After temporarily running out of stuff to watch on Netflix (I only watch about 1.5 hours per day max), I subscribed to HBO Max in order to watch a few shows. I’ll cancel the subscription after I’m done - I’m too cheap to subscribe to more than one streaming service.
I’ve only watched 2 or 3 episodes of the first season of each of these shows:
•
The White Lotus: I liked the first two episodes. I didn’t like the third. If the show keeps going downhill I’ll stop watching. After the first episode I had to laugh: each of the four stages of human sexuality is represented: budding, full bloom, declining, and gone. I’m skeptical whether the show has anything new to say about sexuality or wealth, but I’ll keep an open mind. As a kid, my family used to vacation on Antigua. This was 50 years ago when Antigua was mostly undeveloped. This was quite an adventure for a kid from a flyover state. What’s it like to bring a kid to an exotic tropical resort today? The White Lotus provides one opinion.
•
House of the Dragon: I liked how Game of Thrones tried to accurately represent European medieval life with a clever supernatural overlay (no dragons in medieval Europe AFAIK
). The open question is whether HoD has anything new to say about medieval life.
•
Succession: only a couple of episodes in. HBO may have missed an opportunity to show how power really flows within a major modern corporation (board of directors, senior management, middle management, line management, workers, etc.) The show’s succession crisis seems a bit unrealistic for a large publicly-traded firm, however I recently heard that now-disgraced FTX used QuickBooks for accounting, which is hilarious if true. Quite a few years ago a relative married into a wealthy family where a nasty succession crisis played out among entitled brats (children and grandchildren of the founder). I didn’t have a front-row seat to that drama - too bad.
