A Struggling Boy Band, An African City, and Some Drunk-Ass TV
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!
Boyband
Part of the difficulty in getting older is that increasingly everyone looks like a child. And it’s easy to feel a sense of wonderment about the sorts of things children are doing these days. Babies using Snapchat! Toddlers commuting with drones! Infants advancing stem cell research! But with Boyband, it might actually true. The show has a This is Spinal Tap feel to it, ostensibly capturing the early days of a group of friends forming a boy band, stitching interviews with the earnest teenagers together into a bizarrely self-aware portrait about manufactured pop culture. The biggest testament to the quality is that it isn’t clear if these teens actually wrote the show or are performing someone else’s script. Are they the most talented fifteen year olds in the world? How do they even know who Toad the Wet Sprocket is? How do they know?
An African City
The show has been compared to an African Sex and the City and the parallels are clear - a group of female friends, struggling to figure out careers, family obligations and romance. Relationships in particular are a focus, with the women living in a rapidly modernizing but traditionally-grounded culture where the rules are being rewritten in real-time. The main character is a Ghanaian who lived abroad and finds herself moving back, adding a fish-out-of-water element. It would be easy to pigeonhole this as only appealing to the African diaspora but the themes are universal and it has started to gain quite the global following, with The New Yorker recently singing its praises.
The Drunk Series
One of the pleasures of doing a dry month is that you get to unimpeachably witness how your friends transform over the course of an evening of drinks. It’s not unfair to say it can cause some soul-searching to to realize how just a handful of cocktails changes the tone and substance of conversation. The Drunk Series takes that to its extreme, with each episode written and performed while egregiously intoxicated. Each one is ostensibly a spoof of a different movie genre but the focus is clearly the highwire act involved as actors try to enunciate and stay on script. Why is that enjoyable? Because sometimes the simplest things, like the smell of fresh cookies, neck rubs and watching other people be stupid, are the best things.
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