A television show that'll move you.

Or not.

I’m really, really tired today.

I’m so tired I’m pretty sure I’m about to collapse in about forty-six seconds. But until that happens—I’ve got some stuff to tell you.

Discover Why I Started Watching The Americans (and Why Television Has An Unfair Advantage)

Before I talk about The Americans, here’s one thing I’m thinking about.

The difference between writing for television.

Versus writing for movies.

Versus writing for novels.

Let’s branch out, and I’ll talk about key differences in each:

Movies—maximize for emotional punch, are more visceral, tend to be lean, do more in less time.

Novels—generally tend to maximize for emotional depth, are more introspective, can flesh out psychology since they have more time to do so.

Basically, movies are visceral experiences. Novels engage your emotional capacity for depth.

This doesn’t mean a movie can’t have emotional depth, or a novel can’t have emotional punch—there’s about 7 million counter-examples that prove that they can.

But here’s the interesting thing about television.

A television series is really just a movie, but with more time. With more time, you get a novel—that means more time to meet the characters, more examples to flesh them out, more examples to talk about their psychology, and what makes them tick, and more time to flesh out their interiority.

A movie only has two hours to flesh out the interiority of their characters, and a television show has (roughly) unlimited hours to do so.

With shows like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, you get shows that feel like novelistic movies—all the psychology and nuance of a novel, with all the punch and visceral reality of the movies.

I’m loving The Americans. Because it’s about seven thousand seasons long, I hedged on starting it. But what I forgot is that, in the best television, you get the “depth” that’s missing in a lot of movies these days.

It’s the same depth that novels have, the best movies have, and it is so fun to rediscover.

Discover The Oppenheimer Trailer

Couldn’t be excited for Christopher Nolan’s latest.

Discover Why I Loved Sea of Tranquility

I’ve always repeated this, something I took from Alex Garland:

Science fiction is the theater of big ideas.

It’s never been about the fancy gadgets, or space wars, or giant aliens. To me, that’s not what science fiction is about.

I think it’s 100% possible to create wonderful stories with all of those ingredients.

And yes, categorically, technically—you have a big space war, you’re classified as science-fiction.

But what makes science fiction so great is that it has the space to play with big ideas. Free will. Determinism. The end of the world. You don’t have to shy away from them in science fiction. You can, to paraphrase my hazy memory of what Garland said, embrace them.

It’s one reason that I was so excited to tackle Emily St. John Mandel’s novel earlier this year, because I knew her focus wouldn’t be the gadgets (they’re barely there).

Instead, I knew she would explore what these central conceits (time travel, more directly) would do to the central protagonists. She would focus on character.

I loved this book. In typical fashion, it’s broken in bits and pieces, across multiple time-frames, and multiple characters—all of them colliding in beautiful fashion at the nexus of a single point—and I can’t spoil it, but I can say this:

You should pick it up. It’s fantastic.

Discover a review from the past: The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

The book that launched a publishing bidding war.

Jesus Goddamn Christ—I could talk about this book forever, but a few things to note:

• I’m gonna showcase the first few sentences here, so you get a flavor of the book.

• Before I do that, I need to tell you a mini-anecdote.

I finished the book at 1 or 2 or 12 o’clock (basically: late) and I had this feeling—this feeling wash over me.

My partner was asleep, I was on the floor of the living room and I had this very pointed feeling—I had to talk to someone. I had to talk to someone about this book or else I was going to discombobulate, so I immediately texted my buddy Kevin.

But the best part about all of this was that feeling of finishing something, putting it down, and thinking:

“Jesus, I can’t keep this to myself, I have to tell someone about this.”

Here’s the first few sentences of the book:

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history—state troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory in Hampden shut down, people coming from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston.”

Come on.

That’s good writing. In fact, it’s stellar writing, and Tartt (I immediately picked up The Goldfinch afterwards, finished it, now onto The Little Friend) actually caused a bidding-war among publishers when the book (this is her first) was being optioned off.

A bidding war. In my head, what I’m imagining is very furious telephone calls sometime in the early 1990’s, people losing their collective fucking minds over getting the rights.

And it’s that good. The book—from a technical perspective—does a few things absurdly well, and it’s the reason the book is so, so, so, so good it’s almost mind-numbing.

First, it’s not just the writing—the psychological precision of the characters is deep.

I recently saw Spider-Man: No Way Home (I loved it, go see it), and I’ve been a Spider-Man fan since childhood. But what’s different about novels like this, and movies like that, is that there is a depth of psychological nuance that is just very, very hard to find nowadays.

Meaning—you read these characters, you hear them talk, the way they describe their inner life, and all of a sudden, they feel as real as yourself.

Characters, on some level, can feel flimsy. They’re like one-dimensional puppet-shows.

You put your hand in front of the projector screen, you make your fingers do a thing, and then all of a sudden, your hand vaguely looks like a dog.

But here, the writing and psychology of the characters is so real, so imagined in all of it’s twists and nuances, that it feels like you’re reading—or living—a biography of someone actually deal with the consequences of a terrible crime (the murder of the aforementioned “Bunny”) and it feels so real it is almost too much. It’s this sense of gravity, this psychological reality, that grounds the book, and another thing—

The details. Tartt command of details pops the book into a life of it’s own. Real life is defined by it’s details, and when details (small, even imagined, but weird, quirky) come into the fore, it has the flavor of reality. Take two sentences, for example:

1. Jane walked up the street and into the store.

2. Jane walked past Broadway Ave and went into the corner deli, Big Joe’s, which always smelled like Taco Bell sauce, for some reason.

The second sentence feels more real simply because of the detail—and the oddity of it—and Tartt is a master (if, to be fair, an overdoer) of detail. She adds it in—from the character talking about their Greek classes, to the architecture, to the aesthetics (think dark academia), to the ways Richard Papen (our protagonist) works things out in his mind, the subtle ways that people move and go about the world.

And the last thing I’d like to talk about is the immersion. I think immersion works on a few levels:

1. You read a book and you’re into it, but it’s just that.

2. You read a book and you feel like you can smell the paint on the wall and feel the heartbeat of the characters and you’re in the room with them.

Psychological precision + detail + many other elements I’m not talking about here, add up to a complete immersive quality that Tartt—I think—has mastered, making her (and kill me for saying this) one of the great contemporary masters of the 21st century. Her command of prose forces the reader to be inside of the room, and the room you’re in is one of slow-boil suspense, which is: you know the crime. You know what happens. You know who’s murdered. So now you’re just strung along, trying to put the pieces together of—how does it happen? How does Richard get tangled up with his friends in a murder-plot?

In an 1992 interview with Charlie Rose, Tartt says (edited lightly):

“I love Alfred Hitchcock, and I read something he said—he said: ‘suspense doesn’t come from having a bomb thrown from nowhere at the hero. Suspense comes from having two people sitting, talking at a table—there’s a bomb ticking underneath the table—and the audience sees it, but the characters don’t, and that’s what suspense is.’

And I don’t know. In a funny way, that was what made me want to write this sort of novel.”

Some gratitude

If you’re a friend, thank you for being here. If you’re a loved one, thanks for being there.

And if you know anyone who might like this, pass it along. Any random “hey-you-should-check-this-out” is always appreciated.

Either way—thank you, thank you, thank you for being here.

Hope you have a wonderful day!