This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
This week:
- Slowly losing our minds.
- A great election freakout
- Another great election freakout.
- A great election tweet.
- The Queen’s Gambit!
How quaint it is to turn back the clock to 430 years ago—Monday night, the night before Election Day—when everyone braced for the insanity ahead by sharing their eating and drinking plans for the long night.
Some bragged about baking ideas. Some confessed their plans to order the most indulgent delivery meal in their area, paired with an entire wheel of cheese. Even on MSNBC, pundits couldn’t stop joking about their liquor consumption plans.
Then there’s Food Network host Alton Brown, who had the most relatable, full-on food-related breakdown I’ve seen. I cherished it.
Believe it or not, there’s more where that came from. See his full, hilarious meltdown here.
Leslie Jones spoke for all of us on Election Night, posting videos of herself watching CNN and ranting at what she was being told. “I just gotta say something here: What the fuck?” she said. She openly asked what’s wrong with us that it takes this long to get results, that we didn’t have a plan in place to get results sooner.
In another video tweet captioned, “Why folks ain’t counting all night,” she wondered how we can crown an American Idol winner in a matter of minutes but the election is going to take a week, channeling all of our (admittedly naive) confusion on how there isn’t a protocol to count votes immediately.
“OK, so we’ve been knowing this all is coming for years now, right?” she said. “Why people going home? Why they ain’t staying up all night counting the votes?...One night, motherfuckers, you all don’t get to go to sleep...Please help me figure this shit out. How the fuck can American Idol figure it out in one night? Why is people going home and they going to be back at 8? Put your purse down, you have more shit to count.”
Later, she echoed all of our frustration with the constant analyzing of an election map that has no answers, screaming at the TV, “Y’all ain’t nothing but weathermen...just fucking big-ass weathermen.”
Joining the ranks of people mocking Donald Trump’s false and baseless “claim” to have won Pennsylvania, Duckie made me laugh.
There was actually a time when I thought about things besides this election. Specifically, I was thinking about The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix, which was fantastic and I finished bingeing this week. It’s curious and, in context of the news, fascinating that what it milks to its advantage is intelligence.
So much of the series is spent gazing into Anya Taylor-Joy’s Jupiter-sized eyes as her character Beth calculates and strategizes. It should be cinematically stagnant—a camera trained on a person as they play chess—but is among the most electric things I’ve seen on TV this year. The finale in particular nails this, which leads me to the point of this entry: Let that be the final nail.
Few finales are as gratifying as this one. It ends at the same place the book does. Limited series that have pursued storytelling past the books they’re based on have had mixed results; The Handmaid’s Tale found fruitful territory; Big Little Lies was merely fine, and that was frustrating.
Which is to say, call checkmate on any ideas of a Queen’s Gambit season two! (I have no idea if that is an accurate chess reference. But I tried.)
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City: Joseph Smith would be shook. (Wednesday on Bravo)
Dash & Lily: Something pure and nice, should you for some reason (can’t imagine why) be craving that. (Tuesday on Netflix)
I Am Greta: Climate change: Still a thing! (Friday on Hulu)
A Rainy Day in New York: Imagine watching a Woody Allen movie right now. (Tuesday on VOD)
NBC’s “Chicago” Series: They all return this week, and they’re everything wrong with broadcast TV. (Wednesday on NBC)
