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Another Hollywood occult offering for that most impressionable demographic: the American (global) teenager. We'll excuse Wednesday Addams talking more like a college professor or Hollywood screenwriter given that she is supposed to be precocious and weird. Wednesday must learn to care and defend the outcasts, you see, who are constantly being victimized by "normies" (that is, when they aren't throwing piranhas into high school swimming pools). True to the Riverdale and Sabrina template, it's necessary to have generational conflict with the parents, with absolutely no exceptions: even culturally requisite popular black girl Bianca can't stand the sight of her mother. Werewolf Enid is trying to convince her parents that she doesn't need conversion therapy (do you see how expertly the writers allude our normie issues? So understanding and sympathetic, would that the town's European and religious founders, and their normie descendants, receive the same treatment). The grown-ups just don't understand teenage suffering and will have to be educated by their intelligent offspring. There are some Addams family references here and there, but really, it's just another teen drama series that happens to be set in that world. It doesn't really make as much use of it as it could. Ortega is cute and committed to the role but even her spooky charm will wear off in a season or two. Don't worry, though, the Netflix algorithm will already have another supernatural teen series to deliver by then.

Nick News was (is?) a children's news program hosted by Linda Ellerbee. As a Millennial child, not I, nor a single person I knew had any interest in this show and considered it a waste of valuable time on the Nickelodeon schedule. It was created by adults for adult reasons (indoctrinating youth), and adults congratulated themselves for it to the tune of 9 Emmy awards for best children's program of the year (it wouldn't win a thing if children voted). The content never really appealed to me as a kid (what child wants to watch a news program in their spare time?) but having gone back and watched clips, it's clear the show had a liberal slant and was created for propaganda purposes. If you're going to do that, at least get someone charismatic to deliver. Instead, we're presented with Linda Ellerbee, who serves as one of the most jaw-droppingly boring anchors I've ever seen. If the world had ended, she'd be up there with her staid, monotone delivery going, "The world ended today..."

Avoid.

One should always be on the lookout when Hollywood attempts to depict small town Texas. Earlier on in this show's run, it seemed the writers wanted to say something about race relations, sports, and small towns, but all that camera-shaking, liberal checklist, and likely network executive interference got in the way.

Church attendance is shown in a couple of episodes earlier on and then seems to drop to make way for strip clubs. There's healthy servings of liberal messaging (pro-choice, sprinkles of LGBT, virtuous Central American immigrants). True to Hollywood, the small town of Dillon is portrayed not unlike a prison. If only these poor kids could get away to... New York or Los Angeles! Yeah, that's it! Those big cities will make all their dreams come true, like they have for so many others. They certainly have for the network executives leaving notes for the showrunners.

The series ended up performing so poorly for NBC that it was effectively canceled, only to be rescued by DirecTV. It aired on their (now defunct) Audience Network to DirecTV subscribers, then months later on NBC. It's interesting that just like The Wire, many Americans did not care (or in The Wire's case, did not care and could not afford) to watch this, but it was preserved to make coastal elites happy.

The biggest surprise of the show ended up being that Jesse Plemons, playing a near-tertiary character to start and not really impressive when given material later on (including a disastrous subplot in the second season), ended up being its most successful actor in the years since.

The show that created reality television as we know it (and often loathe it) today premiered in 2000 on CBS, becoming a national sensation by the end of its inaugural run.

The earlier seasons are fun enough, with a little more emphasis put on the locations, whereas today they appear to be entirely Fiji-based.

The most cringemaking segments are when the contestants are made to play Peace Corps (as a reward? No thanks!) but even more so when Jeff shamelessly tries to get an emotional moment out of them, epitomized by those "heartwarming" visits from "loved ones," where they are briefly reunited with family or friends.

The first season is a little rough around the edges and is honestly better for it. The contestants still didn't really know what they had signed up for and some of the younger ones (Gen Xers, how time flies) are openly cynical and derisive of the show's ceremony and rules, such as the concept of voting people out.

The show never became the survival show it was envisioned as being. Alpha males and females are early targets and the strategy of an alliance has given way to cliques, turning the whole thing into Mean Girls: The Game Show. In more recent seasons, Jeff Probst (first host, now producer and apparently dictator for life) has grown fond of adding as many twists as possible, many of them utterly ludicrous. It has led fans to be covet a season according to the "classic" rules, some even wanting one without "Hidden Immunity Idols" (introduced in Survivor: Guatemala).

For all its faults, the show is reasonably entertaining and one could do a lot worse on network television (variations on the concept, such as the execrable Big Brother, already have). The show will never have the kind of cultural popularity and influence as it did with that initial season in Borneo, but what does these days?

This pelicula was a chore, and watching the protagonist do hers didn't help matters.

What we have here is a film that would've been assailed by the critics and tastemakers had it been in English and about an indigenous or mestiza maid working for a white American family. But because it's in the very exotic language of Spanish and set in Mexico City's Colonia Roma, it's just diverse enough to satisfy them. Of course the upper-middle-class family poor indigenous Cleo is serving is much more criollo than castizo. And director Alfonso Cuarón comes from such a background (both parents in STEM), so he's continued the tradition of associating with and catering to the fairer-skinned people, just like how the family in the film did. And because stories about people of color and maids are today very fashionable indeed to this class, he has made them a film they can reward with Oscars. ¡Buen trabajo!

The rest of us will respond more naturally (and probably more honestly) with yawns and shrugs.

In the wake of the abduction of a high school girl, a group of her classmates experience the loss of innocence over three summers in a small Texas town during the early-to-mid 1990s. It all starts out promisingly, with some fun 90s callbacks and the typical missing girl mystery Hollywood has been doing variations on since Twin Peaks, but there's an artificiality and insincerity about it one can't ignore: sure, all this grooming and abuse _could_ be happening in Texas, but wasn't it likelier to be occurring in, say, 1990s Hollywood? There are healthy servings of de rigueur woke revisionism and theatrics (villainous "cis" people, saintly blacks and/or homosexuals upbraiding uppity and unruly whites for their privilege-although it's amusing when it happens to Froy Gutierrez' ostensibly biracial character). The twists and revelations quickly grow tiresome. There's not much to be said for the acting, although Kevin Smith's daughter, playing an unbelievably annoying character, comes across as perhaps the most authentically 90s of the Zoomers.