The Loneliest Year

Huzzah, 2021 is nearly over! We CSI its corpse, spelunking for good stuff.

Dear Wags,

Happy Holidays: the planet, as we have loved it, is falling to pieces! Dread — reinforced by pernicious social media, exacerbated by Covid-19 lockdowns and the rise of Omicron Variant (best sequel name ever)—is the new black. This being the case, it’s devilishly hard to look back at the lost year of 2021 and find cause for celebration.

Hey, at least it wasn’t 536, the year Harvard historian Michael McCormick judges to be the worst year to be alive ever, when a volcanic eruption in Iceland choked the world with bleak fog, causing temperatures to plunge, crops to fail and famine to rage—while bubonic plague culled the population of the Eastern Roman Empire by half. Nor was it as crappy as 1348, when around 200 million Europeans expired from the Black Death. It wasn’t 1862, the grimmest year of an actual, not metaphorical, Civil War. Points of comparison are drearily obvious, but it wasn’t 1918, the peak of the so-called Spanish flu pandemic that mowed down more than 50 million souls while World War I perfected butchery at unprecedented scale. And it wasn’t 1942, when the Axis powers had the upper hand and the Holocaust was underway. In other words, the Dark Ages are always with us, it’s our job to find flickers of light where we can.

None of this excuses the eviscerating lousiness of 2021, or indeed the horror of an entire era — let’s smoosh the years together between the twenty-teens and now—during which points of common ground eroded, a muscular authoritarianism rose, and faith in Western Civ. plummeted to bathetic lows. We live in jittery times, when ill will is rewarded and isolation makes it ever harder to contemplate engaging with a fractious world, sapping a commitment to the public good. Most days, a plague of frogs doesn’t sound half bad, because who doesn’t like frogs?

And yet!

Good things did happen in 2021. Such as: more than 8 billion people, nearly half the world’s population, have received Covid-19 vaccinations, a figure that would have astounded public health officials in 1918. Scientists have apparently proven that cheese isn’t bad for you. New drugs are ridding large parts of the world of Malaria. The New York Times published this headline: When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid from a Clamp, That’s a Moray. Keeping up the Kardashians was cancelled. Adele dropped her new album, 30. Giant Pandas are no longer endangered. Electric vehicle sales spiked by more than 168 percent. Millions of people have reevaluated their work life balance, and life is winning. Oh, and a little information revolution was born.

And as part of that last thing … Wag arrived! (We’re like, the Éponine of this newsetter rush to the barricades).

Wag Industries was founded on a few simple ideas. (1). That discussions of entertainment should be …entertaining. (2). That sharp people deserve their own club. (3.) That the best metric is conversational. We believe that our culture industries matter, and that they are powered not by algorithms but by unique human creativity. We enjoy art — high, medium, and deliciously low — because it makes us feel. And we want to have smart, thought-provoking discussions about it, that liberate us from echo chambers.

The true brutality of 2021 is that it wasn’t merely terrible, it was terribly lonely. Whether or not it was the worst year in history, it was surely the most friendless, a time when enforced solitude left people disconnected, and starved for real community. That’s the whole point of this clubhouse. To reach you with a few amusing words, and reassure you that, no matter how dark the age, you are never alone. And now, a few of our favorite things from this very strange year.

Yours ever,

JDH

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THE SHOWS

Florence in Renaissance, or the End Times? For Hollywood, maybe both! The enormous spigot of televised content continued to spew, though there are signs that the streaming titans are reorienting themselves away from writing blank checks to quirky auteurs and toward big tentpoles, just like old-fashioned studios! It’s still the Wild West out there, but the New Order is shaping up, in which a few big players with the best I.P. will be left standing. Niggling issues remain: Defining a hit in a splintered landscape, and dealing with that old bugbear discovery. (Translation: how do audiences find anything). We have a few thoughts on that, obviously! —Cleo P. Jones

1. Succession (HBO). Wag Supremo Jesse Armstrong shivved Shiv and handed the power over Waystar Royco to … Tom Wambsgans! Kendall became Hamlet! And, somewhere along the way, Succession became the defining comedy (and tragedy) about the way we live now.
2. The Chair (Netflix). While the real world became exorcized about so-called wokeness, Amanda Peet produced a sweet sendup of faculty politics at an elite university. Dame Sandra Oh was aces as a frazzled professor of English literature, trying to save the career of brilliant, bumbling Jay Duplass.
3. Hacks (HBO Max). Logan Roy would meet his match in Deborah Vance, whose life philosophy is: You have to scratch and claw and it never f—ing ends. And it doesn’t get better. It just gets harder. True. One of two brilliant performances this year from Dame Jean Smart.
4. Ted Lasso (AppleTV+) Don’t be a tedious cynic because it was wildly popular. As Fred and Ginger were to the Great Depression, Ted was to the Great Pandemic. The show’s good heart lifted spirits far and wide.
5. The Underground Railroad (Amazon Prime). Ambitious doesn’t quite capture the scope of the adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel. As rendered by Barry Jenkins, it was a gorgeous and unsettling fantasy with a star-making turn by Thuso Mbedu.
6. Maid (Netflix). Margaret Qualley was brilliant as a young woman fighting to survive on the margins and her real-life mother, Andie McDowell, delivered the performance of her career playing her errant mom.
7. Dopesick. (Hulu). Turning Beth Macy’s sprawling work of reportage on Purdue Pharma and the opioid crisis into a limited dramatic series was a tall order. Danny Strong pulled it off, with a stellar cast that included Michael Keaton and Kaitlyn Dever as victims of a drug epidemic.
8. The White Lotus (HBO). Class warfare in paradise! Mike White unraveled the complex relationships between the elites and the help at a Hawaiian resort. It was wickedly funny, and deeply unsettling.
9. Wanda/Vision (Disney+). The most inventive storytelling in the Marvel Universe came from the mutant brain of Jac Schaeffer, who morphed a show about the Scarlet Witch and her android husband into a celebration of classic sitcoms.
10. Mare of Easttown (HBO). Dame Kate Winslet was never better as a bruised detective in the Philadelphia exurbs. Smart (star turn #2), stole scenes as her mom, Julianne Nicholson was heartbreaking as her friend, and we’re still mourning Evan Peters’s Det. Colin Zabel.
11. The Great (Hulu) and Dickinson (AppleTV+). Development executives dread hearing the term Period Piece, because it means costumes, locations, and other pricey stabs at verisimilitude. These sharp-as-razors shows played with anachronism and made two bygone figures, brought to life by Elle Fanning and Hailee Steinfeld, bracingly modern.
12. Squid Game (Netflix). Well, it was awfully upsetting. Especially that killer doll, and the collapsing bridge thing-y. But Hwang Dong-Hyuk’s dystopian game show was the biggest hit of the streaming era. Anyway, we liked the jumpsuits.

UNDISCOVERED PEARL

Reservation Dogs (FX on Hulu). Wag Maestros Sterlin Harjo and Taika Watiti teamed up to create a delightfully off-kilter comedy about four indigenous teens trying to scheme and hustle their way out of rural Oklahoma and escape to the promised land of California. Along the way, they introduced viewers to a new universe of oddballs and a community rarely seen on television. —John Redcorn

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PROPER PISS-UP

Line of Duty (Britbox). Of all the shows we recommended you binge this year, our hands-down favorite is the 2012-2021 UK procedural, set inside a mythical police anticorruption unit. All six seasons are full of twists, but our vote for most diabolical character goes to Det. Lindsay Denton (Dame Keeley Hawes) who will confound you for two of them. —Kate MiskinSubscribe

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THE PICTURES

The Big Screen is back! Maybe not. Perhaps we ought to say the The Big Screen continues to meld with all sorts of little ones. Four of the five biggest grossers this year — Spider-Man: No Way Home, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Venom: Let There be Carnage (oh, goody, more carnage!), Black Widow, and F9: The Fast Saga—come from the MCU (Marvel’s Eternals looks to be No. 6). So duh, comic books continue to be Hollywood’s most successful source material for global spectacle. Prestige drama, more or less the domain of the streamers, continues to recede theatrically. Omicron won’t help that, putting award season on the brink (again!) but these features are worth rooting for, wherever they appear. —Samuel Glick

1. Licorice Pizza. When it comes to critics and awards, never, ever bet against a movie about the movies. Paul Thomas Anderson’s coming of age story stars Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim as Valley kids growing up in the 1970s, and boasts an array of supporting players that include Sean Penn, Tom Waites and Maya Rudolph. It’s a love letter to the ongoing allure of show business.
2. Summer of Soul. Questlove’s look at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, which tapped hours of unseen footage of performers such as Nina Simone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Sly and the Family Stone, is electrifying.
3. Passing. Adapted from Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel by Rebecca Hall, the wrenching story of two friends (Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga) who skirt racism in New York City by shifting identities is aptly told in black and white.
4. The Power of the Dog. Benedict Cumberbatch is spine-tingling as the blackhearted rancher in Jane Campion’s Montana melodrama, co-starring a terrific Kristin Dunst and Jesse Plemons.
5. Drive My Car. A grieving director (Hidetoshi Nishijima) hires a young woman coping with loss (Toko Miura) to be his driver in Rysuke Hamaguchi’s humane adaption of the novella by Haruki Marukami..
6. The Velvet Underground. Todd Haynes immersive look at the ultimate experimental art band is a postcard from a lost New York.
7. The Lost Daughter. Society knows how to crush mothers, and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s dark adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel gives Olivia Colman another meaty part as woman entangled with Dakota Johnson and her child.
8. The Card Counter.The dream team of Paul Schrader and Oscar Isaac power a gritty tale of a man on the brink, with Tiffany Haddish adding a little fire.
9. Spencer. The life Princess Diana is reimagined as a horror movie by Pablo Larrain. If this doesn’t cure of believing in fairy tales, nothing will.
10. The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. The comedy anthology that opened the strangest Cannes Film Festival in history is another elegant curio from Wes Anderson, last of the auteurs.
11. The Green Knight. Dev Patel (also outstanding in 2020’s The Personal History of David Copperfield) ought to be a bigger star. He shines in David Lowery’s ripping update of the great Arthurian poem.
12. Dune. A respectable pandemic success, Dune is also something a miracle — a new blockbuster franchise based on notoriously difficult I.P. (Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel). In Denis Villeneuve’s hands, gobbledygook about spice and worms became diverting escapism.
13. No Time to Die.. Daniel Craig brought new depth to James Bond, and his final appearance as 007 was an inventive end to his run.
14. In Heights and West Side Story. Crowd pleasers need crowds, and movie musicals are probably dead (again). Still, you can’t fault these polished and exuberant attempts at a beloved genre for trying.