Stupid Idiots, Shakespeare as a Romance Columnist, and Edgar Allan Poe Vlogging

The Weekly Binge: 3 Shows to Watch this Week

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You can’t say the show is burying the lede, given a title like this. Two friends who are aggressively unaware of their surroundings with unmoored expectations about reality go barreling forward into every situation they find themselves in. Think Dumb and Dumberwith the unhinged pacing of a Hunter S. Thompson short story. They ignore their jobs which they don’t understand, play act as they attempt but really refuse to grab the check while eating lunch, and have big plans to become DJs off solid performances on Garage Band. Even the sight gags are aggressive in their weirdness — at one point, they’re sitting in a car while it rains, commenting on the ineffective windshield wipers, before the camera cuts to two human hands smearing water around the windshield.

Ask Will

Ask Will is a gentle comedy about a modern-day William Shakespeare. He struggles to find a publishing job and is forced to become a romance advice columnist, which he thinks is beneath him. Only the pilot episode is out for now, but you can already start to see how the show is building out its universe. Will’s upstairs neighbors are Hamlet and Othelia, a constantly-fighting couple, he has a landlady named Elizabeth Queen, and there’s a missing cat named Rosencrantz. That playfulness, and the breadth of storyline possibilities given the advice column plot device, makes us excited for what comes next.

A Tell Tale Vlog

A Tell Tale Vlog is a literary web series that tells the tale of Edgar Allan Poe and Lenor. The two have all the hallmarks of a romantic couple, except here Lenor is a ghost who is attempting to haunt him. The problem is that Poe, the lovelorn, brooding and creepy figure we all expect, is somewhat hard to haunt. The show is done in vlog form, jumping back and forth to tell you both Poe and Lenor’s perspectives. Poe plays the straight man to Lenor’s more comically critical perspective, as she makes it clear that she deserves to be haunting someone better.