I’m Putting Away the Puzzle Box

Puzzle boxes, Succession and more Fast and Furious talk than you can shake a stick-shift at [View this email online]( [Pop Culture Happy Hour]( by Glen Weldon Welcome! It was the week we were filled with that [Cannes-do spirit](. It was the week a major broadcast network helped millions of oldsters understand what the kids mean when they call something a “[self-own.]( And it was the week [the word “Scandoval”]( started popping up in your social media feed. Let’s get to it. I'm Putting Away the Puzzle Box Kids, gather ‘round ol’ Pappy Glen’s knee, and he’ll tell you a tale of television in the olden days of his far-off youth. It was a time when your basic TV show was just that: basic. It didn’t demand much from you, it just unspooled itself before your eyes. Sitcoms could be counted upon to supply canned laughter (the com) but their setting, characters and premise (the sit) would reset back to starting positions every week. Characters on cop shows, doctor shows, lawyer shows and nighttime soaps might get run through serialized plots over the course of a given season (“Who shot J.R.?”), but they certainly didn’t permanently grow or deepen or complicate; that wasn’t why people watched. Mostly, what TV provided was familiarity, comfort, pattern recognition. You might ask a friend or co-worker if they’d seen last night’s Hill Street Blues, and you might idly speculate about that shocking death on ER, but the remarkable thing about such speculation was just how idle it inevitably was. Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly) and James "Sawyer" Ford (Josh Holloway) in Lost / ABC When the internet came along, that passive involvement grew active. Fandoms swelled to fill message boards and chatrooms with a more fervent species of discussion and speculation. TV changed to account for this. The X-Files’ overarching serialized plotting grew hilariously dense and complicated (whose side were those alien bounty hunters on, again?), because suddenly it had leave to do so. Hardcore fans were only too happy to publish their own painstakingly researched roadmaps unpacking a show’s dense lore on their webpages. Series like Lost and, most recently, Westworld were made to withstand, and benefit from, that kind of close attention. But this kind of analysis was only ever meant for a very specific type of high-concept, puzzle-box series like The X-Files, Lost, Westworld, Fringe and Dark – shows intentionally packed with secrets and hidden connections for viewers to untangle. But to hop onto social media is to see this same tool of inquiry applied unilaterally, every damn where, to shows that hide no secrets, that withhold no information for only the most eagle-eyed viewers to discover. I’m not talking about plumbing subtext, here, which is always fair game. I’m talking about looking for hidden, intentionally inserted meanings where none exist. Shows like Succession, House of the Dragon, Better Call Saul and The Mandalorian now come in for the kind of speculation that can’t help but outpace their writers rooms. A character’s absence from a given episode is taken as proof of their death, when it turns out the actor just booked another gig, and they had to write around it. Tony Soprano spends an episode in a coma, and viewers convince themselves that the rest of the series’ run is actually his coma dream. A plot hole in The Mandalorian has viewers running to the internet to avow that a secondary character is actually a spy. To be clear, none of this is harmful. And after all, I’m the one who seeks this stuff out, because I don’t just watch Succession, to pick the most recent example; I read great recaps and much- less-great Reddit threads and tweets and listen to multiple podcasts about it. It’s my own fault. But it is something I’m going to stop doing, because Succession is coming to a close, and I want to experience its end in real time, without a brain a-sizzle with competing, well-argued theories. Avid fan speculation isn’t a spoiler, but it does have a spoiling effect. It conjures the merely possible in a way that makes it notionally real. It creates many such possible outcomes, in fact – in so great a number and with such conviction that at least a few of them are probably gonna come close to hitting the mark. I had the endings of Better Call Saul and Watchmen and The Leftovers and many other shows “spoiled” for me in this way. I’m curious to see how this experiment – let’s call it a tactical disengagement – turns out. If it works, and I’m legitimately surprised and satisfied by the Succession finale, I might join the millions of Americans who still watch TV the way I used to as a kid – lacking content, but perfectly content. --------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter continues after sponsor message --------------------------------------------------------------- We Recommend Eurovision was last Saturday. I wrote [a preview for it](. Next year, Peacock will likely broadcast the semi-finals on the Tuesday and Thursday before the finals, as it’s done for the past two years, and I’d highly recommend watching them. They add so much context to the Grand Final when you can compare a country’s Saturday performance to the one they did to qualify. Be the insufferable guy at your Eurovision watch party who says things like “She blew the whistle note!” (Norway) or “In the semi, he went up an octave on ‘hu-man TOUCH!’ but here he just whispered it. That’s either too much partying or too many nerves” (Australia). We’ll talk about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in an upcoming PCHH episode, but for now just know that I’m over here making my kludgy Tinkertoy rafts that barely float and thinking myself a skilled engineer while other folk are [constructing tanks and mechs and internal combustion engines](. (Kidding about the engines, but seriously – give it a week.) Oscar season is over, the Tonys may or may not go on, but Eisner Award season is forever. Lots of great comics in [these nominations]( hie thee to your local comic shop with this list as a guide. Amid the fervor around Succession’s upcoming finale, and the dark, dark magic that is being wrought on Barry as it comes in for its own landing, another HBO Sunday night show is keeping its head down, doing the good work, and delivering quietly spectacular episodes. Don’t sleep on [Somebody Somewhere]( people. The Best Show with Tom Scharpling is great, and [this episode]( features some of the cast and crew of Jury Duty (also great!) and SCTV’s Joe Flaherty (the greatest)! Scharpling gets to tell Flaherty about struggling to stay awake on Friday nights so he could watch SCTV, and how it seemed targeted to his specific comedy sensibilities. Tom speaks for a great many of us. What We Did This Week Fast X / Universal Pictures Linda recapped a very stressful Succession episode about [a very stressful election night](. On Tuesday, Aisha and Kristen Meinzer talked [Jane, Diane, Candice and Mary]( in Book Club: The Next Chapter. On Wednesday, we encored an episode on which Aisha, Linda, Ayesha Rascoe and Sam Sanders [discussed The Fast and Furious franchise]( and whether or not it’s about (checks notes) family. On Thursday, Aisha was joined by NPR’s [Alt.Latino]( co-hosts Anamaria Sayre and Felix Contreras to talk about [the charming coming-of-age series Primo](. And on Friday, Aisha capped off her very busy hosting week by inviting Wailin Wong, Ronald Young, Jr., and Roxana Hadadi to [discuss Fast X](. (Fast ex? Fast Ten? Fasten?) What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: - Aisha Harris: Janelle Monáe’s upcoming album The Age of Pleasure, and new song “[Lipstick Lover]( - Wailin Wong: [The Soundtrack Show]( podcast, and its series on John Williams and E.T. - Roxana Haddadi: Revisiting [Reservation Dogs]( on FX, and awaiting its upcoming new season - Ronald Young Jr.:[Delusions of Grandeur]( a Star Wars novels recap podcast – and his own upcoming [Weight For It]( podcast --------------------------------------------------------------- Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. [Find a Station]( --------------------------------------------------------------- [Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+](. 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