The time is right for lighthearted entertainment
My wife and I had finally agreed on a movie to watch. It featured Justin Timberlake trying to stretch his acting chops by playing an ex-con who becomes the accidental guardian of an eight-year-old gender-nonconforming child. We got through about 45 minutes – maybe a record – before I paused it.
“Can we watch something else?” I asked. “I’m not sure I can do this.”
I wasn’t put off by Timberlake or the dive into the challenges faced by LGBTQ+ kids (young actor Ryder Allen was sensational.) But the movie was emotionally heavy and you could see more pain and suffering on the narrative horizon for everyone involved. And these days, I just don’t need any more feels.
Right now, I want simple entertainment. Dumb even. It doesn’t need to be moronic comedy – my wife has very little tolerance for Adam Sandler – but I’m not particularly interested in anything that requires emotional investment. With all my empathy being used on real people, I have very capacity for the ones portrayed on screen.
There’s no shortage of those in need of support. Amid this never-ending pandemic, my kids are doing their very best, but they struggle some days. I won’t be watching the Super Bowl with my Dad for the first time in forever. We haven’t had my Mom for dinner for months. So many of the people I love, the things I love to do, are inaccessible and who knows for how long.
And my issues have been, to this point, manageable by comparison. My media feeds and timelines are filled with tragedies big and small: stories of people suffering in real-time, dashboards with numbers and graphs that represent an unfathomable number of dead people. My brain struggles to process it and grasp the emotional enormity of it all.
So yeah, when I turn on the TV and fire up one of the streaming services at the end of yet another COVID Groundhog Day, I just want something that isn’t going to make me feel much of anything. It’s the opposite of what good movies and TV usually do and yet here we are: I want quality without any emotional quantity at all.
There are a few familiar, easy choices – 30 Rock, Star Wars movies, Letterkenny, Schitt’s Creek – but I burned through those pretty quickly during the first lockdown.
Now I’m forced to either wait for things I know are good – I recommend The Expanse or Snowpiercer – or experiment and hope for the best. Sports used to be an easy way to fill this hole because it’s mindless viewing and the emotions are pretty binary – yayyy or boooo – but I think holding pro sports while the world burns is terrible on many levels. Hooray, the Leafs won (but 36 more people in Ontario died of COVID.)
Maybe I should just read a book instead. A quick look at the Amazon bestseller list shows that something called “Burn After Writing” is at the top of the charts. The synopsis: “... encourages the reader to ask yourself where you’ve come from, where you are now and ultimately just where you are going.”
Yeah, where’s the remote? Drew Edwards will take your recommendations on TV and movies to watch given the above criteria. He can be reached at drew@drewedwards.ca.