My Own Little World

I grew up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood more mornings than not. My mom probably remembers it better than I do, but from what I can recall I loved the show in my early childhood. In retrospect, Fred Rogers’s demeanor was probably a big part of that; the man was warm, compassionate, and more sophisticated than many of the other main characters of the other shows I watched alongside his. One of the questions that has sat in my mind about Rogers, though, is whether he was like the man on the show. To have that kind of demeanor in everyday life would completely shock me in the cynical, jaded world in which we live. The documentary on Rogers’s life Won’t You Be My Neighbor? answers this question of many with a resounding “yes.” This film is overwhelmingly optimistic yet not without a sense of grounded realism that Rogers himself possessed. It feels exactly like Fred Rogers the character which, it asserts quite confidently, was Fred Rogers the man. Instead of focusing ...

There's something about watching these shorter shows I've been into recently. I think it's allowed me to get some much-needed variety in my binge-watching habits. Case in point: going from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt , I decided to watch something I had first encountered thanks to one of my bandmates: the SNL alumni project Documentary Now! My first exposure to the show came one late night while we were at our homestay for the weekend and decided to spend some quality time on Netflix. One of us suggested that we watch the second episode of Documentary Now!  because it was an absolute riot, or so he claimed. Well, now I'll claim the same thing: this show is a riot. However, what may be surprising to many of you is that, despite being helmed by Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Seth Meyers, Documentary Now!  is not a laugh-out-loud kind of show most of the way through. Instead, it possesses a huge amount of dramatic irony that all good parodies do. Most of the comedy i...