Sunday, May 20 – Lots on the royal
wedding, with a fun montage on Gayle King and a good little interlude with the
American minister, along with two
“And Now This” segments – one on local news anchors faking British accents and
another on tacky souvenirs. We also
covered tensions with North Korea, revisiting John Bolton’s
less-than-diplomatic approach. The main
story was on rehab. While I wouldn’t rank
it among the show’s absolute best, it was a huge
eye-opener. I was floored by how few
qualifications are required for starting a rehab facility and how little
oversight the industry receives, as well as the description of the cycle of
relapse some facilities nurture, because addicts are more profitable when they
relapse. It was striking that work has
been done in Washington to pave the way for addicts to get help, by getting
insurance coverage for rehab, but next to nothing has been done to ensure that
it’s actually helpful.
Monday, May 21 – Clip show week, with
more “best of” specials on the correspondents.
Round 2 for Desi. For a while, I
was so convinced that they were repeating stories from her first special (they
weren’t – I looked back at my write-up of that episode,) but I think most of
them have been featured in other clips shows at some point or another, because
the last segment was the only one that I felt I hadn’t seen multiple
times. Anyway, they reaired her segments
on people who translate for Trump (with the ASL interpreter doing us proud!),
the guy who voted for Trump despite having a golf course that would get cut off
by the border wall (Mexico’s going to pay for a metaphorical wall!), the robot sex doll industry, the finer points
of interviewing Trump as taught by Fox News (no “gotcha” questions like,
“What’s your infrastructure plan?”), and, the only one I knew I hadn’t seen
repeated, Desi’s harrowing adventure into the world of raw water.
Tuesday, May 22 – Second special for
Ronny this time. We started with the
young Australian guy who jumped into crocodile-infested waters to impress a
girl. Ronny’s disdain is perfect,
especially saying the guy ran counter to natural selectio, that people this
stupid shouldn’t get to breed. Next was
the “Progressive Liberal,” the wrestler making progressive ideas palatable to
Red Staters, the program teaching Chicago inmates how to make gourmet pizzas
(featuring Ronny’s Shawshank-style
breakout to bring the rest of Chicago something other than deep dish, and the
explosion of cryptocurrency (I liked him arguing with the creator of Dogecoin
over its name.) The tech piece they
included was on police technology, from “flying” police cruisers that max out
after 25 minutes to a department trying to connect with kids through a robot
dog; I still love Ronny’s point that all they had to do was get a real dog and
the kids would’ve been sold.
Wednesday, May 23 – Tonight’s clip show
was all Dulcé. We saw her and Desi’s
“song for women” summarizing 2017 – good satire of peak white feminisim from
Desi, taking credit for Dulcé’s ideas. I
really enjoyed revisiting her trip to Mexico with Michael to ask the locals
about the border wall (since she was the one who spoke Spanish, she was a lot
more helpful than he was,) as well as her epic victory lap on behalf of Black
women after Roy Moore lost the Alabama election. Another piece with Desi, their “Shafted”
story on Elvis hitting it big by coopting Willie Mae Thornton’s “Hounddog.” I giggled at the skit solving the issue of
white people calling the cops on innocuous Black people by hiring Dulcé as a
911 operator, and we also got her briefly playing God after Bill O’Reilly
admitting to being mad at the Almighty for the way he “suffered” after his
sexual harassment allegations finally caught up with him.
Thursday, May 24 – The final episode
was for Michael. We got his plan to get
more funding for lakes by “turning them into oceans,” as well as one of his
naughty charts, the “Wrong/Legal” Venn Diagram he fingered (to demonstrate the
intersection of things that are both wrong and legal) in discussing an Alabama
sheriff who skimmed money from his prison’s food budget. Next was his problematic statue tour,
followed by one of his sports pieces with Roy (the 2017 wrap-up one, wherein he
found a way to turn any lighthearted sports blurb into a commentary on the
oppression of “the Black man.”) We
revisited his field report on a program to incentivize violent criminals away
from crime (sometimes with cash rewards or trips to Disneyland!), and finally,
we got his woe-is-me piece on his physical similarity to Donald Trump Jr. – I laughed
at his description of his “Wall Street Fuck Boy” haircut.
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