I’ve spent a lot of the past few weeks thinking about frozen yoghurt as I go to sleep. It’s the fault of the Good Place. In the TV show, which came out a few years ago, Eleanor Shellstrop dies and goes to heaven. Everything is smooth and lovely there. The town she lives in, which is full of smooth and lovely people, has not one but several fro-yo places. For some reason people just love the stuff, one of heaven’s architects explains.
Some episodes later, we find out that (spoiler alert) Eleanor and her companions had actually been in hell all along; the good place, though perfect-seeming, was actually built to subtly torture humans, without them even noticing. The frozen yoghurt was part of it: as it turns out, it’s one of those things humans think they enjoy, but which somehow never quite lives up to its expectations.
The show first appeared on Netflix in 2016, and finished in 2020. It was great. It’s also ironic that I keep thinking about it, because the streaming giant is the reason the dessert has been on my mind lately.
Like, I’m sure, many of you, I watched The Thursday Murder Club when it came out last month. I’ve never read the book but know many people who did, and who loved it. I thought the cast was brilliant – Pierce Brosnan! Helen Mirren! – and the trailer made it look both entertaining yet heartwarming.
In the end, it found it… fine. It was fine. It was a movie that happened in my general direction over the course of two hours. Some acting occurred; I believed there was, at times, some form of plot. I probably laughed once or twice. I finished it, closed my laptop, went to bed, and didn’t really think about it again for days afterwards.
The exact same thing happened a few weeks later with Wednesday. An Addams Family offshoot, the TV show released its second season recently. I’d been looking forward to it; as a former teenage goth, I’d found the first one absurdly enjoyable. The outfits were terrific, Gomez’s schmaltzy love for Morticia was as fun as ever, and the “outcasts” boarding school made me wish I was 13 again.
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The new one was… not that. The cast was the same and the aesthetics hadn’t changed; still, something was missing. I just didn’t care about the story, and kept having to resist the urge to scroll on my phone while watching with half an eye. Somehow, it just all felt like less than the sum of its parts, for reasons I would struggle to put into words.
It reminded me of A Man on the Inside, yet another Netflix show, which came out last year. It was fronted by Ted Danson, an actor I adore, and written by Mike Schur, who was behind my beloved Good Place. Again: it just wasn’t great. It felt like painting by numbers to me, in a way that was quite impossible to define. Why is frozen yoghurt always slightly disappointing? How would you explain it to someone who’s never tasted it?
It’s an odd state of affairs, as movies and shows weren’t always this way. They used to be good or bad, or sometimes middling, but rarely “quite nothingy”. Most entertainment produced by streaming giants is quite nothingy these days. Clearly there is an understanding that they must appeal to the absolute lowest common denominator, and will be watched by people actually doing something else.
As a result, why bother even trying to make something actively good? Or bad? Aren’t we all just here to mindlessly pass the time until we die? Streaming studios can bring us stuff that vaguely seems good, and we can vaguely keep an eye on it while looking at Instagram, and that will be that. Or will it?
Last week, as a protest, I went to watch Honey, Don’t! at the cinema. It describes itself as a “lesbian B-movie” and is a pastiche of noir films. It got much worse reviews than all of that streaming crap, and some of the pans were deserved. It’s a weird little flick, with a lot of mostly disparate vignettes which never quite coalesce into a whole.
It has a story, sort of, but it doesn’t really go where you’d want it to go, and the end leaves many questions unanswered. Some of the humour is in such bad taste it feels dissonant, and there are several scenes featuring quite pointless brutal violence. I loved it. If anything, I enjoyed it more than I would have if it’d been better.
It made me so happy that it was odd and flawed, and occasionally meandering. It made me feel like a person watching a film about people, written by and for people, instead of this weird algorithm-driven life we’ve been forced into. I felt so human and it was so refreshing. It made me think of the ice cream you get on holiday, which melts too quickly and leaves your fingers all sticky but that’s part of the reason it’s so great.
