Meta Rom-Coms, Superhero Cinema-Verite, and Seussian Noir
The Weekly Binge: 3 Web Series To Watch This Week
The Weekly Binge is a handful of recommendations based on what the Stareable Team has been bingeing on this week. Click through to watch and let us know what you think by leaving your own reviews on the site!
Quirky Female Protagonist
Romantic comedies get a bad rap. Some of the best movies are romantic comedies: When Harry Met Sally (Meg Ryan is totally slept on, which is ironic since she starred in Sleepless in Seattle); Annie Hall (especially since Diane Keaton ultimately dodges that Woody Allen bullet); Groundhog’s Day (Bill Murray with himself because yes Andie MacDowell has amazing hair but no one really loves Andie MacDowell). But bad romantic comedies are bad because they treat the audience like they’re idiots. Watching attractive people fall in love is not enough—people want more than a threadbare plot and well-worn timeline (otherwise Katherine Heigl would be doing much better in life). Quirky Female Protagonistbreaks down that basic structure, substituting meta commentary for dialogue. It can be jarring at first but quickly settles into a rhythm, casually yet fluently identifying the tropes of the genre that make these shows so mockable.
Gotham Adjacent
Superhero movies are great but they never really take a cinema verite approach. Sure, Chris Nolan took a gritty approach to Batman. But what about the nitty-gritty? Do the X-Men ever fight about who does the dishes? Is Spiderman a bad tipper? Well, when you live in the town next door to Gotham/Metropolis, where heroes mix with regular folk as they go about their day-to-day-lives, you get to peek behind the curtain. The show uses a setup very similar to Key and Peele’s valet sketch, with two security guards outside of a courthouse talking nonsense during their lunch hour. Think of it as superhero gossip through the grapevine: apparently Wonder Woman gets parking tickets (damn the patriarchy) and Aquaman is a horrible father (if Blue Planet taught us anything, it’s that the ocean is cruel).
NWAR
The Seuss-ical wordplay on this detective noir is enough to recommend it. But it doesn’t come across as cloying because it is nicely balanced by the raspy hardboiled narrator and grayscale minimalist animation. The show focuses on solving surreal Scooby Doo-esque crimes but what really makes it so fun is the palpable joy the creator, Dan Markowitz, clearly took in writing and producing it. Frequently you find yourself marveling at the dry humor as you think “Oh, I see what you did there.” That the show has so few views is absolutely criminal.
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