Give me the Sweet Tooth x Bo Burnham crossover now
Give me the Sweet Tooth x Bo Burnham crossover now
Sweet Tooth, Kim's Convenience, Breaking Boundaries
Welcome to Close All Tabs, a weekly newsletter where we collate the best bits of screen culture from around the Internet. In other words, we’re online 24/7 so you don’t have to be. Mwah!
Close All Tabs is part of Netflix Pause, a publication that’s all about hitting pause to reflect on the latest film and TV. Subscribe now to get three free newsletters in your inbox every week diving into screen culture.
Cold: the weather.
Not cold: the base of my laptop overheating to 70°C due to the amount of tabs I have open, including these ones:
6 Sweet Tooth tabs
A show about the complete destruction of a world overrun by a mysterious pandemic, the death of a majority of the human population, and the post-apocalyptic tactics of a handful of survivors should be appropriately dark, but Sweet Tooth is also…surprisingly wholesome? Part of it is the sheer charm of Gus, the show’s ten-year-old, half-deer, half-boy protagonist who was born a ‘hybrid’ AKA the physical manifestation of the 🥺 emoji. And part of it is all the other hybrids he eventually encounters on his journey into a ravaged American heartland, including everyone’s favourite groundhog-child, Bobby.
🥺 🥺 🥺 🥺 🥺 BOBBY 🥺 🥺 🥺 🥺 🥺
Look, all I’m saying is that Bobby grows up to be Bo Burnham in White Woman’s Instagram but y’all are not ready for that conversation.
Speaking of crossovers, give me this Gus x Fall Out Boy one now.
Both Bobby and Gus encapsulate the tone of Sweet Tooth, where the cute and cuddly collides with something more gothic, far darker, and always looming — an homage to the original DC comics by Jeff Lemire on which the series is based. At Polygon, showrunner Jim Mickle talks about translating the comics’ art style. “I think Jeff’s artwork has a real handcrafted quality,” Mickle says. “You don’t want to do a series that all of a sudden just goes like, ‘Great, let’s throw this into green screen and let some visual effects artists try to capture what Jeff did.”
That level of care towards the show’s aesthetics pays off — the result is a storybook world which feels apocalyptic and fantastical at once. “We went to New Zealand, and it has this kind of heightened magic to it,” executive producer Amanda Burrell tells The Verge about crafting Sweet Tooth’s very specific atmosphere. “The trees look slightly different, the mountains are bigger. It allowed us to really accentuate the beauty of nature.”
And, of course, it’s all tied together by a voiceover narration from James Brolin — deep and soothing, like a local neighbourhood grandpa.
3 Kim’s Convenience tabs
After 5 seasons, we are sadly saying goodbye to this little show that could: a sweet comedy about the Korean-Canadian Kim family — Appa, Umma, and their children Janet and Jung — and their everyday tribulations as they run their convenience store, brush up against whiteness, get up to various debaucheries, and eat a lot of food.
What began as a family sitcom has now morphed into something much larger: not just a form of tokenistic representation for Korean and Asian viewers, but representation that’s meaningful; that doesn’t feel over-explained or hammed up for white viewers. “Kim’s Convenience has succeeded because it didn’t do what was obvious, or more specifically, what would have seemed obvious to a white audience; rarely has a show centered an Asian family cast without centering its story lines on being Asian,” writes Brian Ng in Vanity Fair. “But perhaps what has resonated most with Asian viewers of Kim’s Convenience is that this series—an oasis where integration, not mere tolerance, is standard—exists at a time marked by bleak coverage about the hatred of our community.”
Plus, the food in the series just looks…..so……good: kimbap, mandu, bindae-tteok, etc. etc. etc. The New York Times speaks to viewers and food lovers about the significance of the show’s cuisine, and what it means to bring that to a wide viewership. “It takes the foreignness and otherness out of Korean food,” says author June Hur. “It’s just food and people love it.”
On that note, a little throwback to this Kim’s Convenience cast video which is pure culinary joy…
2 Breaking Boundaries tabs
This doco on the climate crisis sees David Attenborough at his most frantic. The gentle nature narrator is gone. In place of it: a new urgency for stakes that are much, much higher — an impending ecological disaster entirely caused and catalysed by humans.
Breaking Boundaries is not an easy or comfortable watch; it shouldn’t be. Over at the The Guardian, Australian scientist Dr. Daniella Teixeira — also featured in the doco — speaks about the devastation we’ve wrought to Australia’s biodiversity. “There are days when I still get overwhelmed,” she says. “It has really made me more focused on the urgency of the problems and how we as scientists can make changes now.”
Okay, 1 more tab
Ya like j̶a̶z̶z̶ Jerry Seinfeld flying around in a bee costume for Bee Movie’s Cannes premiere?
The holy trinity of Cannes premieres is complete and it is Shrek, Bee Movie, and Fast & Furious 9!!!!!!