Sunday,
April 14 – More on Brexit; responding to a
dumb “Independence Day” reveler, I liked John’s plan for the U.K. not to pull out of the EU but allow
Leave advocates to say they
have. We also covered Julian Assange’s
arrest, touching on his gross behavior at the embassy but also exploring the
implications his arrest may have on journalistic freedom. After a quick And Now This of newscasters
saying hugely inappropriate things, it was onto the main story, an update on
the opioid crisis. Specifically, John
looked at the Sackler family’s involvement in the creation of the crisis that
they’ve since tried to distance themselves from. I really liked the point about how Richard
Sackler’s callous remarks don’t have the same heft because they’re all in print,
with no actual video footage; the solution of enlisting Hollywood actors to
reenact some of his quotes – Michael Keaton, Bryan Cranston, Michael K.
Williams, and Richard Kind – was awesome.
The
Daily Show is off this week and Patriot Act is done with its current block
of episodes, so I thought I’d backtrack a little and give some thoughts on Patriot Act as a whole. As I’ve said, Hasan was my favorite Daily Show correspondent, so I was
bummed when he left, but having his new show to watch totally makes up for it.
First, I really like how brown the
show’s sensibility is. From the way
Hasan doesn’t use an anglicized pronunciation of his name (like they did on The Daily Show,) to his side bars for
aunties and uncles who won’t get the jokes, to his fast and frequent in-references
(like UC Santa Cruz being a shameful college for Asian-Americans to go to,) you
never lose sight of the unique perspective that he brings to his show. It informs his commentary, his humor, and a
number of his topics.
While the deep-dive single-story
format is similar to Last Week Tonight
and Hasan comes similarly armed with well-researched stats and data every week,
the tone and feel of the two shows are very distinct. Just the fact that Hasan has no desk and is
constantly moving around adds a different feel (he’s compared his show to a
funny TED Talk, which tracks,) and the specific way he incorporates and
interacts with his visual aids offers a unique flair. More than that, he just brings a very different
sensibility to his work. He has a lot of
swagger and flair, with this excited/incredulous energy that’s infectious; when
he drops a stat that’s mind-boggling to him, you feel every inch of it.
It strikes me as a very
millennial-minded show. I can’t pinpoint
specifically why, but it’s something about the language, the graphics, the
energy, the references – all these things come together in a way that feels
really millennial-friendly, like you can tell it’s made for their (our)
attention spans by one of their (our) own.
I like that, while I watch three different news satire shows (all of
which, in a way, are offshoots from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show,) all of them really bring something different to the
table.
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