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.
Somewhere in a basement in Maryland, there is a VHS tape of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Allegedly. The truth is that my siblings and I never found it, which is how my poor father ended up having to pay a fine, against his will and much to my embarrassment, to own the Blockbuster rental copy of the film.
Forgetting to return a Blockbuster rental—or losing it entirely—and then having to weather a parent’s exasperation when they’re forced to buy it is a rite of passage for Gen X-ers and millennials. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was not the first, or the last, acquisition that the Fallon Family VHS Library made in this manner. Purchase-via-negligence was as much the quintessential Blockbuster experience as roaming the aisles of the video store itself.
I don’t often feel bad for the younger generation—you have your youth, bastards!—but the fact that they’ll never experience a middle schooler’s Friday night at Blockbuster is particularly devastating. For those of us who did, it’s a shared, foundational memory that bonds us.
Nagging Dad until he relents and piles us all into the minivan, heading to the strip mall. The full hour spent navigating the displays of new releases. Negotiating whether to rent Austin Powers or The Waterboy, and treating the decision with the gravity of Sophie’s Choice. Pretending that renting Tower of Terror or The Big Green a dozen times each at $6 a pop made more fiscal sense than just purchasing the film. Getting permission to buy snacks in the checkout line and being so excited, because you know that it’s a splurge.
I speak for us, the people who know that Titanic was on two VHS tapes. We, the ones who could rank Capri Sun flavors, and for whom tearing the seal of a Sunny Delight bottle is a sense memory. The ones who know what I’m talking about when I say that in your thirties, your body looks like what happens when you pop open a Pillsbury biscuit can, and the dough kind of bursts out and expands. We’re the ones who still refer to groups of people as Spices, as if it were 1997… and we were on our way to Blockbuster.
It makes sense that bricks-and-mortar Blockbuster stores closed, considering that VHS tapes and DVDs, to all intents and purposes, no longer exist. And the fact that the chain is so viscerally tied to a frozen-in-time life experience amplifies the extreme nostalgia surrounding it. This sentiment explains the intense fascination there is with the last remaining Blockbuster store, which operates in Bend, Oregon, and was recently the subject of a documentary. And it is why there was so much excitement for Blockbuster, the new Netflix comedy series, about what it’s like to work in that last store.
There is a warranted protectiveness that—brace yourself for the most upsettingly violent phrase in the English language—geriatric millennials feel toward Blockbuster, because of that nostalgia and those cherished memories. Understandably, then, we are going to more highly scrutinize the Blockbuster series than we would other innocuous streaming comedies. Knowing that, I can say pretty definitively: We, the Blockbuster generation, deserve better.
It is confusing that Blockbuster, with that audience desperate to love it, misses the mark so egregiously.
The show, for reasons that are not entirely clear, moves the last remaining Blockbuster from Oregon to Michigan, where Timmy (played by always endearing Randall Park) is the manager. At the beginning of the first episode, he gets the news that his location will become the only Blockbuster left in the country, and his employees (Melissa Fumero’s Eliza, Tyler Alvarez’s Carlos, and Olga Merediz’s Connie) spiral about what it means for their future. Because he believes in the store so much and feels so bonded to his staff, Timmy rallies the troops for a ra-ra campaign to make sure their Blockbuster lasts, despite the odds.
The idea of this series being on Netflix, of all the streaming services, is kind of perverted. There’s a tossed[off line early in the premiere about a customer not having been to the store for years, because he was busy watching Netflix. There’s no further criticism of the streamer, despite the fact that many physical media-lovers blame it for the chain’s decline. (Though that’s not exactly the case.)
That toothlessness is a bit disappointing. More confusing, though, is that the series neglects to tap into the nostalgia that we just waxed on about. It also seems like a missed opportunity that the show doesn’t make a firm case for the value of a video store—like how it nurtures the love for cinema or offers unique curation capabilities, courtesy of the employees. There are fleeting moments that hint at this, in which different characters talk about movies they love or express why they like being a part of the Blockbuster tradition. But most of the characters explicitly state their indifference toward Blockbuster, claiming that they’re just there because they need a job.
That’s fine—it ties into what seems to be what is instead the “point” of the show. Blockbuster is a workplace sitcom, which tracks, given creator Vanessa Ramos’ past experience on the NBC comedy series Superstore. But even that premise doesn’t entirely land. In the early episodes, Timmy’s pledge to save the store is framed as a crusade for small businesses. That element is pretty much abandoned quickly, despite the premiere’s odd, shoehorned-in wink to the absurdity of its politics: “Isn’t it ironic that the small business taking a stand against the big corporation in this scenario is actually a franchise of a once-huge corporation, named after the exact type of big corporate movies that killed off smaller movies?” Eliza says.
Maybe if Blockbuster leaned further into that meta self-awareness, there would be more about it to recommend. But the thing that makes it special, the connection to Blockbuster, is essentially ignored, resulting in a workplace comedy that isn’t particularly unique or memorable. Instead, there’s commentary about the differences between millennials and Gen Z that isn’t novel or clever. A will-they-won’t-they relationship between Timmy and Eliza couldn’t be snoozier or more obvious. And even with scene-stealers like Curb Your Enthusiasm’s JB Smoove in the supporting cast, there’s no character that stands out as having potential to be a fan-favorite.
It’s a disposable Netflix series, so none of this matters. But let’s just say that if it were 20 years ago. and we had rented these episodes on a DVD from Blockbuster, we wouldn’t have to worry about late fees for keeping it too long. We’d have returned it immediately.
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