A riveting "Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields," the dark moodiness of "Shetland," existential frustrations on "Beef," and more.

Plus, what to watch in a potentially long writers strike -- this Substack was pretty much built for that -- and a podcast appearance with an old friend talking about, uh, writing for television.

Before I get into some of the What I’m Watching lovely bits, first a quick foray into the writers strike and my strange relationship to it (mentioned in depth in a podcast I just did the other day).

I’m resisting the urge to say “it’s complicated” because it’s really not. It’s more like, odd, and unfortunate. As many of you know, in December of 2019 I left my job as the Chief Television Critic of The Hollywood Reporter and took a two-year, first-look development deal at FX. It doesn’t take much memory power to recall that right around March of 2020 the world went to shit in a pandemic, which was bad for business, but for non-industry people it takes a little more prompting to remember that the TV industry imploded in 2022 — also really bad for business, and the year I didn’t have the financial protection of a deal. It started with Netflix losing an ungodly amount of money via a stock plunge from a first (and notable) loss of subscribers and then Warner Bros./HBO being bought by Discovery and told to reverse what its previous owners wanted — a lot more shows in production — which had a chilling effect on the industry long before people outside of the industry really noticed.

So, short version: Really shitty timing, Tim.

Then, yeah, every company in the streaming game claimed that the new model wasn’t ideal for making money and Peak TV wasn’t sustainable, conveniently right about the time the WGA contract was up and, ouch, here we are in a full blown writers strike (and likely a directors strike in June).

The show I wrote for FX didn’t get picked up. But during that process, I looked into joining the WGA, because that seemed logical and I was certainly in need of the insurance benefits. I won’t bore you with those details, but qualifying went back and forth (it’s more difficult than you might imagine) and finally it looked liked I’d get in, but by then the industry was choking on concrete dust from its collapse and even if I did get in and qualify for the insurance, it was very doubtful that I’d have enough work to sustain my membership, so I opted for my partner’s insurance instead and, well, thank the insurance (and TV?) gods that I did.

I kept writing — still am — and turned some of the work I started into the beginning of a book while one pilot remains out there, plus returned to criticism in the form of this Substack which just so happens to operate on the philosophy that there’s too much television and instead of that being a stressful negative as everyone drowns in content, I would be your guide to not being au courant and finding some forgotten gems and worthwhile new stuff in this murky ocean of offerings.

In the last year since it launched, the Bastard Machine Substack has taken off and it’s at least in part helping me pay the bills while writing scripts and starting manuscripts. What a WGA strike does, weirdly, is make everything I do here more relevant, in that the last strike went 100 days and this could go longer, but the backlog of content and some smart curation could easily get viewers through until both sides work out a deal. Strange days, but let’s (continue to) get to it.

(First, after hundreds of TV Talk Machine podcasts, I returned this week to have a chat with Jason Snell on his Downstream podcast. Have a listen.)

I was intrigued by the documentary on Hulu titled “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields,” not because it was a documentary sitting at the top of my very long list, but because my partner watched it first and said, holy hell, it’s really good. I can’t say I knew Shields’ story, other than A) everybody in the world, including me, at one time had a crush on her and B) she went to Princeton and C) she was an unexpected physical comedy revelation in “Suddenly Susan” and…yeah, that’s probably it.

Beauty and aging are fascinating topics — they intertwine so difficultly around existentialism and this country struggles to understand both — so I finally sat down a and watched the two-parter.