Kate Purdy and Raphael Bob-Waksberg, 2019–2022
recommended by Katie Zhang
I had one item left on my list to wrap up 2019: this TV show, about which I knew nothing other than that one of my podcast guests had recommended it. This was the only 2019 debut I’d put on my list, since the time commitment involved in a TV show is not insignificant. Still, I thought I should give it a chance, whatever it was, since it seemed kind of gauche to ask for recommendations and then not act on any of them. I figured I’d watch the first episode and decide what to do from there: if I didn’t like it, I could cross the series off my list; if I was neutral about it, I could put the rest of the series on the “maybe someday” list; and if I actively liked it, I could watch the rest of the 2019 season. What I did not anticipate is that I would like it enough that when I hit the cliffhanger at the end of the 2019 season, I wouldn’t be able to wait until I got to 2022 and would just blaze on through and watch the second season as well. Let’s fire up the ol’ Pattern-O-Matic™ to see why:
Pretty self-explanatory, but in the interest of bulking up my word count, I’ll spell it out a bit. The first episode of Undone presents a character study of Alma Winograd-Diaz, a mordant 28-year-old woman in San Antonio whose life is not panning out the way she might have hoped. Initially, her complaints focus on the same working-class grind explored in the movie Support the Girls, set seventy miles away in Austin: wake up to an alarm clock, eat breakfast, get in the car, and drive to a job that pays just enough to let you do the same thing again the next day. Alma works at a day care, not out of any particular passion for early childhood education but because it’s slightly more fulfilling than working at Double Whammies. When she finally gets off work, her social life consists of drinking with her sister Becca, who has just gotten engaged to a meathead she doesn’t seem crazy about but who has enough family wealth to offer Becca an escape from the rat race. This turn of events has Alma re-evaluating her relationship with her own live-in boyfriend, a nebbishy River Walk waiter who has suggested that he might be amenable to going the marriage-and-kids route as well, which Alma wants no part of. This slice of social realism raises the question: why is all this done in rotoscoped animation? Wouldn’t using a regular camcorder have been cheaper? But we soon find out the answer, when Alma gets into a car accident that leaves her unstuck in time, bouncing around a surreal chronoscape as the ghost of her dead father asks her to help him solve his own murder and perhaps help out his schizophrenic mother along the way.
That is to say, this is a Pattern 38 story that weaves together two very different premises, one a convoluted sci-fi story with time loops and parallel universes, the other a deep dive into the history of a family with roots as disparate as Mesoamerica and the Polish ghetto. This in turn means that it avoids the problem mentioned in Pattern 15: its characters are not just sets of traits, but very specific human beings with unique life stories. Because of this, I actually cared about the story beyond its sci-fi plot twists and structural tricksiness, so the box for Pattern 9 gets a big tick. And San Antonio stands out as a locale much less commonly seen in fiction than the likes of New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, so even Pattern 24 (I like geographically grounded narrative) gets a shout-out. But beyond all these patterns, the main reason I wanted to keep watching the show is just that it’s very well done. It has a lot of jokes, and most of the jokes are funny. It got me to laugh out loud a few times, which is rare for me. Though I suppose I should note that the second season is significantly less funny than the first. The voice acting is very good beyond just selling the jokes, though: the line readings sound like authentic conversation. Sequences meant to have literary quality generally do, and those continue to pop up even when the humor quotient has dipped. And of course the idea of going back and putting right what once went wrong is a seductive fantasy for me, so I would have found the themes resonant even had they not been handled so well.
There were a couple of aspects of the show that I wasn’t a huge fan of. I don’t have a pattern for this yet, but one thing I don’t like about superhero universes is that when they run for long enough, eventually everyone in the story gets powered up, and without a large civilian cast superhero stories feel unmoored to me, like a game of Werewolf with no villagers. Season two veers a bit too far in this direction for my liking. The Pattern-O-Matic™ also has Pattern 17 on the negative side of the ledger, for while that pattern focuses on my antipathy toward Abrahamic religions, it turns out that I don’t have a ton of patience for stories that take shamanism seriously either. And stories involving time travel and parallel worlds are fraught with problems that Undone doesn’t entirely overcome. Still, I guess this goes to show that I should poke at the TV list a bit more, because what I expected to be an afterthought is up there with Knives Out as a contender for the best thing I’ve seen from 2019.
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