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I basically spent the evening last night watching TV shows—all of them on Netflix, actually. First, we watched the season finale of
The Residence, which I did not even realize until was started it was 87 minutes long. That show has merely mixed-positive reviews, and I suppose that's fair as it's hardly a masterpiece, but I must say I really enjoyed it. It's extremely well cast with several quite famous people (albeit all of them well past their prime: whatever) and I never stopped getting a kick out of it. And I especially enjoyed the finale, and how the way Uzo Aduba's Detective Cordelia Cupp solved the mystery was explained. It was just really fun.
Speaking of the casting: I was struck by the diversity of the cast, and really happy about it. For now at least, Hollywood seems pointedly in the oppositie direction of President Fuckwit's wide-ranging "anti-DEI" efforts—something Gabriel has called "The Great Un-Wokening." The key difference is that President Fuckwit is going after government agencies and government-funded institutions like public universities as leverage, and he has no such power over the private business institutions that run Hollywood. And I love to see movies and TV presenting an idealized version of our nation's rich diversity and where it can inevitably lead if shepherded in the right direction. In
The Residence, the "best detective in the world" is a Black woman (Uzo aduba); the companion FBI agent as an Asian American man (Randall Park); and even the Pesident of the United States is an openly gay man (Paul Fizgerald)—one with many potlitical problems, but none of them shown in the show to be in any way connected to his sexuality. He's just a bombastic politician like any other. There is also wide diversity among the White House staff, and I appreciated the representation in all its forms, especially when it was all incidental and never a plot point.
Frankly we need many more projects like this, streaming into the homes of millions of Americans, while this administration is otherwise taking a stranglehold on our culture and making a brazenly transparent attempt at reclaiming white supremacy.
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— पांच हजार सात सौ छियानबे —
Anyway. Once
The Residence was done, we shifted gears dramatically by finally diving into the first two episodes (that being half of them) of
Adolescence—also on Netflix.
This took us from utopian diversity to a slickly subtle examination of toxic masculinity in Western Society, and how it manifests at the youngest of ages: the story focuses on a 13-year-old boy who is charged with murdering a female classmate, by brutal stabbing.
The show was released last month, and is already the most-watched limited series Netflix has ever released. The impact was wide-ranging and immediate, and that is the reason I am watching. It's a UK production, and kind of amazingly, is
being made available to all secondary schools in the country, to spark conversations about social media harm. God forbid we actually did something that useful in the States.
We have two episodes to go, which we will watch tonight. I'm somewhat mixed on the choice to make each episode a single take, which is objectively impressive on a technical level but can also feel like a gimmick. That said, the real-time nature of it also has its uses, particularly in a story of this nature. Granted, already Shobhit and I have spent a fair amount of time talking about how they could have pulled off certain shots, which obviously took us out of the story at hand. Nevertheless, I am deeply impressed with the show so far—especially the performances, again with elaborately staged blocking for a full hour in each case—and am really looking forward to finishing it, the heavy subject matter notwithstanding.
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In other news, this morning I finished the latest Staff Engagement Survey at work. There was one open-ended question at the end, and I just want to preserve what I wrote there here, for posterity:
As PCC has grown far faster than was prudent over the past 15 years, talk about our "triple bottom line" feels increasingly disingenuous when it's not solely about the financial bottom line. I deeply appreciate that we have clearly hit the brakes on rapidly opening new stores, but much of the damage has been done, which leaves me slightly disenchanted compared to the passionate appreciation for PCC that I had for many years. I spent a very long time being defensive about the perception of PCC becoming "corporatized," but things like organizational restructuring and the addition of middle management are natural byproducts of this level of growth, and just by definition leaves PCC as an institution feeling less like it truly cares about its much greater number of individual employees on a personal level. The result is an increase in collateral damage of strictly business decisions, as well as—by necessity, I do understand—major decisions that staff can feel blindsided by because there was no warning and they felt they had no input in.
I do want it to be clear: I love my job and I love the company I work for. Maybe it's just because I've become an old-timer geezer resisting change, but I did used to love it all a bit more. The difference is not great, but the difference is there, and it is all tied to PCC becoming more like the corporations it once far more clearly differentiated itself from. I don't doubt that the experience here remains better than it would be at virtually any
actual corporation (we're still a functioning cooperative)—particularly a national one—and the health benefits here are by all accounts unparalleled. All that said, the undeniable steps away from our roots also cannot be ignored. My loyalty to this company is as fierce as it ever was. The difference is that I no longer feel the company has as fierce a loyalty to
me as I once did. While I have zero expectation of this happening currently, if they found some reason to lay me off due to something as arbitrary as organizational restructuring, I would still be devastated and shocked—just not to the degree that I would have been 15 years ago.
And that just makes me a tiny bit sad.
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[posted 11:56am]
