A Lot of TV

My cable provider gave me free HBO, Showtime, and other pay channels (that I don't have because I can't afford them), so I spent a large part of this holiday weekend watching television. I finished watching The Good Lord Bird (after having seen only the first episode) and largely enjoyed it. As someone I work with said, "Ethan Hawke does bring the crazy." Yes, he does. I also enjoyed Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglass and Joshua Caleb Johnson as Onion. The performances were great. 

After The Good Lord Bird, I turned my focus to a bunch of documentaries and they didn't disappoint!

First: Murder on Middle Beach: I only watched the first two episodes available (although I believe there's another one tonight). Wow. This guy is trying to figure out who killed his mother and then he learns his mother was mixed up in this pyramid scheme with other suburban housewives. Crazy!

Second: There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane: This documentary was about a woman who killed herself, one of her kids, and three of her nieces on the Taconic Parkway back in 2009. The toxicology report found alcohol and marijuana in her system, but her husband claimed she didn't drink or smoke that much and didn't believe she'd drive while intoxicated especially with all of those kids in the car. What I couldn't understand was why she didn't just park herself and wait either to come down from the booze and weed because, according to the documentary, she stopped twice during her road trip: once at a rest stop and once on the side of the road (where she left her cell phone). She clearly knew she was having trouble keeping it together, so why keep pressing on??? No one will ever know what was going on with Aunt Diane that day. A sad story.

Third: The Inventor: This documentary focused on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes who got a bunch of people to financially back her contraption that was supposed to allow for a range of medical tests by using only a drop of blood taken from a finger stick. Yeah, that didn't work, yet so many people (old men mainly) believed in her bullshit. When you're a young, blonde, and cute woman, I guess you can get away with a lot of smoke and mirrors. Ridiculous!