I Will Follow Rosa Salazar Into The Dark
My horrible pitch for why you should watch Brand New Cherry Flavor
If you can even believe it, this essay has no spoilers for Brand New Cherry Flavor. It does fall into the category of TV shows I never would have watched if my mom hadn’t found it first. I might turn this into a quarterly series. Read the last one here.
A few weeks ago I sat on my living room floor and watched a scene in a TV show that had to be one of the most disturbing things I’d ever seen in my life. In the moment of viewing, I swore I’d never watch it again. I couldn’t believe I was watching it now. But I couldn’t turn the screen off. In fact, there was no screen. My vision had taken the shape of a camera lens and I was a paralyzed voyeur, frozen by the sheer abstract nature of what was happening. Watching it felt like the adrenaline that comes with trauma. I could hear myself saying, to no one in particular, “oh no, no, no. Absolutely the fuck not.”
I read a fact somewhere that humans are prone to a fear of spiders because their bodies are the most dissimilar to ours. This felt akin to that: a horrifying but exhilarating newness. The show was called Brand New Cherry Flavor — a title that was never explained or justified but that I understood.
I hope at this point, I have piqued your interest about what the scene, which comes in episode four of the Netflix series, entails. I’m wrestling with how many details to give you, or to give you any at all. I can tell you that its repugnance aligned with the tone of the show as a whole. Throughout the eight episode run, which I watched in a fever, I was bombarded with body horror I would have never expected myself to tolerate.
Part of me thinks if I tell you what happened, you’ll never want to watch it. Which is a shame, because I think everyone should watch Brand New Cherry Flavor. Not just in a “I’ve seen this now so you have to see it too” kind of shared misery, but because I genuinely felt this energy after finishing it, an ecstasy of having lived through something uncharted and uncomfortable.
Despite the fact that I am fighting with Netflix right now because it booted me off my parents’ account, I felt a huge sigh of relief watching this show, which actually came out in 2021 to frustratingly little fanfare (I’ve yet to encounter someone who has even heard the title despite it having some decent names attached to it, including Get Out’s Catherine Keener and The Good Place’s Manny Jacinto). It felt like our Grandfather streaming service was finally digging its way out of a draught of creativity. Watching Netflix take risks again with this and shows like Beef, I realized how much I was craving that adrenaline rush of watching something deliciously unhinged.
I’m not saying the current roster of television is entirely lacking in this, though a lot of joyously balls-to-the-wall shows have recently ended their runs. I had frequent moments of “Oh my god, I can’t believe they did that.” watching Max’s Barry or even The Other Two. I still consider the twist in season four of Search Party to be one of the most brilliantly unhinged bits of storytelling ever written. This is all par for the course for a streaming service that brought us an episode of The Sopranos like “Pine Barrens” but amid all the Virgin Rivers and Too Hot to Handles Netflix has long lost its reputation for taking risks.
However, we forget this was the network that gave us Kevin Spacey pushing a reporter onto the train tracks in House of Cards or Elizabeth Reaser performing her sister’s autopsy in Haunting of Hill House (which admittedly is when I had to turn the TV off, so if that tells you anything about how the pace and tone of Brand New Cherry Flavor kept me going...) We’re at a moment where all of Netflix’s appointment viewing has or is coming to an end: The Crown, Stranger Things, Ozark. Which is a perfect time to raise the subscription price several dollars a month, right? So the question of what kind of content will add the most value for subscribers has never been more pivotal. For a while, it certainly seemed like reality dating shows and under-produced soaps were Netflix’s answer. But shows like this one give me hope for something better.
So I guess I should probably at least tell you what Brand New Cherry Flavor is about??
It’s based on a 1996 book of the same name by Todd Grimson, and follows a young filmmaker named Lisa Nova who has just finished shooting a short film somewhere out in the woods and drives to Hollywood to meet with Harvey Weinstein-esque movie producer Lou Burke. He wants to buy the rights to her short film and make it into a major motion picture.
The description sounds like a classic Los Angeles tale of a talented but earnest young woman who has her dreams beaten out of her by Hollywood's seedy underbelly. And no one is more doe-eyed than Rosa Salazar, who anchors the show as Lisa. It eventually veers onto a much weirder path, but even within the confines of this cliche, Brand New Cherry Flavor cuts refreshingly deep. Burke, played by a breakthrough Eric Lange who some of you might recognize as Mr. Sikowitz in Victorious, is a chilling villain in the first episode. The show portrays the realities of Hollywood’s #MeToo viscerally. Burke’s hand on Lisa’s knee escalates to his hand wrapped around her neck and the audience feels her suffocation.
This is a testament to Salazar, who has a penchant for starring in criminally underrated shows and movies (Wedding Season on Hulu is just plain FUN! and no one’s talking about it). There’s a 50/50 chance you come away from this newsletter wanting to watch Brand New Cherry Flavor, but if you take anything away from this, know that Rosa Salazar is going to be a star. She’s mastered the deadpan that feels signature to someone like Aubrey Plaza but there’s a cooler, less awkward, current running underneath it. She appears both self assured and completely rattled, which makes her perfect for a role where, as NPR put it, Hollywood is a horror show.
Brand New Cherry Flavor gets gross and bizarre slowly and then all at once. Lisa crosses paths with an ethereal woman named Boro (Keener) who promises to help her exact revenge against Burke, but for a price. The gruesome antics of the show lie in that price.
Despite me leaning heavily on the “new” in Brand New Cherry Flavor, the show is essentially a long homage to Mulholland Drive and the venereal horror of David Cronenberg. The series takes the references and builds them into a theme park of wet gore with rides that offer a certain amount of uninhibited fun. There is worm-laced cocaine, popped eyeballs, curses that involve vomiting kittens, zombies, milk baths, a haunted chaise lounge made of jaguar fur, wisteria growing through the floors of Lisa’s apartment, a hot movie star love interest with a death wish (Jeff Ward, who should also be in more stuff) and amid it all a chaser of dry humor that often had me cackling.
The show’s surrealism is really just a sparkly electric blanket cocooning its baseline premise: a girl wants to make a movie. Maybe I’m partial because at many times in my life I have identified as girl-who-wants-to make-a-movie. Never girl-who-is-actively-trying-to-make-a-movie, but I suffer from a delusion that obviously one day I will make a movie, like one day I’ll go to Italy. I have no faith that I’ll buy a house, give birth, adopt a dog or even make it out of my tax bracket, but it feels inevitable that one day I’ll make a movie. Though after watching this, I am having second thoughts.
Having a throughline this simple and driven by someone as strong as Salazar is essential for this circus of a show to thrive beyond the bizarre attractions. The creators get something right about David Lynch that his imitators tend to miss. The uncanny in Brand New Cherry Flavor is matched with a distant but beating heart. The series will shock you, it’ll mess you up just a little, but mostly it’ll tie a rope around your ankle and drag you along with it at a pace that does (cliche or not) feel like a roller coaster. And it can do that without throwing you off the track completely, or losing you at the start, because it’s anchored in a kind of ridiculous truth.
I think back to why I love that twist in Search Party season four so much. The entire season is buckwild, starting with Dory getting kidnapped by “twink” superfan, Chip, who keeps her in the basement of his rich aunt’s house and dresses up in drag so the neighbors won’t notice. We spend the whole season watching Dory live in hell, feeling bad for her even though we’ve seen her do terrible things in previous seasons. And then a flashback in a later episode reveals that Dory had a chance to escape Chip, and chose to get back in the car. The entire season is flipped on its head knowing that Dory chose this for herself. Chaos doesn’t just appear as a fixture in her life. She is the chaos.
Brand New Cherry Flavor is asking a similar question about Lisa. Is she the chaos? There were several moments in the show where she could have turned around but walked further into the darkness. I realized what was so disturbing about that scene I swore to never watch again wasn’t just the body horror (though there’s plenty of that), it was Lisa’s reaction to what was happening. Salazar does an excellent job teetering between terror and a kind of natural comfort in the sick and twisted. This spectrum which exists in her giant doe-eyed stare leaves her enemies and friends perplexed as much as it does the show’s viewers.
We indulge in the idea that her motives are a mystery to be unraveled, but most mysteries come to a mundane conclusion. She tells us again and again: She just wants to make a damn movie! The space between Lisa and her goal is a brand new hellworld that sprouted up around her with her explicit consent, and as viewers we submit ourselves to that world just as she does.
And when I’m not begging for mercy watching images I’ll never be able to scrub from my memory — hell, even in those moments — it’s an absolute pleasure. Netflix better be dishing up a season two and plenty more of these kinds of shows if they want me to pay $12 a month. So please, for the love of God, forget everything I’ve said and follow Brand New Cherry Flavor into the dark.
B Plot
Question: What’s the most scared you’ve ever been watching a TV show?
Mallika: Just in time for this B plot I watched the infamous episode of X-Files “Home” which was so disturbing Fox had to pull it from reruns. It lived up to the hype! I don’t think I was as scared as I could have been because I knew it was famously gross and terrifying, but it was still far from an easy watch. Other than that more obvious answer, I will go with one for the Criminal Minds girlies out there: anything with Mr. Scratch. You may think that a serial killer who hypnotizes people into committing murder is far too unrealistic to be petrifying and you would be very wrong. Yes, it’s even scarier than that time Jason Alexander joined the Criminal Minds universe as a serial killer dressed like colonel sanders (?).
Rachel: Being scared and disturbed are two very different things for me. So for instance, I don’t think I would pull a scene from Brand New Cherry Flavor or even Haunting of Hill House (actually I take it back, the bent neck woman is disturbing AND scary). I feel like I would describe scared as closing my eyes and ears and yelling no they’re not gonna die, are they gonna die?? nooo. Honestly “Fishes” in Season Two of The Bear might be a contender. The lawnmower incident in Mad Men is also a runner up. Every other episode of Barry caused me heart palpatations. Amy Adams all drugged up in Patricia Clarkson’s bathroom at the end of Sharp Objects still gets me everytime. In the end I’ll give it to the shooter episode of Greys Anatomy. I was maybe 13 when I watched it for the first time and both my parents worked in a hospital. That cursed show is still the source of all my anxiety…
C Plot
The most important video on the internet this week is the one of Andrew Scott being absolutely disgusted, appalled, offended that Paul Mescal thinks his Roman Empire is The Beach Boys. (Paul meant the Pet Shop Boys… bless him). We would pay for a whole ‘nother streaming service just to watch these two interact for hours.
Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore have never endured the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of Riverdale. Moments like this one in which Portman and Moore are so sheepish about never having watched Riverdale in front of Charles Melton remind us why we missed press tours. (Though we are gonna need a little more drama going into this awards season. Who is the Don’t Worry Darling of 2024? And DON’T say that Sydney Sweeney Glen Powell rom com.)
THE Sarah Michelle Gellar is going to be a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race season 16. Shantay she slays!
Very not-in-the-holiday spirit for Freeform to cancel two (bad) shows Mallika cares (too much) about: Good Trouble and Cruel Summer. Can we not just enjoy a good bad teen show in peace? Now we’re going to have to watch My Life with the Walter Boys and we DIDN’T want to.
Michael Imperioli is going to be in a Broadway play with Victoria Pedretti and Jeremy Strong, which is important, but perhaps not as important as the fact that Michael Imperioli is opening a bar on the Upper West Side. Move over, Cousin Greg! We will not travel to Manhattan for a man unless that man is Christopher Moltisanti.
Curb Your Enthusiasm is ending after 12 seasons. When Larry David’s show first aired during the turn of the century, children across the world went to bed listening to that silly theme song from the other room while our parents laugh laugh laughed and now we’re those parents! (To be clear, we don’t have kids, just poetic language.) Time is passing, end of an era… someone comfort us like Drew Barrymore is doing in this clip where she absolutely refuses to let go of Oprah’s hands for no reason.
What’s better than one queen playing the part of an actual queen? Three queens playing the part. Olivia Colman and Claire Foy are joining Imelda Staunton in the finale of The Crown.
And finally, there is only one cop in the universe whom ACAB does not apply to and it is the fictional Captain Holt on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. This is a testament to the comedic genius and softness of Andre Braugher, who died last week at 61 after a battle with lung cancer. It’s completely unfair that Braugher was taken from us so soon. He was such a delight to watch on screen. We’re taking the time to remember his brilliance by watching the best episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, “The Dentist,” which also happens to reference a famous bottle episode from the other cop show that made Braugher famous Homicide: Life on the Street. In the 99 episode, Sterling K. Brown guest stars and, no offense to the rest of that cast, it’s a freaking ball watching Braugher go toe to toe with someone else in his caliber of talent. He had the range even if he was always in uniform. Watch Braugher being excellent here.