There is no bigger first-world problem right now than choosing the next incredible TV series to watch with your life partner. For the past several years, I’d been trying to convince my wife to give HBO’s Game of Thrones a chance, but she would only answer me with a dismissive, “Dragons,” and we’d have to move on to finding something else.
But then, for whatever reason, a couple of months ago, she relented, and by the end of the first episode, she was hooked. Cue a wonderful couple of months as she not only dug in to the world of Westeros, but she dug in so hard that by the end of watching Season Three, she was spending her last waking moments reading the first book in George R.R. Martin’s incredible fantasy series.
But then, a few weeks ago, that most dreaded moment arrived: the credits rolled on the series’ final aired episode, and it was time for us to choose something new.
Our requirement was simple: the series had to take place in an alternative world. At this point in the year, the daily news was dominated not only by President Trump’s horribleness, but the increasingly plain-faced racism, misogynism, homophobia, and xenophobia of America’s mainstream culture.
In Georgia, white men engaged in “textbook voter suppression…aimed at silencing the voting power of communities of color in the state.” In Vermont, our only black female lawmaker was threatened and harassed so often and so forcefully that she resigned her seat in the State House out of fear for her family. In Massachusetts, a ballot initiative tried to rob transgender individuals of their equal rights, while in Washington D.C., President Trump vowed to erase legal protections for people whose gender didn’t match their physical sex at birth. In Florida, a deranged supporter of the President mailed pipe bombs to his leader’s various critics. Throughout the country, angry white men continued to terrorize the nation with mass shootings, rendering even more public spaces unsafe. And all over the globe, the hope of preventing the worst effects of the extinction-level event that is human-caused global climate change decreased with every news report.
It’s no wonder we wanted to escape reality for an hour or so each day.
Unfortunately, we were not able to land on anything that hooked us as joyfully as Game of Thrones had. We tried The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, a Netflix series that takes place in an alternative version of the world of Archie comics (it’s a darker version of Sabrina The Teenage Witch). We watched the first three episodes, and while we both found the world-building relatively interesting, the series is obviously intended for a teenage audience, and it couldn’t hold our interest for long.
Prior to starting Game of Thrones, we had watched a few episodes AMC’s new series, Lodge 49, which we both thoroughly enjoyed. Unfortunately, we’d been spoiled by HBO Go, Netflix, and a Hulu Plus account that skips commercials, so watching Lodge 49 with commercials on AMC’s Apple TV app was too much for both of us, and we decided not to finish it.
We’d heard that Netflix’s new miniseries, Maniac, was pretty good. Starring Jonah Hill and Emma Stone, the series takes place in an alternative near-future and involves seemingly schizophrenic hallucinations coupled with some kind of high-level conspiracy involving pharmaceuticals. We only watched the first episode, but that was enough to turn us off. Paranoia isn’t exactly escapist.
An article my wife found introduced us to The Best Shows of 2018 (So Far). We’d tried (or watched) many of the shows listed, but there were a few that were new to us. Amazon’s show, Forever, starring Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph, intrigued us both, and we watched the first few episodes. Each episode ends with a pretty big twist, so that kept us hooked for a little bit, but once the twists ended, so did our interest. What’s more, the alternative world introduced by the show wasn’t clever enough to keep us from looking at our phones.
Then came our next television savior: Netflix’s On My Block.
Set in inner-city Los Angeles and following the coming-of-age crises of four high-school freshmen, plus two new members of their lifelong squad, the series isn’t exactly escapist. The lead female character (pictured above) has grown up without her mom and has fallen in love with one of her oldest friends, a young man (pictured at right) who has just been jumped into his brother’s gang. Additionally, one of the new members of the squad (not pictured) only joins them because her parents have been deported and she has no one else to turn to.
In other words, there are no dragons here.
But when you have characters this strong, escapism doesn’t matter. Each of the major characters in the series has something exceptional to offer.
My favorite was Jamal (pictured at left). Over the course of the first (and only) season (so far), Jamal’s character grows from being a kind of nerdy Chris Tucker to an obsessively-driven Sherlock Holmes wanna-be, cursing the sky as he follows the conspiracy-solving instructions of garden gnome.
My second favorite character is Ruby’s Abuela (that’s her official name in the credits). A pot-smoking grandmother who tells her grandson that, back in the day, she was known as “a sure thing” by all the boys on the block, Ruby’s Abuela serves as a lighthearted elder who loves all of her grandson’s friends and doesn’t hesitate to give them the kind of wise advice they so desperately need. But she’s also not afraid to live her own life. One of my favorite scenes takes place during a quinceañera celebration, when Ruby walks in on his Abuela and a neighborhood priest ripping a bong hit and giggling their asses off in the bathroom.
The plot of the series is not as strong as Stranger Things. There is a Goonies-style mystery that drives Jamal’s narrative for a good part of the season, but the other characters deal with more mundane concerns. There’s a Friends-style “will they or won’t they” relationship plot for two of the characters; a Freaks & Geeks-style “how to exit the friend zone” plot; and several versions of the “Parental Abandonment” trope, with one character being raised by his gang-banging brother, another by her perenially-on-the-road truck-driving father (after her mother abandoned her), and another by her distant relatives (after her parents were deported).
As mundane as the various plots may be, the momentum of each episode is masterful, compelling you to binge the ten episodes of this half-hour coming-of-age dramedy as quickly as Netflix’s autoplay will allow.
The season finale, which we watched last night, makes it completely worth it. As Alexis Gunderson wrote, “When the final credits hit, it’s clear that not one second of the season’s 10 short episodes was wasted: Every line was measured out, every background track meticulously calibrated, every initially jarring tonal shift set up precisely for a singular cumulative effect that lands in the season’s final moments like a punch to the chest.”
From the richness of its characters to the hilarious performances of its actors to the high quality of its writing, the series has everything you need to ignore the ignoramus in the White House as well as the daily horrors of America’s never-ending political news cycle. If you and your partner are searching for your next great binge-worthy series, I can’t recommend On My Block enough.