https://medium.com/@MTV_TheChallenge_Total_Madnes/watch-the-challenge-total-madness-s35e04-episode-4-karma-chameleon-mtv-full-show-a20e8edaac99
https://medium.com/@MTV_TheChallenge_Total_Madnes/the-challenge-total-madness-episode-4-karma-chameleon-s35e4-mtv-full-show-4f4c58162c8a
https://medium.com/@MTV_TheChallenge_Total_Madnes/the-challenge-total-madness-season-35-episode-4-s35e4-full-episodes-ddd36826c64
Choice paralysis is real, and the only evidence we need sits a click or two away. Maybe the cord-cutting era has largely done away with the act of channel surfing, but many of us rack up an equally large amount of idling time these days. Rather than clicking from PBS through TNT, instead we're perusing what's available on various streaming services and saving the interesting stuff to our lists. Once something hits that list, of course, there's no guarantee it'll ever get watched anyway (perhaps making channel surfing more productive in retrospect).
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Don’t Panic: The comprehensive Ars Technica guide to the coronavirus [Updated 4/5]
But, like seemingly everything, our viewing habits and rituals have changed drastically in the last month as society settles into its temporary, at-home COVID-19 reality. Around Ars, some of us have taken advantage of the extra time in proximity of a screen and hit "play" on the stuff that has forever been "eh, I'll watch it next time." Others face new realities from ever-present kids to newly shared selection duties that make us regret never revisiting those queued up films and shows beforehand.
All of us, however, undoubtedly have more time to think about how our streaming queues have been affected. These are those stories (Law & Order: SVU marathons not yet included).
Have you watched episodes one and two of The Irishman, yet? Us, neither.
tfw, you finally have three and a half hours to spare
The Irishman (Netflix) is an obvious choice for a list like this: it’s well-reviewed, it has legendary stars, and its titanic three-and-a-half-hour runtime should be less of a burden when I can’t leave the house. But, yeah, that.
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Netflix exclusive The Irishman unites Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino
This isn’t a controversial stance, but I’m kind of a Martin Scorsese fanboy. His highs (Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, GoodFellas) are almost incontrovertibly brilliant, but I’ve appreciated his genre work (Shutter Island, Cape Fear), period pieces (Gangs of New York, The Age of Innocence), tortured religious epics (Silence, Kundun, The Last Temptation of Christ), even the kid’s movie (Hugo). The Wolf of Wall Street might be the most scorched-earth takedown of American greed, temptation, and self-indulgence put on film, and The King of Comedy might be more relevant today than it was in the early '80s. All of them are so considered, so committed on every level to furthering whatever questions Scorsese wants to ask with a given piece. I can always count on them to entertain but not pat me on the head and hand me meaning on a plate.
The Irishman is a sweeping gangster film starring Robert De Niro, so it seems to be right in Scorsese’s wheelhouse. Feedback from friends has been mixed, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. "I don't have the time" is less of an excuse these days, at least for me.
—Jeff Dunn, Commerce Editor
Outlander, and one Friday the 13th binge nightmare
I jumped on a six-month Starz subscription in January solely so I could watch season five of Outlander (Hulu) in 2020. Our family has "yours, mine, and ours" entertainment, and that one is mine, all mine. And since not even my husband's interested, I usually end up sneaking the show in during breaks, in chunks. Normally, weekday daytime hours have proven to be optimal, as the show's bare Highlander bottoms and equally naked swords are not really appropriate for children.
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Need a meaty, complex time travel series? Start watching Outlander
Except, well, you know. Schools have been closed, and my children have been home with me at all times since Friday, March 13—at which point I was still only halfway through the second episode. I've read the books, so I know what's coming, but it's driving me crazy that I have the perfect binge-watch sitting right there and can't ever bring it up.
Other shows I'm not binge-watching right now due to perpetual child presence include the third season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon Prime), which has less nudity than Outlander but twice as many jokes and choice phrases I don't want to spend my time avoiding explaining.
-Kate Cox, Tech Policy Reporter
I mean, who among us could deny this?
Enlarge / I mean, who among us could deny this?
Jim Salter
When at home, why not get weird?
For me, being stuck at home hasn't become so much a case of "working through saved movies" as it has become "watching the weird stuff I didn't know about." Case in point: the Major Lazer cartoon (Hulu).
For those who aren't familiar, Major Lazer is a quasi-Caribbean electronic dance music group consisting of three DJs: Diplo, Walshy Fire, and Jillionaire. Diplo is a garden-variety white dude, Walshy Fire is Jamaican, and Jillionaire is Trinidadian.
It's sort of a "concept" music group, with album images and occasionally musical themes revolving around the exploits of a burly, quasi-military Jamaican dude whose right arm has been chopped off and replaced with an enormous laser cannon. The actual songs are all EDM club bangers, heavily influenced with Caribbean beats and instruments.
With me so far? OK, great: now that you understand what Major Lazer is, I can tell you that Diplo broke off and made a Major Lazer cartoon—without involving (or at least without crediting) Jillionaire or Walshy Fire.
In the cartoon, the titular pseudo-Rastafarian Major Lazer smokes tons of weed and saves music, white girls, and the world, in roughly that order. All four of these elements are important plot points—themes, if you're being generous—across the entire 11-episode (yes, 11) run, now streaming on Hulu.
—Jim Salter, Technology Reporter
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Goodbye me-time, my old friend
We all had our rituals. Maybe you and yours sat together to join John Oliver on Sunday nights. Or, perhaps you squeezed in some new Better Call Saul episodes in-between when your partner went to work on Tuesday mornings and when you had to log in. The old schedules have been put on hold like everything else at this point, and in my house that means something of a constant entertainment negotiation. My partner and I have a single TV but nothing representing solo viewing hours now. In the evening if we're out of mutual material these days, she picks one thing, I get the next.
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At last, a sci-fi movie that accurately captures the horrors of dating
So far, this has mostly worked out. She leans toward TV and likes binge-able shows without insurmountable episode totals, so we've breezed through Sex Education and Grace & Frankie (both on Netflix). The former is an easy recommendation if you enjoy teen/high school shows, since it has all the familiar beats (prom, crushes, new kids in the group, detention, etc.) but presented through a unique lens (the main character is the son of a sex therapist, and he falls into giving advice to his explorative peers). The latter has Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Martin Sheen, and Sam Waterston playing mismatched, sexually liberated older adults. If that sentence excited you, get moving. Even if it doesn't, the show moves briskly and can be quite refreshing. (It's also easy to tune in and out of if trying to get work done).
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On Netflix and next projects, a night in genre-king Bong Joon-Ho’s lecture hall
To mix it up on my part, I'm aiming to finally empty out my movie queue, my partner's typical taste be damned. Netflix has the Spider-verse, but I've been eyeing the absurdist premise of The Lobster and know the dialogue and tone will be equally wild after finally seeing director Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favorite. Amazon Prime seems to primarily be about documentaries; she's already seen Bill Cunningham New York so instead I've got Time Zero, about the final year of Polaroid, in my view finder. And on Hulu, well, I've already pushed the kaiju-meets-Anne Hathaway genre-bender that is Colossal, which is just as weird, dark, and delightful the second time. Luckily, they picked up a bunch of movies from some guy named Bong recently and she has yet to sit down with Parasite.
—Nathan Mattise, Features Editor
If Nick Offerman's villain in Devs leaves you a bit cold, might we suggest his comedic performance?
Looking to the local government (of Pawnee at least)
One of my responsibilities here at Ars is staying on top of the news throughout the workday. Not a problem under normal circumstances, but given the reality of the pandemic, the last thing I want to do after dinner is watch a drama. Even The Expanse, which I’ve been watching on Amazon Prime, has fallen by the wayside.
Instead, I’ve been binging Parks & Recreation on Netflix. I only caught the occasional episode during its run on NBC, but the antics of Pawnee, Indiana’s best and brightest (well, not Andy Dwyer) government servants have been a welcome and hilarious distraction.
-Eric Bangeman, Managing Editor
Agent Dale Cooper is very much back.
Enlarge / Agent Dale Cooper is very much back.
Suzanne Tenner / Showtime
Same hours, same movie queue
Self-isolation has had no effect on my at-home movie watching. That's because I'm still working evenings, and—even though she's working from home—The Wife has to keep basically the same hours as she did during the Before Time. She works for a NASA contractor, no big deal *cough* humblebrag.
So no binging: no Fanny and Alexander (Kanopy), no Out 1 (Amazon), no Heaven's Gate (Hulu), and no Brighter Summer Day (Kanopy). We divided all three-plus hours of Reds (Crackle) over two nights and averaged a couple episodes per sitting for Twin Peaks: The Return (Showtime), which is the same as we would have done pre-COVID.
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Twin Peaks is back and somehow as strange and beautiful as ever
Still, we are determined to not let the pandemic go to waste—meaning we will find a way to do all 3.5 hours of Spike Lee's Malcolm X (Netflix) in one sitting. Dammit.
—Peter Opaskar, Copyeditor
The Deuce (2019): Official Series Trailer | HBO
Binging can be good
When I haven’t been busy with home schooling and work (I know, I’m one of the fortunate ones who still has a job), I’ve spent much of my shelter-in-place time catching up on shows or series I’ve missed. My preference is to choose compelling series that have at least a season’s worth of episodes I haven’t seen. Then I watch them, as many as possible, in one sitting, in true binge fashion. Here are a few shows that have worked for me:
If you liked David Simon’s other series, you’re sure to like The Deuce (HBO). This three-season series follows Times Square in 1971 (season 1), 1977 (season 2), and 1986 (season 3) with a meticulous lens. There’s a particular focus on the sex work industry and the ancillary businesses that come with it, with convincing portrayals of prostitutes, pimps, porn stars, peep-show workers, mafia men, avant-garde actors, and bar tenders. This series has a fair amount of grit, but the humor, drama, pacing, and attention to detail make this one of the most entertaining shows I’ve seen in a few years.
Elsewhere, the four-part docuseries How to Fix a Drug Scandal (Netflix) tells the real-life scandal of two drug lab chemists responsible for convictions that sent thousands of people to prison. After one is caught faking tests and the other stealing the lab’s high-grade drugs over almost a decade, the Massachusetts State Attorney’s office performs an investigation so haphazard that it borders on gross negligence. It is only through the dogged determination of a defense attorney that the true scope of the misdeeds comes to light. His efforts lead to thousands of prisoners, most with low-level drug convictions, being released, but not before some outrageous behavior from authorities. The callousness and inaction is nothing short of heartbreaking. As a journalist, reenactments in documentaries always make me uncomfortable. Fortunately, How to Fix a Drug Scandal keeps them brief and minimalistic.
Finally, I blew through the last season of High Maintenance (HBO) in a few nights (not impressive, I know, unless you're a parent who never gets enough sleep as it is). “The Guy” (we don't learn his name until the last episode of this season) rides his bike through New York delivering weed to his many colorful customers. Episodes involve a wide range of characters in a wide range of environments. Some of The Guy’s customers include: an agoraphobe longing for connection, a college student trying to balance her parents’ strict religious values with her desire to come of age in New York City, neighbors of hers throwing a swinger party that goes terribly wrong, and Ira Glass (yes, the This American Life host) and his staff, who make a fantastic cameo. The writing for this series is brilliant. I have adored each episode for the richness of its slice-of-live storytelling.
—Dan Goodin, Security Editor
Boldly going where others have (smartly) gone before
I'm pretty behind on TV-watching for a few reasons. For one, my home state's stay-in-place orders coincided conveniently with a crapton of massive video games, ranging from cute to gruesome to epic, so my past few months of home time have been pretty focused on gaming. For another, when I'm not either gaming or typing about games, I've been getting into a bad habit of reading and re-reading news as a way to feel connected with the outside world.
Part of this issue is that I was already suffering from work-from-home fatigue as February began winding down. This happens seasonally for me at Ars, and it's usually remedied with vacations or outdoors adventures. But, here we are. Without a legitimate outlet for explorations and unfettered outdoor journeys, I've tried to get my fill of "human" contact via things like Twitch streams and social media use.
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What Deep Space Nine does that no other Star Trek series can
But this list is a good reminder that I'd probably be better off breaking that cycle and catching up on one of *many* TV series I'm criminally behind on, since I won't magically cure a pandemic once I refresh Twitter for the 4,000th time. My colleagues' votes are also a nice way to focus my choices, since a tap on Netflix or Hulu can feel overwhelming in that analysis-paralysis way. I'm confident that's one reason I tapped on Netflix's Tiger King while eating dinner one recent evening—ugh, I don't want to think about making a choice, just give me this sugary goop—yet I found myself bailing on that series within four episodes. It's too thick with the kind of collective-trust failure I'm not really feelin' as of late: that sense of everyone expending energy to accuse everyone else of being cruel and selfish. Watching Tiger King is an exercise in imitating the same judgmental behavior as Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin: "Well, these people sure are repugnant! My oh my!"
Nope. I think I'm gonna redirect that TV-watching energy to something else. Maybe some of the above choices. Maybe an older Trek series (I'm leaning towards DS9 on Netflix).
—Sam Machkovech, Culture Editor
How Homeworld Almost Got Lost in 3D Space
On this episode of War Stories, Ars Technica sits down with Rob Cunningham to revisit the groundbreaking 1999 3D real-time strategy game, Homeworld. When Rob and a group of friends founded Relic Entertainment, they set out to marry the gameplay of Command & Conquer with the feel of Battlestar Galactica - all in a full 3D environment. On top of the everpresent memory limitations of the day, the team needed to get creative in figuring out how to orient players when, in space, no direction is up.
