One Day You’re In, And The Next
I’ve made no secret of my love of good reality TV show contests — I’ve eagerly binged recent seasons of Project Runway, Top Chef and The Great British Bake Off (Yes, I know it’s officially Baking Show here in the US, but no-one really calls it that, do they?), and even became temporarily addicted to the UK version of Love Island in a bout of madness — so I feel pretty confident in reporting that Amazon’s recent venture into the genre, Making The Cut, is… not a good reality TV show. That said, it might the most Amazon reality TV show imaginable.
There are a number of reasons why Making The Cut doesn’t work. On the most basic level, there’s the simple fact that it doesn’t actually spend enough time or energy humanizing the contestants, who instead get to spout some generic, faux inspiring lines about their struggle each episode that don’t really connect with what they’re actually working on — which, in a sad way, makes sense, given how little attention is actually paid to what the contestants are actually doing in each round.
Each episode, the contestants have to design and kinda make two outfits — a Runway Look and another that can be sold on Amazon, because it’s a show where shifting product is the immovable focus. But, aside from vague comments about inspiration and footage of designers frowning in the workshop, the actual process of getting to the final outfits is missing, which feels like a real mistake. It’s one made intentionally, though; the show’s format centers around the designers handing unfinished clothes off to unseen “seamstresses” at the end of each day, and picking up the results the next morning. That’s why I said “kinda make,” above — it’s actually the work of nameless, faceless workers, because Amazon is entirely utterly lacking in self awareness about concerns over its labor practices.
The true focus of the series is capitalism — there’s repeated discussions around the words “global brand,” and contestants aren’t graded on their aesthetics or individual skills, but how they promote their brand and how sellable their work is. The soundtrack of the show is generic, but lyrically focused on wealth and success, and the much-ballyhooed globe-trotting aspect — they’re in Paris! They’re in Tokyo! They’re in New York! — meaningless in any sense beyond offering tourist backdrops and lip-service to finding a global market.
The more you watch the show, the more obvious it is how gross it is; how disinterested it is in anything beyond promotion of a new Amazon product line and Amazon in general, no matter what. (While Heidi Klum had little credibility before this, I do feel the show humiliates Tim Gunn as he gets pulled into this promotional mess.) I watched the whole thing, utterly fascinated by the spectacle eating itself and how ultimately boring it turned out to be. Which, I guess, makes me the problem, doesn’t it?
May 4, 2020
May 1, 2020
Now I See Through To The Back Of This Town
What’s that, you say? It’s time for even more THR newsletter graphics? Ask and you shall receive — with a number of graphics that didn’t even make the cut, because there was a period where the newsletter stories changed on a regular basis as we got ready to hit send.
And then it got a new headline…
This old favorite made another comeback, because… well. What is going on in the world…
A couple where the headline changed after the first image was created…
And then there was the one where we couldn’t help but come up with multiple Salem’s Lot puns:
April 30, 2020
Keeps On Slipping Slipping Slipping
Perhaps it’s because March felt like the month that would never end, but I’ve been surprised how quickly April has gone; there was a point in the middle of the month where I had to look up the date and felt genuinely surprised by how quickly we’d reached the teens, as if they’d crept up behind me and jumped out in surprise: Hello, it’s April 17th already aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
What had actually happened, I suspect, is that the strange, disturbing sensation of days beginning to blur together and seem meaningless in this era of self-quarantine was starting to take hold of me, as well. When time itself seems to be an arbitrary concept — is it Thursday or Friday? Oh, it’s actually Wednesday? Really? — then it’s not the biggest surprise that any sense of time passing in a larger sense starts to fray around the edges, as well.
It was, again, mid-month that I realized that I’d lost track of how long we’d been in quarantine; I’d been telling myself it had just been four weeks, but I’d lost one and we’d been internally quarantined for five already at that point. It was a realization that was part oh, I’m so forgetful, silly me and part wait, am I losing it? all at the same time. Which feels entirely appropriate and authentic to the world as-is, to be blunt.
I don’t subscribe entirely to the view that every day is the same now — I’ve always worked from home, so there’s definitely a sense that my day-to-day isn’t significantly different from what it was, just busier and more compact — but I can’t deny that time certainly feels different right now, in ways I can’t fully wrap my head around… More elastic in some ways, more malleable, without the edges and the shape that used to make everything recognizable.
There’s no punchline here, nor a smart realization or wrap up that puts everything in perspective; I’m just living in the moment same as everyone else, trying to make it through. But, as counter-intuitive as it may be, I’m excited that April passed so seemingly quickly; all things considered, I’d rather time flies than crawls as we collectively hope that things can change and we get to open our doors and see people again.
April 29, 2020
April 28, 2020
Singing Cathy’s Clown
And then, there was the time where I did four podcasts in a five day period, which was both eye-opening, and somewhat exhausting. All four were comics-based, and all four required re-reading a bunch of material — two of them needed hundreds of pages each — and drawing some kind of critical analysis. Suffice to say, it was a pretty full five days.
The scheduling was actually entirely accidental; three of them were long-standing commitments, and only one had been scheduled significantly in advance — that one was an episode of Drokk!, the monthly series re-reading Judge Dredd with the far-smarter-than-me Jeff Lester; I’d say that was also the least stressful of the four, if it wasn’t for the fact that I had to edit it the next day, too. Each of the others, though, kind of just coincidentally happened at the same time.
(They actually all started to be scheduled on the same day earlier that week, all via Twitter DM. It’s actually kind of amazing how much of my work and/or work-related conversations happen via Twitter DM these days; they’ve started to take the place of texts, which took the place of emails some time back. There’s an evolution of shorthand, but important, ways people get in touch with me for work that’s kind of fascinating. But I digress.)
So, I scheduled the podcasts and staggered them out: one on Thursday, one on Saturday, two back-to-back on Monday. (They were two episodes of the same show, so it made sense.) This way, I told myself, I’d have a breather and time for my brain to readjust and prepare for the next one without it being too much.
Reader, I was wrong.
I was wrong for the simplest reason, which is just that… life happens. There’s relationships and work and, shockingly, a need to actually switch off at some point or else you’ll go mad, and all of that makes fitting in hour long recording sessions, and finding the many hours required to do the homework ahead of time, trickier than I’d initially given any thought to. In theory, I knew this already — I do it monthly for Drokk!, after all — but what I can handle for one event per month is, it turns out, somewhat different than four in less than a week.
Each of the podcasts, I enjoyed doing a lot. I certainly don’t regret doing any of them, and I think I did a pretty good job on each, even if I’ll never listen to any all the way through again. But, in future, if this ever comes up again, I’m going to be kinder to myself and ask for a schedule that lets me breathe and think about something other than comics for awhile.