Welcome to The Friday TV Five, a column where we pull out five of the best, worst, and weirdest highlight-worthy things from the week of television, and present them all in a handy list format where the numbers don’t particularly mean anything. We have fun.
1. Queen Lyanna
One of the most important takeaways from the Battle of the Bastards is that the North is totally hosed. Yes, they got rid of Ramsay, which is good, in the way that getting rid of a murderous sociopath is always good. But the leadership structure they have in place is still a mess. Jon Snow, the winner of the bastard battle, tried hard to lose it by sprinting face-first into waves of arrows and troops, by himself, abandoning all the sound military strategy he spent half the night laying out, despite an explicit warning from Sansa that Ramsay would probably toy with his emotions and kill Rickon. Probably not the behavior you want from the guy who is supposed to protect you from an army of undead ice monsters.
Sansa fared a little better strategically, showing up with Littlefinger and reinforcements just in time to save Jon and defeat Ramsay, which was good. But here’s the thing about that: By not giving anyone a heads up about her plan, or even just a “Let’s wait like 30 minutes,” she let hundreds of her side’s men get killed, either negligently or deviously, depending on how much Littlefinger and Ramsay have worn off on her and she was willing to sacrifice them to strike when Ramsay was weakest. Also not good behavior from a leader.
Which brings us to the North’s best hope: Lyanna Mormont. Someone needs to step in and put her in charge. It’s their only hope. And I want to stress here that this is not a “Hahaha look at the little girl’s face, let’s make her the Queen” thing. I am serious. (Mostly.) Lyanna is the only one in this whole braintrust who has any kind of sense. I hope she ends up with a dragon.
2. Welcome back, lunatic television show
Public Service Announcement: Zoo, CBS’s summer series about the world’s animals rising up against humans, returns next Tuesday, June 28. I am telling you this now so you all have a chance to binge the first season on Netflix over the weekend, if you so desire. And I hope you do, because hoo boy, is Zoo some exceptional bad television. A quick rundown of things that happened during season one:
- A pack of wolves orchestrated a prison break
- Kamikaze bats waged war on lesbian scientist fans in Antarctica
- A blonde French spy used a dead exterminator’s flamethrower to kill thousands of bloodthirsty rats in Massachusetts
- Bob Benson from Mad Men stole a zebra!
And more! I really can’t stress this enough: Season one of Zoo brought me more straightforward joy than anything else on television last year, even though I never bothered to learn any of the characters’ names or attempted to follow the actual plot. I will never get over the line of dialogue in that GIF up there.
3. Sorkin!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujdVdQkw24M
So Aaron Sorkin is doing this online screenwriting course for a company called MasterClass. The gist of it all is that, for $90, you can watch a bunch of videos in which Aaron Sorkin gives little tips and walks a small group of students through the breaking of a script. And not just any script! It’s the season premiere of the fifth season of The West Wing, or the one that exists in a hypothetical world where Sorkin had not left between seasons four and five in the middle of the cliffhanger about President Bartlet’s daughter getting kidnapped. He’s re-writing West Wing history! This is important! To me!
But that’s not the point. The point is to tell you that there’s a moment in that teaser video where he says to the students, “I just wanna hear your bad ideas,” and I have never wanted to be in a room worse than I did the second I heard him say that. I would have shouted bad West Wing ideas at him until he kicked me out of the class.
“Leo goes full Neeson-in-Taken and gets her back by shooting dozens of people!”
“Donna goes to space camp!”
“Everyone starts a band and moves to Hawaii!”
Worth it.
4. We are not done talking about O.J. Simpson
Did you watch ESPN’S five-part O.J. Simpson documentary, O.J.: Made In America, last week? I really hope you did. It was incredible. If you had told me after the first few episodes of FX’s O.J. series that it would only be the second-best, big-budget, multi-part O.J. Simpson project of 2016, I mean… I’m not sure what I would have done, actually. Probably gotten really confused.
One of the most amazing aspects of the documentary was the sheer amount of access it had. Some of the footage was mindblowing, if only because it left me wondering how they even got it. (Especially the O.J. home videos after the trial.) And director Ezra Edelman got almost everyone to talk about the case, on camera, even though the whole thing was painful and embarrassing for many of them. The only notable absences were Chris Darden, O.J. himself, and Robert Shapiro. And I’m impressed at the restraint the showed by not just replacing the real Shapiro with Travolta doing his version. The temptation must have been almost unbearable.
5. Here’s two hours of Norm MacDonald
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqNb8-1D0rY
It’s a very slow week on the TV front outside of Game of Thrones, and it’s a Friday afternoon in June, so here’s a solid two hours of clips of Norm MacDonald doing appearances on late-night shows and hosting events and such. Have a nice weekend.
