Content Consumed: Succession, Bama Rush, Welcome to Wrexham, and a book review

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Content Consumed

6 min readMay 8, 2023

Hey, folks. It’s Monday. A very Monday-ish Monday. Keep holding it together, guys. In today’s edition of Content Consumed, we’re gonna have fun:
👑 The Bama Rush trailer is terrifying
⚽️ Why I can’t watch Welcome to Wrexham
🎥 Succession Episode 7 review
🩸 Book review: Before We Were Innocent

Also, I do not care about the coronation, except for a meme or two or three that came out of it.
Also! I am aware of Matt Healy and Taylor Swift and I am choosing not to comment because I do not believe in it.
Also, I did my annual rewatch of O Brother, Where Art Thou? this weekend. Still a classic.

By the way, Succession is further down the list so you won’t get spoilers if you haven’t watched! Love y’all.

The Bama Rush documentary trailer terrifies me

In case you hadn’t heard, HBO Max is releasing a highly-anticipated documentary that “follows the social media phenomenon that grew out of University of Alabama students documenting their sorority recruitment experience.”

#RushTok! I remember it like it was yesterday. (It was August.)

Now the trailer…? Oh my god.

Every single one of these girls is going to regret participating in this. Especially one of our main characters, who tells us: “Being in a sorority will help me figure out the person I want to be, because I feel like I don’t really know who I am.”

Then she tells us she has trust issues… which are surely about to get a lot worse. Soon, we’re dialing into other 18-year-old girls’ lives, from dead dads to racial discrimination.

It’s… a lot. Watch it yourself. I know I’ll be tuning it when it comes out on May 23.

Why I can’t finish Welcome to Wrexham

It’s Ryan Reynolds.

I cannot stand his humor. It’s juvenile and attention-grabby, and not in a fun way where he can get away with it. It genuinely takes away from the show.

The show, by the way, is about two wealthy American entertainment stars/media moguls adopting a beloved Welsh soccer—sorry, football—team.

What I love about the show: producers pick out and tell the stories of the fans, the volunteers, and the players in a meaningful way. You can tell these people aren’t 100% being taken advantage of (come on, of course they are a little bit, this is TV). Participants are very willing because they fucking love Wrexham. And if Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney can get their team wins and promotion into the league above them, they’ll celebrate that.

What I don’t love about the show: once again, Ryan Reynolds. He and Rob both play themselves—slightly snarky, obtuse L.A. dads with money to throw around—very well. That’s not a compliment. They started and produced this FX docuseries following their Welsh business venture, so I understand why they have a chunk of camera time. But… it’s too much camera time. Something about Ryan Reynolds cracking so many jokes about something that impacts an entire town of passionate common folk bums me out.

Ah, the vanity of middle-aged rich white men who just bought a sports team abroad.

Succession: Episode 7

Woof. Another extremely uncomfortable yet fascinating and perfectly executed episode of television!

Episode 7 of Succession was about Tom and Shiv more than anyone else.

Sure, there was a lot going on: Matsson’s party crashing, some dubious numbers in India, Connor’s 1% causing alt-right candidate Mencken (therefore Roman) angst, Willa considering—and declining—to live in Oman with Connor as a diplomat’s wife, Kendall screaming at his ex on the street, Greg’s firing bravado, Gerri threatening Roman, Nate being the most logical person in the room, and a whole lot of tension ahead of the looming election.

But none of it compares to Tom and Shiv’s battle on the balcony. (Battle on the Balcony… kind of has Battle of the Bastards vibes? No?)

They said some of the nastier things a human could say to another human. Which, yes, they’ve done before, but this was different. This was potentially the complete end of the road for Tom and Shiv, something they could never rebound from.

It hangs on the fact that Tom tells Shiv that she is incapable of love and should never be a mother—while Shiv is nearly 20 weeks pregnant and has not told Tom (the likely father).

Devastating, brutal, and straight to the core. Tom’s tired. Election day is tomorrow. Everything is about to change for him. Shiv’s playing three sides and none of them may be successful.

They’re both doomed, really, for unhappy eternities. The question is: are they doomed together or separately?

Election day is next and it’ll be a chaotic episode and I’m so excited.

Book review: Before We Were Innocent

Ah! It’s been a while since I had a page-turner like this. The premise: “A summer in Greece for three best friends ends in the unthinkable when only two return home.”

Three pretty teen girls, wealthier than most, one an heiress, on a pre-college summer trip to a European hotspot… it’s an iconic set-up. Before We Were Innocent travels between two timelines with one narrator—one of the two friends who didn’t die and were cleared of the crime of killing their friend.

Did Bess and Joni kill Evangeline, or did she just die in a suspicious matter? I won’t tell you, obviously.

Now, ten years after the death, Joni is caught up in an eerily similar murder, and soon our narrator Bess is entwined and reckoning with their shared history.

Ongoing themes: girlhood trauma, coming-of-age romance, wealthy vs. working class, true crime (think Amanda Knox), and media obsession (again, think Amanda Knox). It ends on the right note—not one you’d expect, but the right one.