 with Kevin Fallon Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture.
This week:
The Figure Skating Coverage Was Unwatchable Listen, I've seen the Rocky movies. I know what we're supposed to think about Russian athletes. But this is all too much; the disgraced and devastated 15-year-old figure skater Kamila Valieva is no Ivan Drago.
There's been nothing remotely pleasant or entertaining—and plenty that's been grotesque, perhaps even exploitative and irresponsible—about Valieva's saga during these Olympics. That unfortunate story concluded for U.S. audiences during Thursday evening's NBC primetime coverage, with a fallout and debasement that bordered on a snuff film of emotional torture more than it did a broadcast of spectacular sports drama.  Her story and her scandal, the way she's been treated by the vulturous media and her arguably abusive coach, and the debate that surrounded it all just about electrocuted the legitimacy of figure skating at the Olympic level—which just about every current and former skater and skating expert confirmed this week. And in the wake of that shock: a death knell for the already struggling relevancy and popularity of not just the ice-bound competition, but the Olympic Games in general.
Whether you're a once-every-four-years Olympics cheerleader or an in-the-weeds figure skating obsessive, you hated every second of it. In a year of Olympics coverage dominated by the question, "Do people care about the Olympics anymore?," this, in all its ugliness, is not what anyone involved in the Games and how they're broadcast wants as the dominating conversation piece.
I'm not sure how to breeze through a summary of what happened to make me, a person who has already forgotten the teams from Sunday's Super Bowl, suddenly ascend the pulpit to preach about the fire and brimstone awaiting the world of sports. But I am a) a TV critic and b) gay, so I do know a lot about what makes for valuable versus unsavory event television, and what it means to think about nothing else but some teenagers spinning on ice skates for two weeks every four years.
The shortest recap is that Russia's Kamila Valieva made history when, during the team event, she became the first female figure skater to land a quadruple jump in Olympic competition. It was the kind of feat that, no matter what patriotic allegiance you have for your home country athletes, you were awed by what a person as young as she had just accomplished. But I had barely come down from the high of…well, her heights, when the bombshell news detonated that she had tested positive for a banned substance and was put on temporary probation.
The logistics and details of the whole ordeal were a mess. Everything from what the drug was to whether or not she knew she was taking it and, most egregiously, when the test took place—back in December!—muddied what should have been a clear-cut decision: You dope, you're done. Just ask Sha'Carri Richardson, the track and field star who was told exactly that when she tested positive for marijuana just before last year's Tokyo Olympics.
While shielding Valieva with empathy, there was a volcanic eruption of outrage when it was ruled that she could compete in this week's individual women's competition, where she was favored to win gold. It was unfair to the clean athletes. It put an asterisk on this year's Games. It exhibited favoritism, corruption, and double standards—and maybe even excused doping in the future. The sport had been spoiled, perhaps irreparably.
"I am so angry," tweeted former Olympian Adam Rippon, who coached American skater Mariah Bell at this year's Games. "Fuck this," he added. "This entire situation is heartbreaking." "What a shit show omg."
For all the discourse and debate the decision ignited, there was something eerie and unusual when Valieva took the ice for her short program debut at the beginning of the week. NBC broadcast announcers Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir, who typically gab as if auditioning for a Christopher Guest film, were basically silent. As she finished, Lipinski didn't mince words: "She had a positive test. We should not have seen this skate."
Nobody wanted to see this. It's not good television, which is a fatal issue when you're a network banking on interest and celebration in this being some of the most profitable television you'll air in four years.
And there was certainly more than silence when Valieva, who finished her short program in first place, fought for the gold during the free skate on Thursday.
It was a disaster. She fell multiple times. Each mistake seemed to chip at her conviction and composure. There were tears. There was embarrassment. This wasn't schadenfreude for a Russian athlete caught doping. This was raw-nerve pain; deep, deep sadness and a broken spirit from a teenager who, understandably, collapsed under the immense weight of a global scandal she may not even have been aware she was going to set off.
But then came the screaming. It came from her coach, Eteri Tutberidze, who berated her. "Explain it to me," Tutberidze said. "You let it go completely. I don't get it. Everything was fine." It was cruel. It felt like witnessing violence. Valieva's countrymate, Alexandra Trusova, melted down in a tantrum after finishing in silver position for a skate she felt deserved gold: "I will never go on the ice again in my life! I hate this sport, I hate it! You can't do it this way! You can't do it this way! Everyone has a gold medal, but not me. You knew everything!"
Sports should spark outsized emotions. There are high stakes, and that should yield high drama. But there was nothing thrilling or remotely redeemable about any of this. It was a live look at a formerly beloved sport swallowing itself whole amid corruption scandal. First, the doping. Now, as Trusova was alluding to, unfair judging.
All of this happened just after dawn Eastern time. By the time most Americans signed on for work on Thursday, they could read news reports about what happened, assuming they didn't rise with the roosters to stream the event live.
The "spoiler alert" of it all affects how you take the competition in when you can finally watch it later in the evening on NBC primetime, like I did. There are advantages to this, like the opportunity to read the kinds of deep dives into the judging that contextualizes what to look for when the telecast finally starts. (Here are some great pieces.) But knowing that we all likely knew the outcome, the way NBC cheekily teased it—as if it was some climactic and exciting reveal—bordered on insidious, and was certainly gross.
I don't know how the sport bore itself into this unwatchable hole, or how it can get out. Remember when we were all beside ourselves marveling over Nathan Chen's record-setting gold medal performance last week? That might as well have been in the '90s, which is just as well, because that's the Golden Age my brain is stuck in when I think about why I love this sport.
The likes of Kristi Yamaguchi, Brian Boitano, Surya Bonaly, Oksana Baiul, Scott Hamilton, and, of course, Nancy Kerrigan and Tanya Harding (I suppose scandal is intrinsic to skating) weren't just stars every four years, but household names between Games. I remember my neighbors at the bus stop talking about Michelle Kwan like a Marvel superhero. Tara Lipinski's golden moment is seared in my brain in the same file as major personal life events.
It's such a beautiful, breathtakingly difficult sport to be invested in. These athletes are unbelievable. I had to take a break from writing this because I got so overwhelmed thinking about what it must mean for them to be at the Olympics and make themselves so proud after a lifetime of work that I had to go have a little cry. But for it to end like this, with this hideousness? It's unfair.
It's a dark mark not just on figure skating, but what the Olympic Games—not to mention its media coverage—has come to mean. And a mark like this could, and maybe should, be permanent.
The Relentless Mrs. Maisel Is Back What is life now but a cyclical, zombie-like float from the work area to the couch area, where a parade of nightly TV binges tangle with each other until they are confused, nonsensical braids of disparate plots and characters fused together as one?
It is with this muddled mindset that I sat to watch the first two episodes of the new season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which were given to critics early and debuted on Amazon this weekend. I must say, I wasn't braced for Midge Maisel to be in her Anna Delvey era.  Maybe I'm just tuned into that interpretation because we're in TV's Golden Age of mediocre girlboss/scam queen shows. Of course, season four of Maisel was in production long before this trend across streaming services spread faster than an Amy Sherman-Palladino character speaks. But at the start of this season, Midge is once again down on her luck, and she's doing some swindles! And, as will be familiar to anyone who just finished watching Inventing Anna on Netflix, we're meant to root for her as she does…or to at least understand why.
She's lying to her father-in-law in order to delay paying back an apartment loan, as she has no money. She shuffles around her Upper West Side neighborhood, running a con where she convinces all the local shops to double her line of credit on the promise of all the business she'll eventually bring them. Jobless and broke, she still finesses her way back into her fancy apartment with all its trappings and local amenities.
If you'll recall, at the end of season three, which aired way back in 2019 (if we were ever so young), Mrs. Maisel's skyrocketing comedy career suffered a catastrophic flameout when she was very publicly fired from her gig opening for singer Shy Baldwin. Things look bleak, and she's not going to accept those circumstances. "That's life. Shit happens. You should be a bigger man and just let it go," she says during a standup set soon after. "Well, I'm a woman, so fuck that." A great line, and possibly the entire thesis for this current glut of scammer series.
The impulse to add this perhaps unnecessary read of the first two episodes probably comes from the fact that there's not much else new to say about the series. After setting the show and the character forth on a pretty thrilling trajectory for the first three seasons, this new one is a complete reset. As in, Midge Maisel is in exactly the same situation she was when we first met her: single, desperate, and obstinately pursuing a career in comedy even though she can't land a gig or respect.
Watching season four of Mrs. Maisel is like watching the series from the beginning again—a thrill to those who have adored the frantic, dazzling energy of the series, or the instigator of a full-blown allergy attack for those who found the show to be grating, cloying, and chaotic.
 The show's biggest critics, especially ones who refuse to embrace it for what it is, find it exhausting. That is reasonable! Every scene is a cannon blast of rapidfire dialogue, often screamed at each other, delivered while running around, through, or over something.
The line readings are impeccable and precise. The physical comedy is outstanding, perhaps even unrivaled. Yet we are people who have been lulled into an existence of hibernation. A pandemic has flattened the extremes of daily life into a mainline of monotony. I am a person who has to come to terms with, when he checks his pedometer app, routinely being told that he has taken approximately 70 steps that day. Seeing Midge Maisel monologue in hysterics on the phone while stumbling through a bedroom, rolling over furniture, and spinning around is a jolt to the system.
That's also, of course, the pleasure of this series. It's so vibrant and kinetic. Especially after these last two years, it's a joy to bask in a production so big, ambitious, and unabashedly expensive. The premiere episode has this massive sequence set at Coney Island, where almost the entire cast speedwalks while arguing in long, continuous tracking shots, culminating with a madcap argument shouted at each other from different carriages on the Wonder Wheel.
It's an undeniable triumph. Or it's unbelievably irritating. Only you know where you land on that spectrum, but give credit to the aesthetic that this series fastidiously honed: you absolutely know. Snoop Dogg Called Me Old
This week, pop culture was hellbent on sending a cruel message to millennials: Newsflash, you are old.
Oh, we were feeling ourselves on Sunday night, living our best lives dancing to hits from the likes of Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Mary J. Blige during the Super Bowl Halftime Show like it was the eighth grade dance and the planning committee had sprung for the three-liter bottles of Mountain Dew. This is the best halftime show ever, we thought, as those among us with kids ignored the children's perplexed stares and secondhand embarrassment.
Finally, not one of those Super Bowl shows for old people, we thought, allowing just enough fun to be had and time to pass before acknowledging the wrinkled, gray-haired elephant in the room, the one with chronic heartburn and bad knees. Shit. We're the old people.  Rudely, that pummeling factoid of reality came at us about as often as Joe Burrow was sacked in the big game. (Look at me making a sports reference!)
Then it was announced that there would be a new Star Trek film featuring the Chris Pine-led cast. Makes sense! It was just yesterday we were first introduced to him as Captain Kirk. But, as reporter Adam B. Vary pointed out—quite rudely, I might add—it's been 13 years since the franchise rebooted in 2009. A child born that year would now be at their version of the eighth grade dance we were all just reminiscing about.
Back at the Olympics, in what has been heralded as "an absolutely massive moment for Old Millennials," a 36-year-old and a 40-year-old won a snowboarding gold medal for Team USA. The wonderment over it is only slightly more offensive than when a 19-year-old spins across the ice in figure skating and the announcers salute the miracle that such an athlete is still going at their advanced age.
Then there was the vibes piece. If you don't know what the vibes piece is that went viral this week on social media, then I must thank you for proving my point about us being old. The article, from The Cut, was titled "A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will Any of Us Survive It?" Besides the urgent issue of staying alive, the article begged several other provocative questions, such as what the hell is a "vibe shift." Or even, "What is a vibe?"
Generously, the article is a fascinating bit of cultural anthropology about human behavior and trends in our current fraught time. Points are made. Points that went so far above so many of our heads that Jeff Bezos waved at them from his little rocket. Reading the whole thing is a valuable experience. After all, they say the best way to learn a foreign language is to immerse yourself in it.
I understand that anxiety over aging is an unhealthy preoccupation, yet I can't help it if it's also my primary concern. I try to focus on other things. How long can I go on not knowing what an NFT is? Was the Lindsay Lohan Super Bowl commercial really a win for her? How dare The Gilded Age air tits instead of butts as its first gratuitous nude scene?
I Will Not Rest Until We Are All Watching Abbott Elementary Y'all can have your traumatizing Sundays spent at Euphoria High, because for me there is only one school worth caring about, spending an entire week marveling at the brilliance of the most recent episode, and heralding as the next great entry into the canon of television excellence. Abbott Elementary is the best thing airing on TV right now.
If you haven't caught on to the charms of the ABC workplace comedy, you can catch up on Hulu, and it will be the greatest gift you could give yourself. Then, once done, you can join me in rewatching clips of the same two jokes over and over again, until I need to find a chair to sit on and then fall off of. (Thanks to Spencer Althouse for clipping these two videos on Twitter.)  How do we get an Emmy for Sheryl Lee Ralph, Janelle James, and Lisa Ann Walter all at the same time?
My Parents Had a Great Time on Sunday  I have replaced all photos of my family in my apartment with this Instagram shot of Martha Stewart with Guy Fieri at the Super Bowl. I have told them all, and they not only understand but endorse the decision.
What to watch this week: Severance: It takes a second to get into, but then you're really in. (Fri. on Apple TV+) Dog: Channing Tatum and a dog on a road trip gets an absolute yes from me. (Fri. in theaters) Law & Order: For some of us, there's no sweeter sound in the world than "dun-dun." After 12 years, the original artist is back. (Thurs. on NBC)
What to skip this week: Uncharted: Very glad, after seeing critics' reviews, to not have to care about this movie based on a video game. (Fri. in theaters)
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Russia’s Figure Skating Scandal Should Ruin the Olympics
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