Analysis Paralysis Analysis Paralysis

In this episode, we discuss Christopher Nolan's time-hopping spy thriller, Tenet. We jump from Neil's faith to The Protagonist's bleeding heart and spare a thought for Cat's inability to stop talking about her son. If you'd rather try to understand Tenet than just "feel it," then you've come to the right place.

After an unplanned hiatus, we're back to enthuse about Rian Johnson's latest offering - his terrific modern take on both a whodunnit and an homage to whodunnits: Knives Out. In this episode, we discuss Thrombey family morality, the Perfect Immigrant stereotype, and whether Daniel Craig's accent is breathtakingly good or indefensibly bad (spoiler: it's breathtakingly good).

We finally get around to talking about Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda's award-winning musical about the until-recently unsung Founding Father. We're as late to this party as we are with this episode, but we bring oodles of enthusiasm for legacy-building, revolutions, and Alexander Hamilton's fatally poor impulse control.

(Some useful links: the full animatic musical - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwqkmfFJ6LU | Hamildrops - https://www.hamildrops.com/)

This extremely belated episode goes into the nitty-gritty of Down With Love, the 2003 rom-com/pastiche of "no-sex sex comedies" from the 60s starring Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor. In this episode, we talk rom-com tropes, feminism, 60s set design, and why Down With Love - though largely ignored by both critics and audiences - is the perfect film to rehabilitate the rom-com genre.

In this episode, we talk about The Good Place, that sitcom by the creator of Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn 99 that you've definitely heard about. Join us for a heated debate about the season one twist, the unusual pairing of philosophy and comedy, and which characters we think should hook up in season three.

In this episode, we talk about the little-known but powerfully influential 90s sitcom, The Powers That Be. Much darker than an American sitcom has any right to be, this show you've never heard of was created by the folks who went on to create Friends, featured actors like David Hyde Pierce and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and helped to set the benchmark for modern political satire. Join us for this extract-heavy episode that should be accessible to both newcomers and veterans of the show.

Content warning: due to TPTB's unbelievably black humour, this episode contains references to depression, anxiety, suicide, eating disorders, and euthanasia. But it's a comedy, we promise!