I’m perpetually torn about the concept of “not for me,” the response to a given piece of art that suggests that there’s nothing necessarily deficient with it but rather that I myself don’t connect with it and that’s fine. On the one hand, I have experienced exactly that feeling so many times in life that I can’t doubt the utility of the concept. Ariana Grande’s music is not for me; the kind of fiction that James Wood likes is not for me; the collective work of Danny McBride, I’m genuinely sorry to say, is not for me. “Not for me” is a pleasant kind of critical detente in a world full of shouting, and I get it.
Seinfeld seems to have taken a dip in popularity but I don't care. I think it's better than Curb and It's Always Sunny, the two shows that people always say is better than Seinfeld.
Why are you really glad about that? That's a very weird thing to be glad about, not hearing about things. I can't imagine what kind of utility or pleasure could come to me from not hearing of TV shows or immensely-famous actress Emma Stone. Could it be that, instead, what you're trying to awkwardly signal is "there's a kind of person that I'm NOT, I'm a better, cooler, less stereotypical kind of person!" Could that be what this comment is really about?
This is satire, yes? You're happy that you dont see "mean spirited" shows while in the same sentence describing "a whole lot of humans" as insufferable, self-obsessed and not terribly smart"? Sheesh! Talk about proving Freddie's thesis!
"If you don't recognize that a whole lot of humans are insufferable, self obsessed, and not terriblely smart you're likely sheltered, inexperienced, or deluding yourself."
Nah, I've been around -- for a long time, actually. And the fact that you so quickly go to the non sequitur of "bully" so easily makes me wonder......
Plus, have you considered the odds that YOU are insufferable, self obsessed and not terrible smart?
Your "your difference between us" paragraph was I'm sure VERY satisfying to write. I, too, like strawmen. Enjoy your life!
Thank god. When I reluctantly clicked through to this comment section, I was briefly worried. “I wonder if internet user Michael Leza is feeling adequately rewarded for his superb taste in entertainment product..? Would he risk dipping a single mighty toe into the brackish millpond of mass market television, or might his iron will guide him towards nobler pursuits?” But I should’ve known you’d come through for us. Now, unburdened at last by these aching questions, I can rest. To anyone else who might dare challenge you, I say…Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them!
Driving a scion 120 miles per hour then I crashed made me laugh pretty hard. Maybe I’m laughing at this guy who wanted to be on HBO tv. Freddie always asks questions which is good and it makes me think about things differently sometimes or maybe I agree with him. On this one I have to disagree. First time commenting on a Substack.
Couldn't we also psychanalyze you as trying to justify your own time spent watching these shows, and being on top of pop culture, by writing articles such as these? Couldn't it be genuinely good to avoid "the latest thing"?
I liked his comment, but not for the reasons you lay out here. I just didn't like the premise of the show as you tell it. It doesn't sound funny to me, only tiresome.
Comedy shows that try to insert social justice issues into them just fall flat to me. It's like they are trying to backdoor SJ by using laughs to mask it. Tons of people are really tired of 'virtue' entertainment. It's still sort of a lecture, despite it being 'comedic'. And no one likes to be lectured to, especially when it comes to comedy.
I don't watch much TV (outside of sport) so include me in the list of never having seen these shows. I always find your writing interesting, but in this case, yeah..."not for me"
There's finite time in the day and so there's a finite amount you can see or hear so why not be glad you avoided seeing and hearing about something irrelevant and unpleasant to you?
Reading comments sections is a really interesting exercise. I’m like, “do I have anything to say about that? Do I have anything to say about that? That? That?” I can sort of feel my engine overheating, but in a good way. Just a random observation about comments. And myself.
The key point here is that comedy is subjective in a way that drama isn’t. We have stumbled upon the 3 act structure that makes for a satisfying narrative, but comedy doesn’t quite work like that. There is definitely a craft to writing jokes and gags, but you can do everything right and still have a joke fall flat with some audiences. And unlike drama, which you can gain an appreciation for by better understanding the craft, comedy doesn’t get funnier when it’s explained. I think there will always be humor that doesn’t work for some of us, for me, I just don’t find Adam Sandler or Will Farrel movies to be funny, it just doesn’t work for me. The tricky part of comedy is that when it doesn’t work, it’s a disaster. A bad drama can be inadvertently entertaining, even funny. A bad comedy is just excruciating. An even worse experience is when everyone is laughing but you, it’s hard not feel like the joke’s on you
This is an insightful and interesting review! I am not a fan of Fielder either and probably wouldn’t watch this show (the word “precious” comes to mind for me - when he is on camera, he seems to be imploring the viewer to understand how clever he is).
I think this review can coexist peacefully in a world where “not for me” is perfectly acceptable, and objective value is just about impossible to ascertain. I still appreciate critical takes, and I will agree with some and not others. Nothing wrong with that.
It's funny, I interpreted The Rehearsal as Fielder's examination of and penance for Nathan For You. The whole shtick of The Rehearsal, in my view, was that you didn't in fact know how much you, the audience, were being fucked with: were these people actually real? The show, again and again, suggested that they might not be, and that the audience was the real mark. The thrust of the first episode was that Nathan Fielder was not to be trusted, that the entire conceit of the show was not to be trusted.
This was one of my main curiosities about White Lotus. Does the core audience have any idea that they're the subject of its content? The people in my life who love it so much and talk about it the most might as well be the Aubrey Plaza character in S2.
What does it mean if you didn't like it? I thought it was the a very boring piece of television, with deeply unlikable characters. Why did people like it?
The show reads to me as more of generational representation than that of a few specific types. I was expecting to see something about my social class and generation that I could connect with, both good and bad, at a personal and generational level.
my genZ boys love Impractical Jokers; I think it's mean - to the unsuspecting participants as well as the so-called friends. But I think that reveals, in me, a lack of understanding the way men interact with each other
my slightly older daughter eagerly awaits every Nathan Fielder project, but I've only seen 2 episodes of Nathan For You. I read alot of press for The Rehearsal, and she really talked it up, but I still didn't seek it out. There's a lot out there and only so much time.
I was disappointed by Good Time, which felt like a half-baked and unremarkable crime thriller with an unusually good lead performance and soundtrack.
But Uncut Gems - Uncut Gems is art, a unique, nauseating and wholly personal statement. I've never seen anything like it. Parasite was probably the only 2019 film I saw which exceeded it.
I feel about Good Time the way I feel about Mean Streets. I was underwhelmed when I watched it, but I understood that Scorsese couldn't have made Goodfellas if he hadn't made Mean Streets first.
I'd be curious to hear Freddie's thoughts on Heaven Knows What - the Safdie brothers probably get too much of a pass from critics because of their talent for style and and willingness to explore grime and moral complexity in a way so few directors do these days, but I think his criticism is mostly on-base.
For me it was Mr. Show. I heard nothing but praise, nothing but how brilliantly funny it was. So I watched it and found it aggressively unfunny. I'm willing to accept that the fault may be mine, but that still doesn't make me laugh.
Humor is definitely tricky, especially in episodic form. I can watch Seinfeld or Cheers over and over and over and still laugh, but something like The Office doesn't do a damn thing for me. I remember talking to someone a decade younger than me who had the exact opposite take. So maybe it also matters when you are, and not only who you are?
I think you last sentence explains people who like horror as well. They are glad it's not them. They like feeling superior. Interesting. I think it explains why I don't like either genre.
I think that's true of some horror, like old school slasher films where a bunch of unlikeable characters get bumped off, but the appeal of a lot of horror is that you identify with the protagonist and want to cathartically go through something horrible with them while they survive and triumph.
As someone who survived too many real life horrors, I've never understood the appeal. I guess it's a safe way of experiencing trauma and having it immediately fixed after 2 hours. Thanks for helping me see that.
This is off-point, but: how does Nathan Fielder get to star opposite Emma Stone? Either I don't understand the Hollywood marketplace, or things have really changed in the past few years, or Emma Stone is less of a star than I thought, or, maybe, she does whatever she wants to do, and she wanted to do this.
Your last point is the correct one. And given the huge buzz around both this silly TV comedy and the coming Oscar baity "Poor Things", she seems to pick her projects rather well.
I felt the struggle between "this is dogshit" and "this doesn't match my taste" when I saw Asteroid City. I didn't feel it, it hardly felt like a real movie. Watching positive reviews of it though, it's like we saw two different films. Clearly, I just didn't "get it" and instead of saying it's bad out of ignorance, I give the most polite refusal of "not to my taste."
Now though, I really just didn't like it. Wes Anderson's style is so overbearing, the movie feels set in a fantasy land separate from our own even compared to actual fantasy lands like Oz or Middle Earth. None of the characters feel like actual people, and any "development" they're meant to have is obfuscated by the fact that they are characters playing characters in a movie in a movie. I cannot seriously hide behind "not my taste" because I've enjoyed Wes Anderson movies in the past.
To get even a little more irate, Wes Anderson is just known to critics as "the man you like if you have good taste" and the reviews of Asteroid City start with that premise to reverse engineer a positive review. Reading the positive reviews, it was like reading Hieroglyphs. You really got THAT out of this movie???
I'm a huge Anderson fan and Asteroid City didn't land for me at all, you're not alone.
I chalk the (relatively) favorable reviews up to the mere touching on inside baseball creative process stuff being catnip for the art discourse class. It's a film with interesting ideas, it just doesn't accomplish anything in particular with them.
Wes Anderson is not my bag, but my girlfriend wanted to watch "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and, while it's very much not my cup of tea, I laughed a few times, it was fairly well paced, and of course I can admire the craft that went into the cinematography, costume and production design.
"Asteroid City" was dogshit though. Just two hours of pointless quirkiness for quirkiness's sake. Literally the only time I laughed was when the alien came on-screen. All this stupid pedantic dialogue where the "joke" is apparently that it's pedantic and explained in exhaustive detail. Sure the production design is gorgeous, but when it's in service of something so tedious and unengaging, who cares? Someone needs to buy him a really big dollhouse.
I've never seen any other Wes Anderson films, and came away from Asteroid City wondering if perhaps I was just too stupid to appreciate his work since so many people love him, so glad to hear it wasn't just me.
His other films, especially the recent ones, are way more enjoyable. He always has a somewhat cerebral theatrical/artificial style, but normally you still come to feel for the characters and end up with some heartfelt moments. Asteroid City's play within a play setup just made everything feel too detached. I wouldn't let it put you off - try The Grand Budapest Hotel or The French Dispatch before deciding he's not for you, both way better IMO!
My best friend, a big film buff, told me that she wanted me to watch Asteroid City because “I can’t decide if you’re going to love it or absolutely hate it and either way I think the reason why will be very interesting to me.”
I still haven’t seen it but that made the prospect of seeing it and hating it feel more fun!
I liked Asteroid City far more than most other Anderson films because it was more openly depressive, even philosophically pessimistic. He's very hit and miss for me. His recent Dahl adaptations that I watched didn't work for me at all - failed to capture what I actually like about Dahl's writing and imagery, though I liked 'Fantastic Mr Fox' well enough.
I love most of Wes Anderson's work, with the exception of The Darjeeling Limited, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City. I actually did enjoy the Asteroid City main story color segments, but they would have been too slight to stand on their own, and the black-and-white behind-the-scenes segments were completely baffling to me.
Seinfeld seems to have taken a dip in popularity but I don't care. I think it's better than Curb and It's Always Sunny, the two shows that people always say is better than Seinfeld.
Why are you really glad about that? That's a very weird thing to be glad about, not hearing about things. I can't imagine what kind of utility or pleasure could come to me from not hearing of TV shows or immensely-famous actress Emma Stone. Could it be that, instead, what you're trying to awkwardly signal is "there's a kind of person that I'm NOT, I'm a better, cooler, less stereotypical kind of person!" Could that be what this comment is really about?
This is satire, yes? You're happy that you dont see "mean spirited" shows while in the same sentence describing "a whole lot of humans" as insufferable, self-obsessed and not terribly smart"? Sheesh! Talk about proving Freddie's thesis!
"If you don't recognize that a whole lot of humans are insufferable, self obsessed, and not terriblely smart you're likely sheltered, inexperienced, or deluding yourself."
Nah, I've been around -- for a long time, actually. And the fact that you so quickly go to the non sequitur of "bully" so easily makes me wonder......
Plus, have you considered the odds that YOU are insufferable, self obsessed and not terrible smart?
Your "your difference between us" paragraph was I'm sure VERY satisfying to write. I, too, like strawmen. Enjoy your life!
I really don’t understand this comment thread or why Michael’s original comment was offensive.
You’re coming across as unreasonably hostile and I don’t know why that is either.
We have libraries so you never have to watch/read new stuff. We have a big backlog of reading for everyone.
I was actually being serious. I'm a librarian.
A librarian with a great newsletter! https://kathleenmccook.substack.com/
Thank god. When I reluctantly clicked through to this comment section, I was briefly worried. “I wonder if internet user Michael Leza is feeling adequately rewarded for his superb taste in entertainment product..? Would he risk dipping a single mighty toe into the brackish millpond of mass market television, or might his iron will guide him towards nobler pursuits?” But I should’ve known you’d come through for us. Now, unburdened at last by these aching questions, I can rest. To anyone else who might dare challenge you, I say…Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them!
Driving a scion 120 miles per hour then I crashed made me laugh pretty hard. Maybe I’m laughing at this guy who wanted to be on HBO tv. Freddie always asks questions which is good and it makes me think about things differently sometimes or maybe I agree with him. On this one I have to disagree. First time commenting on a Substack.
Couldn't we also psychanalyze you as trying to justify your own time spent watching these shows, and being on top of pop culture, by writing articles such as these? Couldn't it be genuinely good to avoid "the latest thing"?
I liked his comment, but not for the reasons you lay out here. I just didn't like the premise of the show as you tell it. It doesn't sound funny to me, only tiresome.
Comedy shows that try to insert social justice issues into them just fall flat to me. It's like they are trying to backdoor SJ by using laughs to mask it. Tons of people are really tired of 'virtue' entertainment. It's still sort of a lecture, despite it being 'comedic'. And no one likes to be lectured to, especially when it comes to comedy.
💯 I am heartily sick of moral scolds.
I don't watch much TV (outside of sport) so include me in the list of never having seen these shows. I always find your writing interesting, but in this case, yeah..."not for me"
There's finite time in the day and so there's a finite amount you can see or hear so why not be glad you avoided seeing and hearing about something irrelevant and unpleasant to you?
Reading comments sections is a really interesting exercise. I’m like, “do I have anything to say about that? Do I have anything to say about that? That? That?” I can sort of feel my engine overheating, but in a good way. Just a random observation about comments. And myself.
Did this essay make you feel less glad?
The key point here is that comedy is subjective in a way that drama isn’t. We have stumbled upon the 3 act structure that makes for a satisfying narrative, but comedy doesn’t quite work like that. There is definitely a craft to writing jokes and gags, but you can do everything right and still have a joke fall flat with some audiences. And unlike drama, which you can gain an appreciation for by better understanding the craft, comedy doesn’t get funnier when it’s explained. I think there will always be humor that doesn’t work for some of us, for me, I just don’t find Adam Sandler or Will Farrel movies to be funny, it just doesn’t work for me. The tricky part of comedy is that when it doesn’t work, it’s a disaster. A bad drama can be inadvertently entertaining, even funny. A bad comedy is just excruciating. An even worse experience is when everyone is laughing but you, it’s hard not feel like the joke’s on you
This sounds like a Curb b-plot. In a good way. You've unintentionally sold me.
This is an insightful and interesting review! I am not a fan of Fielder either and probably wouldn’t watch this show (the word “precious” comes to mind for me - when he is on camera, he seems to be imploring the viewer to understand how clever he is).
I think this review can coexist peacefully in a world where “not for me” is perfectly acceptable, and objective value is just about impossible to ascertain. I still appreciate critical takes, and I will agree with some and not others. Nothing wrong with that.
I’ve also tried with Nathan Fielder. Stuff like his just doesn’t make me laugh.
It's funny, I interpreted The Rehearsal as Fielder's examination of and penance for Nathan For You. The whole shtick of The Rehearsal, in my view, was that you didn't in fact know how much you, the audience, were being fucked with: were these people actually real? The show, again and again, suggested that they might not be, and that the audience was the real mark. The thrust of the first episode was that Nathan Fielder was not to be trusted, that the entire conceit of the show was not to be trusted.
Interesting point!
This was one of my main curiosities about White Lotus. Does the core audience have any idea that they're the subject of its content? The people in my life who love it so much and talk about it the most might as well be the Aubrey Plaza character in S2.
What does it mean if you didn't like it? I thought it was the a very boring piece of television, with deeply unlikable characters. Why did people like it?
I'm so with you on this. I didn't last 2 shows.
`Does the core audience have...'
The show reads to me as more of generational representation than that of a few specific types. I was expecting to see something about my social class and generation that I could connect with, both good and bad, at a personal and generational level.
my genZ boys love Impractical Jokers; I think it's mean - to the unsuspecting participants as well as the so-called friends. But I think that reveals, in me, a lack of understanding the way men interact with each other
my slightly older daughter eagerly awaits every Nathan Fielder project, but I've only seen 2 episodes of Nathan For You. I read alot of press for The Rehearsal, and she really talked it up, but I still didn't seek it out. There's a lot out there and only so much time.
I was disappointed by Good Time, which felt like a half-baked and unremarkable crime thriller with an unusually good lead performance and soundtrack.
But Uncut Gems - Uncut Gems is art, a unique, nauseating and wholly personal statement. I've never seen anything like it. Parasite was probably the only 2019 film I saw which exceeded it.
I feel about Good Time the way I feel about Mean Streets. I was underwhelmed when I watched it, but I understood that Scorsese couldn't have made Goodfellas if he hadn't made Mean Streets first.
Exactly, Good Time was like a dry run for techniques they would later perfect in Uncut Gems.
The noise I made when I learned about The Unforgiven III
I'd be curious to hear Freddie's thoughts on Heaven Knows What - the Safdie brothers probably get too much of a pass from critics because of their talent for style and and willingness to explore grime and moral complexity in a way so few directors do these days, but I think his criticism is mostly on-base.
For me it was Mr. Show. I heard nothing but praise, nothing but how brilliantly funny it was. So I watched it and found it aggressively unfunny. I'm willing to accept that the fault may be mine, but that still doesn't make me laugh.
Humor is definitely tricky, especially in episodic form. I can watch Seinfeld or Cheers over and over and over and still laugh, but something like The Office doesn't do a damn thing for me. I remember talking to someone a decade younger than me who had the exact opposite take. So maybe it also matters when you are, and not only who you are?
I think you last sentence explains people who like horror as well. They are glad it's not them. They like feeling superior. Interesting. I think it explains why I don't like either genre.
I think that's true of some horror, like old school slasher films where a bunch of unlikeable characters get bumped off, but the appeal of a lot of horror is that you identify with the protagonist and want to cathartically go through something horrible with them while they survive and triumph.
As someone who survived too many real life horrors, I've never understood the appeal. I guess it's a safe way of experiencing trauma and having it immediately fixed after 2 hours. Thanks for helping me see that.
This is off-point, but: how does Nathan Fielder get to star opposite Emma Stone? Either I don't understand the Hollywood marketplace, or things have really changed in the past few years, or Emma Stone is less of a star than I thought, or, maybe, she does whatever she wants to do, and she wanted to do this.
Your last point is the correct one. And given the huge buzz around both this silly TV comedy and the coming Oscar baity "Poor Things", she seems to pick her projects rather well.
I felt the struggle between "this is dogshit" and "this doesn't match my taste" when I saw Asteroid City. I didn't feel it, it hardly felt like a real movie. Watching positive reviews of it though, it's like we saw two different films. Clearly, I just didn't "get it" and instead of saying it's bad out of ignorance, I give the most polite refusal of "not to my taste."
Now though, I really just didn't like it. Wes Anderson's style is so overbearing, the movie feels set in a fantasy land separate from our own even compared to actual fantasy lands like Oz or Middle Earth. None of the characters feel like actual people, and any "development" they're meant to have is obfuscated by the fact that they are characters playing characters in a movie in a movie. I cannot seriously hide behind "not my taste" because I've enjoyed Wes Anderson movies in the past.
To get even a little more irate, Wes Anderson is just known to critics as "the man you like if you have good taste" and the reviews of Asteroid City start with that premise to reverse engineer a positive review. Reading the positive reviews, it was like reading Hieroglyphs. You really got THAT out of this movie???
I'm a huge Anderson fan and Asteroid City didn't land for me at all, you're not alone.
I chalk the (relatively) favorable reviews up to the mere touching on inside baseball creative process stuff being catnip for the art discourse class. It's a film with interesting ideas, it just doesn't accomplish anything in particular with them.
Wes Anderson is not my bag, but my girlfriend wanted to watch "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and, while it's very much not my cup of tea, I laughed a few times, it was fairly well paced, and of course I can admire the craft that went into the cinematography, costume and production design.
"Asteroid City" was dogshit though. Just two hours of pointless quirkiness for quirkiness's sake. Literally the only time I laughed was when the alien came on-screen. All this stupid pedantic dialogue where the "joke" is apparently that it's pedantic and explained in exhaustive detail. Sure the production design is gorgeous, but when it's in service of something so tedious and unengaging, who cares? Someone needs to buy him a really big dollhouse.
I've never seen any other Wes Anderson films, and came away from Asteroid City wondering if perhaps I was just too stupid to appreciate his work since so many people love him, so glad to hear it wasn't just me.
His other films, especially the recent ones, are way more enjoyable. He always has a somewhat cerebral theatrical/artificial style, but normally you still come to feel for the characters and end up with some heartfelt moments. Asteroid City's play within a play setup just made everything feel too detached. I wouldn't let it put you off - try The Grand Budapest Hotel or The French Dispatch before deciding he's not for you, both way better IMO!
My best friend, a big film buff, told me that she wanted me to watch Asteroid City because “I can’t decide if you’re going to love it or absolutely hate it and either way I think the reason why will be very interesting to me.”
I still haven’t seen it but that made the prospect of seeing it and hating it feel more fun!
I liked Asteroid City far more than most other Anderson films because it was more openly depressive, even philosophically pessimistic. He's very hit and miss for me. His recent Dahl adaptations that I watched didn't work for me at all - failed to capture what I actually like about Dahl's writing and imagery, though I liked 'Fantastic Mr Fox' well enough.
I love most of Wes Anderson's work, with the exception of The Darjeeling Limited, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City. I actually did enjoy the Asteroid City main story color segments, but they would have been too slight to stand on their own, and the black-and-white behind-the-scenes segments were completely baffling to me.