Weekly Culture Menu 3.27.24
What's Anning your Hathaway?
For this week’s installment of the Weekly Culture Menu, we have a sampling of content across a variety of mediums, lengths, and sensibilities so that you can dip in and out all week. Once you subscribe, you can expect a weekly menu delivered to your inbox every Wednesday.
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Hi team! It’s mid-week, how are we feeling? What’s Anning your Hathway? Withering your Spoon? What’s really Channing my Tatum is excitement to see the new musical Teeth tomorrow. It’s a show that’s been high on my list, and I can’t wait to report back. In the meantime, here are some new menu items for you below.
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🍤 Amuse Bouche [ -10 mins ]
🗞️ Jungle - “Back on 74”. I really enjoyed this breakdown of Jungle’s viral “Back on 74” from Molly Cameron of
. This sent me down a rabbit hole of TikTok dance videos - a favorite pastime for me despite the fact I can’t dance, but boy, do I love cheering on people who can (as evidenced by my love of Dance Life).
🍟 Appetizer [ -30 mins ]
🗞️ Rejecting the Binary. Back in the day, I was a competitive high school/college policy debater using my vicious rhetoric to PwN Noobs (I think that’s what we used to say in 2009?). Somewhere along that road, I became obsessed with the famed academic Judith Butler. So much so that my legendary high school debate coach gave me a signed copy of their first book, Gender Trouble, as a graduation gift. Butler has now released a new book called Who’s Afraid of Gender, and I couldn’t be more excited to read their perspective in a contemporary context. This article, from one of their former advisees, is a good entry point if you’re curious.
🍽️ Main Course [ 1 Hour+ ]
📺 Grey’s Anatomy Season One and Two. My recs this week are fewer, largely because I’m so deep into a Grey’s Anatomy rewatch that I feel like I performed a Whipple procedure yesterday. I’m not sure how many times I’ve rewatched this 400+ episode TV show, but I find myself in what seems to be a shrinking camp of people who have kept current with the latest seasons. As mentioned in the Friday Special, it’s a foundational text for me. I continue to fight the urge to “unzip myself from my human form, dissolve into the screen, and materialize as a Seattle Grace Intern.” In between my packed surgery schedule, I thought I’d take a moment to try and articulate why I genuinely think this show is worth a watch. Note: this will be a spoiler-free discussion because if this write-up convinces you to give it a try, you deserve the full emotional rollercoaster.
I was twelve when Grey’s first aired on ABC in 2005. But it didn’t enter my consciousness until I saw my mom sobbing while watching the season two finale (we still talk about this moment eighteen years later). My morose curiosity made me desperate to know what had driven her to tears, so we made a trip to Barnes and Noble, purchased the first season DVD box set, and I shut out the world to catch-up. I then quickly devoured the second season (she’d thankfully DVR’ed it). By the end of the second season, I had signed up for AP Chemistry with plans to become a surgeon (shortlived), watched all of Patrick Dempsey’s filmography (Can’t Buy Me Love 🥰), and forever committed myself to the Shonda Rhimes fan club. I’m now thirty-one years old, and Meredith Grey has been in my life for nearly twenty years. There’s been something special about seeing a show and its cast age in real time - like a Richard Linklater film, but on network television.
Still, you ask, how has this show continued for twenty seasons? The simple reason is Shonda Rhimes understood network television from the jump - rather than feeling constrained by the rules of the form, she used that conventional framework to test limits while understanding how to use the formula to her advantage. The show is generally comprised of larger-scale, tragic events that require some element of suspended disbelief and acceptance of soap opera melodrama alongside more personalized and individual character issues happening on an ongoing basis. Both make for compelling television, and there’s a general humorous self-awareness even in the most catastrophic (they also can’t believe another natural disaster has struck Seattle). The show has also always been progressive, drawing on contemporary events for material and enlisting a diverse cast to tell often unrepresented stories. All of that, combined with an ever-rotating set of characters (it’s a teaching hospital with new interns and teachers), has allowed the show to have endless character permutations and natural reinvention. But still, in the DNA is Rhimes’ original desire to portray real women (in doing so, she’s made Ellen Pompeo one of the highest-paying women in TV). Per Rhimes:
I wanted to create a world in which you felt as if you were watching very real women. Most of the women I saw on TV didn't seem like people I actually knew. They felt like ideas of what women are. They never got to be nasty or competitive or hungry or angry. They were often just the loving wife or the nice friend. But who gets to be the bitch? Who gets to be the three-dimensional woman?
So, if you’re looking for something to sink your teeth into, make yourself some popcorn, assemble an arsenal of favorite sweets, and cozy up to a Grey’s binge. You’ll immediately be teleported back to a simpler time when network television ruled the world, cliffhangers couldn’t be dissected on social media, and interns making out in on-call rooms was the most titillating thing on television. My favorite seasons are one, two, five, six, and eight. Start with season one (it’s only nine episodes because it was a mid-season replacement), and let your journey begin. Before you know it, you’ll be on Season 20 (skip the musical episode, though - that was bleak).
🧁 Dessert [ -1 hour ]
📺 Ellen Pompeo and Katherine Heigl - Actors on Actors. Let’s go ahead and stick with the Grey’s theme. This Ellen Pompeo and Katherine Heigl conversation is required viewing for all Grey’s fans. Like many early cast members, Heigl had a famously tumultuous exit from the show. But it’s now been on long enough that her villainous media portrayal has had an arc, and people have begun to believe that she was vocalizing unfair working hours and expectations (albeit with some ego and youthful lack of tact). I loved this conversation between the two of them!
And as it’s Easter this weekend, I’ll leave you with a recipe I found that might just be my only shot at convincing people that Peeps are great.
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💖 If you liked this post, don’t forget to hit the heart to let me know and help others find my writing.
📮 Do you have any menu requests? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Greys will always be my comfort show. I was sixteen when it started airing and my high school girlfriends and I would gather at someone's house to watch it every Thursday. I always go back to seasons 1 and 2, probably because they feel so nostalgic and because I just live for Meredith's panties thumbtacked to a cork board.
I LOVE Actors on Actors!!! I saw a bit of Katherine and Ellen’s. I feel like it’s such a great series and nobody knows about it!