What to Binge This Weekend

October 22, 2019

Even if it is still exhibiting signs of Endless Summer where you live, fall is coming, and with it, relaxing days on the couch in front of your faithful cool temperature companion, the television (or computer). Have time for a good old-fashioned binge session this weekend - peruse here and let the cushions do their best work.

Modern Love (Amazon Video)

Based on the weekly column published by The New York Times and primarily written and directed by John Carney (Once, Sing Street), this anthology dives into all things love related and adjacent. Each 30 minute episode tells a different personal story once published by a guest writer. Some humorous, some tear-worthy, but all enjoyable and brilliantly cast with well-known faces set in the best-known city, Manhattan.

Looking for Alaska (Hulu)

The first novel from John Green published in 2005 is finally the streaming and binge-worthy series we have been waiting for. Deviating slightly from the novel, the series still remains true to the high school emotionality we crave and drops us perfectly into the throwback teen drama genre. If the fashions don’t do it, the soundtrack will take you right back to 2005. Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage of Gossip Girl and The Carrie Diaries fame adapted the story perfectly to fit the smaller screen with a cast that does their smarter-than-the-average-high schooler characters believable justice.

Daybreak (Netflix)

Based on Brian Ralph’s comic series of the same name, a misfit gang of Glendale teens navigate their Los Angeles hometown post-bomb drop. Think all of the high school cliques but at their most aggressive. The cheerleaders now wield bow and arrows instead of pom poms and the jocks are more combative than ever before. Glendale no longer has malls but the Mad Max style environment does not leave much time for hanging at them after school anyway.

Stumptown (ABC / Hulu)

Set in Portland, Oregon and adapted from the comic book series of the same name created by Greg Rucka, Matthew Southworth, and Justin Greenwood, Stumptown stars Cobie Smulders as Dex Parios, a Marine veteran now working as a private investigator to support herself and brother. Smulder’s Dex is sarcastic and truly embodies the rarely seen genuine-feeling kick ass female character. Her rawness is solidly complimented by Jake Johnson’s “Grey” - her bartender, best friend, and the voice of reason. Premiering on September 25, 2019 you already have four episodes to binge on Hulu before watching weekly on ABC.

Unnatural Selection (Netflix)
Not scared about the future and how our aggressively growing tech field can affect it yet? Settle in for this docuseries and call me after. Twenty years after we mapped out the human genome we have figured out how to technologically alter it. Film-makers Joe Egender and Leeor Kaufman dive into genetic engineering and it’s societal implications in this four parter. Following families with the need for astronomically expensive still-in-testing-phase gene therapy to an at home HIV cure to three-parent IVF, Egender and Kaufman explore all forms of gene editing - nightmarish or Gattaca-esque, it is an engrossing topic.

Sorry For Your Loss (Facebook Watch)

Binge season 1 and then wallow around in the currently released season 2 episodes. Starring Elizabeth Olsen as a young widow coping with the unexpected death of her husband, Sorry For Your Loss is a candid, well-timed humorous, and emotionally raw look into a family’s grief process. Olsen’s “Leigh Shaw” continues to piece together her dead husband’s actual life, which is not the one she thought she knew so well. Dealing with all manner of heart-wrenching incidents, this Facebook Watch series is worth your attention…and that box of tissues.

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