Streaming the Chill and Aimless

On Midnight Diner and Joe Pera

I don’t have any real rhyme or reason for watching the shows I watch, only that I try to wait until after the hype has died down to really get into a show so I don’t have to engage with the toxic sludge of “the discourse” surrounding anything in the larger cultural conversation. Sometimes I’ll watch something for work or a show like Winning Time, which basically has everything I could want in terms of entertainment, just strikes me as something I’d like to binge as fast as possible. But often I go back to 10 years ago, in 2012, when I wish I could have told myself, “Hey, Jason, you don’t need to watch Girls now. Maybe give it a few years and just mute any mentions of Lena Dunham on Twitter and you’ll likely enjoy the show a great deal more.”

And so I try to take my time. I don’t want to be part of “the event” of watching something with the rest of the world just for the sake of saying “I was there.” That’s a balance I’ve had to figure out over the years, trying to understand why we talk about certain shows and deciding whether or not I want to spend my time watching it. The perfect example is Game of Thrones. I didn’t care about it, but it felt like everybody watched it, so after getting through the first season or two and deciding it wasn’t for me, I kept up with it through reviews. I found breakdowns on sites like Vulture or AV Club to be far more interesting than the CGI and rape scenes I didn’t really feel like I needed in my life.

But a show like Joe Pera Talks With You, which has been on since 2018, is something I’m actually a little surprised I didn’t get around to sooner. There was really nothing besides maybe not having the right streaming service holding me back from watching the comedian go through life in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The episodes are all relatively quick, there’s really no emotional weight you the viewer has to carry, and while you might find yourself waiting for an installment to merge into cringe comedy territory, it doesn’t really go there. The Joe Pera trick is you think the show is going nowhere, and then it goes somewhere, but you might not be exactly sure where that is but you’re glad you went along.

I think Joe Pera Talks With You fits in with something I wrote about a few months back at GQ about “meditative TV.” Shows like Painting With John, Chillin' Island, and the show that I think share a somewhat similar feeling with Pera’s, How To With John Wilson. These are shows where you have to truly live in the moment. The difference is Pera’s is a scripted comedy, the other three are just sort of meandering, stoner-friendly, difficult-to-classify shows that I imagine a lot of the population that has been raised on a steady diet of bland sitcoms and overly-market tested, soulless pap that most people won’t get because the whole point is that you don’t have to get any of it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how Midnight Diner is also a certain kind of meditative TV, but the Japanese show that is streaming on Netflix is nothing like those American shows that I just watch and get all Ram Dass about. I know we’ve used up this word in recent years, but if there’s anything that could adequately describe Joji Matsuoka’s series based on a manga of the same name, it’s truly a vibe. Midnight Diner is truly a vibe. It entices you, lures you in and plays with all your senses: the sounds, the easy way the camera follows characters, the shots of food. Each episode is 25 minutes, but there is this particular feeling that lingers with you like you are actually in the little late-night spot owned and operated by a guy known only as the Master. And it all starts with the chill opening credit of Tokyo by night and the ASMR of a guy cooking in an empty little shop down some alleyway.

The opening is enough. I could watch just that for a solid two hours. I also find myself drawn to the nighthawks of a big city, the weirdos and outsiders looking for a place to be. But it’s a show made up of a lot of quiet moments, people not talking, just looking out and contemplating. There’s drama, but it’s minimal. The show is more about tugging at your heart’s strings and not as much about giving a jolt to it. I often think that’s why I seek out shows from other countries; because I truly want to escape America sometimes. I want to get as far away from it. Shows like Midnight Diner or basically anything on the Masterpiece channel I subscribe to offer that help with that. And while I enjoyed Squid Game, I remember feeling so uneasy after watching it and feeling like the South Korean drama was offering up some sort of commentary on America even if it wasn’t. I’m glad I watched it and thought it was a perfectly great show that would have been called dystopian 20 or 30 years ago, the problem was in 2021 it felt plausible. In 2022, I’m really trying to get far away from plausible and just try to watch or read things that will get me the hell out of here.