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From Netflix to Criterion: All You Need to Know About What’s Streaming

Those of us who are not doctors, nurses, or EMTs or others on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19 are faced with some time on our hands. The only silver lining to the situation is that our new reality of soft quarantine comes just as streaming video services are proliferating. There are many choices, but which ones are right for you? Here’s a rundown on the major streaming services and a recommendation of something good to watch on each channel.

Stevie Wonder plays “Superstition” on Sesame Street.

YouTube

The granddaddy of them all. There was crude streaming video on the web before 2005, but YouTube was the first company to perfect the technology and capture the popular imagination. More than 500 hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Cost: Free with ads. YouTube Premium costs $11.99/month for ad-free viewing and the YouTube Music app.

What to Watch: The variety of content available on YouTube is unfathomable. Basically, if you can film it, it’s on there somewhere. If I have to recommend one video out of the billions available, it’s a 6:47 clip of Stevie Wonder playing “Superstition” on Sesame Street. In 1973, a 22-year-old Wonder took time to drop in on the PBS kids’ show. He and his band of road-hard Motown gunslingers delivered one of the most intense live music performances ever captured on film to an audience of slack-jawed kids. It’s possibly the most life-affirming thing on the internet.

From Netflix to Criterion: All You Need to Know About What’s Streaming

Dolemite Is My Name

Netflix

When the DVD-by-mail service started pivoting to streaming video in 2012, it set the template for the revolution that followed. Once, Netflix had almost everything, but recently they have concentrated on spending billions creating original programming that ranges from the excellent, like Roma, to the not-so excellent.

Cost: Prices range from $8.99/month for SD video on one screen, to $15.99/month, which gets you 4K video on up to four screens simultaneously.

What to Watch: Memphian Craig Brewer’s 2019 film Dolemite Is My Name is the perfect example of what Netflix is doing right. Eddie Murphy stars as Rudy Ray Moore, the chitlin’ circuit comedian who reinvented himself as the kung-fu kicking, super pimp Dolemite and became an independent film legend. From the screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski to Wesley Snipes as a drunken director, everyone is at the top of their game.

Future Man

Hulu

Founded as a joint venture by a mixture of old-guard media businesses and dot coms to compete with Netflix, Hulu is now controlled by Disney, thanks to their 2019 purchase of Fox. It features a mix of movies and shows that don’t quite fit under the family-friendly Disney banner. The streamer’s secret weapon is Hulu with Live TV.

Cost: $5.99/month for shows with commercials, $11.99 for no commercials; Hulu with Live TV, $54.99/month.

What to Watch: Hulu doesn’t make as many originals as Netflix, but they knocked it out of the park with Future Man. Josh Futturman (Josh Hutcherson) is a nerd who works as a janitor at a biotech company by day and spends his nights mastering a video game called Biotic Wars. A pair of time travelers appear and tell him his video game skills reveal him as the chosen one who will save humanity from a coming catastrophe. The third and final season of Future Man premieres April 3rd.

Logan Lucky


Amazon Prime Video

You may already subscribe to Amazon Prime Video. The streaming service is an add-on to Amazon Prime membership and features the largest selection of legacy content on the web, plus films and shows produced by Amazon Studios.

Cost: Included with the $99/year Amazon Prime membership.

What to Watch: You can always find something in Amazon’s huge selection, but if you missed Steven Soderbergh’s redneck heist comedy Logan Lucky when it premiered in 2017, now’s the perfect time to catch up. Channing Tatum and Adam Driver star as the Logan brothers, who plot to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Inside Out

Disney+

The newcomer to the streaming wars is also the elephant in the room. Disney flexes its economic hegemony by undercutting the other streaming services in cost while delivering the most popular films of the last decade. Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars flicks are all here, along with the enormous Disney vault dating back to 1940. So if you want to watch The Avengers, you gotta pay the mouse.

Cost: $6.99/month or $69.99/year.

What to Watch: These are difficult times to be a kid, and no film has a better grasp of children’s psychology than Pixar’s Inside Out. Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) is an 11-year-old Minnesotan whose parents’ move to San Francisco doesn’t quite go as planned.

Cleo from 5 to 7

The Criterion Channel

Since 1984, The Criterion Collection has been keeping classics, art films, and the best of experimental video in circulation through the finest home video releases in the industry. They pioneered both commentary tracks and letterboxing, which allows films to be shown in their original widescreen aspect ratio. Their streaming service features a rotating selection of Criterion films, with the best curated recommendations around. You’ll find everything from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent epic The Passion of Joan of Arc to Ray Harryhausen’s seminal special effects extravaganza Jason and the Argonauts.

Cost: $99.99/year or $10.99/month.

What to Watch: One of the legendary directors whose body of work makes the Criterion Channel worth it is Agnès Varda. In the Godmother of French New Wave’s 1962 film, Cleo from 5 to 7, Corinne Marchand stars as a singer whose glamorous life in swinging Paris is interrupted by an ominous visit to the doctor. As she waits the fateful two hours to get the results of a cancer test, she reflects on her existence and the perils of being a woman in a man’s world.

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Film/TV TV Features

The Get Down

As I watched The Get Down, I felt the slow realization that I don’t think Baz Luhrmann understands how narrative works.

Over the course of his 26-year film career, from the slick exploitation of Strictly Ballroom to his wildly overblown take on The Great Gatsby, he’s certainly proven he knows how to create spectacle. The Get Down is a vision of the birth of hip-hop as Olympian myth. Empowered by a free-spending Netflix, Luhrmann seems to have been encouraged to go more fully Luhrmann-esque than ever before. In his hands, the Brooklyn of 1977 is a hallucinatory war zone populated by characters of operatic breadth. The cast are all relative newcomers, led by Justice Smith as Zeke, a young poet whom we meet on the edge of becoming a proto-MC. His love interest is a singer named Mylene (Herizen F. Guardiola), and his mentor is a mysterious DJ named Shaolin Fantastic (Shameik Moore), and together they set out to conquer the world through tight flow and sick beats.

Justice Smith (left) dips Herizen F. Guardiola in The Get Down.

Or something like that. It’s really hard to fathom what is going on, plot-wise, at any given moment. Luhrmann seems incapable of concentrating on a storyline for more than three or four shots — and that’s only if there’s some kind of interesting movement taking place that he can track in some outrageous Dutch angle. He treats emotion the same way he treats color, splashing it across the screen for garish effect. Take his use of the great Giancarlo Esposito as Mylene’s father, the puritanical Pastor Ramon. Here’s an actor with superhuman control to spin a tapestry of conflicting emotion on his face, but Luhrmann sets him on one speed — “righteous rage.”

Lurhmann’s not using his actors to their full potential, but the same can’t be said of his production designer and cinematographers. The Get Down is one great frame after another, stuffed with detail, and connected by more whip pans and smash cuts than the 1966 Batman. It’s this manic inventiveness that’s always been the attraction to the director’s fans, and it’s here in spades. It might not be so much that the director doesn’t understand how to construct a narrative as he just doesn’t care. There’s no recognizable human psychology, but often The Get Down reads like one of the best long-form music video projects since Thriller. Letting the beautiful dancing people, the bumping soundtrack, and the hot-shot construction wash over is a pretty pleasant use of an hour or so, even if its lack of clear story renders it emotionally flat.

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Stranger Things

Unlike a movie studio or traditional broadcast network, Netflix is not in the business of appealing to a mass audience with each new release. Instead, for their original productions, the streaming service tries to create shows that will find a niche audience. The business model for a show like NBC’s America’s Got Talent involves delivering ads to the largest number of people at once. But Netflix doesn’t sell ads. It sells subscriptions, and its execs know that it will only take one great show to hook someone into paying that monthly fee. Netflix doesn’t release rating numbers, but shows such as Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, Sense8, and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt have enjoyed critical praise while amassing large enough loyal audiences to justify their existence. In the traditional advertising model, the interests of the networks are more closely aligned with their advertisers, but selling subscriptions directly to the audience switches that allegiance to the fans.

The latest successful product of this realignment of forces is Stranger Things. Netflix took a chance on a pair of twin brothers from North Carolina, Matt and Ross Duffer, a pair of newbies with a killer pitch: What if we remade all of the films of the 1980s at once? Well, not all ’80s movies, just the low- to mid-budget sci-fi and horror films of the type Hollywood rarely makes any more. Like The Goonies, the heart of the story lies with a group of precocious kids. Mike (Finn Wolfhard) is introduced as the dungeon master in the midst of the weekly Dungeons and Dragons session with fellow tween dweebs Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Will (Noah Schnapp). After a 10-hour bout of snack food and polyhedral dice, the boys bike home, but Will is intercepted in the dark woods of rural Indiana by a sinister, faceless monster who kidnaps the boy into a spooky parallel dimension that resembles the spirit world from Poltergeist. The next morning, Will’s mom, Joyce (Winona Ryder), calls the police, sending Chief Hopper (David Harbour) on a search for the missing boy.

Winona Ryder

Meanwhile, a young girl wanders out of the woods. Disoriented and almost mute, she has a shaved head and a tattoo on her wrist identifying her as “11.” When the owner of a diner offers her aid, a group of shadowy government agents show up in pursuit. Led by Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine), the staff of Hawkins National Laboratory seem to be somehow involved with the monster’s parallel universe and responsible for Eleven’s telekinetic powers, whose depths are slowly revealed as the series progresses through eight episodes.

Matarazzo, Brown, and Wolfhard channel ’80s horror.

The Duffer Brothers follow the Tarantino formula of creating a pastiche out of loosely related genre films, taking images and moments from films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Stand by Me, and Flight of the Navigator and sculpting them into something fresh. Stranger Things subverts as it mimics. Mike’s older sister, Nancy (Natalia Dyer), escapes the sexual punishment aspect of ’80s horror, while her prudish bestie, Barb (Shannon Purser), disappears into the netherworld. The crumbling Midwest of the Reagan era is painstakingly reconstructed, and the Duffers’ meticulous world-building pays off again and again, such as the way they luxuriate in 1983’s lack of cell phones, allowing them to keep information selectively hidden from their characters while letting the audience in on the bigger picture.

None of that would work without good characters, and Stranger Things has those in abundance, led by Winona Ryder in pedal-to-the-metal parental hysterics mode. The other adult standout is Harbour as the deeply damaged police chief, haunted by memories of his dead child. The heart of the show is Millie Brown as Eleven, whose combination of spooky intensity and wide-eyed innocence personifies the appeal of Stranger Things.

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Daredevil

Marvel’s Daredevil: Season One (2015; various dirs., including Phil Abraham, Farren Blackburn and Brad Turner)— Although it eventually succumbs to its own primal fan-service instincts and climaxes with a final-episode alley brawl between two grotesque, guilt-wracked gargoyles seeking imaginary control over a city they will never truly own, Drew Goddard’s brutal, film noir-inflected 13-episode Daredevil reimagining is, along with Iron Man 3, Guardians of the Galaxy and Jessica Jones, one of the smartest and most rewarding recent additions to the oh-God-will-it-ever-stop-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Set in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, the show’s visual scheme is typically dark and atypically striking; so many scenes and framings recall writer/penciller Frank Miller’s influential work on the Daredevil comic in the early 1980s that it’s easy to imagine the whole production team poring over individual panels from those issues every night and then re-decorating the sets for maximum angular moodiness the following day. The show’s cinematographic signature is an invasive, piss-yellow light that leaks down rain-slicked streets and into shadeless tenement windows.

Daredevil’s first nine or so episodes display unusual courage and tenacity in that they refuse to let the titular hero—a.k.a. blind, combat-savvy vigilante Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox)—off the hook for his actions. While the show has plenty to say about fatherhood, the sins of the past, and an individual’s ability to change a system from either within or without, its central question—and the only superhero question that truly interests me anymore—is “Why would someone take to the streets as a masked crime-fighter in the first place?” In spite of the massive institutional corruption in and around Hell’s Kitchen, why does Matt bother working within the law as a criminal defense attorney by day if he’s going to subvert his beliefs in rules, regulations and due process at night? If he’s going to spend his evenings pummeling thugs and breaking bones before staggering home to stitch himself up, where will he draw the line?

Such questions plague Murdock and hamper his already-aloof relationships with his partner Foggy Nelson (Elden Hanson), his secretary Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and a compassionate nurse named Claire (Rosario Dawson). Yet Cox’s handsome, smallish Murdock remains unreachable; he’s only really alive during the regular after-hours missions that are one-third personal penance, one-third suicide attempt and one-third (I’m so sorry, everyone) blind rage. His spinning kicks, flips and acrobatics throughout the many unusually well-choreographed fight scenes compare favorably with Gina Carano’s work in Stephen Soderbergh’s great Haywire. And, almost unique among today’s superheroes, he never escapes unscathed. This masked man bleeds. A lot.

As Murdock’s rich and powerful nemesis Wilson Fisk, Vincent D’Onofrio feasts on the huge slabs of supervillainy-glazed ham thrown his way. His Fisk is a giant, glabrous, all-powerful baby overdressed for picture day and simmering with barely suppressed rage and pain that nearly shoot out of his ears like cartoon steam whenever he loses control. D’Onofrio dramatizes Fisk’s moral dilemmas by making every sentence he utters a clenched-throat combination of measured negotiations and hissing threats. As unsettling as Fisk in the flesh is, he is more frightening earlier in the series, when he exists only as an idea, a phantom, or a voice on a walkie-talkie.

Episode highlights include “Cut Man,” (the one with the astonishing single-take fight scene that I love without reservation), “World on Fire,” (the one that has the only Matt Murdock POV shot) and, best of all, “Stick” (the one guest-starring an inconceivably leathery and ornery Scott Glenn as Murdock’s mentor). The new season airs on Netflix March 18; here’s hoping its rehabilitation of the Punisher and Elektra is as successful as its resurrection of Kingpin and “The Man Without Fear.”

Grade: A- 

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W/ Bob And David

W/Bob and David (2015; dirs. Keith Truesdell, Jason Woliner and Tom Gianas)—
Last weekend I sailed into the Netflix maelstrom for the first time, and even though I occasionally felt like I’d stumbled across the 21st-century version of The Entertainment from Infinite Jest, it wasn’t too bad. Aziz Ansari’s new series Master of None is pretty great, and that single-take hallway fight scene from the second episode of Daredevil is as thrilling as ever. But I was also happy to check out the four episodes of W/Bob and David, Bob Odenkirk and David Cross’ return to televised sketch comedy after a nearly two-decade break.

Odenkirk is best known as Saul Goodman of Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul fame; in a just and fair world, everybody would recognize Cross from his role as Dr. Tobias Fünke on Arrested Development. Alt-comedy aficionados will remember these two abrasive, committed writer/performers as the co-stars of Mr. Show With Bob and David, which aired on HBO from 1995 to 1998. Mr. Show specialized in detailed, foul-mouthed, loosely linked skits that frequently pursued an idea up to and then far past its logical endpoint; at its best, it was the closest an American show ever came to re-imagining Odenkirk’s beloved Monty Python’s Flying Circus. There’s more of the same kind of thing in W/Bob and David, but this time around there’s a distinctly weird and confrontational Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! vibe in places. Take the animated opening-credits sequence, which depicts various characters dissolving into and bursting out of each others’ eyes and mouths while undulating rivers of Cross and Odenkirk’s heads flow by in the foreground and background.

Just like in the old days, organized religion and idiotic commercials are two of W/Bob and David’s biggest targets; in one sketch, a parent urges her child to stop talking about God as “some all-forgiving monster.” A courtroom TV show that has to replace a “no-nonsense” judge with a “some-nonsense” judge (before finally bringing in an “all-nonsense” judge) is one of several sketches as thorough and funny as the best Mr. Show bits. Not everything works; the behind-the-scenes look at a musical about a singing house is one of a handful of tough slogs. Throughout it all, Odenkirk proves a far nimbler, gentler, more sympathetic performer than Cross, who used to steal scenes with ease but now exudes an immobile surliness more often than he used to.

If you knew about this unlikely act TV necromancy before now, then chances are you’ve already scarfed it down. But if you aren’t sure whether it’s your thing, go find Rap: The Musical and the Lie Detector sketch online and see where they take you.

Grade: A-

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Film Features Film/TV

Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp

When I first watched the 2001 film Wet Hot American Summer, I only responded to the unexpected pang in Michael Showalter’s romantic plot and the non-sequitur trip-to-town sequence. But my 25 subsequent viewings had a Lebowski-ian effect. Everything bloomed with dry confidence. Mundane teen movie staples turned first from deadpan parody into casual emotional violence, then into reassuring absurdity. The charm was in how the movie knew when and when not to try. There were “rake gags,” where a bit went on so long it became hilariously absurd. There were moments where a key prop, stunt, or exit was left out or drastically undercut, which called attention to the ridiculousness of the actors’ histrionics. (In the update, for example, a toxic waste spill is represented by a Day-Glo green puddle.) There was also the comedic freedom of unrestrained expression without consequence. Horniness, despair, and aggression were deployed for comedic effect and then forgotten a minute later. In addition to playing with tropes, writer Showalter and director David Wain were arguing that human emotions are mechanical, that they come along regardless of whether or not there is a prop or plot to excuse their expression. Teens (and the adults playing them) flail and scream because their conditioning tells them to, then rationalize a grandiose reason later.

Postmodern prequel with an all-star cast

Fourteen years later, as a Netflix series, Wet Hot is very successful at mimicking the beats and rhythms of the original, from the bright grass greens to the absurdist, Brechtian schtick. It is a prequel, set on the first day of the camp, whereas the first one took place on the last day. Showalter, now conspicuously overweight, bewigged, and 45, is playing an even younger teenager, whose lovelorn crushes are even more about entitlement and possession. He is specifically labeled “a nice guy” who can’t deal with the fact his quasi-girlfriend (Lake Bell) wants to sleep with a visiting Israeli (Wain), who has wonderful patter: “The tongue in the mouth, it can mean so many things … This is the true meaning of community, of kibbutz.”

The scope widens to include spies and undercover reporters, but it’s basically the same as other work by Showalter and Wain, like Wainy Days and Stella. The huge cast (Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, H. Jon Benjamin) is supported by ringers (Michael Cera, Jon Hamm). The core players from comedy troupe The State are true to form, if less fresh-faced. They still make familiar Hollywood devices feel dumb and unnatural, while grounding them in feelings of longing, rejection, and the sense of otherness.

On first viewing, it’s a little too dry. Comedy that comes from character more than unbridled absurdity is better. I enjoyed another recent online show involving idiots yelling, Other Space, more for this reason. Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp is a fine example of a postmodern prequel, but it’s still a prequel, with all the expectations and emotional baggage that entails.

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Orange Is The New Black Season 3

In place of a social conscience, we have pop culture. It is a conversationally unobjectionable comfort, unsuited to anything but filling Hollywood coffers. Season 3 of Orange Is the New Black is very comfortable. The social ills it engages include racism, transphobia, rape, homophobia, and, most of all, the prison-industrial complex. This makes our binge-watching feel more honest.

Looming over it all is Lost, a show whose redundant flashback structure has been imported here and grown longer in the tooth. All character traits must be foregrounded with strange actions in the past. All plots must be delayed to tell us what we already know. The flashbacks help continue series creator Jenji Kohan’s greatest success: her campaign to humanize all the characters in Litchfield prison, from the villains to the comic relief. It is part of the novelistic project of modern television. But in practice, it often delays the story, and tells predictable tales with an excess of melodrama.

Orange Is The New Black cast

Characters act evil because a villain is needed to drive the plot. Humorous situations don’t build into serious ones; they switch on and off the way real world physics does in action movies. A scheme to sell soiled panties online results in bitter betrayal, but it’s hard to take seriously because the situation feels like a joke. A silent character grows a cult around her saintly quietude, but when the group banishes a member, her resulting suicidal depression seems strangely hollow. It’s the shadow of another show, Kohan’s Weeds, whose narrative also suffered from unearned swerves.

This is all offset by the scatology of a comedian hiding the deeply felt in offensive jokes. Jolly Rancher shivs, vaginal discharge viscosity discussions, bifurcated penises in erotic sci-fi literature all undercut any self-seriousness. Orange is full of details expertly delivered by its murderer’s row of actors. The only false spot is newcomer Ruby Rose, an Australian model introduced to pay lip service to the concept of gender fluidity. But mostly, she’s just there to beat the show’s dead horse of a romance. Her love triangle with Piper (Taylor Schilling) and Alex (Laura Prepon) has all the dynamism of a plane stuck on the tarmac.

Lea DeLaria as Big Boo

The best actress is Lea DeLaria as Big Boo, who is even better than Natasha Lyonne at personifying the show’s combination of Borscht Belt jokes and real-life hurt. She and Pennsatucky (Taryn Manning), a one-note villain from earlier seasons turned into a squeaky-voiced stalwart, are the season’s true stars. There’s a moment where Pennsatucky declines to sodomize someone with a broomstick that works as both low comedy and character drama. A wordless sequence devoted to the daily routine of Chang (Lori Tan Chinn), an older woman ignored by the other inmates, is also a highlight. We see her mash Fritos in secret, with her feet. Unlike the flashbacks, there’s joy in not knowing where it’s going.

The other most successful subplot is the acquisition of the prison by a private company that sets the prisoners to work and cuts the guards’ hours in half. Their attempt to unionize is pitiful (their union song is from Les Miz), but the show effectively stresses how corporate structures prevent real reform, because financial pressure privileges short-term gains over things like mental health care, of which prisons are our largest provider.

Against real world problems, the only hope the show offers is a swerve towards transcendence. Laverne Cox and Piper Kerman have both used it as a springboard to discuss transgender rights and prison reform. Does it matter if we can see the strings? John Oliver and Jon Stewart’s soapboxes are modern examples of comedy as a method by which actual political discussion can leak in through corporate media. Orange Is the New Black is another unsung example.

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Film/TV TV Features

Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, and Edward Hopper

Spoiler alert: If you aren’t current on Mad Men, be aware of thematic and plot revelations in this review. And, if you don’t know what Mad Men is, Google it and get busy catching up. Also: Consider where you may have gone wrong in your life.

“Previously on” the Flyer‘s TV review page: Contemporary scripted TV is our equivalent of masterpieces of fine art. Our museums and galleries are HBO, AMC, Showtime, the basic networks, FX, Netflix, and Hulu. The Sopranos is a Caravaggio; Parks and Recreation is a Keith Haring. Breaking Bad is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death.

Mad Men is an Edward Hopper. It’s Nighthawks and Chop Suey and Office in a Small City and Intermission and a dozen more, all rolled into one: gorgeous, perfectly designed, lonely, contemplative, sexy, and gender-inclusive. Creator Matthew Weiner paints Mad Men with pure confident brilliance. Mad Men is social commentary with the benefit of decades of perspective.

The big knock commonly advanced about Mad Men is that nothing much ever happens in the show. The times that the show has truly shocked viewers can probably be counted on one hand: A lawnmower comes to mind, as does a man’s severed nipple. But, taking place during the tumultuous history of the 1960s, Mad Men usually prefers to let the big moments happen in the public consciousness and take the personal histories at a more glacial pace. Pacing is actually Mad Men at its most honest: The world may change overnight, but people don’t.

Weiner ramped up for Mad Men as a writer on The Sopranos. His episodes, including “Chasing It,” “Soprano Home Movies,” and “Luxury Lounge,” are more sociological, observational, and digressive than most other Sopranos episodes. Weiner never seemed as interested in the big plot points of the New Jersey crime family as he was with what effect this was having on individuals. In Mad Men, he doesn’t recreate the scenes of those seismic national events but instead focuses on what they mean for the characters — similar to how author James Ellroy explores “the private nightmare of public policy” in his Underworld USA trilogy.

Last Sunday, Mad Men‘s Season 7 signed off until 2015 with “Waterloo,” a half-season finale in the middle of a bifurcated final round of episodes. (Don’t get me started about how annoying a network ploy this is.) But, at this point, I’m ready to stop debating if Mad Men is the best show of all time: It almost doesn’t matter what happens in the show’s final seven episodes, Mad Men has surpassed other great hour-long shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, M*A*S*H, Breaking Bad, and whatever else is presumptively the title-holder. (And comparing the relative value of dramas versus comedies is too difficult and too dependent on preferences. Apples to apples, I’ll take Parks and Recreation over any other comedy and Mad Men over any other drama.)

Until late in Season 7, Mad Men hadn’t yet tipped its hand about ultimate intentions: Is it a show about things falling apart or coming together? As “Waterloo” ends, things are hopeful. Don finally has the inclination and means to simply do and enjoy his work. Sally picked the earnest nerd over the cynical football player. Peggy found her voice. Things may change again in the second half of the season. Mad Men might do its thematic version of the Altamont Free Concert. Either way, it’s a cultural alchemy that is a joy to behold.

Watching Mad Men isn’t like watching paint dry, it’s like watching a great painting dry: Hopper’s Morning Sun oxidizing into immortality.