The Friday High Five

Cowboys and killers, genteel violence, and life as a series of days

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. 🙏🏻

Netflix

My Favorite Thing

Fallout

I promise this is the last time I’ll bring up Fallout. We binged the entire season in a single week and I’m still grappling with everything I saw and felt.

My favorite thing is how the show plays with the mystique and mythology of the American cowboy, both in the before times and the after.

Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins, incredible) is an actor with a long track record of playing white hat cowboys. In order to keep with the times, Cooper slowly acquiesces to performing less-noble acts on and off screen. Does that open the way for what Cooper becomes? Maybe. Hard to say, but interesting to think about.

Yoda was pretty clear on this, however: “Once you start down down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will.”

The Ghoul is a creature consumed by rage. It’s not obvious at first. He masks it with an old-world, genteel drawl and mannerisms. But nothing—not even the faint shreds of his own humanity—will get in his way.

In the Ghoul, Cooper becomes the deadly cowboy he’d always played at being. He adopts the look of a cowboy—duster, wide brimmed hat, spurs—and uses a saddlebag as his murse. The Ghoul is the personification of everything Cooper’s heroic characters would’ve hunted down. He’s a monster, and not just because he looks horrific.

It’s obvious the show is setting up a redemption arc, though I think the white hat cowboy is truly dead and gone. I’m curious what his personal reconciliation looks like, and how much of Cooper is left under that tattered flesh.

So… season two—when? Sadly, not for a long time. Season 1 took about 2 years to make. 2026 is probably a best-case scenario.

Streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Other Things I Enjoyed

Bridgerton: Season 3

We don’t usually base what we watch next on what we watched last, but going from the zany bleakness of Fallout to the pastels and lace of Bridgerton is a pleasant palate swap. Variety is the spice of life, and what is TV if not the appearance of life?

Last night we cracked the lid on Season 3. It’s too early yet to talk about what this season is, but if I can read the lavender-scented tea leaves, Penelope is getting the full Bridgerton treatment this season.

On the surface, Bridgerton is not really my kind of show. Where are the gunfights? Why isn’t anyone racing those carriages? Would it be too much to ask for a courtesy suplex, explosion, or heist amid all this ballroom dancing?

When it comes to things to watch, my criteria is rather short: Is it good? If yes, proceed directly to Go, hit play, and pass the popcorn.

And, dear reader, here’s the shocking truth—are you sitting down?—many things with guns, suplexes, and heists are not actually very good. I know! It’s rather disturbing. Turns out that no amount of action can paper over gaping deficiencies in character or plot.

That isn’t to say Bridgerton doesn’t have action. Most of it is just veiled, and the knives are metaphoric. Though there was one dueling scene in season 1. So very occasionally, Bridgerton involves pistols.

Bridgerton is not a masculine show, but I still find myself drawn toward the show’s entitled strutting peacocks.

Bridgerton is manly in a bygone way that feels both antiquated and timeless, harkening back to when men had whiskers and stood about with their hand stuffed partway between the buttons of their vest and said things like ‘quite’ and ‘just so’ and ‘verily’, and regularly dealt with matters of great importance. They dress smartly, all cravats and half-coats and vests. Watching at home in three-day-old sweatpants, the contrast couldn’t have been more stark. There is a quiet nobility in dressing well, in presenting your best self to the world; I haven’t felt like my best self in some time.

I’m not a man’s man. In Bridgerton parlance, I’m more like the guys hiding away in a seedy den in order to make art.

My chief complaint about the show is how characters from the previous season’s frenzied matchmaking just sort of fade away. Is that an allegory for how life ends after marriage? Or is it just that married people quickly fall into lifelong routines that appear boring from the outside?

I assume the Bridgerton end game involves marrying off all the titular children, after which Mama Bridgerton can finally unbutton her corset, let down her hair, and pour herself a tall, cold one.

Streaming exclusively on Netflix.

Every Lightsaber Fight Ever

20th Century Fox

I mean that.

I’m discussing the 5 greatest—or, at least, my favorite—lightsaber fights as part of next week’s podcast on The Phantom Menace. And although I know them intimately, this week I refamiliarized myself with all the Force-fueled melees via the magic of YouTube.

The very notion of a lightsaber fight is a bit squishy. Do both combatants need to have a lightsaber for it to count? I say no. That’s a duel. However, I think it needs to be a melee fight. Thus, I self-disqualified Obi-Wan (lightsaber) vs Jango Fett (blasters, rockets, utility belt of goodies). But The Last Jedi throne room scene is eligible even though Snoke’s guards don’t have Jedi weapons.

I don’t say this lightly but I think people are going to be shocked at my list.

Ice Cold Slurpees

Growing up, we opened the pool Memorial Day weekend, closed it Labor Day weekend, and everything in between was summer. The logic checks out. Swimming outdoors in Michigan can mean only one thing: Summer.¹

More recently, summer became the time of year my kids weren’t in school. We traditionally marked the occasion with a trip to 7-11. Slurpees aren’t the official drink of summer, but they should be.

My daughter came home from school yesterday at 11:30 AM. We were in the car by 11:35. I went with my old standby: a 50/50 Coke and Cherry mix. She picked Mountain Dew because she’s a Pierce teenager and that’s in the bylaws. She also swindled me out of a bag of chips and some brownies; there’s a reason she asks dad to take her, and I don’t think it’s for my musical tastes.

One of the things I miss most about childhood is the giddy excitement of the last day of school. I still get a secondhand whiff of it, enough to feel a nice little buzz of possibility.

One Day

Netflix

I wanted to quit this show after 10 minutes.

It isn’t that it’s bad. It made me feel something no other show has: Old.

One Day is a love drama mini-series based on a book of the same name. I initially took the title to mean the two characters would get together ‘one day,’ as in, someday, eventually. It’s clearly that kind of story.

Each episode takes place during a single day. Much belatedly, I realized ‘one day’ is quite literal. One specific day—July 15, I think—in successive years.

Taken together, the narrative feels like a sweeping life story, not unlike how The Crown depicts the passage of time. Watching someone’s life unspool in neat 20-30 minute chunks made me appreciate how infrequently life changes, and how change is slow to come and often reluctantly pursued.

And, of course, how the most drastic changes are the ones we’re least prepared for.

The first episode is the meet-cute. It occurs in 1988 or similar, and features a bunch of college kids partying. I couldn’t get into it. In fact, I actively disliked it. I felt at arm’s length, like there was glass separating what was happening and my emotional response. I had no response. I usually have the opposite problem. All the emotions.

One Day unfolds from the late 80s to the 00s. I lay claim to those years as much as any one person can own something immaterial that is gone besides. But One Day was made in 2023, for 2023 young people. And I felt uncomfortably out of place watching that first episode.

This was probably similar to my mom’s experience when I made her watch the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” music video. I see relevance, she sees sepia-tinged screaming.

The whole ordeal had me thinking I’d aged out of this kind of love story. Fortunately, it turned out not to be the case.

One Day is a slow burn. We stuck with it even as we questioned why, slowly kicking the can down the road for several weeks. And then it clicked and we couldn’t stop watching. We finished the last 6 episodes in one sitting and I’m still thinking about it.

Streaming exclusively on Netflix.

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What brought you joy this week? Drop a comment and put something awesome on my radar.

1. This is a Sio Bibble reference, from The Phantom Menance.