This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
This week:
- What to make of Bridgerton Season 2?
- The unexpected staying power of Hulu’s Life & Beth.
- A diamond made of what now?
- Go see Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum be hot!
- Great series, great actress, perfect photo.
Contemplating Life & Happiness With Life & Beth
Amy Schumer will be among the three hosts, alongside Wanda Sykes and Regina Hall, at Sunday’s Oscar ceremony. There, I imagine you’ll get to see Schumer in familiar territory: telling topical jokes in front of a laughing audience.
It’s a major platform at a fascinating time in her career.
The comedian also just announced a stand-up tour—again, familiar territory—but also recently launched a series on Hulu called Life & Beth, which she created, wrote, directed, and starred in, and which reveals her in a fresh and thrilling way that many, even her fans, might have never expected.
In her review of the series for The Daily Beast, Emma Fraser wrote of Schumer, “It does seem like the more she is critiqued the more she bares her soul.” The dramedy is immensely personal, flitting back and forth between the character of Beth, who is inspired by Schumer, as a girl navigating complicated relationships with her parents, and as an adult at a crossroads when it comes to her career, her love life, and her sense of worth.
You’d be wise to check out the show, which has all its episodes available for streaming. “Lovely” is an apt term to describe it, though that can sound patronizing and might discount how sharp and funny it often is. But it packs a poignant punch that has stuck with me in a way that I maybe hadn’t noticed the intensity of at first, like an emotional bruise that intensifies as time passes.
When Life & Beth begins, something terrible happens in Adult Beth’s life. It is the first domino to fall of several terrible things that happen. These events accelerate what Beth had already been thinking: that her life needed to change.
At the center of the series, I think, is the question: Could you be happier? I mean, raise your hand if, especially over the last two years, you haven’t pondered that when it comes to at least one element of your life. (If we were in a stadium right now, I’d expect we’d all be doing the wave.)
What Life & Beth really hits on is both the bravery and the fear that question entails. Contrary to what “happy” actually means, it is maybe the scariest thing there is in life. It’s precarious. It’s mythical. It’s fleeting. There’s a reason why, in real life, there aren’t the grand gestures and sweeping moments we cherish in TV and film. They’re not logical. They’re not guaranteed. And they could be miscalculations, the wrong thing to do, a delusion, or cause real, irreparable hurt.
But… what happens if they don’t? What if they really do make you happier? What would it take for you to take that chance?
The great thing about Life & Beth is how it translates formative moments in Schumer’s life, which, of course, is a life of celebrity that includes things like hosting the goddamn Academy Awards, into a real-world scale: an even playing field on which you can understand and appreciate what a bold thing it is to claim your worth, to validate the idea that you should and could be happy. Where you commiserate with the fear involved, the inertia, and the possible regret.
It’s a great series that affected me more deeply than I might have realized. You should check it out, too.
Diamonds Are a Salad’s Best Friend
It has come to my attention that a diamond made from ranch dressing was recently sold for $12,500 on eBay. I have so many questions, such as: What?
According to Time Out magazine, “Hidden Valley Ranch hired a professional diamond maker to heat-blast its ranch dressing to 2,500 degrees and then crush the resulting charred dressing under 400 tons of pressure. Five months later, voila! The two-carat (carrot? It is for the salad, right?) round brilliant-cut diamond was placed in a 14k white gold band with the engraving HVR LVR: ‘Hidden Valley Ranch Lover.’”
I now have second thoughts about throwing out the bottle of ranch dressing that had been sitting in the back of my refrigerator for, if I’m being conservative, about four-and-a-half years. Surely if I had plopped that sucker next to a classic New York City furnace, I could have replicated those results and been a cool 12 grand richer.
To quote Melissa McCarthy in the best piece of pop culture that has ever existed about ranch dressing, a subcategory of entertainment one never expects to reference in their career, “That cash could really get me out of a couple of jams.” While I start plotting my Ranch dressing jewelry empire, do yourself a favor and watch McCarthy’s SNL skit, one of the Top 10 Things That Make Me Laugh Most in Life, Non-Fart Category.
A Very Good Movie for You to See
Every time I talk to a friend about the new film The Lost City, they get excited and say how they can’t wait for it because it’s “the kind of movie they don’t make anymore.”
The big-budget action comedy starring very famous celebrities like Sandra Bullock is a genre that didn’t used to be so niche it required all those words to describe. They were great, and, for some reason (cough, the rise of comic-book movies, cough), Hollywood stopped making them, leaving people like me and all my friends with nothing but TBS’s Sunday afternoon lineup as a big-budget action comedy graveyard to visit.
So, I beg of you, go see The Lost City. It is a hoot! Will it factor into the Oscars next year? Of course not! But let it be what it is: A movie in which Sandra Bullock is fun, and Channing Tatum is fun, and Brad Pitt is fun, and Daniel Radcliffe is fun, and the whole thing is fun. Maybe, then, they’ll start making more movies like this again and I can finally shut up about it.
The Gilded Pepperoni
If you follow a gay person on social media then you have seen this photo of Carrie Coon in her Gilded Age wardrobe eating a slice of pizza, as it has been posted so many times I think it legally must now be incorporated into the Pride flag. If not, enjoy!
What to watch this week:
The Lost City: Please. I beg of you. Also, you see Channing Tatum’s butt! (Fri. in theaters)
Julia: A very charming series about Julia Child. Imagine, now, my hideous impression of her saying, “Bon appétit!” (Thurs. on HBO Max)
Starstruck: I’m just a guy, standing in front of all of you, insisting that you watch this deceptively brilliant rom-com series. (Now on HBO Max)
What to skip this week:
Infinite Storm: Someone save Naomi Watts’ career! This is an emergency! (Fri. in theaters)
American Song Contest: It brings me no pleasure—pain, actually—to say that something involving Kelly Clarkson is not good. (Mon. on NBC)
