This Week:

A full-on spiritual meltdown about Steve Martin’s TV show.
An untreatable addiction to a Disney star’s YouTube channel.
Diane Keaton singing “Thank U, Next” may have broke me.
The new Dancing with the Stars casting definitely broke me.
The only Real Housewives star I want to see from now on.

The Silly Murder Podcast Show Has Touched MY SOUL

On the morning after record rainfall in New York City and so much alarming flooding that it made me question if I should ever leave my apartment again, I swam my way over to my computer and contemplated why I felt so deeply seen by the new TV series Only Murders in the Building, which came out this week on Hulu.

It stars septuagenarian comedy legends Steve Martin and Martin Short (can’t relate), who live in breathtaking, spacious apartments in a tony building on the Upper West Side (lol still can’t relate) and befriend Selena Gomez (nope!) because of their shared obsession with true crime podcasts (absolutely not).

Especially after this week’s precipitation trauma, nobody needs someone to rain on their parade, so I’ll withhold my abhorrence of true crime podcasts. I’ll also silence my near-incredulity that a series could center a group of people so passionate about them that they venture to make their own, and somehow not be entirely insufferable.

But of course, it’s not insufferable. It’s Martin and Short in a quirky comedy that asks, “What if The New Yorker was a television series’ entire aesthetic?” Anything, even true crime podcasts, is going to be fun.

So, I set out on the Only Murders in the Building journey—three episodes are now available—with the idea of the show as a glorious, necessary pleasure right now. That, along with Ted Lasso, The Other Two, and the new season of What We Do in the Shadows, it would be an example of how, even after all this time in the pandemic, our demand for delightfulness in the face of darkness is as strong as it was all those months ago. That I would like the show because it is simply nice. Remember nice?

I didn’t expect, after pressing play on episode after episode (I’ve gotten to see the whole series), that I would end up finding it to be so deep.

The fast sell on the series is that Martin, Short, and Gomez all live in an old-money apartment building on the Upper West Side that is rocked when one of the residents is murdered. While exiled from the complex as the police investigate, the trio discover that they had all been listening to the same murder podcast and become fast, unlikely friends. They decide to cosplay as podcasting sleuths themselves and create their own series while clue-hunting in real time.

It’s a logline that telegraphs some madcap comedy, which the show delivers. Stringing that along a tangled plot of twists is clever, too. But silly humor and an intriguing mystery wouldn’t be enough for the series to imprint on me the way it has. Then I realized what it captures about what we’re all feeling right now: It is a show about loneliness.

Martin plays Charles-Haden Savage, a former TV actor who became a curmudgeonly recluse following a tragic breakup. Short is Oliver Putnam, a disgraced and ostracized Broadway producer hemorrhaging money and flailing without purpose. And Gomez’s Mabel Mora is a young girl whose capacity for joy and dreams for the future were zapped in an instant, a destabilizing event she’s not yet processed or recovered from.

They are people whose understanding of what the world could be and the fulfillment they could expect from it has been upended. Such an assault on hope and happiness is defeating. They retreat within themselves, and within the walls of their apartments, swearing off connection and the vulnerability of aspiration—or even trying anymore.

The thrill of the murder and the allure of solving it together entices them, even coaxing them back into a state of craving friendship and experience again. But they’re cautious at every turn, wary of the devastating crash that comes when spirits climb too high.

I don’t think it’s a reach to say the show is tapping into something visceral we’re all going through. At least I am.

This summer, after the year of absolute hell and the illusion that things were opening up again, I’ve had the impulse to leap back out into the world. Then the world turned out to be more heinous than ever, and I wanted to dive back into a hole, never to emerge again. I feel like I’ve pulled a spiritual muscle. There’s this tension between the desire to feel light and bright again, and the self-preservation mechanisms that have us pulling down the shades and climbing back under the covers.

It’s impossible to feel brave or excited or adventurous when reality snaps you back to defeatism like a taut bungee cord. California’s on fire, New York is under water, the Supreme Court just issued a death threat to Roe v. Wade, and getting vaccinated or wearing masks to end a pandemic is still, unfathomably, a political and religious issue.

There was this false promise of #HotVaxxSummer and things turning around, but the best I can really hope for is being this rat doing the backstroke in a flooded subway station. The world we live in is garbage, may destroy us, and so much of it is outside of our control. You can either be the rat pretending this is not the end times and make the best of it, or you can go back to your lonely bunker and give up.

Loneliness is a terrible feeling. But it’s also armor. So I deeply feel these characters in Only Murders and their trepidation over trading it in for a lark that may hurt them once again. I feel like every step toward happiness these days is an act of courage. It’s terrifying and it seems so arduous as to be insurmountable. It’s come to a point where you don’t trust that things will get better, even if they seem like they are.

But Only Murders reminds me that it’s not unique to our current hellscape. There’s always the threat of something happening that will convince you that loneliness is the only option. But maybe, too, there’s always an opportunity coming that can serve as the rescue raft to pull you out of the dark waters. (Especially in New York, we need that now.)

It’s a funny and fanciful little TV show that I’ve been quite enjoying. But it’s interesting what happens when you watch the right thing when you’re in a certain mood. It can end up being profound.

Help, I Can’t Stop Watching a Disney Star’s YouTube Channel

I am so fortunate to have piles of screeners for some of the best and most exciting TV series coming up—hours of them, more than there are hours in the day available to watch. And yet I have spent every moment of free time in the last week watching YouTube videos of a former Disney Channel star spilling secrets of all the ways childhood fame fucked up her life.

The videos are from Christy Carlson Romano, who is extremely famous to a very specific age of elder millennial (a phrase that makes my knees creak and hair go 10 percent more gray each time I type it) for starring on the Disney comedy Even Stevens. They are remarkable because she is essentially dishing all the stories you’d want to ask her about if you ever met her but, if you had a shred of grace and empathy, would never do so.

I think I stumbled upon these videos because of one in which she talked about having an acrimonious relationship with co-star Shia LaBeouf made headlines, and as a rule I click any and all stories about Shia LaBeouf being a little shit.

In the video, called “Why I Don’t Talk to Shia LaBeouf,” Romano is candid about how the warped egos of childhood fame poisoned their relationship—she was especially hurt when he didn’t thank her after winning a Daytime Emmy for Even Stevens—and how she regrets that the schism between them kept her from recognizing the trauma and difficulty he was going through. (He’d dramatize some of that later on in the film Honey Boy.)

There are truths I just have to accept about myself, and one is that I am depressingly susceptible to YouTube rabbit holes. I don’t burrow my way through them so much as swan-dive right down them, like Pocahontas leaping off a cliff into a pool of nonsense content that will keep her up until 2 a.m. But there’s something about Romano’s videos that seem elevated from that nonsense.

At a time when getting a celebrity to be actually honest about an experience on a show or with fame is like asking that girl you went to high school with who now sells essential oils to stop posting anti-vaxx conspiracy theories on Facebook, Romano is doing some useful truth-telling. And it’s not being packaged as empty nostalgia like these “so-and-so actor from so-and-so TV show do a podcast talking about that TV show” that have become so popular and so useless.

Romano is rarely throwing anyone under the bus for attention. She’s centering all these stories, juicy as they may be, around her role in them and the lessons she’s learned, in hopes that they may be cautionary tales.

In “How I Lost All My Money,” she talks about how gratuitous spending, bad advice from parents and managers, and the delusion that she’d be working forever led to her burning through $1 million in a year. “What My Celebrity Bullies Taught Me” does tease that a “really huge star” who does “huge franchise movies” was a tormenter, but she doesn’t name names and instead focuses on how she worked to heal from the trauma.

But what makes these videos all the more captivating is the way they’re shot. They’re not the classic YouTube vlog where someone sits at a desk and chats at the camera. In each one she’s, for some reason, walking outside while someone else seems to be walking backwards filming her, creating these unexpectedly cinematic tracking shots. Alfonso Cuarón is absolutely shook.

Anyway, we all have the craven, kind of gross curiosity over what happened to child stars and what led to their Hollywood “demise.” (We always assume it’s a demise.) To have the information delivered in this manner by someone who seems to have done the work to re-screw a good head back on her shoulders is fascinating. At least that’s the conclusion I came to after watching my ninth straight one of these at 1 o’clock last night.

Play Diane Keaton’s “Thank U, Next” Cover at My Funeral

My favorite kind of online content is when you can’t tell if someone is doing a bit or being aggressively earnest, and therefore I don’t know whether to laugh, cringe, or dial 911 to report an emergency. And so, I alert you to Diane Keaton, who posted a video on Instagram in which, over a montage of photos of Ariana Grande, she stammers about how “once in [her] stupid life” she wants to sing along with the pop star—and then she does.

As “Thank U, Next” plays, Keaton croons along, altering the arrangement haphazardly—taking a note up here, speak-singing there—like a legitimate duet partner would. This is all very on brand for Diane Keaton: batty, adorable, quirky, and that thing where she’s hyper-energized to the point of approximating human behavior, rather than reflecting it. Things that would be a little tragic to the ordinary among us become off-kilter genius in her hands.

The entire post, from its all-caps caption to its crude collage of Grande photos (not to mention the vocals), carries strong TikTok tween energy. Truthfully, I can’t decide if the whole thing is deeply cursed or possibly healing. As the waters rose in New York and Diane Keaton scooping up a spoken-word “next!” on the first line of the chorus played in my head on a constant loop, I thought, “What if this is the last thing on my mind as I meet my demise?” It was chilling. Then again, a comfort.

Listen, Diane Keaton bashfully singing is quite possibly cinema’s greatest treasure. A recent movie night at a friend’s house began with my casual suggestion that we watch First Wives Club and quickly escalated from them being impressed that I could quote so many lines to abject horror as, without warning, I began performing the exact choreography to “You Don’t Own Me” at the end. I have had a pumpkin artist (real thing!) carve a still from that scene onto a jack-o-lantern. There’s an artist’s rendering of it hanging in my apartment, which I take down and put back up every few months based on how I’m feeling about it seeming “too gay for me.”

This is to say that this “Thank U, Next” post should be my exact jam, and as such I am choosing to treasure it. I mean, Lindsay Lohan is the first comment I see on my Instagram. I’m compelled to love it.

If any other celebrity did this? My God, so embarrassing. But in this case, there is no choice but to rule it iconic.

Dancing with the Stars Is At It Again

It is that special time of year when summer turns to fall.

The temperature is so wildly different each day that I will never once be appropriately dressed for the weather. People start shrieking about their beloved pumpkin spice, and then others shriek in response about how much they dislike pumpkin spice, as if that makes them more interesting. The people who define their personalities by an obsession with Halloween begin their reign of tyranny. And the Dancing with the Stars casting directors return, as they do at this time every year, to terrorize me.

From the leaky-toilet visionaries who brought you Sean Spicer doing the salsa, waltzing Tucker Carlson, and Carole Baskin stretching the limits of the definition of “dancing” to its precarious extreme, we now get Olivia Jade as a cast member on the new season of the show.

The Gen Z influencer, an icon of vlogging of scamming, is probably best known for being one of the students at the center of Operation Varsity Blues, in which her parents, Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli, reportedly paid $500,000 in bribes in order to secure her a spot at USC.

While pesky little things like nationwide moral outrage and a come-to-Jesus about entitlement, privilege, and access in academia meant that she never saw the halls of the university, she now joins the hallowed ranks of deplorable public figures seeking redemption in the ballroom.

I don’t know what it is about this show and its siren call that brings me back year after year. I genuinely enjoy it, proving that in the soul of every elder millennial gay there is a Midwest boomer housewife waiting to break free. But this annual trolling infuriates me. Moreover, I don’t see the draw here. Is Olivia Jade going to bring in viewers? Do most people even know who she is?

(There are also less substantiated rumors that Hilaria Baldwin may be joining the cast, and the chaos that portends Latin Dance Week already has caused my blood pressure to spike.)

In any case, if history has anything to tell us, it’s to look forward to Olivia Jade’s completely CGI’d foxtrot when Dancing with the Stars returns this fall.

A Reality Star Is Born

Obviously, Tammy Faye Girardi and her carefully-rehearsed ability to let one single tear drip down her cheek and stain her makeup is the source of all the drama on this season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. You know, with her shocking lawsuits, her apparent lack of empathy for victims, and the farce of uttering lines like “LOOK AT MY LIFE!” as if she’s Fantine in Les Miz while, in reality, she is sitting at a dinner in Kathy Hilton’s mansion wearing a designer outfit with full glam on a TV show eating caviar pie at a table decorated with $900 candlesticks.

But on Wednesday night, a new star was born. His name is Patrick. He is on the staff at Hilton’s house and served the cast during the episode. He is French. More specifically, he is the candlestick from Beauty and the Beast come to life. He is an icon, and I demand a spin-off immediately. Attention: Andy Cohen, Bravo, NBC Universal, the Pope, Oprah, Emmanuel Macron. Whoever! Make it happen.

Worth: Does one truly “recommend” a drama about families of 9/11 victims? Either way, the acting in this—specifically from Stanley Tucci and Laura Benanti—is amazing. (Fri. on Netflix)
Impeachment: American Crime Story: It’s all over the place, and one of those places, occasionally, is really good. (Tues. on FX)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: My favorite kind of Marvel movie: One that doesn’t feel like a Marvel movie. (Fri. in theaters)

Cinderella: No amount of horse pills will save you from this movie. (Fri. on Amazon)
Frogger: In New York, we call this “crossing the street,” and no one gives me money when I succeed. (Thu. on Peacock)