friend of a Friend – 4.28

A Media and Culture Blog by Eric, all formatting errors now also by Eric

Welcome back to friend of a Friend! Not quite as much for me to cover this time around because it’s only been a couple of weeks instead of four months, but I’m sure I’ll find a way to ramble anyway.

So read on! Or don’t. It’s not homework, and I’ll never know the difference (thank goodness I’m not being paid on page views…).

As always, send me things to watch/read/listen to. Maybe I’ll get to them! Maybe you’ll scream into the void!

What I Watched:

The Pitt S2 E15 (Season Finale):

The Pitt’s central real-time conceit means its finales will never be barn burners. Storylines will wrap up (or not), the shift will end, the world will go on. If the showrunners are going to stick to one day per season and significant time skips between seasons (and they should, if for no other reason than to give themselves new emergencies to cover), cliffhangers will never have the chance to be wrapped up “next season”. The Pitt is far from the only show to use the final episode as a chance to catch its breath rather than sprint to the line (GoT famously put its climactic episodes in the 9th week of each season and kept finales for resolution and table setting), but this season’s struggled with pushing too many storylines off until the very last moment.

Still, the Season 2 finale is both fitting and entertaining, even if a lack of balance between its wide cast of characters left a sour taste in my mouth.

The Pitt’s biggest problem over the last hour is that it decided the most important storyline was Dr. Robby’s, to the detriment of the rest of the ensemble. His mental health struggles are engrossing, but after the fourth conversation between him and another doctor without any character development, it starts to feel like banging your head against a wall. Contrast that with Dr. Al-Hashimi’s struggles, which are “resolved” within a single conversation, and Dr. Mohan’s internal conflict, which is only hinted at after the midpoint of the season, and the continued focus on Robby looks even worse. Again, the central conceit means most, if not all, of the day’s conflicts will end unresolved (real problems aren’t solved in 12 hours), but watching each of the team’s struggles keeps the show fresh. In the same way that watching the ER treat only broken limbs would eventually wear you down, watching Robby refuse to listen eventually evolves from an interesting character struggle to a boring retread.

Still, great show, and I’m nitpicking because they’ve set up a dozen or more entertaining characters that I wish we could spend more time with. It’s a first-world problem, but one that I hope is solved before the show returns next year.

Episode Rating: 3.5/5

Season Rating: 4/5

For Fans Of:

  • ER
  • Talk Therapy
  • Alanis Morisette

Euphoria – S3E2 & E3:

So…Season 3 is still really bad. I’m convinced showrunner Sam Levinson hates all of his characters, or maybe his cast, and no one outside of Zendaya and Hunter Schafer is having any fun. The good news is, the show finally remembered that those two are incredibly talented and putting their characters in the same room is the fastest way to give the show a jolt of life. The two finally share the screen (for contrived plot reasons, but you do what you gotta do at this point) at the end of the second episode and instantly give Euphoria its most entertaining scene of the season.

Series newcomer Priscilla Delgado is another bright spot in the second episode, matching Zendaya scene for scene. A heartbreaking appearance from Eric Dane, clearly battling symptoms from ALS, feels invasive rather than touching, but I don’t fault him for wanting to give the show whatever he could.

The wedding episode wants to conjure up memories of Season One’s carnival episode, bringing together the whole cast in hopes of explosive fireworks. Instead, we get exposition-heavy conversations, uncomfortable scenes, and a whole bunch of jokes that land flat.

I’m not sure what the show is trying to say, if it’s saying anything at all. I’ll keep watching…I guess? But I’m pretty sure we’re going nowhere fast.

My Rating: 1.5/5

For Fans Of:

  • CW Sopranos
  • Inertia

Odds and Ends:

  • I watched Noah Kahan’s Netflix documentary in the run-up to his new album (no spoilers for the below, but it’s good) and came away entertained but unsure what it was going for. It was supposedly about his Fenway Park concerts, but instead focused more on his own life and experiences. Unsurprisingly, he’s candid about his mental health struggles, and it makes for an enlightening 90 minutes, but concert film this is not. It’s heavy, but I always enjoy getting to learn about the humans behind the music.
  • I was in the music documentary mood, so I also watched Score: A Film Music Documentary. I don’t envy anyone trying to condense a century of sound and film into 90 minutes, but it felt far more like a compilation of six-minute YouTube videos than a cohesive film. We bounce from silent film music to 80’s synths to deep dives on John Williams and Danny Elfman with barely more than a beat between. It’s a whole lot of surface-level information that would probably be interesting to someone who has never really thought about movie music, but I can’t imagine that audience is seeking out this movie. Film scores are awesome, but you’d be better off picking a couple to listen to than spending 90 minutes trying to learn about all of them from this documentary.

What I Read:

Infinity Gate – M.R. Carey

I think I’d like the story Infinity Gate is trying to tell if it ever got around to telling it. Infinity Gate is the first in the Pandimonium duology, but it feels a lot more like a 500-page prologue than a novel worthy of standing on its own.

We follow a wide cast of characters from across the multiverse. Hadiz Tambuwal discovers the existence of said multiverse from the dying embers of our Earth, and from there, we bounce around The Pandimonium as they grapple with a new Artificial threat. The novel is far more interested in a “What makes us human?” story than a multiverse-hopping one, which is plenty interesting, if not a bit of false advertising. Still, I was willing to get on board if the damn story would ever start.

Talk of an upcoming war carries throughout the 500-page story, as does the omniscient narrator’s promise of doom, stakes, and death, but little of that makes it into this entry. It’s all well-written and fine enough, but like a superhero show where the hero doesn’t suit up until the finale, I was just ready for them to stop setting things up and get on with it. The characters are interesting, and you can see the conflict off in the distance, but every time we start moving towards it, we’re reminded how much further we have to go before we can even begin.

The best entries in a series both advance the broader plot and work as their own self-contained story. If the second book sticks the landing, maybe this one will feel better. For now, it feels like I read Act 1 rather than a complete arc.

My Rating: 3/5

For Fans of:

  • Becky Chambers, if her stories are too cozy for you
  • This tweet:

What I Heard:

The Great Divide – Noah Kahan

Hey, look, marketing synergy at its finest! After setting the mood by watching his documentary earlier in the week, I was ready at 11:00 pm sharp last Thursday to take in Kahan’s first album since 2022. Stick Season was one I came around on in fits and starts, from its title track, which was a staple in my playlists from the moment it was released, to deep tracks like “Come Over” and “The View Between Villages” that didn’t leave an impression as I listened, but popped in my head weeks or months later until they finally made their way into my regular rotation.

With The Great Divide, Kahan flips the focus of his always personal songwriting. Instead of describing the inescapable suffocation of rural Vermont, he turns the mirror on himself, exploring his own conflicted feelings on farming his loved ones for fame. It’s as raw as ever, and in the oxymoronic way of art, the more specific he gets, the more universal it feels.

“You act like we just sit up here and wait for you to reappear. But, baby, there are bills to pay, and your dad’s road needs salt,” he sings on “Porch Light” as he inhabits one of many characters and envisions how his “escape” from Vermont may feel a lot more like abandonment to those he left behind. Kahan creates an entire chorus of judging ghosts on “Haircut”, another standout track, and they are vicious. “Help me if it helps you sleep. Help me if it helps you write. Help me if it helps you sleep. Help me if it helps you lie,” they taunt at him over a hellish set of strings.

It’s surely not a fair picture Kahan paints of himself or of his support system, but if mental health were fair, it wouldn’t be so damn hard.

There are optimistic, or at least upbeat, detours like “Paid Time Off” and “Headed North” that keep the album from feeling overly heavy and enough catchy riffs and choruses to keep the whole thing palatable if you just want to sing along. For those who choose to dig in, though, the theme is clear:

Fame is hard. Life is hard. Leaving is hard. But it’s all a little bit easier when we can share in it together.

It’s heavy, catchy stuff, and will almost certainly be one of my most played albums of the year.

For Fans Of:

  • Any or all of boygenius
  • Bon Iver
  • Trauma Bonding

Where to Start:

  • “Porch Light” — If you need a reason to call your parents
  • “Paid Time Off” — If work sucks, and you know
  • “Lighthouse” — If Folklore wasn’t enough Aaron Dessner for you

Maisie Peters – Live in Chicago!

I went to see Maisie Peters with a few friends a couple of weeks back, and while the songs she played and the ones of hers I listen to regularly had almost no overlap, I still had a good time. Live music, it’s fun!

Peters is one part venomous heartbroken singer-songwriter and one part cheeky pop-rocker. Her favorites of mine lean heavily towards the latter category. Given that it was an acoustic show to promote her upcoming album, she stuck mostly to the former at the concert. Even so, she carried the emotion from the studio into her live performances, and there was still plenty of weight to her yearning and spurning.

Would go see her again, although I’ll probably make sure it’s a full electric set next time, if only to increase my odds of hearing “Watch” and “Cate’s Brother”. Her album’s out in a few weeks. You should give it a listen!

For Fans Of:

  • Julia Michaels
  • Writing your crush’s name over and over and then crossing it out in red pen when you catch them kissing someone else
  • The British pronunciation of Adidas

Odds and Ends:

  • “You Would Have to Lose Your Mind” – The Barr Brothers: The song’s almost ten years old at this point, but I only heard it for the first time last week. It’s dark, moody, and feels like I’m stuck on a spaceship flying further and further away from everyone I care about. There are some nasty chord combinations near the end of this that should hurt, but instead feel like a cathartic release. I’m a sucker for a song that can create a mood, and The Barr Brothers came up with something totally unique here.
  • “Drop Dead” – Olivia Rodrigo: Forgive me, I’m going to nerd out about songwriting and composition in a sec. “Drop Dead” is obviously bubble-gum pop greatness, a new direction for Olivia Rodrigo after leaning hard into pop-rock stylings for her first two albums. It’s running through a field with your significant other, rainbows sprouting ahead, flower petals swirling behind. It’s wandering wide-eyed, hand in hand, and care-free while the camera spins above you. But it also feels like it shouldn’t work. The slow chorus and the quick verse almost feel like two different songs stitched together. It might just be the line that scratched the back of my brain, but I think the secret to the song happens right before the start of the second chorus. After a minute-long intro that includes our first taste of the slow, soaring chorus, Rodrigo drops in a Chappell Roan-like verse, full of humor and fast-talking lyrics. It feels like the song is careening downhill with no breaks, threatening to lose control. Just before we hit the chorus again, the entire backing track drops out except for a drum fill and Olivia singing “we can tell the whole damn world how.” We’re flying over the edge, no ground left below us. And then, the backing vocals pop in with a vibrating “world”, a drum fill backs her up, and all of a sudden, we have liftoff. It’s a masterclass in tension and release, and showcases how a drumbeat can give the same tempo two massively different feelings. She pulls the same trick at the end of the guitar solo, throwing in another drum fill and dropping out a bunch of the instrumentation to bring the mood back down. The BPM never changes, but the combination of sounds gives the song an arc that you feel more than hear. Awesome stuff. Awesome song.

Still In Rotation: