Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. This Week: - Slowly losing our minds.
- A great election freakout
- Another great election freakout.
- A great election tweet.
- The Queen's Gambit!
A Week in Rachel Maddow Purgatory My heartburn medication ended the day before Election Day. (That sentence just said, "Hi, I'm in my thirties.") I had to laugh, but this development actually seemed appropriate to the mood of this week. Not only would the days ahead be unpleasant and stress-inducing in every way, it was going to be impossible not to feel the pain of it.
My job is, when you oversimplify it, to watch TV, yet I still have never watched this much TV. And, outside of planning my dream wedding to Steve Kornacki in a fit of 3 a.m. delirium, I have never hated watching TV this much.
 It's been election maps, no answers, and constant anxiety, over and over blasted from my TV like the Oscar-winning score of a war movie.
No matter how altered your whiskey-and-Xanax-blurred existence has been since Tuesday, a crazed man's all-caps tweets about the vote count somehow amounting to election fraud blasts through the fog and sobers you right up.
As the paint in your living room starts to shrivel from the toxic cloud of wine burps and stress farts, you wonder, how can this be the situation? You count yourself a sane person in a sane world, but every sign you've observed in these last days has contradicted that assumption entirely.
This column was written on Thursday afternoon, so who knows what the news will be by the time it's published and lands in people's inboxes Friday. While watching the election results has been a miserable experience by every account, with cable pundits preaching patience while hypocritically micro-analyzing outcomes that, by their own admission, shouldn't be discussed yet, there was one firm conclusion: Among nearly half of American voters, there was no repudiation of Donald Trump and everything he stands for.
It's an ugly truth we would be forced to wear like a rotting cape on our backs as we floated through the next days of unease and malaise, its putrid stench making us gag. Try as you might to be normal—sign in to work in the morning, dial into that conference call that's been on the calendar for weeks, attempt to work out, make a salad for lunch instead of indulgent grief food, even change the channel from cable news to a distracting show—it is impossible to feel sane.
Election Day was its own descent into madness, emceed by Rachel Maddow.
There was no information. We were being told to have patience by the same people testing it, every misleading ballot that trickled in treated as apocalyptic breaking news, even as the anchors tried to deliver context for why their own assessments were meaningless. On the one hand, if I never have to hear about Broward County again, it will be too soon. On the other hand, we were all begging to be pandered to—spend three hours talking about Broward County! I will watch it all!
It's been heartbreak in slow motion. Not a shattering with one forceful blow, but torn from top to bottom with a painful, meticulous slowness.
After four years of each day seeming like you've been apparated into a different alternative universe more surreal and hellacious than the last, this election week has proven that there's no conditioning for disorientation.
You don't get used to wondering how we got here, how something so blatantly bad can't be fixed, and, more, how so many people don't seem to recognize it as bad. How many times were we warned that this would take longer than Election Night to settle, that he would cry fraud and go to the courts, that it would be confusing and slow? It turns out you can't brace for a world that intangibly doesn't feel like your own anymore.
Friends and family check in on each other. On social media, people live-update their own anxiety spirals. But for all the comfort of that support, there's still the naked truth. As instinctive as it seems to wallow and be angry, nearly half the country still wants Trump.
 There's a lot of well-meaning talk about what to watch for comfort food and what pop culture pleasures we deserve to delight in right now, lists of shows and movies that could cheer you up. It's understandable, but strange. The Crown screeners I had to watch in the latter half of this week didn't do the trick. Neither did catching up on Real Housewives, cueing up my favorite episodes of Sex and the City, or even turning to my North Star, national treasure Guy Fieri.
The only way to make myself feel less insane was to drive myself more insane, watching countless hours of the news as literally nothing happened, feeling the veins in my eyes morph into a tectonic map of red lines as I scrolled through Twitter, texting a link to all of his tweets to my group chats: "WTF do people really believe this?!?"
The truth is that, for many Americans, normal life goes on even in outrageous circumstances. There are emails to send, children to take to school, dogs to walk, dishes to be done, bills to pay, dinner dates to attend. But "normal" has come to mean a backdrop of unease, disgust, fury, and fear—and, maybe more than all of that, exhaustion. That is now undeniable, too.
Even the good news is bad news, the hope is tinged with resignation, the encouragement is counteracted with despair. It's like being told pizza is on the way but when it arrives it's a Hawaiian pie—except, you know, it's the future of our country, not Dominos, that has the gall to tarnish something good with pineapple and ham.
Alton Brown's Election Night Menu How quaint it is to turn back the clock to 430 years ago—Monday night, the night before Election Day—when everyone braced for the insanity ahead by sharing their eating and drinking plans for the long night.
Some bragged about baking ideas. Some confessed their plans to order the most indulgent delivery meal in their area, paired with an entire wheel of cheese. Even on MSNBC, pundits couldn't stop joking about their liquor consumption plans.
Then there's Food Network host Alton Brown, who had the most relatable, full-on food-related breakdown I've seen. I cherished it.
Believe it or not, there's more where that came from. See his full, hilarious meltdown here. Leslie Jones Is All of Us Leslie Jones spoke for all of us on Election Night, posting videos of herself watching CNN and ranting at what she was being told. "I just gotta say something here: What the fuck?" she said. She openly asked what's wrong with us that it takes this long to get results, that we didn't have a plan in place to get results sooner.  In another video tweet captioned, "Why folks ain't counting all night," she wondered how we can crown an American Idol winner in a matter of minutes but the election is going to take a week, channeling all of our (admittedly naive) confusion on how there isn't a protocol to count votes immediately.
"OK, so we've been knowing this all is coming for years now, right?" she said. "Why people going home? Why they ain't staying up all night counting the votes?...One night, motherfuckers, you all don't get to go to sleep...Please help me figure this shit out. How the fuck can American Idol figure it out in one night? Why is people going home and they going to be back at 8? Put your purse down, you have more shit to count."
Later, she echoed all of our frustration with the constant analyzing of an election map that has no answers, screaming at the TV, "Y'all ain't nothing but weathermen...just fucking big-ass weathermen."
We're All Just Claiming Things Now Joining the ranks of people mocking Donald Trump's false and baseless "claim" to have won Pennsylvania, Duckie made me laugh. The Queen's Gambit Is Great, Let's Not Have Any More There was actually a time when I thought about things besides this election. Specifically, I was thinking about The Queen's Gambit on Netflix, which was fantastic and I finished bingeing this week. It's curious and, in context of the news, fascinating that what it milks to its advantage is intelligence.  So much of the series is spent gazing into Anya Taylor-Joy's Jupiter-sized eyes as her character Beth calculates and strategizes. It should be cinematically stagnant—a camera trained on a person as they play chess—but is among the most electric things I've seen on TV this year. The finale in particular nails this, which leads me to the point of this entry: Let that be the final nail.
Few finales are as gratifying as this one. It ends at the same place the book does. Limited series that have pursued storytelling past the books they're based on have had mixed results; The Handmaid's Tale found fruitful territory; Big Little Lies was merely fine, and that was frustrating.
Which is to say, call checkmate on any ideas of a Queen's Gambit season two! (I have no idea if that is an accurate chess reference. But I tried.)
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The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City: Joseph Smith would be shook. (Wednesday on Bravo) -
Dash & Lily: Something pure and nice, should you for some reason (can't imagine why) be craving that. (Tuesday on Netflix) -
I Am Greta: Climate change: Still a thing! (Friday on Hulu) -
A Rainy Day in New York: Imagine watching a Woody Allen movie right now. (Tuesday on VOD) -
NBC's "Chicago" Series: They all return this week, and they're everything wrong with broadcast TV. (Wednesday on NBC) © Copyright 2020 The Daily Beast Company LLC
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