February was a rewind: a Scrubs reboot, a Sopranos marathon, a Varsity Blues rewatch, and a Korean War book that reads like a conversation with someone who was there.
Scrubs is one of my favorite shows of all time. It has the singular ability to transition viewers from doubled-over laughter to crying on the floor, in a span of five minutes. (“Where do you think we are?” 😭😭😭😭)
So, I was cautiously-optimistic when the reboot was announced. I know Zach, Donald, and Sarah would give it the care it deserved, but at the same time, when has a reboot ever been good?
In this case, however, they absolutely nailed it. The show had the old fantasy gags of the original series, but it still knew how to rip your heart out, all while making you laugh and feel something real.
And most importantly, it felt like hanging out with old friends.
Scrubs is such a great show because it gives us hope. It’s one of the few shows I know of that is able to accurately portray hope so honestly on screen. It’s a shown that taught us that hope isn’t the absence of pain. Such a naive approach is better termed as optimism. Rather, hope is what you build on top of pain. From losing patient after patient, to Dr. Cox’s breakdown, the characters never stop caring: for their patients or for each other. Scrubs always manages to sit with that pain while also bringing us back to life, through friendship and through laughter.
And the new Scrubs makes that lightning strike twice.
We’re really behind in finally watching this, but I now understand the hype. It was such a solid, slow HBO drama before HBO dramas were really a thing.
Tony Soprano was one of the first, great TV-villains-as-protagonist. You can see a lot of the Walter White’s evolution in the way they develop Tony’s character. The main difference, however, is that you never really cheer for anyone in the Sopranos. You come to like certain characters (Paulie and Silvio), but in the end, they’re all bad people. Now, contrast that with Breaking Bad, in which you come to know Walter White as a terrible person, but you can’t help but love Jesse. Sure, he does horrible things, but it’s because he’s a lost kid. And in the end, you know what Walter is going to do to save him, but it still hits so hard when he actually does it.
In this way, I love the Sopranos for what it is: a great character study of the “bad guys.”
It won’t go down in my top-5 shows of all time, but I appreciate what it did for television in the late ‘90s, and I now understand how this pioneering show influenced the next decade of television.
Rewatched this old nostalgic-comfort movie after hearing of the passing of James Van Der Beek. It’s such a quintessential 90’s movie, and I think (along with Office Space) subtly shaped how a lot of my generation approaches adulthood.
Yvon Chouinard once wrote about entrepreneurs: “To understand the entrepreneur, you have to understand the juvenile delinquent, who is saying with his actions, ‘This sucks. I’m going to do my own thing.’” In that way, the Varsity Blues characters still finish out the sport they love, but they do it on their own terms. A message my generation holds dearly.
On my (never-ending) path to find a book that is a straight history of the Korean War (e.g., something similar to Shelby Foote’s survey of the Civil War), I thought this might be the one. Although it came close, it wasn’t exactly a full survey. For example, I’ve still never read a book that covered the Battle of Heartbreak Ridge.
That being said, this was an absolutely phenomenal book. In the afterward, a commentator describes Halberstam as first and foremost a journalist, and more importantly, an interviewer. The measure is fully accurate and one of the many reasons the book was so good.
Against the backdrop of the fact-finding and research, we feel as if we’re learning about the war from those on the ground fighting it. It’s as if a family friend was candidly relating their experience, their war, and the anger and praise towards those that led them.
Chief among the targets of scorn (and deservedly so) was Douglas MacArthur. It almost makes your blood boil hearing how careless he was with the lives of his soldiers. And in the end, you come away with the realization (the same realization that many soldiers would later have), that victory doesn’t always mean a glorious triumph against a defeated army. Sometimes victory is simply the ability to keep evil at bay. A pragmatic ending to a messy conflict.
A Final Note
What I’m currently reading
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. I was instantly hooked, and now I’m strapped in for quite a long ride. My first impression of Hugo’s writing is that he gives long, winding exposition, but he earns it with the payoff in his character development.
Guns, Germs, & Steel by Jared Diamond. I’ve always heard about this book but decided to finally dig in.
A quote I’m pondering:
Halberstam once said that after finishing Harvard he deliberately sought work on small-town Southern newspapers so he could learn how to talk to ordinary people, a skill not much cherished in the Ivy League, but indispensable to success in journalism. Getting people to talk was vital to his distinctive way of writing history, because he believed in the individual human as history's agent. It is doubtful that he was ever much interested in a Tolstoyan view of man at the mercy of history's tides, and for good reason. Take that road and journalism becomes absurd; Halberstam was a journalist, heart and soul.
Until next time
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