Rich Heldenfels, Pop Culture Wanderer

I have been keeping a running list of binge-worthy shows on various pieces of paper around my desk, certain that I would get around to a post about them. Then I didn't. Part of that had to do with my wanting to get through shows, then being sidetracked. I have started Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All Access   at least three times, and I like it, but somehow I have never gotten out of Season 1. While Picard (also on All Access) is intriguing, I am several episodes behind and therefore withholding judgment.  On the other hand, there are shows I have binged and found wanting; Amazon's Jack Ryan  comes to mind, as mostly meh, especially in a second season that reworked large chunks of Clear and Present Danger, though not very well. Why Women Kill on CBS All Access I may go back to The Boys, or not, since it didn't thrill me one way or another. And there are shows that await my bingeing, like Dare Me, which is so artfully unsettling that I'd rather devour it all at once ...

More notes .... "Last Chance U."  While the current, third season of "Last Chance U" has been mainly about the Independence Community College head football coach, Jason Brown, and his team of players trying to find their way to Division I and other kinds of self-fulfillment, the hero of the piece is an English teacher, LaTonya Pinkard. More than anyone else, Pinkard -- pictured above -- demonstrates not only the determination to move her students toward academic success but a mission to help young black men understand their place in the world, on and off the football field. We saw a similar figure in Brittany Wagner, an academic advisor at East Mississippi Community College in the first two seasons of "Last Chance U," but the contrast here between coach and teacher is even stronger. Brown has an appallingly limited vocabulary consisting mainly of variations on the f-word, and a fury that is so hard to control that he not only gets into disputes wi...

Spoilers included. At dinner with friends recently, the conversation turned to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and the ending of the second season. I thought the season as a whole was powerful in the way it repeatedly emphasized the ruthlessness of the powerful – that the men in charge of Gilead were going to maintain control no matter how brutal they felt they had to be. And that control was not over some women, but all women, as we saw in the execution of a misguided teen (who had been betrayed by her own, control-minded father) and the repeated punishment of Serena. As one of our friends said, Serena thought privilege gave her a pass on society’s worst treatment of women – only she learned otherwise, and finally saw that her “daughter” would be denied even those few things Serena had carried over from the pre-repression years. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the portrayal of women, men and power – not only because of what we see from the men ruling the country (and their, w...