What to Stream Over Your Thanksgiving Break
by Zane Goins
Everyone needs a break during Thanksgiving. It’s a time to turn off your brain and enjoy something that takes absolutely no input from yourself. Those buzzed relatives you haven’t seen since last year will only add to your desire to get away. In service of this goal I watched a bunch of stuff on Netflix, giving you insight into what will serve as a good distraction.
I would like to add that I am not a Netflix shill and it just so happens that I watched a lot of Netflix in the past month or so. Netflix, please pay me though.
Living With Yourself - Netflix
Everyone’s guilty pleasure is watching Paul Rudd be an amazing actor and you cannot dissuade me from this. That being said, this show constantly blindsided me with its depth and familiarity of human emotion. Never once going into watching this show did I believe that I would go from watching Paul Rudd stumble through a neighborhood in only a diaper to tearing up just a few short episodes later.
If you’re not aware, Living With Yourself is a new show starring Paul Rudd and co-starring Paul Rudd. That’s all I’ll say on that front until you watch the show. Also, Tom Brady makes a cameo appearance and it was actually funny, proving this show’s ability to continue to shock me in ways I didn’t even know were humanly possible. The show is incredibly self-aware and genuinely made me laugh out loud while watching Paul Rudd attempt to navigate the same problems and emotions that I suspect most of us have on a weekly basis.
With half hour episodes, an easy transition from making you laugh to making you cry, and a new perspective or character to explore every episode, Netflix has once again upped the game when it comes to making shows designed to be binged. This first season is also relatively short with only ten episodes, so you can easily watch it in only one or two nights of hiding from your relatives.
Daybreak - Netflix
Don’t we all miss Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide? We miss someone breaking away from the action and drama of the show to turn to the camera, breaking the fourth wall at any given point, and giving it to us straight. We could all use somebody just telling us how it is sometimes. Daybreak borders on the absolutely, insanely ridiculous to the point that it makes Degrassi: The Next Generation seem like a perfectly normal sit-down family dramedy. Blood, guts, and very silly violence abound as we watch a bunch of teenagers attempt to navigate post-apocalypse Glendale, California.
Daybreak is a strange amalgamation of the aforementioned shows with a healthy amount of Mad Max leather-clad apocalypse tropes. To top it all off, there is the constant threat of the zombified adults that still roam the streets. While never really being as dire a threat as, say, the zombies present in Dawn of the Dead, the adults turned “ghoulies” do check another box off of the show’s very long list of cliches.
Netflix’s new winning formula to keep you binging their content is to focus on a new character’s perspective every episode, keeping things fresh and interesting. Daybreak also uses this as a chance to take deep dives into the psyche and history of individuals we see but haven’t yet learned much about, often taking the form of flashbacks that bring the character and the viewer back to today’s familiar pre-apocalypse world. While making some questionable choices when it comes to the history of our protagonists, I hope and look forward to these choices being the subject of future seasons.
El Camino - netflix
For all of us that remember watching the Breaking Bad finale and wondering what in the world happened to our favorite character, and he better have been or we can’t be friends, we finally have the answer five years later. Jessie Pinkman’s struggle to at last escape the grasp of Walter White’s criminal enterprises takes place in the form of a two-hour direct to Netflix film that feels tight and driven. To fully feel the impact of the film, you really need to have watched the entirety of the show, and Netflix has included a handy recap before the beginning of the movie to refresh your memory.
Watching Jessie deal with what can easily be construed as a serious case of PTSD, attempt to escape to a new life, and finally tie up all of those possible loose ends hits me in a way that I honestly didn’t expect it to. Where the final season of Breaking Bad considerably scales down from the previous seasons’ empire meth business to bring a tighter focus to the characters we knew and loved, El Camino does this by creating an even more tightly focused and small scale perspective of the criminal world. Ever on message, Director and creator Vince Gilligan stresses once again that crime does not continue spiraling upward in an ever expanding circle of money and drama.
The most powerful moments of the film are undoubtedly when Jessie is alone. Seeing him grapple with his new reality, realizing that he was going to make it out of his criminal past with just a few thousand dollars to show for it, and remembering all that he lost along the way makes it a compelling end to his story. If you cared for him during the show as much as I did, which you should have, be prepared to bawl when you finish this movie.
The King - netflix
Now, I know what you’re thinking at this point. I’m just a shill for Netflix’s original content and I’m going to get a very measly check for pushing students to their new content. If only. It really just so happens that Netflix has been killing it lately, and the new period drama The King is no exception to this.
Everyone around me knows that I love a well-crafted, slow burn period piece more than just about anyone, so I may be slightly biased in this particular review. Where I think this film stands on its own merits is the fact that people who don’t care to know about the politics and deep history of a war fought six hundred years ago have turned this film on and still found it incredibly enjoyable. The familiar faces of Timothee Chalamet and Robert Pattinson make this film easily accessible to those who know them from their heart-throb performances, and their newfound successes go on to prove that there is nothing wrong with getting your start in such roles.
The intimate character study of a young man, probably the same age as many of us, who has complete power thrust upon him makes for some very tense viewing. We get to see his failures and growth during one of the defining moments of King Henry V’s reign. Be ready for a dark and dirty foray into a story that you may not be familiar with. No matter how you feel about historical crap, I bet that you’ll find you enjoy something you didn’t think you would.