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What prompted me in Charlie Jane’s newsletter is that she says “the first two episodes didn't entirely land for me, especially the first one” while for me it not only was the other way around (although I actually enjoyed the first) but it was the other way around precisely for the reasons she calls out as the tightrope the show tries and fails to walk. While I enjoyed the first episode (“The Promotion”), the second episode (“The Oner”) for me was borderline unwatchable.

(For what it’s worth, my ranking of those first four episodes is: “The Promotion”, “The Note”, “The Missing Reel”, and “The Oner”.)

Here’s how Charlie Jane opens her critique of the first episode, “The Promotion”:

The show sets up an absurdist situation that ultimately doesn't ring true and makes Rogen's character appear wildly delusional.

She continues:

This is obviously a super heightened premise, which is intentionally absurd. But it does make Rogen's character seem so incompetent that it's obvious he should never have gotten that job.

Weirdly, because opinions are like that, these are precisely the reasons why “The Oner” was excruciating for me while “The Promotion” worked. In the first episode, I bought what seemed to me to be the premise, which was that Matt’s excitement over his new position addled his brain a bit and sent him wildly out over his skis. His sense of self-importance and self-righteousness caused him to get ahead of himself in his need to be seen as a serious film guy. It helped, to be sure, that I might totally watch a Martin Scorsese film about Jonestown called Kool-Aid.

When it came to “The Oner”, however, this suddenly was just a self-satisfied white guy with no discernible talents fucking everything up for everyone around him who were the ones getting the actual work done. Maybe it’s the current climate of gestures at everything but I just don’t find that an engaging or entertaining thing, and felt little need to subject myself to it. In fact, I quit the episode halfway through in exasperation and only went back later because I didn’t want to watch episode three without having finished episode two

(For much the same reason, I never made it past the first episode of Netflix’s The Diplomat because I couldn’t stand having to watch the self-important husband who couldn’t stop inserting himself where he no longer belonged, and obviously this was going to be a substantial element in the show.)

Charlie Jane is right that the core of the show is that Matt “sincerely, passionately wants to create great art and just cannot get out of his own way”. I just think it’s dramatically and more artlessly on display in the second episode than it is in the first, and then the fourth episode is just generally artless all around.

Anyway, the point is that I will not be watching beyond episode four, “The Stolen Reel”, which gave “The Oner” a run for its money on terribleness but in this case just because it’s glaringly obvious who stole the reel and glaringly obvious that there’s an unofficial wrap party and I find it exhausting watching characters run around unable to see the most obvious things happening right in front of their face. It’s possible that this was the point of the episode, but if so it simply wasn’t at all well-executed and the only other option was that the writers really thought the glaringly obvious wasn’t glaringly obvious, which: sigh.

In the end I suppose that’s my problem with the show as a whole: the most glaringly obvious thing of all is that Matt should not be the head of the studio to begin with, and I just don’t have time for the proposition that watching a mediocre, middle-aged white guy making life difficult for those around him without consequence is in any way whatsoever meant to be taken as an entertainment.

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“Autism destroys families, but more importantly it destroys our greatest resource which is our children,” he said. “And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date.”

He was speaking here of those needing more or less constant and consistently high levels of support, which he terms those with “severe autism”. It’s only that I’m a stickler for accuracy that I point this out, since much of the social media reaction from autistics and their allies elides this to make it sound like he’s simply talking about all autistic people, period. I mean, yes—he does in fact hate all autistic people, but consider it an autistic special interest of mine to need accuracy even in these reprehensible things.

(The newerfangled term in use by an alliance of the aggrieved and put-upon Autism Mom community and some medicalized autism researchers is “profound autism”—a term I’d initially supported but backed away from in due, if delayed, course.)

My own reaction to Wormwood’s ignorant litany of complaints is somewhat severalfold.

First, the reality is that I do not pay taxes; have held but do not currently hold, and am incapable of again holding, a job; broke my arm the only time I tried to play baseball; have in fact written more than one poem; and do not go out on dates. He’s not, as I noted above, talking about me, but nonetheless he’d almost certainly still look at these things as reasons to view autism as a disease.

Second, any someone who never pays taxes, never holds a job, never plays baseball, never writes a poem, and never goes out on dates nonetheless still has worth and value simply by virtue of existing as an alive human being to whom and for whom we all are responsible. None of these things, or any of the other things they’re meant to implicate or inculcate in your imagination, are in and of themselves somehow the signifiers of dignity.

Third, and this was I think my first response on Bluesky to all of this, I’m almost more squicked by the idea of children as “resources” than I am by anything else in all of Wormwood’s monstrous, morally-malformed tirade. All of this nonsense is nothing more than bootstrap mythology, which in the end goes hand in hand with eugenicism.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that at one point during all this relentless focus on children, Wormwood rhetorically asked, “If the epidemic is an artifact—a better diagnostic criteria or better recognition—then why are we not seeing it in older people?” Hello, I am right here. We literally are seeing increased diagnosis in adults, and rendering us invisible won’t help us survive, let alone thrive. Again: this is eugenics. Of course, what he meant was why aren’t we seeing an increase in diagnosis of “severe” autism in adults, which is a completely ludicrous thing to ask.)

One of the reactions on Bluesky suggested that he’s implicitly framing autistic people as a burden on society and on their families. I have a complicated relationship with this contention because, as I’ve said, in fact I am a burden upon my family and upon society. It’s just that I’m one that my family in full and society in part has deemed worth the carrying. The issue isn’t burdendom, per se, but the feeling that some among us aren’t worth the effort of that carrying.

It does take in some cases an extra if not substantial effort to keep this, that, or the other person alive in dignity. The point isn’t that we should be denying the burden but that we should be embracing its carrying. The effort and the empathy is worth it because people are worth it, inherently and intrinsically.

This is something that Wormwood simply does not understand, and likely is incapable of comprehending even in part. The only thing about autistic people that he sees is the burden they cause to the bootstrap myth, because that fundamentally eugenicist myth rebuffs any and all belief in the natal dignity of each and every person.

Some of us require more effort on the part of others to keep in this world. Notwithstanding the paradox of tolerance, anyone who argues that some people in fact just aren’t worth it should be concerned that we will take that as a cue to think that of them.

Addenda

1. Somehow I glossed right over the fact that after initially mentioning autistic adults in the context of diagnosis, he did then proceed to wonder why we don’t see ”severe” autism out in the world, like walking around the mall. Nonetheless, this is as ridiculous a statement as the other.

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Specifically, I want stats that record a player’s “contribution to wins”. For example, something that tells me the degree to which a player’s on-base percentage has contributed to winning games. Similarly, something that tells me the degree to which a player’s fielding percentage contributed to winning games.

What made me start thinking about this once again is the fact that the Red Sox once again are sucking pretty hard, but all anyone ever talks about are stats that are about or ultimately source to individual achievement. In response to people raising whether or not the team’s issues are about coaching, Peter Abraham countered thusly:

Pete Fatse has been hitting coach since 2022. From 2022-24, Sox were 9th in the majors in runs, 5th in OPS, and 2nd in hits. This with a revolving-door roster, long-term injuries to key players, etc.

These collective runs, OPS, and hits are ultimately drawn from the individual player stats, and so they are only a measurement of collective individual achievement and tell us nothing about how these performances impacted the actual games. As I noted last year, you could have a player with one-hundred home runs on the season, but if they all came in losses, what does that stat really tell us?

Individual stats are great for determining salaries and are important for cults of personality, but baseball is not in fact a sport of individuals but one of teams. These stats feed into a player’s career but don’t tell us a thing about how good the player has been to the success of the team.

What I need here is some enterprising baseball stats nerd to work up these new stats. We don’t need to wait for Major League Baseball. Give me a stat (or multiple stats if that’s somehow easier or more sensible) measuring what portion of a batter’s hits, runs, on base, slugging, whatever numbers came in games that their team won. If we’re looking at a single stat, call it BWIN—Batter’s Contributions to Wins.

(Unclear to me if how you factor in, say, hits that came when a player’s team was already in the lead and maintained the lead for the rest of the game.)

Then extend the approach to other aspects of the game. PWIN for pitchers. FWIN for fielders. Baseball is a game of individual effort combining to collective success or failure, and we’re overdue for stats reflecting the latter.

Someone is out there complaining, “Isn’t that what WAR is for?” But I don’t find Wins Above Replacement to quite be what I mean. I don’t care about “how many more wins he's worth than a replacement-level player” which seems like a needlessly arcane thing. I don’t even understand what I’m looking at when I see a WAR number. I’m talking about something much cleaner.

Basically, give me a simple sense of the proportion of wins to which a player’s batting, fielding, or pitching contributed. I don’t care about comparing to a hypothetical other. Just a vanilla number: how well did this individual’s achievements contribute to won games.

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After an especially good weekend of game calling on WEEI if not an especially great weekend for the Red Sox themselves, and in the spirit of letting people know when they are seen or heard that I’ve been trying to cultivate of late, earlier today I sent the following to soxbooth@weei.com.

Hello. I’m a born and raised Red Sox fan from upstate New York who now lives in Portland, Oregon. I watch games through MLB.TV and prefer the WEEI audio when doing so.

I just wanted to compliment WEEI on the current stable of announcers for Red Sox games, who seem as a whole to be leaning into the old-school “audio description” style of calling games, as compared to the newer “podcasting” style which often seems to see game calls as an afterthought (Rob Bradford being the main example of this truly awful approach).

I’ve especially been very impressed by Cooper Boardman, but in general the lineup of Flemming, Middlebrooks, DiNardo, and Boardman has been working really, really well.

Please keep this up.

Listening to WEEI coverage has been so pleasant this year so far, and I hope it continues in this direction.

If there’s anyone else out there who prefers this approach to the calling of games, please let them know. Sports and sports media has its share of problems, and sports fans are known for letting them hear it. They’re not quite as known for letting them know when they get it right, and I’d love it if WEEI heard some encouragement on this count.

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