we finished Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof's Mrs Davis last night and:
- oh hey a show that actually understands what a great big complicated statistical algorithm actually is (mostly, a mirror)
- this is great because it lets Lindelof's beloved themes about human relationships to the unknown, to deific figures (or figureheads), and so on actually work without becoming as hackneyed as so many AI As God stories are. just as in Lost and The Leftovers, it ultimately comes back to how people respond to narratives and information.
- once again "Everyone just wants someone to tell them what to do"
- do you like Jane Crocker? well this is the show for you. there are so many god damn Janes Crocker in this show. maybe the highest quantity of Janes Crocker per named character I've ever seen. this show is to Mommy Issues what Lost is to Daddy Issues.
- after watching the first episode I described it as "what if an entire series was just A Hurley Episode". I was not wrong. this is an incredibly goofy and cartoony show, partly just because that seems to be the world these characters inhabit, and partly because an algorithm based on human narrative cliches is warping events
- I don't know that the show always hits the right balance with this dynamic. it can sometimes slide into Whedonism about the whole thing. I'd say the self awareness works about 70% of the time, mostly when people are raging at the fact that a weird phone app demiurge is shoehorning them into the narrative in particular roles, and about 30% of the time it starts to feel a little bit cloyingly self aware. where it works best is when Betty Gilpin in her nun habit as Simone is visibly on the verge of doing an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle. she rarely shifts into a sort of smug register of Rick Sanchez eyerolling self awareness, but rather has this edge of awkward borderline hysteria about the whole thing. she knows she's been dropped into A Narrative and would desperately like to get out.
it's got a weird writing team that has more experience with, like, sitcoms? also jonny sun is there weirdly? and I think it results in some uneveness of tone and maybe a bit too heavily pushed a cartoony affect. Sarah and I would both rate it below Lost, The Leftovers, and Station 11, which remains sort of the trifecta of what we're thinking of as the Lindelverse I guess, but I think it's well worth watching particularly if you want to see a show finally, fucking finally, just say "this machine is stupid and you have to understand it not as a thinking entity but as a bunch of statistical processes designed to tell us what we want to hear."
