YWSW's 2023 Wrapped
We PROMISE we're not doing in/out lists for 2024 but we are reminiscing on what we wrote last year.
Five days into 2024 and we’re already feeling older and wiser (that's what setting the New Year's resolution "read more books" will do to you). And with all this wisdom, we can look back on the previous year with a fresh set of eyes.
Some of you lovely, dearest subscribers have been with us since day one and we salute you for not unsubscribing even when Rachel used the word “cunty” as an adjective for the nth time or Mallika somehow wormed a reference to The OC into another issue. Many of you hopped on the YWSW train on a later stop, whether it was our detour into hellsville rewatching Courage the Cowardly Dog (an essay in which Mallika garnered us not just one but two haters… an achievement), or maybe you joined us alongside Rachel’s existential dread about death and climate change while watching a silly Australian sitcom. Maybe you saw our Q&As with the amazing Jennifer Keishen Armstrong and Ennica Jacobs and thought wow this is so interesting I can’t wait to read more of these and in 2024 you WILL (hold us to it please). Or maybe you are a fellow Upper East Sider who slid in for our ice cold takes on Gossip Girl during Thanksgiving.
Whatever brought you to us, we are very grateful you’re here and we love you, like Meredith Grey making a house of candles LOVE!
More than anything, though, we love to WATCH. In 2024 we are consuming television like Jacob Elordi’s bathwater. But before we run head first into the new year with all our hot takes on shows we’ve been watching on a loop for years or ones that are just waiting for us to check them out, we want to take a moment to look back on the previous year.
A little peek behind the curtain, being a substacking duo has truly been a godsend. We don’t know how you solo substackers get those newsletters out on your own every week, because even together, alternating who has the bulk of the writing responsibilities each week, we’re still often left scrambling. Writing with a partner can go one of two ways. It can be laborious, more work than just going at it on your own as you have to bend, compromise and step to the gait of another writer. Or it can be joyous. You can make each other better. Punch up each other’s jokes. Identify for each other what isn’t working and what can be elaborated on and what can be cut and what’s going too far or not far enough. We’re lucky to have a partnership like the latter. Some of our newsletters have just one byline on them, but everything that graces your inbox is a product of collaboration, of long text exchanges always ending in a “hell yeah, you got it this time around!” This newsletter is one rambling conversation between the two of us that, thankfully, never ends. As a result, we have 39 essays (and little nuggets in between) we’re freakin proud of from 2023.
We do have a few favorites of each other’s, though, that we think you should read if you haven’t already.
Rachel’s Favorites
Coming to Terms With Chuck and Blair
This was an essay I had been begging Mallika to write for months. Absolutely clamoring for it! And she did not disappoint. Everyone knows Blair and Chuck are toxic but Mallika did a great job of diving into the psyche of loving them anyway.
Who Are All These Childhood Reboots For?
Another essay Mallika dangled like a carrot in front of me in every pitch session! Why the hell we allow these childhood reboots to happen is Mallika’s Roman Empire. She is always thinking about it and when she’s not thinking about it, her Instagram algorithm is reminding her about it with stupid fan edits. I couldn’t wait to read her inevitable takedown and again, I was not disappointed when she finally put pen to paper (or text to google doc?). Her essay goes beyond haterdom and points out something really interesting about the shows we hold on to and the ones we let go.
Having a Quarter Life Crisis with Toby Fleishman
Fleishman is in Trouble was famously my favorite show of 2022. I found myself referencing it in conversation almost constantly and not in a superficial way like “the gays are trying to kill me!” It sparked a lot of thought in me about aging and marriage and having children and living in New York City. Unfortunately, all of that was flattened into a punchline when The Cut wrote a piece about how hard it is to own a brownstone prompted by the show’s popularity among affluent New York moms. I always saw this as an injustice, so I was grateful Mallika, who watched the show a year outside of all the discourse, gave it a much fairer shake. She described exactly how I felt watching it, capturing the bizarre hopefulness it invoked.
Breaking Up With My Boyfriend Over Firefly Lane (This Is Clickbait)
I’m a sucker for getting sentimental about friendship, but when I tell you I actually cried reading Mallika’s first draft of this essay! This was early YWSW and no offense to the newsletters we put out before it, when I read this one I thought, “Goddamn, we maybe have something going on here.”
I Rewatched Courage the Cowardly Dog So You Don't Have To
If our newsletter had a number one hit single, this would be it. Somehow we gained a whole influx of subscribers after Mallika’s rewatch of a show that haunted the nightmares of everyone our age, and one lovely reader commented “Wow you are one warped confused and WRONG woman...” which was so true honestly. This essay embodies all the things I want us to do more of in 2024, revisiting our past selves through television, finding new discoveries in the old. And we need to watch more cartoons! Hits are hits for a reason!
Mallika’s Favorites
Once upon a time, the two of us had an idea for a co-written post that, when we sat down to write it, actually turned out to be very hard to write because it was a bad idea (we’re admitting that here and that’s called growth). Instead, Rachel said “I have a half-baked idea” and in, I kid you not, an hour or two, banged out what remains one of my favorites. She dove into Succession’s season finale and used Tom Wombsgams and Cousin’s Greg’s final showdown to talk about what makes every character — from The Sopranos to Eeyor in Winnie the Pooh — a little more interesting: some self-loathing. The surprising way she connects Succession to one of her favorite tropes in shows like Beef and Buffy the Vampire Slayer made me know I was very lucky to have hitched my wagon to Rachel’s brain (am I mixing metaphors?).
Buffy Summers: Class Protector
Speaking of Buffy, there are so many reasons I love this essay but one is that you can feel Rachel’s love for this show radiating off the page. Buffy and her adventures with the Scooby gang have become a cult classic since the show first aired in 1990s and here, Rachel shows us why — and how so many shows since and so many shows to come can’t do the same. I will bet you $1,000 you’ll leave this essay convinced that Buffy is the perfect main character (for legal purposes, the $1,000 part was a joke).
Amy Sherman-Palladino's Un-Marvelous Women
Where Buffy soars, Amy Sherman-Palladino stumbles. One of the reasons we started this newsletter was to revisit shows we love and investigate how they helped shape us as people, and in this analysis of the main characters in Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Rachel does this so well. It’s fascinating to watch her work through her appreciation for characters like Lorelai Gilmore who were (in Rachel’s words) made “into something magical, marvelous and magnificent and then trapped on a pedestal they were maybe never meant to sit on.”
This beauty is going to be a sleeper hit when everyone finally gets around to watching a show that apparently only Rachel has watched: Amazon Prime’s Class of 07’. She uses the show’s premise (the end of the world) to force us to face our complacency as she confronts her own — something she manages to do both gently and directly at the same time. It’s also the perfect essay to publish as we kick off the new year because it may be about the future but it’s also a time capsule of 2023. Imagine having to explain this excerpt to your grandmother: Space freaks me out. The ocean freaks me out. If Gwenyth Paltrow invites the aliens to her AirBnb guesthouse, or if the orcas successfully bargain for overtime or if a Jeff Goldbloom-coded googly-eyed black stick figure shimmies down his UFO stripper pole to collect an asteroid like in that Wes Anderson movie, maybe give me a call. But otherwise, I’m perfectly fine not knowing what’s out there or what lies ahead.
The West Wing's 9/11 Bait and Switch
As we argue over and over again, television shouldn’t be underestimated, no matter how silly a show. It helps us situate ourselves and understand our place in the world. I love this piece in which Rachel works through how her views on The West Wing have changed as she’s grown up and her politics have shifted. It’s a good reminder about the challenge television shows constantly face of incorporating real-life events into imagined entertainment — and I’m guessing it will be especially relevant going into 2024. Plus, if there’s one thing I always know Rachel will do well, it’s adequately dunk on Aaron Sorkin (see also her essay on The Newsroom).
B Plot
Question: What is your TV new year’s resolution?
Mallika: First, finish Buffy so Rachel stops being mad at how long it’s taking me. I love it and if I were watching it alone, I would have finished months ago, but I’ve hitched myself to a co-watcher who considers “binging” watching two episodes in a row. Second, watch some of the classics that have been on my list for ages and that I’m honestly embarrassed I haven’t watched considering I write this newsletter about TV. Three, try some more feel good shows. Yes, it’s easiest for me to turn on an old Criminal Minds or Law and Order when I want to relax but perhaps watching murder is not the healthiest way to wind down? I’m not going to go as far as to say I’ll watch sitcoms in general, but I do feel like it’s time for a Malcolm in the Middle revisit.
Rachel: Julia Cramer, if you’re reading this, I WILL watch Love Island in 2024. I can’t guarantee I’ll watch ALL of Love Island but I will watch enough to have some kind of semi-informed opinion to write about in this newsletter. My other resolution is to tie up loose ends. I used to be a television completionist to a fault. I watched that god awful final season of Weeds. I followed The Vampire Diaries to the finish line, I sat through that lifeless final season of The Mindy Project, anything to squeeze out those final drops of the characters I once loved even if it’s really just backwash and sediment. But I have in recent years abandoned this prinicple and taken a sharp right turn. It’s criminal the amount of GOOD TV shows I have left on read. I’m ashamed1 to name them all, but let’s just say it’s time to actually finish Peaky Blinders, Sex Education, Insecure, maybe Dead to Me if I have time. I still haven’t seen the last three episodes of Mad Men but I might leave them, I just didn’t want that show to end.
C Plot
In our last C plot, we told Ben Stiller, a director on Severance, to get his ass to work on season two and he has since confirmed he is in fact getting his ass to work. Do we trust him? It’s giving the same energy as Bridgit Mendler tweeting “k sit tight for news” in November 2022 only to disappear and return a year later saying news is still coming but “not imminently, give it a few.” A few what? Months? Years? Decades? We want Bridgit Mendler back in the pop culture discourse and we want Severance season two NOW.
Sometimes we’re mad at Ryan Murphy but the man knows what he’s doing and the new trailer for FEUD: Capote Vs. The Swans is evidence. Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Chloë Sevigny, Calista Flockhart, Molly Ringwald and Demi Moore teaming up to take down Truman Capote played by Tom Hollander? With that “You're No Good” needle drop? Ok, you got us again, Murphy…
Young Sheldon is the latest example of the power of Netflix: After premiering on the streamer late last year, the show became one of the most watched streaming shows in the U.S. three weeks later. In all seriousness, what is with this show? How is it always one of the most-watched shows on whatever platform it’s on? Knowing how much we prioritize TV over actual responsibilities in our lives, we will get around to watching this eventually2 but if someone can weigh in in the meantime that would be appreciated because this sounds snarky but we’re genuinely curious.
The first of our 2024 predictions is coming true with Lifetime’s six-part Gypsy Rose Blanchard documentary airing today. Yes, if we had done more research perhaps we would have already known this when we made the prediction. But we’re busy. Though not as busy as Blanchard who, in addition to this documentary, is working on an ebook and going viral on TikTok.
The White Lotus season three cast is OUT baby — at least some of it — and much to our chagrin it does not include Adam Brody and/or Leighton Meester. But it does include some exciting names. Will Jason Isaacs play yet another messy villain as he has in Harry Potter, The OA and The Crowded Room? Here’s hoping. Rumors are still swirling on who else is in talks to star, including Carrie Coon, who should simply be in everything.
True Blood, which I famously debuted this newsletter writing about, is unfortunately still waiting on my return.
Mallika wrote this and I want to make it clear that I, Rachel, am making no such promise.