You should be reading more television
Closed captioning is your friend, especially when those damned Brits are talking


Not just sports are pointless. Watch It! is a new section on the Pointless Exercise newsletter where you get to read me drone on about movies and TV shows.
Maybe it’s because I’m getting old, or maybe it’s because I feel like I can say I’m “reading more these days” but I find myself turning the closed captioning on a lot of shows now.
This is unrelated to my visit to the doctor on Wednesday for my annual physical. After getting very excited that my lab work “is excellent in all ten areas” (I have no idea what those areas are, but I assume one of those is my groin) my doctor did a perfunctory physical exam where she checked my breathing, looked in my mouth my eyes and my ears. She told me that, “you have some wax, but nothing exceptional.” I was disappointed because I was truly hoping to have exceptional ear wax.
I have noticed through my own exploratory efforts with a q-tip into my ears (another doctor once told me to ‘never put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear’ so I’m careful, but still curious) that my left ear seemed to have more stuff in it. I asked her and she said it did and she asked me if I wanted to have them cleaned out.
And boy, did I want to. I haven’t been that excited since the time I had a work physical and they handed me a cup and told me to “fill this up,” but then they clarified that they wanted urine, not anything fun.
To my glee, not one but two nurses appeared with some syringes, some peroxide and a little cup with a cutout to help you stick it under your ear. And they were excited, too. Watching a nice long flow of wax pour out of somebody’s ear like a tepid volcano is oddly satisfying.
They started on my right (good) ear and the nurse with the syringe was immediately disappointed that that ear, “didn’t look bad at all,” and sure enough after several attempts only a little wax trickled out with the peroxide and water mixture.
But then they moved over to big lefty and…still mostly disappointment. Eventually a chunk about the size of a milk chocolate M and M flowed out of the ear and into the little cup and that was about as exciting as it got. I do think I can hear a little better out of that ear now if that’s any consolation. But it was not consolation to the disappointed nurses. I apologized to them as they left.
So I can’t even use a plugged up ear an excuse for my sudden desire to “read” a bunch of TV dialogue, because my hearing, apparently has always been fine.
But I can tell you what show started it all.
If you’ve watched any episodes of Peaky Blinders (and you should, it’s amazing) you know that you can’t understand about 70% of what those Irish degenerates say, and then when Tom Hardy joins things as Jewish mob boss Alfie Solomons, captions are a necessity. I think the only character Hardy has ever played that I can actually understand is Bane.
Imagine that. It’s almost like he had to go back and dub every one of his lines after they finished filming.
Because he did.
I also started watching Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon episodes with captions on, but that’s as much because it’s easier to figure out who the hell they are talking about with them on, as anything to do with posh accents getting in the way. George RR Martin is just fucking with us with the character names in House of the Dragon.
Think I’m kidding? Here are some of the names. Rhaena, Rhaenys and Rhaenyra. Laenor, Laena and Heleana. Aegon, Aemon and Aemond. Baela, Baelor, Baelon and Balon. I mean, come on. And then, just to really screw with us he has one named Hugh. Just Hugh.
If there are Hughs in Westeros, why aren’t there more normal names? Well, there is Jason Lannister, I guess. I guess he’s Jamie and Cersei and Tyrion’s great-great-great-great grandfather? You know what? Nobody cares.
Anyway, if you read the names as they say them you can actually kind of figure out who the fuck they are talking about most of the time. Until a dragon burns their face off. Which is always fun.
Another fun show to caption is The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, as Boyd Hilton likes to call, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of the Lord which seems right, too. I very much enjoy that show, and even thought the only Tolkien book I’ve ever read was The Hobbit and this show is apparently based on some footnotes and appendices of the three volumes (and other stuff) from The Lord of the Rings books, and they make very little effort to dumb it down for people like me who haven’t read any of it, I found it perfectly easy to follow.
There are some familiar characters in it, like Galadriel played by Morfydd Clark (love those Welsh first names) who was played by Cate Blanchett in the movies and Elrond (Hugo Weaving in the movies) who I like to call Elrond Hubbard1 and then laugh to myself as my wife looks on and tries to remember the number to Bellevue.
That show is apparently the most expensive TV show in history. And you know what? It actually looks like it. It’s amazing. No wonder Jeff Bezos couldn’t afford to let his newspaper run a presidential endorsement.
I find that watching any British show necessitates the captions, except for my all-time favorite British show, All Creatures Great and Small. I can understand all of them just fine. I don’t know why I love that show so much, but I just do. It’s just so nice. It’s based on the real life veterinarian James “Alf” Wight who wrote a bunch of books under the name James Herriot. He practiced in the Yorkshire Dales for 50 years starting in the late 1930s. Season five airs on PBS in January and the other seasons are available there and for money on Amazon Prime Video. We’re up to the part where Herriot has joined the Royal Air Force during World War II. The real guy was discharged for developing an anal fissure. I have a hunch the TV character will have something more glamorous.

All Creatures Great and Small is so good that I’m already looking forward to the scene this season when Tristan returns from the army veterinary corps. This means nothing to you. But I’m going to need a hanky.
My new favorite show, if you can call a gut wrenching murder show a favorite, is Sherwood. Season one is on Britbox, which you have to pay extra for, but there’s a 14 day free trial on Amazon Prime Video and if you time it right you could watch season one and then season two when it releases on November 14. You absolutely need captions to understand some of the accents, but an unexpected treat is that one of the coppers is played by an actor named Robert Glenister. His brother, Phillip played the greatest British cop in TV history, DCI Gene Hunt in both Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. Both of those shows are on Britbox, too, so if you really want to go nuts you could watch those. Though trying to get through two seasons of Sherwood, two of Life on Mars and three of Ashes to Ashes in 14 days is not advisable for your mental health. Unless of course next week’s election goes tits up. If it does, then what does any of it matter?
I also like that the star of the show, David Morrissey kind of looks like Morrissey did about 20 years ago. I’m easily amused.
Another show that demands closed captioning is Slow Horses on Apple TV+. You’ll miss a lot of great insults if you rely on understanding their accents. Gary Oldman alone is worth a dozen per season.
Oh, and in a crossover that probably entertained only me, one of the stars of All Creatures Great and Small, Samuel West, who plays Siegfried Farnon the fussy widowed head vet, shows up in seasons 1-3 of Slow Horses as a corrupt politician named Peter Judd. It’s almost like actors can play more than one role at a time.
Remember that when Robert Downey Jr. shows up as Victor von Doom in two years.
I took this subtitles thing to the extreme a couple of weeks ago, albeit unintentionally. I went to see Saturday Night in a real, live theater and the only showing I could make was open captioned. That’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s just the movie presented as normal but with the captions on. I was in my element. Since the Jason Reitman written dialog is pretty Aaron Sorkin-y it was kind of nice to actually see it as it was performed. I did like the movie. It’s probably more of a movie where you can afford to wait for it to stream to see it (and at this point, I think you have to now).
I was relieved to see none of the cast trying to do impressions of the famous cast members. I thought in particular that Lamorne Morris (Winston from New Girl) was good as Garrett Morris (no relation), Cory Michael Smith played a smarmy enough Chevy Chase, Matthew Rhys (The Americans) did a nice job with George Carlin and Tommy Dewey was just skeezy enough as Michael O’Donoghue, and that he and Matt Wood (John Belushi) did a good job with the one sketch you see in its entirety, the first one in SNL history:
The scene from Saturday Night that’s already famous involves JK Simmons’ Milton Berle “pulling out just enough to win” in a made up scene with Chevy and his then fiancee.
The touch I enjoyed was that Nicholas Braun (Cousin Greg from Succession) played both Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman (not the former Illini forward). And it happened in the most SNL way possible. Braun was originally cast to play Henson and Benny Safdie was going to play Kaufman, but Safdie had a conflict. Reitman called Braun to ask him to play Kaufman and Braun thought he was switching roles, until Reitman told him, “Nah, they don’t look anything alike. You can just be both.”
It’s not a great movie, but it’s pretty good. You can wait until it’s on Peacock, or whatever, to judge for yourself.
If you watched Shōgun on Hulu earlier this year you know that they did an incredible job with the subtitles. And it’s a good thing, because there are a lot of them. They made the decision—an essential one, I think—to do all of the Japanese dialogue in Japanese with subtitles. Characters who aren’t speaking Japanese are speaking Portugese but we hear those in English otherwise we’d go batty.
Because they knew they were going to do subtitles all along, they actually shot the movie with them in mind. They framed every shot to provide an non-intrusive space for them, and they are purposely placed higher in the frame than normal so that it’s easier to read the subtitles while seeing the actors…,you know…act. It works great. You forget you are reading after just a few minutes.
Here’s a non-subtitled trailer. It’s such a good show.
Anyway, take my word for it. Embrace closed captioning. You’ll pretty quickly realize just how much you actually miss.
More from Watch It!



In my mind Elrond Hubbard is not related to the scientology guy L. Ron Hubbard, he’s actually former Cubs and Rockies outfielder Trenidad Hubbard’s cousin. Trenidad went by Trent, which I always enjoyed. Maybe he’ll be in season three of House of the Dragon hanging out with Hugh? ↩