide respite from that but simultaneously being about the important things might be just what we need right now. Because it leaves us feeling a little bit more hopeful, and wanting to be a little better.
2. Mindhunter
“It's a riddle, but it can be solved. It's complex, but it's human.”
People have always had a sinister fascination with serial killers. But in 2019, we became almost nostalgic for it. From Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to Zac Efron starring as Ted Bundy, this year the serial killer filtered back into the cultural consciousness; a figure in society we all feared but also recognised almost too well. And perfectly capturing this fascination is Mindhunter, Season 2 of which was released on Netflix this year.
Mindhunter frames true crime storylines through a psychological lens and follows agents Tench and Ford as they interview and sometimes try to catch renowned serial killers by trying to understand their psyche, from Ed Kemper to Charles Manson. In Season 2, the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979-81 become the primary focus, underpinning the generally enticing thriller format of a criminal investigation with racial commentary.
The banality of evil finds a new face in Season 2. What is most sinister and gripping isn’t the crimes Tench and Ford investigate, it’s how the lives and minds of heinous criminals are projected into the safety of the suburban home. Season 2 takes a particular focus on Agent Tench and how his everyday family life becomes scarily like the work he does.
By exploring how to reconcile your sexuality with your workplace, your race with your identity, your home life and your work life, what other people are capable of and what you could be, Mindhunter covers a lot of ground and doesn’t paint things as black and white. It puts the poles of good and evil, fascination and fear, dedication and morbid curiosity on a spectrum; maybe they’re not so far apart after all. What lurks behind your neighbour’s door, what your children are up to when you’re not looking, what is just under the surface of society - is it under the surface of ourselves too? Mindhunter is a must-watch this year, and lingers in the back of your mind - just like the fears you have about what everyone might be capable of.
1. Fleabag
"I have a horrible feeling I am a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can't even call herself a feminist."
Fleabag is like a toxic boyfriend. At first, it makes you laugh. A lot. It feels new and exciting and maybe has that edge that you’ve been looking for. But it also makes you feel comfortable; it’s familiar and relatable, even if it feels different this time and you’ve never known anything like it. Then, as soon as it opens up emotionally just a tad and hints at something deeper, you let yourself invest just a little bit. Then it takes your heart and steps on it. It chews you up and spits you right back out, but then Phoebe Waller-Bridge looks down the barrel of the camera at you with a wry, flirty smile – like this is just a secret between the two of you – and you feel like maybe you’re ready to trust again. It’s like you’re asking to get hurt. But it’s also so worth it, and you wonder if anything has ever been this good, if you’ve ever had this much fun in your life.
Our protagonist Fleabag, as she is known, starring the show’s sole writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge is impossibly witty and cynical, but her vulnerabilities soften the coarseness of crude humour. What she captures best is the nuance of a woman who is in the same moment so proud of herself for making that snarky joke, but also hating that she’s made it because she knows it’s a defence mechanism. That dry humour, the kind that you can only get with the understanding that often life really isn’t that funny – is simultaneously what she loves and hates about herself. And that speaks to all of us, because who we are – particularly as women but moreover as people – is an attempted reconciliation between mismatched parts; the almost-forgotten memories of an old best friend, our incessant desire for sex against our shame about being sexual, past happinesses now rendered sad by virtue of their being past,, our trauma and the simultaneous ability and need to find humour in it.
It is the best show I’ve watched this year. It’s worth the hype and Phoebe Waller-Bridge deserves all your praise. Because really, she did all of this. And yet despite being so uniquely genius, she is also all of us.