Have You Watched Rooster or Shining Girls? (My Thoughts)

Just so there’s no confusion, these are two VERY different shows. They just happen to both be on Apple TV, and I really enjoyed both of them.

Rooster stars Steve Carrell as a famous author who accepts a temporary teaching position at a liberal arts college, where his daughter is a professor. It’s full of other great characters and very funny moments, all while basking in the glow of a warm, welcoming college in the fall.

Rooster also consistently does something I really appreciate. In nearly every episode, a character says something that isn’t true (they’re lying to themselves just as much as they’re lying to someone else). For most shows, this would end up as the plot of the entire episode. But in Rooster, almost immediately after saying the lie, the character tells the truth. It feels so much more real than a contrived sitcom plot.

Shining Girls is a complete 8-episode miniseries based on a book of the same name. It’s an intense look at trauma mostly through the eyes of the excellent Elizabeth Moss, and there is a slightly otherworldly twist: Moss’ character’s reality shifts in subtle ways, all the time.

One of the impressive aspects of Shining Girls is that we actually spend considerable time with the antagonist, yet he is just as much a mystery to us as anything else. I commend the series for wrapping up everything in 8 episodes–that means that big questions are continually answered instead of stringing along the audience for multiple seasons.

I highly recommend both of these shows. Have you watched either of them (or anything else great recently)?