Watching the War with Iran Unfold

 

The Middle East is a region where empires go to die, as we should know by now. Map of Iran during World War II from Wikimedia Commons, attribution notes: Uploaded a work by NEA Telephoto from Iowa City Press Citizen Newspaper Archives August 26, 1941 Page 1 with UploadWizard

I’ve not made a survey of all, or even a diverse range, of news media sources on the war between the U.S. and Iran—I am too busy living life, I suppose. But I have tuned into the war, consuming news media content and watching, with a great deal of anxiety, as the world again descends into violence and madness.

It is said that truth is the first casualty of war, and as is the case in almost any war, nothing is simple about this current conflict nor will we fully understand it for some time. Take, for instance, the ABC newscast of June 22, 2025, which I consumed in full on Sunday:

What impresses me, partly, was the weird war tone of the newscast, which included the anchor’s best wishes for returning American Air Force planes. They could have played martial music in the background. I don’t resent that sentiment—I’m glad they (the air personnel) returned safely—but I would recognize that this weekend was the final one for some people in Iran who likely were atomized by American bunker-busting bombs. I’d like some best wishes for them, too.

And, while I trust neither President Trump nor the yahoos he appointed (I don’t swell with pride when I see the U.S. Secretary of State nor the Secretary of Defense, for example), I want to recognize, too, that the roots of this conflict are deep and convoluted, even if it feels that the war was launched by a petulant orange toddler whose finger was placed on the nuclear trigger by a base of my fellow American voters whose motives and reasoning I don’t get.

Well. That sentence flew from my fingers almost too quickly. I think there are some emotions at boil in my mind. Wars do that, inflame passion before rational thought kicks in.

Anyway, I’m not a fan of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, nor of the current Iranian regime, but neither am I liking the path that we are on. Just recently, President Trump was facing massive No King protests that overshadowed his bizarre birthday party tank fest. And suddenly, bam, we’re in a fight—in war, the first reaction usually is to rally around the flag, and American presidents in the past have used wars as a pretext to exceed their usual powers to quash dissent.

Does that play into Trump’s decision to launch U.S. bombers during an air war between Israel and Iran? Hard to say. I don’t know how deeply Trump thinks about anything, and that’s part of my anxiety over this conflict—we don’t have an FDR or even a Richard Nixon or President Bush at the helm. We’re in a time where the captain of our ship of state is old, ignorant, petulant, and spontaneous. There is a horse in the hospital.

Well, American “wars” since World War II have generally been shooting conflicts where Congress was never asked to declare war—although at least some past Presidents (think Johnson with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) have at least worked with Congress. And I hope this “war” does not expand, but anything can happen.

One definite change for me is how much I tune into news. My media consumption has shifted because of this little (I hope) war. I usually check the New York Times daily, but now I would say four or five times a day is the new norm. I’m not as regular a checker of other news apps on my phone—I have CNN and Reuters, for instance—but those buttons are being clicked now more often than usual. I read the “Green Gazette,” the electronic version of The Cedar Rapids Gazette, each day and these days pay more attention to the world-national news pages.

I am no expert, but when did that stop any human from commenting online? Here are some of my other takes on this war:

It’s not over. Sure, Iran attacked a U.S. air base today, and President Trump posted that it is time for peace now that Iran got the need to retaliate out of its system—but I am not buying it. The animosities that fueled this conflict are long simmering, and I think the deep thuds of the bunker busting bombs are going to echo for a while. How do most countries react when they are bombed? Did the U.S. say: “It’s OK, Japan, we don’t really need those antique battleships in the era of aircraft carriers, anyway” when Pearl Harbor was attacked? Did the U.K. give up when London burned? In American mythology, it took atomic bombs to convince the Japanese that their war effort was not sustainable, although many historians note that the end of the IJN plus the entry of the Soviet Union into the war may have had more to do with Japan giving up. In any case, conventional bombs that horrifically burned Tokyo (the deadliest air attacks of the war were not the atomic bomb blasts but incendiary bombing of the Japanese capital city) in March of 1945 didn’t motivate Japan to give up.

From Wikimedia Common: Bomb damage in Iran. This is from Israeli bombing on June 13, 2025. Still, given what we, the U.S., has done, we're going to share the blame. Original description: At dawn today, several explosions were heard in different parts of Tehran and other cities of Iran.The Zionist regime officially confirmed the aggression of this regime against targets on Iranian soil. The US Secretary of State claimed that Israel has taken unilateral military action against Iran. This is an image from the Tasnim News Agency website, which states in its footer, "All Content by Tasnim News Agency is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." Per this discussion, all images without explicitly watermarked attribution to agency photographers are presumed to be outside this license.

Bombs may have complicated the Iranian drive for atomic power. It’s difficult to believe that they ended the drive—instead, they probably strengthened the Iranian resolve. They were attacked. They may not react well. Who could blame them?

I struggle to maintain good spirits and hope. People are dying in a war that we did not start and seemed all too eager to join. May it all work out for the best, but these are perilous times.

As a political strategy, I do think the Iran war did what Trump probably wanted it to do, a least for a brief time. Anybody been fussing over tariffs lately? The “no kings” movement seems of the distant past, for now. But the patriotic boost Americans feel when our armed forces join in a conflict can often be short-lived, and there is also the danger of a backlash. Even parts of Trump’s base can’t figure out what this “peace president” is thinking. Probably, the answer is not very much, and that’s part of the problem.

For now, Trump is having a moment. Moments are fleeting in politics, however, and even this moment is more chaotic than triumphant for this would-be authoritarian.

Today seems like uncharted times. Iran is a large country, more than 90 million people. It’s also a weak country, due to all kinds of economic, social and political problems. Frankly, the U.S., the world’s strongest superpower, faces ongoing economic, social and political problems. Media, government, everything seems to be in flux these days.

Of course, as Billy Joel sang, we didn’t start the fire. Everything is always in flux, it’s just that the pace and severity of flux these days is breathtaking.

From Wikimedia Commons, ethnic makeup of Iran. Attribution notes: By Iretn 847362 - Own workA source (reference) has not been provided for the data in this self-made work., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=112682697

This war, as every war does, shows how important history is. Iran has a nuclear program in the first place because it was, historically, a U.S. ally, and the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s had an “atoms for peace” program that Iran participated in. When the Shah was overthrown in 1979, the Iranian nuclear program was put briefly on hold, but revived in the 1980s as tensions with the U.S. ratcheted up. 

We bombed Fordo (or Fordow, transliteration is messy), Natanz and Isfahan to, maybe, celebrate the summer solstice (makes as much sense as anything else I have read), and now we are in one of those historical pivot moments.

From Wikimedia Commons, the physical setting--a large country in Asia. As noted in "The Princess Bride," a rule of history is "never get involved in a land war in Asia." There is just so much land. Of course, this is an air war. For now. Attribution information: By Ikonact - Own workSources of data:Topography: ETOPO1 (public domain);Other data: © OpenStreetMap contributors;Tool:The map is created with Octave scripts developed by Ikonact, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89573656

What is good about this situation? A bit. Iran’s drive to be a nuclear power may be stalled (although Iran may have the bomb sooner than we think, they did move nuclear materials before the American bombs fell). The bombings didn’t target cities nor cause mass casualties, even if Trump did tell Iran to “evacuate Tehran.” The retaliation against an airbase in Qatar was not a big deal.

What is bad? A whole bunch of stuff. There is plenty of destroyed Iranian real estate from Israeli bombing, and it is easy to see that we are linked with Isreal in this conflict now, especially from an Iranian point of view. Then, there is what war does to people, to truth, to the fabric of our world. Iran and Isreal are well beyond rhetorical conflict and are trading actual blows. Iran has been driven into the chilling embrace of Vladimir Putin and China. Our U.S. president lied to us during his election campaign when he said he would avoid foreign entanglements—but of all of the huge bucket of bad stuff this unfortunate series of events has unleashed, that somehow seems like the least surprising. We know he lied because his lips are moving. Well, honestly, it is usually his hand toes that are moving on his cell phone when he lies, but you know what I mean.

Supposedly, a Chinese curse is “may you live in interesting times.” I’m not tired of all the winning. I’m exhausted from the interesting.

Reshaping the Weirdness of Oz to Something New

I have not yet read the novel “Wicked,” but I do plan to, having recently seen the musical movie of the same title.

“The Wizard of Oz” was always a bit of a strange tale to me. I read the book when I was young, and it was OK but not one of my favorites. That also sums up my feelings about the 1939 movie, too—it’s OK, it was on TV in my childhood and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t something that I was all that gaga over.

Never mind, the world of “Wicked” is a radical re-imagining of L Frank Baum’s and Hollywood’s imaginings, and Oz isn’t exactly the same. Yes, in the 1939 movie, the wizard was willing to hoodwink the crowd with his tricks—but in Wicked, we see a much darker Wizard of Oz.

And I like it. It’s relevant to today. I feel that we follow too many wizards in our lives now—fakers whose only talent is to play to the crowd, and who feel that you unite folks by giving them someone to hate.

My wife saw the stage musical “Wicked” in London, but I have not experienced the stage show, so the movie was my first introduction to this alternative alternate reality. I am a fan, and I find myself really enjoying the songs, too.

When they do work, musicals can be magical. I think part of what they do is what the songs in the musical episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” did—the singing is a convention that allows the characters to think aloud, to reveal themselves. It also helps like a musical when there is a great ensemble song.

“Wicked” is wickedly good partly due to the quality of its songs. It’s also good because of they way in which both the songs and the plot beyond the songs subverts expectations of what or who is truly wicked.

I liked that Glinda (or Guh-Linda), while good at heart, is also vain and shallow. That the most intelligent and empathetic characters, Elphaba, is the one who will be falsely branded as “wicked.” That much of the social life of Shiz concerns ephemeral fads and shallow criteria of what or who will be popular—sort of like school actually was, although more high school than university.

Wikipedia image of book cover.

Popularity as a goal is a strong cultural force in this era of orange ogre Presidents and social media and success measured by clicks—and “Wicked” is partly a rumination on how far some people may go in order to achieve popularity.

Plus, it has all those scary parallels with the world we inhabit: “What you need to bring people together is to give them a real good enemy.” Yikes, Mr. Wizard, that’s so sadly true and sad that it seems so true.

I don’t have an opinion of the way Wicked was “Hobbit”-fied—that is, a shorter story was somehow expanded, for “The Hobbit” was a short children’s book somehow morphed into a trilogy of movies. For “Wicked” a Broadway play was somehow doubled in length and made into two movies.

Poster from www.Wickedmovie.com web site.

I do think that the pace of the first movie was a bit slow at times—I liked the climatic song, but it just went on for a bit too long.

Yet, I can only judge the movie, not it in comparison to the stage show. And I give the movie two thumbs way up. I am excited for part two to come out later this year so this wicked saga can continue. I predict that it’s going to popular, even without a makeover from Gah-Linda.

A Gripping Tale of Mutiny and Murder

My spring break 2025 book.

Life in the British Navy in the early 1700s was quite rough—hard work, authoritarian power structure, harsh penalties—and then there are the diseases. Humans packed together in poorly ventilated, unclean conditions lends itself to raging infectious diseases.

And then, months into a slow voyage dependent on the winds blowing your ship, scurvy. An account I read recently vividly describes what scurvy was like, and it was hell.

I’ve long been a fan of Erik Larson and his books based on historic events. He’s a storyteller who uses literary tools to tell truths.

And recently, on the recommendation of my daughter Nina, I’ve read a book by an author who is new to me, who pulls the same magic that Larson does. It’s David Grann, and I just read his 2023 book “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.”

The ship The Wager was a merchant vessel converted to naval use. British sea power would come to rule the world in the next century, but that lay in the future when The Wager left England as part of a squadron that was tasked with attacking Spanish shipping during a war between the U.K. and Spain.

A newly promoted Captain, David Cheap, obtained his first command due to some command shuffles. The ill-fated Wager had trouble staying with its group as the little wooden vessels were pounded by merciless storms as they attempted to pass from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean by sailing around South America.

And the Wager found itself alone, when it also, unfortunately, found rocks off of a desolate island. The ship was pounded by the rocks and damaged beyond sailing, although the wreck, in poor shape, was there on the rocks for some time.

The depleted, demoralized crew were facing winter weather with few provisions and no shelter. On their long journey from England, they had lost many crew members to disease, and most were debilitated by scurvy at the time of the shipwreck. (Desperate, the crew ate wild celery, one of the few foods they found on what they named Wager Island—and, ironically, the fresh vegetable cured their scurvy).

While stranded, the crew broke into factions, some loyal to the captain, others forming their own encampment. They were visited by indigenous people who aided them with food, but they plotted against their helpers, who abandoned them.

1744 painting depicts The Wager. From Wikimedia Commons via Wikipedia.

So much goes wrong There is so much suffering. As starvation and tensions rise, a misunderstanding leads to the captain shooting and killing a sailor.

Eventually, the crew manages to enlarge and repair some small boats. An attempt to head north and continue the Wager’s original mission doesn’t go well, and after that much of the crew abandons the captain on Wager Island and attempts to head to Brazil, where they could potentially find transport back to England.

When survivors start to show up in England, more troubles await them. The Navy doesn’t treat mutiny lightly, and the long arm of the law has to be contended with. And, months after some survivors reach England, the captain, very much alive, unexpectedly shows up.

The Navy sets a court-martial trial to ascertain the facts. Should the captain be tried for murder? The crew tried for mutiny?

After all the suffering and the time spent trying to get home, it’s almost heartbreaking that home turns out to be filled with different kinds of dangers.

Anyway, I found the book gripping. The needs and ambitions and desires of men lead them to contradictions and difficulties that make one glad to be born in these troubled times rather than those.

The books didn’t have any jump scares, but it did have, like life, lots of unexpected twists and turns. It’s a story that is well told, well worth the read.

Is Cedar Rapids Fading into a News Desert?

Front page of Jan. 31 edition.

On Jan. 14, the Gazette, the daily newspaper of Cedar Rapids, announced that it’s following the trend of many other newspapers in the U.S.: Daily will soon not mean every day.

Starting Feb. 17, the Gazette will print only three editions per week, on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. Otherwise, news of the community will be available via the Gazette’s web site.

Meanwhile, the cost of a print subscription remains the same. The Gazette is making an iffy gamble that people are willing to pay, in effect, much more per printed paper. Their argument, made in a follow-up column by editor Zack Kucharski, is that their cost of reporting the news justifies the continued price.

We’ll see. My wife and I are still discussing what we might do—I am sure we’ll still want the Sunday paper, but if the others papers are available online, is paying for the very occasional print product worth it? Reading the Gazette is a daily habit, it gets passed around the breakfast table, and I don’t think my relationship with the digital product will be the same. But it cannot be a daily habit if the paper no longer is delivered daily.

Well, the Gazette isn’t the only paper that I have an online relationship with. I subscribe to The New York Times, and enjoy skimming its list of stories and picking what I want to read, so the idea of treating a “paper” as an online source is not alien to me.

I hope The Gazette can make its digital presence a bit easier. With the NYT, for example, it was “one and done.” I subscribed, signed on, and their app just keeps me signed on. On both my PC and my phone, the Times seems to know who I am, instantly.

As a print subscriber to The Gazette, I’m supposed to have full digital access to their site, too—but it’s not as smooth. It seems very frequently the Gazette demands that I sign in. In my digital life, I have multiple usernames and passwords, and remembering which applies to The Gazette is not easy for me, and there have been days that I just give up and prefer not to read a Gazette story on their web site rather than find and dig through my password file.

So please, Gazette, if I’m going to depend on your app, keep at it making the app more user friendly. Aim for NYT-level ease.

Gazette web site.

Another issue is that the print Gazette gets passed between my wife and I, and our grandson when he is staying with us. When we’re accessing digital content, only one username or password works, I assume. Is there a way that 2 or 3 “readers” can be associated with a digital subscription so my wife could just as easily install the app and access content as a “household” subscriber who lives with me?

Those are technical issue, adjustments I’m sure The Gazette will consider. The larger issue, to me, is what this change means to The Gazette and to my local news environment.

I know the situation is different, but the same forces that the Gazette contends with have changed the nature of the university newspaper, the Mount Mercy Times, that I advise. We made the decision to cease print operations altogether, as it was be coming too expensive and our readers were out of the print habit anyway.

Unfortunately, at the moment, the status of the Times is not great. Our staff has slowly shrunk, our frequency of updating our news has declined and our online readership has not grown as it should. I hope to encourage students to try some new strategies to boost the Times, but first I must recruit more students, and somehow that was easier when there was a print artifact that reminded everyone that student journalism exists at Mount Mercy University.

I hope that The Gazette can maintain a sense of status and strength when it become more ephemeral, when it’s just dancing digits rather than ink on a page. I’ll miss the morning tug of war over who gets section A first, and the experience of skimming the headlines in my hands rather than on the tiny screen of my phone.

Too many communities in the U.S. have become news deserts. That’s not happening here yet, but it does sort of feel like we’re going from a lush news jungle to a drier, dicey news savanna, where the desert no longer seems so far away.

As a customer, paying the same for less product doesn’t make me happy. But as an old news person, a former newspaper editor, I hope the Gazette finds a way where so many papers have stumbled. Society as a whole is no longer as willing to pay for news, and that has left too many of our citizens subsisting on the junk food of social media disinformation, rather than the richer, healthier diet that a quality daily newspaper provides.

The daily Gazette isn’t perfect. But it will leave a hole, for me, when it is no longer there.

So, from a disgruntled customer, to the Gazette: Good luck. I hope you find a way to make it work but I’m worried.

Lesson of ‘Lasso’: Don’t Assume You Know Their Story

One of the reasons I became a fan (in relatively recent years, it was long after it aired that I got around to watching it) of the old TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was the way that it played with and inverted tropes. The monster and the pretty blonde head down an alley—but in the end, it’s the Boss Ass Bitch Blonde who emerges and the monster who gets dusted.

The show was of uneven quality, as all, even good, long-lasting TV shows are, so it’s been a joy in recent years to see creators playing with trope-inverting or avoiding scenarios in series that are designed to be contained in a short run. Think “Derry Girls” or “The Good Place,” shows that reached a planned destination, destined to let the arc of their story burn out in a pleasant way.

No jumping the shark for these quick series. The experience of binging them is a bit akin to reading a good book—you get engaged, you grow to love somebody, and then, too soon, it all ends. Better too soon than too stale, however.

I don’t know exactly where she heard about it, but my wife, before her birthday this year, expressed a desire to experience the 2020 Apple TV show, available on DVD, “Ted Lasso.” It’s origin is a little weird because it is a series based on the premise of a humorous Super Bowl commercial, about an American football coach who heads to England to coach a soccer team.

Coaches from Los Angeles Times story, Apple image: Brendan Hunt, from left, Jason Sudeikis, Brett Goldstein and Nick Mohammed in “Ted Lasso.” https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2021-09-01/ted-lasso-apple-tv-cast-episodes-guide

Well, the watching of the three seasons of this short series turned into its own minor saga. We started, and loved, season one in November shortly after Audrey’s birthday—but the DVDs, that I had purchased online from Wal-Mart, proved flawed—at the end of each disk, the final episodes would deteriorate into a pixelated jumble like someone was drinking too much of Coach Beard’s girlfriend’s tea (opps, yes, on this blog post there may be some minor spoilers).

We made it mostly through season one, but decided not to proceed, instead returning the DVDs to their source and getting a refund (to Wal-Mart’s credit, that was not a difficult process). And then my wife, shortly before our anniversary, found copies locally—a different edition, but that gave us some hope. Anyway, I was trying to figure out what to get her for Christmas and suggested I would find a different source for “Ted Lasso,” when she fessed up that she had already bought me an anniversary present.

Yup. The day before our anniversary (Dec. 18 is when we got married), we jumped the gun and inserted the new DVDs, which proved less jumpy. And so, the first half of my Christmas break from university teaching this year consisted of a marathon, watching “Ted Lasso.”

From “Deadline” review, Apple TV image of Keeley Jones (Juno Temple), Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddigham) and Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift) watching the final game in the final show. Use Google and check out the cast, it’s amazing. https://deadline.com/2023/05/ted-lasso-hannah-waddingham-season-3-series-finale-interview-spoilers-1235383916/

And, liked Sam and Rebecca, although in a less doomed way, I and my wife fell in love. “Ted Lasso,” TL from now on, is marvelous. It you enjoy a sometimes funny, sometimes deeply poignant TV show, full of interesting, quirky characters and emotion, TL is for you.

TL succeeds for many reasons—an excellent cast, of course. But mostly, excellent writing that inverts tropes and expands the premise of a Super Bowl ad into a fully imagined, fantastical, fictional but real feeling, story.

A short summary of just some of the trope inverting: There is the optimistic, clueless football coach who knows nothing of soccer—who turns out to be an insightful, talented, intelligent man whose cheery demeanor can’t hide his intellectual depth, and who has his own complex back story that explains some of his quirks. There is the pretty model girlfriend, who turns out to be a scrappy, smart, hard-working, creative business woman whose sunny disposition again can’t hide street smarts and drive. The statuesque “Boss Ass Bitch” who begins the series intent on destroying the soccer club as revenge against her philandering ex husband (and who is inevitably converted to an ally, partly through the unexpected power of Ted Lasso’s baking skills).

The soccer players are self-absorbed pretty boys—who each has a real life and unexpectedly complex motivations. You hate the pretty boy bully at first, and later you don’t love him, but I felt way more empathy for him after you see him grow up a bit and you meet his disappointing, disapproving dad.

Zava, the avocado-raising Italian soccer miracle, leads the Richmond Greyhounds in pre-game meditation. Apple TV image used on NPR review of Season 3. https://www.npr.org/2023/04/15/1170074939/ted-lasso-season-3-review

It’s nice to see a TV show that highlights a point I remind myself of in my professional life when dealing with college students. Don’t assume their motivations. You don’t know their stories—and everyone has a story.

And it’s not just that in TL tropes and stereotypical characters are often reversed—the show, under the veneer of its breezy, silly premise, explores depths most TV comedies don’t touch. One of the recurring themes in TL is the challenges of parenthood, particularly fatherhood, and the long-lasting damage or positive energy a dad can deliberately or accidentally impart. Another theme is how most villains (with the possible exception of the watcher from Buffy who grew old and grew very, very evil) are not full villains, and most heroes have flaws and make mistakes. Few people are as bad as or as good as they seem.

The other quality of this show is the way it delivers unexpected twists. It’s a sports saga that, particularly in the first season, doesn’t go where you expect a sports saga to go. Sometimes, your team, with all its heart and moxie, doesn’t achieve its goals.

How can you respond to life’s disappointments and heartbreaks? The show has some ideas. “Be a goldfish,” Ted Lasso says—get over your mistakes and move along. Well, even he is not entirely serious about that in all cases, because some setbacks are too big to forget and some require a good confidant—be it wise girlfriend or therapist or circle of Diamond Dogs—to process and get through.

There are a lot of potential coffee mug sayings from this show: Be curious, not judgmental. Grow up and get over it. Taking on a challenge is a lot like riding a horse—if you’re completely comfortable, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Good as they can be, these slogans aren’t TL’s main charm. Mostly it’s that, a bit like Buffy did, this is a show of consequences where the characters remember what happens to them and relationships change in lasting, transformative ways.

Ted learns to set his wife free, even though he does not want the divorce. Leslie Higgins (one of my favorite characters) has built a life with his wife and sons, but deeply misses and mourns his dead cat, Cindy Clawford.

In the end, I think the main message of the show is summed up by Roy Kent, the eternally grumpy player turned coach, when he asks the Diamond Dogs, “can anyone change?” Roy’s been trying, but feels like he is failing. The dogs bark various answers, and they aren’t simple nor straightforward. No, you can’t convert yourself into someone else, you can’t will yourself into perfection or an idealized version of yourself. But yet, the striving, the attempt to change, it can nonetheless help you build better relationships and a better life. Higgins said that, in better words, and you have to watch the final episode, or this excerpt, to get a better version of that advice.

In the end, we know Ted will come home to be more of a father himself. But we are cheered that Coach Beard fakes appendicitis to stay in England with his weird love who nobody else understands but who nonetheless completes him.

TL is, like all TV shows, a bit uneven. I felt the third season dragged a bit for me, and some of the story arcs in that season didn’t have all of the surprises nor emotional heft of seasons 1 and 2. But the seasons are short, and none are bad. You can binge the whole run of the show in a week, especially if there comes a cool winter Saturday, perhaps the shortest day of the year, where you and your wife can snuggle on the couch to watch the coach, snack on bad food and just spend that day seeing Ted and his friends and freinemies find their crooked path through this crooked world.

TL exceeds Buffy for lots of reasons. The characters are more adult, the run shorter and more condensed so it’s spicier, like chili left to simmer for a while. You can finish a 30-minute episode and be a bit off balance, startled at how much can happen in a short show. Maybe it’s the one where Coach Beard gets lost and finds himself in disco church. Or the one where Ted finally finds he needs a therapist. Or when a 13-year-old girl helps Boss Ass Bitch compose a business email. Whatever.

It's a show full of heart. It will leave you wanting more, and, paradoxically, grateful that there isn’t more because the show has logically played itself out and didn’t stay too long.

Like “Derry Girls,” TL is a TV show world that you may visit and binge again. Even if you’re not a goldfish, because you will always remember this.

Rose: A Greg by Another Name

Junior Taskmaster Rose Matefeo and assistant Mike Wozniak, from YouTube thumbnail.

One of my favorite moments in the British TV show “Junior Taskmaster” was, I think, in the second episode, where a child contestant refers to the sidekick of the host as “Alex.”

“Alex?” asks the Taskmaster, in this case, host Rose Matafeo. “I don’t think there is such a person. That sounds like a made-up name.”

Well, of course that’s a joke. Alex Horne is the creator of the very popular show “Taskmaster,” where Greg Davies serves as the bossy, authoritarian Taksmaster and Alex as his hapless sidekick. But in Junior Taskmaster, Greg is Rose, and Alex is Mike Wozniak.

Although we haven’t been hooked by the Australian or New Zealand knockoffs, my wife and I have become big fans of the original UK Taskmaster. The show, available in America on YouTube, features a changing cast of British showbiz types, usually comedians, engaging in humorous or odd tasks for the sake of winning up to 5 points (in most tasks, the winner gets 5, second place is 4, etc.—although sometimes a contestant is disqualified and gets zero, and Greg will arbitrarily decide now and then to allow a tie or to award a bonus point) per task.

It’s an interesting subgenre of both the TV game show, one of the medium’s oldest formats, and “reality” TV. I quote “reality” because the reality is only live coverage of events truly counts as reality TV, and shows constructed of recorded, edited content aren’t “reality” at all.

Anyway, why is Taskmaster so addictive? The fact that there are scored tasks involved creates automatic tension. The cast of comedians also provides their own wry commentary. The ongoing jokes, such as Greg always belittling Alex, can get tiresome and repetitive, but provide a sense of familiarity, too.

YouTube thumbnail of Greg Davies and Alex Horne.

Clearly, it’s a show that doesn’t take itself seriously. The prize, after all, is a ridiculous bust of Greg Davies, such as no rational human being would ever desire. That’s one feature of British TV gameshows that’s not so popular in the U.S.—think of the Great British Baking Show, for instance. The title is surely the only thing of value, as that show requires a lot of time and effort for a cake stand one assumes one could just buy at Marks and Spencer.

Anyway, how people accomplish, interpret and circumvent the tasks is the real drama of Taskmaster.

There have been a variety of personalities in the many seasons of Taskmaster, and we’ve enjoyed some seasons more than others simply due to the changing cast of contestants.

And that brings us to Junior Taskmaster. In essence, the premise is the same—a cast competes in meaningless tasks for points. However, the contestants are children, age 9 to 11 or so, and rather than 5 competing for a whole season, the cast changes from show to show, where the top two will advance to semifinals before a final.

So, the show is not as dependent on the quirks of its cast, although it seems the casting directors have done a good job a finding outgoing, expressive kids. Junior Taskmaster is a more family-friendly version of the show, absent the adult humor of Taskmaster—but the vibe is still silly, irreverent and fun.

And the Junior Taskmaster may use gentler language, but she does still dominate her assistant.

Both Rose Matefeo and Mike Wozniak were contestants, and good ones, on the original Taskmaster show, so their understanding the vibe seems natural. Rose does a good job of bantering with the child cast during the show, and Mike is a quiet, observant straight man to the shenanigans.

It's good to see the Taskmaster idea translate well into a new venue. Junior Taskmaster, so far, has been a worthy spinoff, enjoyable even for two old fans of the original series.

Our Latest Binge: ‘Only Murders in the Building’

For her birthday, one of my daughters gave my wife a subscription to the streaming service Hulu—and we have been overwhelmed, in the two seeks since that day, by an obsession.

We just can’t get enough of “Only Murders in the Building,” and have binged the first two of the four seasons of this show. There’s just so much to like in it. It reminds me a little of “The Good Place” or “Pushing Daisies”—it’s full of memorable characters saying witty things, with unusual insights into topics that aren’t often covered by TV shows.

Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez.

Granted, “Only Murders” isn’t magical realism, like those other shows, but instead is set in a real building in a real city. Still, there is a zany sense that makes this “real” show somehow unreal, somehow better than real. Maybe it’s real magicalism?

A draw of this show it its stellar cast. Selena Gomez (Mabel Mora), Steve Martin (Charles-Haden Savage) and Martin Short (Oliver Putnam) are an unlikely trio who accidently find, after there has been a murder in the building, that they are mutually obsessed with a true crime podcast. So, they decide to produce a podcast of their own, entitled “Only Murders in the Building.”

Inside Martin's brain--haunted by Looney Tunes.

The building is one of the characters in the show, full of interesting people, unexpected passages, and its own secrets. It’s a large full-block apartment building in New  York—and although the name is changed, it is a real New York apartment building. And it’s inhabited by an eclectic mix of New York characters. For several episodes, our crime-investigating trio becomes convinced that the victim was killed by Sting—yes, that Sting, who happens to live in the building.

Of course, the Police lead singer is a red herring, as are so many others.

A sting against Sting goes wrong. He didn't do it.

It’s the second mystery show that has hooked us, after the UK’s “Midsommer Murders.” This show, however, is not a police procedural, but rather a comic, thoughtful rumination on some rather deep topics. One recurring theme is the distinction between memory and reality, how our own brains will trick us into magical thinking.

Another theme is that there is always a story. None of the character are all good nor all bad—the crime boss eatery owner, for example, is suffering real pain because of strains in his relationship with his son, whom he deeply loves. One of Steve Martin’s associates is the stunt woman who stood in for him in a past popular TV cop show he starred in— but she is the stunt woman who he had to continue working with after his wife had run off with her.

New York Times image of The Belnord, the real building.

And yet, one reason why they connect now is that relationship ended badly, too, so they both had been jilted by the same woman who they both cared for.

Parental relationships and misunderstandings between parents and children is another theme. Martin is estranged from his stepdaughter, who he deeply misses. Martin Short’s character is a Broadway producer long past his prime who is depending on his son for support and hates himself for it. Selena Gomez’s mother pleads for the old men to leave her daughter alone so she can move on from previous trauma.

Theo, deaf son of a crime boss, but not who you think he is. Nobody is.

I think one of the real charms of the show is the way it so often shows “the other side.” The unpleasant head of the tenant’s association is actually a deeply lonely woman who just wants some human connection. Sting thinks he drove the murder victim to suicide (and is so relieved when he learns it’s just a murder).

And we learn, along the way, the importance of a turkey to open doors and start conversations.

As a media professor, the nature of podcasting, the way in which a need to record experience changes the experience, the jokes about theater productions, the use of text messages as a key communication tool for dialogue that fuels the plot, the impish pokes at the nature of fandom—well, this is one sweet show.

It is sweet, It’s also saucy and spicy. The mystery is almost beside the point, and yet it’s there, too, with unexpected layers being peeled back and new secrets coming to light.

We’re taking a short break between seasons 2 and 3, due to Thanksgiving and house guests. We just can’t sit, rapt, in front of the TV for several hours each evening as the most pleasant of murder shows washes over us. But don’t’ worry, Hulu, we’ll be back. We’re hooked.