Back on the Couch

Summer ends and you start watching things properly again—sitting down, full episodes, dark outside before you finish. The queue that accumulated all July and August starts to look like a plan.

That September, Narcos returned for a third season, which was the real test: two seasons built entirely around Pablo Escobar, now what? The answer turned out to be "keep going, it works." BoJack Horseman came back for its fourth season, still the most formally adventurous and emotionally punishing show on the platform, still watched by fewer people than it deserved. Season four was where it got genuinely dark in ways the earlier seasons had only approached—the kind of writing that doesn’t release you when the credits roll.

New arrivals included American Vandal, a true-crime parody so structurally committed to its premise that it functioned as actual documentary filmmaking regardless of the joke. Big Mouth, which had a setup that should have been unwatchable and turned out to be one of the more honest animated shows about adolescence I’ve seen. And Star Trek: Discovery, about which I had complicated feelings before the first frame aired and complicated feelings after.

On the film side: Milk, still the best argument for revisiting Gus Van Sant; and Inside Deep Throat, which is a better piece of work about the American cultural moment of the seventies than most things made about that era with serious intentions. Also Keira Knightley twice—Bend It Like Beckham and Pirates of the Caribbean. I watched at least one of those again and felt no regret whatsoever.