Hello! Happy new year to one and all!
I hope that you have not caught any novel coronaviruses this holiday season and that, if you have, your symptoms are/were very mild. What a fun, sexy time to be alive. Anyway, despite my visiting Ontario for two weeks, I am so far germ-free, I guess because I spent nearly all of my holiday time with immediate family far away from any city.
I’m also back after a very long time away from this newsletter, a time in which I had about 50 deadlines and managed to hit at least 45 of them. While (nearly) completing all of the work I had to do, I thought a lot about this newsletter and what I wanted to achieve with it. I’ve really enjoyed writing it and hearing from all of you who watch the things I recommend! But I think I was recommending too many things, and sometimes when I talked to people I know in real life I started to get stressed that I was repeating things I had said in the newsletter and would come off like I had prepared my conversational topics in advance. I also realized I was writing, like, 3000-word-long newsletters. That is too long. I’m not even a writer! I’m like a visual artist or something!(?)
So, welcome to the ~*new*~ newsletter. I’ve decided to change up the format a bit. I will still be sending them out bi-weekly (every-two-weeks-ly?), but I will be recommending just one thing per newsletter, and recommending it heartily!
This brings us to our very first 2022 “Stuff Emma Likes” recommendation:
Joe Pera Talks With You
Style: Soft and weird, but also genuinely funny.
Feels Like: Drinking a hot cup of tea after shovelling show.
Comparable to: “How To with John Wilson”; “Fireplace For Your Home”
Length: 3 seasons; 33 episodes total; 11-minute-long episodes
How to Watch: Canada: purchase / US: Adult Swim / UK: All4
It’s hard to know where to start with this recommendation because I just want to tell you to watch it with zero preparation. I don’t want to affect your viewing experience one bit! But I’ve realized that’s not a great way to recommend things, because generally people don’t remember what you’ve told them to watch, and they also have no reason to be interested in the thing. Instead, I’ll tell you how I became a convert to the Joe Pera way.
First, although I won’t recommend doing this, I personally watch all of writer / comedian / professional ghoul Conner O’Malley’s videos right when they’re posted, and I have noticed this kind of comment pop up every once in a while:
So I mentally noted: “watch Joe Pera Talks With You.” And then I did not watch Joe Pera Talks with You for many more months, until recently, when youtube recommended this:
I put it on one day while Peter and I were eating lunch and, after recovering from how much we were laughing, we went to work finding out how to watch more. Adult Swim used to be very accessible to Canadians, but they are making some bad business decisions lately, so it’s now region-blocked and hard to get past with a VPN. Meanwhile, SuperChannel is ~supposedly~ the only place to stream it in Canada, yet for some reason they only have season three. So Peter and I just paid for it on the streaming sites. It’s well worth the small cost for the entire series.
Here’s my pitch: Joe Pera Talks With You is exactly the cozy show we need right now. It’s formatted as an educational documentary in which our main character, Joe Pera, talks to the camera about various topics including iron ore, beans, making a chair, and eating breakfast. But Joe often gets distracted by everyday life on the Upper Peninsula where he lives and works as a middle school choir teacher. I’m still inclined not to go into too many specifics but I hope you will watch it and enjoy the experience. I genuinely think it’s legitimate fine art at times, and a very funny cozy show at other times, so there is no losing here.
Babies love Joe Pera and I think you will too.
Wishing you a wonderful 2022 with LOL (lots of love).
xo Emma