#56 What I've been reading, watching and listening to this week.
A wild new documentary series and Hannah Einbinder's first comedy special.
I don’t know why it took me weeks to discover Ren Faire, the documentary series about the power struggle behind America’s biggest renaissance festival.
The three-part series follows King George, the 86-year-old overlord of the Texas Renaissance Festival, who has decided that in nine years, at the age of 95, he wants to die by assisted suicide in Switzerland.
This means he needs to find the fair’s next ‘King’ so he can spend his remaining days filtering through the women he meets on sugar daddy websites, so he can find the ‘natural-breasted’ love of his life.
This decision, of course, ignites a power struggle between the most ambitious members of the renaissance festival, who will stop at nothing to wear the crown.
It’s basically like Succession meets Tiger King meets your weirdest fever dream and it’s streaming on Binge in Australia.
In this piece on The Cut, writer Samhita Mukhopadhyay writes about how she made her job her identity and how she reckoned with that after she was fired. It’s an interesting read and it has got me thinking about whether the ‘dream job’ even exists anymore.
And tomorrow I’ll be sending my paid subscribers all the best things I’ve read on the internet this month.
I really enjoyed Hannah Einbender’s first comedy special Everything Must Go on Binge. In the comedy special, the millennial half of the Hacks duo talks about her struggle to meditate with ADHD, her parents’ deep desire to have a son and her bisexuality.
‘Tis the season for brilliant Australian true crime podcasts and the latest one racing up the podcast charts is Troubled Waters. The 10-part investigative series is looking into the mysterious death of 24-year-old Louisa Ioanndis in 2011. Louisa’s body was found facedown in a local creek and police determined there were no suspicious circumstances. However, those closest to Louisa have always doubted the findings and wondered why Louisa, a strong swimmer, entered the creek in her pink dressing gown in the first place.