Introducing: TV Tuesdays

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One of the first rules of blogging is that you need to pick a topic and stick with it. Well, to hell with all that. I’m a multifaceted motherfucker (ADHD) and this is my newsletter and I do what I want.

Here’s a thing you might not know about me: I love TV. I’ve always loved TV. From the after school lineup and Must See TV growing up to Netflix and HBO Max or Go or whatever they’re calling it these days today, I watch a LOT of TV. I love getting invested in the characters and storylines and unlike movies, shows let me see them through over many hours. And it’s gotten progressively harder for me to visualize things in my head over the years (aphantasia, which is correlated with autism) so I prefer watching fiction to reading it. Plus my low energy and social anxiety (autism) makes watching TV much easier than socializing. Apparently “People with insecure, anxious attachment styles are more likely than those with secure attachment styles to form perceived social bonds with television characters.”

My loneliness story

I pretty much only read non-fiction. I’m also pretty obsessed with podcasts and audiobooks, exclusively non-fiction.

During panny, I basically ran out of TV that kept my attention. I’d always read a LOT of news and commentary. Like, one of the first things I did when we got a computer at home was start reading the Drudge Report on a daily basis. I’d play Freecell while the pages loaded through our dial-up connection. But in panny I found myself wanting some kind of media that would keep my attention without further stressing me out.

I found history to be the perfect salve. It was non-fiction, so I could read it or listen to podcasts about it. It kept my attention. And, best of all, there wasn’t a thing I felt like I needed to do about it. Plus, it felt more hoity toity than TV, but to my delight I found it could be even more lowbrow and salacious than the most asinine reality TV.

I’ve long idly dreamed of writing for a TV show. How wonderful would it be to translate my weirdness into a gift of pleasure a la Insecure or Fleabag or The Mindy Project?

I’d also love to write about TV. Great pop-culture commentary is one of life’s most sublime experiences. When I think about what I want to produce with my life, I think about a podcast called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s.

To experience something as pleasurable as a great song, and then to have someone articulate what made it great and could have made it better and the economic and cultural realities that shaped it and our collective response to it and what it means or could mean as well as the author’s personal experience with it. Baller AF. It’s like the hot chocolate sauce on your brownie with ice cream. A brownie with ice cream is great either way. But now that the hot chocolate sauce is there, you have to admit that it really makes it a million times better.

Anyway. All that to say, fuck it. Life is short and this is my blog and I’m going to try a thing where I write about TV on Tuesdays. I’m not particularly good at pop-culture commentary. This newsletter will probably never be as fun as 60 Songs. But I think it will be fun and also I keep having thoughts about the shit I’m watching and I don’t have any other place to put those thoughts so you have to put up with them. Obvs if you don’t want my thoughts on TV, don’t open these emails on Tuesdays until and unless I end the experiment. You’ll know if I do that because I’ll stop headlining these posts “TV Tuesdays.”

To start us off, I’m currently watching The Last Kingdom (?/10) because Netflix suggested it after I finished The Lost Pirate Kingdom (6/10). Which is honestly a great companion watch for HBO’s Our Flag Means Death (10/10). Concurrently, I’m playing a lot of Bubbles Empire Champions, a very stupid phone game, while listening to history documentaries on YouTube. One thing I love doing is comparing what historians say really happened with the fictionalizations I watch.

One example is from Hulu’s The Great. The show, a highly fictionalized retelling of Catherine the Great’s rise to power, lives up to its tagline: “An occasionally true story.” An excellent biography of Catherine the Great (which one of my OnlyFans subscribers gifted me) actually started me off on the history kick, or at least kicked it into high gear. In the show and in real life, Peter tried to use Cossacks to defend him against Catherine and the army when it was time for him to not be on the throne anymore. And he really was, by all accounts, an unusually terrible husband, monarch, and person.

Another fun overlap between fact and fiction is that Our Flag Means Death depicts Blackbeard as super hornt and erratic. According to The Lost Pirate Kingdom, the dude truly was pretty slutty and in his sluttery contracted syphilis. This STI was still pretty new to Europeans in the 18th century, and so especially virulent. In later stages, it often caused dementia. Until recently mean believed that Nietzsche’s descent into madness at the end of his life was advanced syphilis, (which didn’t quite comport with what an incel he seemed to have been). Turns out it was probably brain cancer. Also, the main treatment for the syph until like 1930 was liquid mercury, which didn’t work but also hurt a lot. I’d long wondered how it was used. According to the docuseries, it was injected into the peehole.

I’ve watched one or two episodes of the new Catherine de Medici show and am currently on my second listen of Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France (8/10). One more fun historical sex fact that I will burn down the Starz hq if they don’t include in the show: Catherine and her husband the future King Henry II of France fucked for the first ten years of their marriage without her getting preg. Legit fearing he’d divorce her, she saved her own ass by crying in front of the current king, Henry’s dad, who really liked Catherine and also couldn’t stand to see a woman cry.

Realizing that crying would only take her so far, Catherine kicked “Operation Get Preg” into high gear. She apparently cut a hole in the ceiling above Henry’s fave mistress’s bedroom so she could see if they were doing something differently. But all she could see was that Henry and the mistress were having a much better time than Henry had with Catherine and her eyes were too full of tears to get good intel. Then Catherine started asking the court for help. Someone at court got her in touch with a doctor who looked at Catherine and Henry’s genitals and recommended a new way to fuck WHICH HAS BEEN LOST TO HISTORY DAMN IT that worked so well that she ended up getting preg nine times. Also, speaking of syphilis, it killed both Catherine’s parents soon after she was born and she might have had congenital syphilis and passed it on to at least most of her children. Margot was I believe the only one who was super healthy and weirdly Catherine liked her least. But the evidence is even stronger that they had congenital tuberculosis, or possibly both.

One more fact/fiction overlap and then I’ll let you go, my sweet babies. In the first episode of The Last Kingdom (SPOILER BEGINNING) the Danes won a battle against the English by tricking them into getting all their forces caught between two walls of shields and then cutting at their legs. (SPOILER ENDING) It turns out, according to this BBC doc, that the Vikings really did win a lot of their battles with the English using trickery and cunning rather than just brute strength.

I like to think of these show’s writers sneaking in bits of plot as easter eggs to history nerds. I also think about how truth is often stranger and more interesting than fiction and wonder why writers don’t include bits like Blackbeard being syphilitic. Like it’s pretty weird that syphilis is pretty much a main character in European and American history from the moment it showed up and yet in nearly every fictionalization it’s just… not there at all? Justice for syphilis! Representation matters!

Anyway, I hoped you liked reading this because I really liked writing it. :D Expect more next week my babies.

Fun history fact (not related to TV): The Shakers took up celibacy after Ann Lee, who was repulsed by sex, became their head honcho about a decade after their founding.