May Binges Part 1: North of North, The Four Seasons, Conan O'Brien Must Go

There has been a staggering amount of new TV on streaming services lately, and I've been making my way through them all, alongside catching up on the many returning seasons of my favorite shows. Phew. It's been an onslaught of TV, but it's all so good, so dive in with me!

North of North: This is probably the buzziest show this year - everyone I have recommended it to says, "Oh yeah, I've heard of that!" But I'm here to convince you that you need to go ahead and watch it. Created by Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alathea Arnaquq-Baril, this Canadian show stars Anna Lambe as Siaja, a young Inuk woman who lives in the fictional Arctic town of Ice Cove, in Nunavut. It may be one of the coldest places on earth, but this sweet sitcom will make your heart go warm and fuzzy. And with only eight half-hour episodes in the first season, you'll binge it all in one glorious afternoon.

The show opens with Siaja realizing that maybe she got married and had a child way too young and needs to find a new identity for herself. She gets a new job with the town manager, Helen (Mary Lynn Rajskub), who is a well-meaning white lady who neds more help providing valuable services to the local Indigenous population. Over the course of eight episodes, we also reckon with Siaja's relationship with her mother, Neevee (Maika Harper), who raised her as a single mom, and has a lot of baggage of her own. I won't spoil any further details, but let's just say Siaja meets a lot of interesting new people, while learning lessons from all the regular folk around the town, and while a lot of the subject matter is deep and painful, everything is told with a light, comic touch that makes this story sing. The beats may seem familiar, but the setting and the people represented on this show are unlike anything you've seen before. Get ready to spend an absolutely delightful time in Ice Cove.

The Four Seasons: This miniseries is based on a 1981 movie written and directed by (and also starring!) Alan Alda. As a huge Alda fan, I had already watched this movie many years ago, and had no idea Tina Fey, Lang Fisher, and Tracey Wigfield had turned it into a miniseries until my friend Laura told me about it. I figured I would check it out and then promptly binged all eight episodes in one go. Damn does this show go down easy.

The premise is simple: there are three couples who are great friends and like to go on vacation with each other four times a year, in every season. However, one year, when one of the couples goes through a divorce, this causes some significant turmoil in the subsequent vacations, as you can imagine. The show is sharply written, with each season being covered in two episodes, with a massive cliffhanger in the middle that will make it impossible to not keep watching. And the couples are played by Tina Fey and Will Forte, Steve Carell and Kerri Kenney-Silver, and Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani. That cast is just excellent, and they play off of each other beautifully, fully capturing the little foibles and annoyances between longstanding friends and their partners and their shared history over the years. It is an extremely funny show, but it can also be extremely incisive and real and sad. There is no Netflix bloat and each episode is a perfect little morsel that tells the right amount of story, develops these characters, and quits while it's ahead. I heaved a great big happy contented sigh when I finished watching, and I'm certain that you will too.

Conan O'Brian Must Go: I have always been a big Conan fan and particularly loved his travel show on TBS, Conan Without Borders. So, I was delighted when (HBO) Max decided to throw some money at him to fund this new travel show. Currently in its second season, the show features Conan visiting a new country each episode to meet fans who called into his podcast, explore the local culture, and get up to many silly shenanigans in typical Conan fashion.

Those shenanigans are obviously not to everyone's taste (certainly not my husband's, who refuses to watch this show with me!) so I understand that your mileage may vary. But man, I'm just captivated. There are only three episodes this season, so I've watched him ravage Madrid with Javier Bardem, and do the haka with Taika Waititi in New Zealand. But if you've never seen the show, you can explore the entire back catalogue (Max also will let you watch Conan Without Borders) and indulge in some absolute silliness. Conan's fans are often as weird as he is, so they can do some pretty ridiculous things when he's in town, but there are also often moments of real wonder, punctuated by Conan's deep love of world history. There was a particularly powerful episode in 2019 when he visited Ghana with Sam Richardson, but then there are also hilarious episodes in Japan or Korea when he is faced with a completely unique culture and will not be able to fit in as a 6' 4" gangly Irishman. It's the perfect show for those days when you just want to travel away to far-off climes from the comfort of your couch and chuckle.