Content Consumed: Drive to Survive, Caleb Hearon, Griselda, and Kate Middleton

Hey, hey! Welcome to this week’s edition of Content Consumed, where we’re chit-chatting about…

💸 Drive to Survive—or Succession?
📚 The Women: Review
🤭 Podcast rec: So True with Caleb Hearon
🧨 Sofia Vergara stuns as Griselda
👑 Quick question… where’s Kate Middleton?

Drive to Survive is back and dripping with wealth

Everyone’s favorite sports docuseries Drive to Survive is back just in time for the 2024 racing season.

I watched the first episode this weekend and stared, slack-jawed, at modern Bond villain Lawrence Stroll’s big Aston Martin party. The episode was appropriately titled “Money Talks”, which is truer than ever in Formula 1, even with cost caps. Stroll, owner of the Aston Martin racing team and daddy to driver Lance Stroll, is a billionaire who certainly spends what he’s got.

Watching ~the help~ prepare for Stroll’s arrival to the party… felt almost fake. The dialogue was straight from Succession, from every occasion where Logan Roy’s arrival was imminently expected. Pillows are fluffed and lighting is perfected. We hear “Mr. Stroll” whispered into walkie-talkies. We watch a montage of all the global elite and celebrité making their appearances. We see other billionaires get a bit nervous for Stroll’s arrival via helicopter. If you didn’t know already: this is a powerful man.

Man, I miss Succession. Drive to Survive is helping me get my fix right now, though.

I didn’t love The Women

Please, Kristin Hannah fans, put down your pitchforks.

I read The Women, Hannah’s new novel about women nurses in the Vietnam War, pretty quickly. I think it took me a week. So I’ll give it points for pacing.

But otherwise… the novel fell very flat for me. Stuffed with cliches—yes, women can be heroes too, we get it, it doesn’t need to be said like that 17 times!—the novel uses every trope possible. Every tragedy that could happen does happen. This seems to be the only way the author attempts to get an emotional pull: killing off characters that we couldn’t even get that attached to.

PTSD, addiction, etc.—there’s nothing new in this story that you haven’t already read in many other war novels. Perhaps if the main character, Frankie, was more compelling… but I could not connect with her. First-person POV could have been a better narrative choice for this particular story.

And while the book promises to be about women, it’s mostly male characters that push Frankie toward any character development. The other women are, unfortunately, also full of tropes and clichés.

It’s commercial fiction, written by an author who pumps out a new novel almost every year. So I guess my hopes were a little high. Maybe if I had read another Kristin Hannah book before, my expectations would have been more reasonable.

But this is not the best book of 2024 so far, as some reviews have claimed.

P.S. Find out what I’m reading now at my Goodreads profile.
Currently: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.

Caleb Hearon’s cracking me up

A favorite comedian of mine, Caleb Hearon, started a podcast. I jumped right into his episode with Caitlin Reilly, because I’m a fan of hers as well.

No one is making mundane topics as funny as these two in this episode. Or bigger topics—is there a God?! Social media, pickleball, deep-cut directors, Beverly Hills, British accents, Stuart Little, ghost stories (are ghosts real or are you just a bitch who loves attention?), and more—Caleb and Caitlin touch it all.

Just press play and hang out. That’s what it feels like. Just hanging out with your two funniest friends.

Sofia Vergara’s got shit going on

I’m halfway through episode 2 of Griselda and loving it. Yasss, Jefa! Girlboss!

Sofia Vergara is not the Gloria Pritchett you know from Modern Family. She transforms—physically and otherwise—for this role as Griselda Blanco, the Colombian drug lord who created one of the most powerful drug cartels in history during the ‘70s and ’80s in Miami.

And she’s nailing it so far, from what I’ve watched.

It’s different than Narcos and the other North American drug trade TV shows because the main character and the plot are seen through a distinct feminine lens. Griselda is a mother. She faces violent misogyny as she tries to move her goods; she fights her battles differently than men might. (No, you’re not supposed to feel bad for her, but it’s something to provide an interesting perspective and get insight into her decisions.) She’s a classic anti-hero.

I like how this HuffPo review put it:

Griselda uses sexism and motherhood to make Griselda a more likable anti-hero for the viewer and a symbol for her devotees — the vulnerable prostitutes and immigrants she “protects” as “Godmother” by offering money and employment, and a twisted version of hope.

However, as the series unfolds, it becomes clear that the viewer rooting for the female narco to show the other drug lords that she is more than a “girlfriend,” “housewife,” or “headache,” has fallen down the same depraved rabbit hole as Griselda’s acolytes.

I like that it’s a miniseries. Six episodes feel like they’ll be perfect. The opening of the show featured a quote from Pablo Escobar—“The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco”—which is a brilliant set-up for the incoming carnage.

The Internet’s talking: Where is Kate Middleton?

Kate Middleton has not been seen or heard from for two months.

So where is she? The answer’s actually pretty simple. She’s recovering from an abdominal surgery of sorts. But that hasn’t stopped Twitter from speculating and making some memes.

Banksy, bangs, and BBLs… here are my favorites.

And that’s it for now! Thanks for reading. Love ya.

Cheers,
Casey

🗯 Wait, what’s this Content Consumed thing?

I’m Casey and I’m a writer based in Portland, Oregon. My day job is writing at an ad agency, my primary hobby is novel writing, and I publish this column about once a week (at least, that was how it went until I took a break from November through January).

In every edition of Content Consumed, I’ll catch you up on the culture of the moment. Mostly entertainment — television, movies, music, podcasts, books, sports.

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👉🏼 Find out what I’m reading at my Goodreads profile.