What I’m Streaming on HBO

I originally wanted to do one blog post going over my top four suggestions on each streaming platform, but the media studies student in me started taking over. I was getting way too in-depth, and out of fear that this would never get done, I've decided to break things up and make this a series.

I'm going to go slightly out of order here because one of my favorite suggestions for HBO is being removed next week, so I've got to get that covered before it's too late.

We've been in this quarantine for the past few months, and I've heard a lot of people say they ran out of things to watch in the first couple weeks. I'm here to tell you you're wrong. As someone who watches about 5-10 movies and/or a couple series a week, if I haven't run out of content, there is no way you have. Sometimes you just have to go digging through the movies and shows people don't always talk about.

HBO

Silicon Valley

HBO seems to be most well known for shows like Game of Thrones, Westworld, and Barry. They are a network that puts out high-quality content and have used their paid programming platform to put out edgy, raunchy content for years. HBO has been able to break the rules of cable television and get away with explicit language and nudity. I've given all these big named HBO shows a chance. I even had a media professor tell me that if you don't like Game of Thrones, you don't like good media and shouldn't be studying the subject. That wasn't the case for me at all. I haven't been captured by any of these shows that everyone seems to obsess over.

Then comes Silicon Valley. This is the first HBO show I've truly enjoyed, and I'm upset it took me so long to find it. The premise of the show doesn't sound like something I would typically relate to or enjoy. It's a comedy about a tech startup in Silicon Valley. I know nothing about tech and thought the humor would go straight over my head, but I was so wrong. We binged the entire series in a couple weeks and has become one of the most quoted shows between my boyfriend and me.

The show has the endearing quality of a satire that is continually making fun of itself. The main character is someone you kind of hate most of the time because he keeps messing things up, but at the same time, you're still rooting for his success because you want to see the people around him succeed. It's a story of making mistakes over and over again and having to pivot. Their startup's end product is so far from where it began because they had to keep changing due to the events through the show. I think that is what makes this show so entertaining and relateable even if you know nothing about tech because we all know what it's like to fail and have to get back up again.

Silicon Valley is wildly underappreciated and worth giving a chance if you are looking for something new to watch.

Flight of the Conchords

This show is such a classic for me. In the depths of YouTube, there is a music video for one of the songs from this show my family and I made. Flight of the Conchords is an early 2000s comedy about two guys from New Zeland trying to become musicians in America. The show only ran for two seasons, but it gathered a strong cult following, keeping them relevant enough to do concert tours.

Similar to shows like The Office, Flight of the Conchords is a comedy of the mundane, following people with relatively normal lives. Our main protagonists are poor, unemployed, and unknown. There is nothing particularly special about them. Most of the scenes take place on the streets of New York, in a cheap apartment, or in an office at the New Zeland embassy. Looking at the show strictly from the premise and setting, it seems like a rather dull show, but its the characters that make this show great.

Like many other projects with people from New Zeland, this show uses a lot of dry humor. Here we have an unusual cast of characters played in the straightest way. The comedy doesn't come from over the top characters trying to get laughs, but odd characters being played deadpan serious. There are the two main characters, Jemaine and Bret, the New Zeland musicians that are still struggling with understanding American culture. Murry, the band manager and a worker at the New Zeland embassy who is still out of touch with the society he now lives in and is constantly making mistakes. And Mel, the bands one and only superfan/stalker, which I will admit is a borderline over the top character. Still, her interactions with Jemaine and Bret give them more opportunity to show this deadpan humor just through how uncomfortable she makes everyone feel.

The quality that makes this show different from other sitcoms with a similar formula is its polite comedy. The jokes aren't really crude or slapstick, and our characters are generally too polite for the situations they find themselves in. Placing these characters in a city like New York that is so contradictory for them brings to light the flaws and virtues of human nature. For example, a large part of the plot is that the guys are always trying to get girlfriends. They struggle with this because their views on relationships and sexuality are different from the typical American man. There is almost a role reversal with the girls they have relations with because the women are much more forward, while the men are much more careful with their heart and in touch with their feelings. This is where we begin to get some classic songs like "I'm Not Crying."

Music is used in this show to move the story forward and show Jemaine and Bret's inner emotions. These comedy songs pull inspiration from a variety of different genres and artists through the two seasons. Some of the songs could be described as parody, but not a typical parody that mocks the original. Their songs are more of a loving parody or a comedic homage. Jemaine and Bret are using these music styles because it speaks to them and their characters rather than the most obscure song they could create. With this broad scope of different musical styles, they can explore different film styles within the episode. They create these stylized sequences that serve as music videos within the episode.

Overall this is a little out of the box show worth checking out if you haven't seen or heard of it before.

Blindspotting

You need to watch this movie. It is sadly leaving HBO at the end of this month, but even if you miss that window, you need to find a way to watch this movie.

Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, two life long friends, wrote and starred in this movie about two life long friends. Blindspotting came out a few years ago and didn't get the exposure it deserved. It was only on my radar because I'm a massive fan of Diggs and everything he puts out.

The story is about a man trying to get through his last day of probation without getting into trouble and the relationship he has with his best friend. The movie deals with some intense subjects like police shooting and the lengths men go to to protect their families.

This story's inciting incident is when our main character, Collin, played by Daveed Diggs, is waiting at a red light and witnesses a black man being shot by a police officer. This is where the title Blindspotting comes in. Blindspotting is the idea that an image or something can be seen in two different ways, but you can only see one interpretation, so you have a blindspot to the other. We have seen this in internet crazes like the white and gold vs. blue and black dress or yany vs. laurel debates. Once you hear or see one, it's nearly impossible to notice the other. In this film, they are dealing with seeing a black man and seeing him as a threat before a person. Collin is dealing with his identity, being branded by the color of his skin, and viewed as a threat who has to walk through this world with more caution to stay alive.

On the other hand, we have Miles, played by Rafael Casal, the troublemaking white friend who has grown up in the same community. As the white guy, growing up in a primarily black area, he sees being black as a privilege and acts "black" to be seen as an equal among his peers. We see how their friendship is tested as they struggle with identity in their rapidly changing and gentrifying city.

The strong relationships between the creators behind this film gave them the creative freedom to try new storytelling techniques. The director and both writers have backgrounds in spoken word and freestyle rap, which was used in the film to heighten the emotion in some scenes either by adding comedy or tension. One of the most powerful scenes at the end of the film was entirely spoken word, some of which was made up on the spot. This was one of my favorite movies I've seen in a while, and I don't want to spoil too much because you have to watch this one.

Good Boys

Okay, hear me out, this movie made me cry. Yes, for the most part, it is just another Seth Rogen movie chalked full of way too much crude humor and innuendos, and it's especially uncomfortable because it's starring a cast of actual children. BUT I think there is a really sweet story about friendship underneath it all that really hit me in the feels.

The story is about three 6th graders who have been best friends since kindergarten are starting to mature and want different things in life. They get thrown into a series of events that get them into a lot of trouble and test their friendships. It's in the title of the movie that this is a group of Good Boys that wild things keep happening to them. They aren't bad, they aren't trying to get into these situations, and they really don't know that is going on, and that's where most of the humor is coming from—adult humor stemming from kids not understanding the adult world.

Good Boys is a coming of age story taking place in the time in life where kids think they know everything, but they really don't. There's this great line that really summarizes that idea, "Stop treating us like kids. We're tweens. We know how things work." Each of the three main characters has their own journey in character development, realizing they are growing in different directions, going through puberty at different rates, and are starting to want different things in life.

There is a scene in the movie where the boys are in the car with these two teenage girls, and they talk about different friendships. This isn't a comedy about kids doing inappropriate things. It's a story about how friendships grow and change, and a childhood full of memories together doesn't always mean a lifetime of being together. So if you can look past all the crude humor, I'd give this one a shot.

So that's what I've been watching on HBO lately. Hopefully, I've given you something new to try out. Let me know in the comments if there's anything on HBO that you're loving right now so I can check it out. I'll be posting my suggestions for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Disney+ over the next couple weeks, so stay tuned for more ideas if you're still struggling to find content.

Love,

Julia Carrington