Kamala Harris steps into The Shade Room
Plus, my fave network TV shows
I can tell autumn has arrived because my local coffee shop has stopped selling my favorite peach iced tea… and replaced it with pumpkin iced tea. I’m all for pumpkin-spiced coffee. Go crazy. Whatever. But who the fuck is pumpkin iced tea for? Pumpkin-as-a-brand is getting as annoying as bacon-as-a-brand did in the 2000s.
For autumn, we listed our favorite fall films on Keep It today (video releasing later this week, since we’ve started splitting them up to increase views. It’s annoying to long-time subscribers, but it’s better for advertisers in the long-run!). I also made a list of cozy and spooky films on my Letterboxd.
GQ editor Frazier Tharpe, whose writing I love and rarely disagree with (especially on music), watched network TV for a week and concluded it sucks. This time he’s wrong! But that’s because he watched all of the wrong shows: Ryan Murphy’s 9-1-1, Doctor Odyssey, Brilliant Minds, and Tracker. Meanwhile, three of my favorite shows are on network television right now! And they’re all some form of mystery/detective show.
Found on NBC is a pulpy series starring Shanola Hampton and Mark-Paul Gosselaar (Zach Morris!) about a former kidnapping victim who manages a crisis management firm. Zach Morris plays her former kidnapper, whom she has kidnapped and keeps locked up in her basement to help her solve her kidnapping cases. It’s giving Scandal. It’s giving You. It’s perfect.
Elsbeth is a quirky cop show (it’s still ACAB here, but not on my TV shows, sorry) that’s the third entry in the Good Wife universe. Elsbeth Tascioni is a savant lawyer and detective who’s a bit like Columbo and the cases are usually goofy and the guest stars are great. Jane Krakowski! Retta! And this upcoming season has Laurie Metcalf! Much like Columbo, you discover who committed the crime when the episode begins. It’s a less gritty Poker Face. Season 2 premieres Thursday on CBS.
Also airing Thursdays on CBS, is the new Matlock starring Kathy Bates. This Matlock has a surprise twist: her name is Matlock “just like the TV show.” She’s not directly related to Andy Griffith’s original character. But wait, there’s more: she’s also pretending to be a formerly retired lawyer trying to get back into law when really she’s joined a new firm to discover which lawyer there is responsible for her daughter’s death. It’s a great twist and the show is a hilarious take on legal dramas. But what else would you expect from Jennie Snyder Urman, creator of Jane the Virgin?
Teenagers are sneaking into NC-17 movies again. The Hollywood Reporter has posited that the bump in The Wild Robot this weekend is due to teens buying tickets to the animated film and sneaking into Terrifier 3. I love horror films, but those movies look abysmal. But then again, I did say that about the Saw franchise for a decade, and now I’m in love with it. I saw a lot of people online debating whether or not you can even sneak into movies these days because most theaters have assigned seating. Which, duh. All the assigned seats show up in the app where you buy tickets, so once the trailers roll it’s easy to see which seats are open!
Kamala Harris steps into The Shade Room.
Kamala Harris has really been making the rounds, hasn’t she? Last week, she caused an uproar on white social media when she went on Call Her Daddy. Yesterday, she shook the table on Black social media when she stepped into The Shade Room.
The takeaway from the Call Her Daddy episode was mainly that it was a huge get for Alex Cooper’s brand. She’s managed to turn her former Barstool Sports podcast about blowjobs and threesomes into a celebrity marketing tool. The second takeaway is that it allowed Harris to bypass traditional media, create a lot of buzz, and get her message out there.
The Shade Room has low vibrational origins similar to Call Her Daddy’s.