music

Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Wednesday, December 29th, 2021

I am John Plothorts the editor of commentary. We're doing this week of many podcasts to survey to make some

recommendations and to talk about the cultural offerings of 2021 that impressed us or that maybe we

wouldn't like so much. Whatever that's what we're doing. That's what we're trying to entertain you this week. We're not

talking politics, talking culture. Today we're going to talk about television and streaming and with me to do so

executive editor Abe Greenwald Hyab. Hi John. Senior writer Christine Rosenhykrstein. Hi John.

An associate editor, Noah Rothman. Hi, Noah. Hi John. Okay, so there are now 257,000

television series a year on 283,000 streaming channels and five networks. So

there's a lot to talk about. There's a lot to consume. There was a lot to watch. There's a lot to talk about.

And so we're trying to zero in on just a couple. So who wants to go first? I am going to

I'm going to designate Christine as our opener opening on the What Should People Watch or What Should They Not Watch

from the offerings of 2021. Okay, I have a kind of a we might seem like a weird choice but I'm going to explain it briefly.

I picked the righteous gemstones, which is a series on it's on streaming on HBO Max. I think it

actually came out in 2019. I saw it in basically in the over the past year because I hadn't heard about it,

didn't know much about it. Shout out to my friend Matt Leibasch who told me about it. And the reason he

told me about is that he knew I grew up in a in a culture that was a very fundamentalist Christian and

very into the whole televangelist world, right? So in the 1980s, the sort of Jim and Tammy Febaker,

this is a Danny McBride series that is hilarious. It's about a family, the righteous gemstones.

The gemstones are a family. They run a mega church. The patriarch is played by John Goodman. Danny

McBride is the oldest son who's supposed to inherit his mantle. There's a there's a daughter Judy

gemstone who's played by E. D. Patterson. And Adam Devine plays Kelvin, the young hip sort of youth

...