The Friday High Five

Hacks is back, Tom Brady is a plastic man, and the horniest Superman ever

Hacks is back! HBO

Every Friday I share 5 things I enjoyed this week. Also, high fives are inherently cool, and I think we can all agree Friday is the bestest day. Hence the Friday High Five. 🙏🏻

My Favorite Thing

Hacks

Man I love this show.

Hacks is a hilarious drama about Deborah Vance (Jean Smart, never better), a legendary comedian who has a standing gig in Vegas and on QVC. She’s not exactly phoning it in, but she’s definitely coasting, and is at risk of Losing It All. To reinvigorate her act and stave off execution, Deborah hires Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder, a snarky revelation), an unemployed comedy writer.

These two are the Batman and Robin of comedy.

Eventually.

Hacks gets a ton of mileage out of the odd couple pairing; much of the first two seasons are devoted to getting these two on the same page. It’s so blindingly obvious that they are the yin to the other’s yang. They work so good together, but they also sorta hate each other. It’s a whole situation.

It’s been a long two years since season two ended. And now that season three is finally(!) back, we’ve been hovering up the episodes. I don’t want to call season three the best season, but it’s trending that way.

As funny as this show is—and it is fracking hilarious—what elevates Hacks is the dynamic between the two leads. I just want them to be BFFs so bad.

Hacks is exclusively on HBO—I’m not calling it Max, screw that, it’s HBO—and totally worth a subscription to see.

Other Things I Enjoyed

The Roast of Tom Brady

I really had no interest in watching this. And then I heard Tom regretted doing it because of collateral damage inflicted on his family.

Adult Swim

Every roaster dunked on Tom for the dissolution of his marriage. Nobody held back. Why would they? That’s what a roast is.

You hate to hear kids got caught up in this, though, and I do feel bad for them. It’s probably not fun to hear about your mom banging her karate instructor. Can you imagine the crap they’ve had to hear at school? You thought roasters were rough? Bruh…

But it’s also super disingenuous for Tom to cry foul after the fact. Why would he sign up to be roasted if he was concerned about what his kids would hear? Has he never seen a roast?¹ Roasts are a special dark blend of comedy. There’s a viciousness to the mockery that is rather shocking. Sacred cows lock the barn because not even they are safe from the slaughter.

The Dad Rulebook is short because dads by and large won’t read instruction manuals. Even if we’ve never taken apart a lawnmower before.²

The Dad rulebook

1. Love your kids and keep them safe.

2. See rule number #1.

You don’t need an actual rulebook because it’s common sense. As natural as breathing or disappearing into the bathroom for 10 minutes of me time.

Tom obviously knew Gisele would come up, probably frequently, but went ahead anyway. He clearly was not concerned about his kids at that point. Or perhaps he was just too enamored with the idea of a bunch of celebs kissing his ass. Maybe he’d bought into his own mystique, and thought nobody could touch him. But he found out differently in front of millions of people. And he just sort of sat there, smiling like a plastic god who doesn’t understand why people are laughing at him.

NBC

I like to pretend I’m above rubbernecking at pop culture gossip, but sometimes the wreckage is too spectacular to look away from.

As for the roast—it was actually perfectly in my wheelhouse. 3 hours of comedy centered around football? Where do I sign?

The roasters are a mix of good to great. Even the former players are pretty funny. Though Gronk is a problem waiting to happen. I think my favorite thing is watching Kevin Hart laughing at the jokes. That would 100% be me. Laughing is best.

Interestingly—or perhaps not, given everything I just said—Tom’s own jokes in response practically seethe. He talks about his own greatness as much as he does the other people on stage. I didn’t expect the roast to end with graphic autofellatio.³

You can watch the roast exclusively on Netflix, which the roasters mentioned multiple times.

Superman III

Warner Bros.

I’ve inadvertently decided to rewatch all of the original Superman movies for the first time in 30 years.

This all started after I showed my son Superman: The Movie, and was surprised to find it actually kinda sucks. Superman II fares far better—it’s the best of the Reeves films in my opinion—though I couldn’t stop myself from pondering the intricacies of Clark’s love life. From there, Supermans III and IV were no-brainers.

I remembered Superman III fairly well—Richard Pryor, Bizarro Superman, the lady getting consumed by a computer—but didn’t recall just how schticky it is. Friends—the hijinks are off-the-charts bad.

The movie starts with a long sequence on the streets of Metropolis. Imagine Rube Goldberg cause-and-effects, but with a sea of randos. I can only assume all those extras needed screen time to earn their SAG card.⁴ There is even an army of wind-up penguins wandering around with their heads afire. None of this has anything to do with anything. It just happens.

I actually enjoy the part where Superman turns into a chode, stops shaving, and starts drinking. Which leads to this little interlude atop the Statue of Liberty where Superman and a woman aligned to the antagonist talk about rolling around in some silk sheets.

Do you get the subtext??! Warner Bros.

I honestly can’t believe they shot the scene this way.

One thing that is sort of awesome about rewatching these as an adult is all the stuff you pick up, things that are blindingly obvious now. All these innuendoes and outright inferences have been there this whole time. I was just too young and too invested in the heroism of the cape to notice. There’s a scene where Superman actually decides, “You know what? Those imperiled people can wait. I’m going to show Lana Lang why they call me the man of steel.”⁵ And somehow I don’t remember that striking me as odd. I didn’t remember it at all.

Watching Superman III, you can understand why the genre died out in the mid-80s. And we haven’t even gotten to Superman IV, which is one of the worst movies known to man. That’s next.

Pray for my soul.

Superman III is streaming on HBO. Something to watch between episodes of Hacks.

Remember the Game? Retro Gaming Podcast

My new favorite podcast! (Not counting my own, obviously.)

I don’t even remember how I found this podcast exactly, but it is so down main street. The host is super passionate about NES / SNES era gaming. He also covers later consoles, but those original Nintendos are his sweet spot. It’s nostalgia bait and I don’t care.

I’ve listened to several episodes. This one on GoldenEye 007 was my most recent listen:

If you’ve tried to play GoldenEye again on the Nintendo 64, you know it hasn’t aged well. I have no idea how we made that single analog stick work. However, if you were gaming in the late 90s, you probably have amazing memories of playing this game.

Some good news: You can find a really good GoldenEye port on the Xbox. My brother and I fired it up one evening when he was in town last year and it was hilarious. Slappers only!

Emily the Criminal

Roadside Attractions

More times than I’d like to admit, my decision to watch something is informed entirely by who’s in it.

Longtime readers might remember I watched a terrible, no-good adaptation of the video game Hitman just because Timothy Olyphant starred. No ragrets.

This image is a link. Click it, and be whisked away to a magical place sometimes called OlyFans. (Use your email to sign-in if prompted!)

The only thing I knew about Emily the Criminal is that it starred Aubrey Plaza and it was about a woman named Emily who apparently considered laws optional.

Sold.

I don’t want to spoil anything but I’ll just say the film isn’t as cut-and-dried as its name makes it seem. Emily has reasons for breaking bad, and also a past that may suggest she was more or less preordained for a certain kind of life.

There’s no reason to expect any comedy because this is a drama about serious things, but I was still sorta disappointed not to get any of Aubrey’s straight-faced snark. It’d be like watching Timothy Olyphant in a movie without his unfairly gorgeous head of hair.

Shades (Theo Rossi) from Luke Cage co-stars. Good to see him pop up in something.

I don’t typically rate movies because I’d rather make jokes, but I’d give this a solid 7. The premise is interesting, the actors are good, but it doesn’t feel entirely satisfying in the end.

Emily the Criminal is streaming on Netflix.

1. Speaking of roasts! The second or third episode of this season of Hacks is about Deborah getting roasted. Loved it.

2. I’ve learned more about lawnmower engines in the past 2 weeks than I’ve ever wanted to know. Which is a shorthand way of saying something went horribly amiss when I was doing seasonal maintenance and ended with me sitting in the driveway, surrounded by a disassembled mower.

3. I own some Tom Brady stock from his days playing for the University of Michigan, and therefore take like 10% credit for the New England Patriots dynasty—historically, Detroit Lions fans looked for anything we could claim as a win—but I think I’m going to divest those assets. The Tom Brady I loved is long gone.

4. I have no idea if that’s how the SAG actually operates.

5. Laura Lang was so traumatized by the near-rape, she changed her name to Hope and moved to Virgin River.