There's not much left of me. Can TV help?
Can my cable provider actually save the day?
I have become a husk of a man. Skin holding bones. Muscle moving bones. What would a great series be to binge that will inspire me? All I have is time.
Ideally, inspiration just kind of finds us. It strikes from out of nowhere. It plows right through the street-facing windows of the Apple store where we are prodding a display iPad and launches us into a wall rack of $80 phone cases. But it’s all too easy to get stuck in the inspiration waiting game: Is today the day you catch a meaningful glimpse of a YOU GOT THIS tattoo on someone’s forearm and kind of wave off the SS bolts on their biceps? Will your doomscrolling suddenly be interrupted by a video recounting the bravery of a POW who survived years in a labor camp by volunteering to act as taskmaster to his platoon brothers? OK, how about nature then? Maybe you’ll be motivated by the work ethic and sense of purpose of some ants. Sure, maybe, but what are the odds you’ll ever randomly encounter those?
And so, when we’re tired of waiting, we go looking for inspiration where we’ve been told we should expect to find it. One of those places is culture, by which we mean the arts, by which we mean TV. And I’m not good at keeping up with shows. This is not a way of hinting at some more erudite interests because let’s say I don’t dislike professional wrestling. It’s more, like, if people are talking about it, I’ll actually pick up on it years later. Kind of like the Japanese holdout soldiers of Disney+.
So I can only tell you what little I do.1
When I want to feel inspired by topnotch comedy writing and connected with characters who are as insecure and incapable of getting unstuck as I often am, I might watch Peep Show, the entirety of which you can find on YouTube. (“I have become a husk of a man. Skin holding bones. Muscle moving bones” is very much the kind of interior monologue we’d hear from Mark Corrigan on his way to the breakfast table.)
When I want to travel back to a moment in time when I was little and all the magic had not yet been wrung from the world, I’ll actually watch commercials from my childhood, like this one for the game Dark Tower. I did not know at the time that the actor was Orson Welles and that it was no tiny miracle they got 30 sober seconds out of him.
When I have the desire to see good punching evil in the face, when I want to believe such a thing is even possible, I’ll watch My Bodyguard, featuring cinema’s scariest high school bully, played by Matt Dillon. (Moody is just plausible enough as the campus extortionist, you see. No humor or absurd heightening to let you disengage.)
I realize only one of these is a proper show, and its last episode was a decade ago. I did say I was bad at shows. Besides, if you’re truly feeling like nothing more than sinews tugging on a skeleton, I’d suggest branching out beyond streaming services. Like, well beyond. Novelty anywhere you can find it, deviating from your routine in any manner that does not involve lots of police or provoking a zoo animal that has just been waiting for a human to get within goring distance. Novelty has always been the best way to temporarily break free from the negative scripts that get me down and that I think are also afflicting you at this moment. Anything at all different from the day before. This is just a start, of course, and I’m truly guessing at what you might need. After all, I’m what F. Scott Fitzgerald famously described as “just another jabroni with a Substack.” I don’t know what your heart ultimately requires, but I suspect there’s no Netflix plan for it.
This column has only existed for about a month, so I’m not sure how many eyes besides my own are even reading these words. But anyone who’s made it to this footnote should feel free to submit their recs for inspirational series in the comments.