Monday Media Musings - 7/26/21

Leverage, Seasons 2-5: I've mentioned a couple of times that I've been the process of rewatching Leverage original flavor, in part because of the new series and in part because it's never a bad time to watch Leverage again, but this was a little different, because I convinced T to watch it with me. Although he never quite fell in love with the series, he enjoyed it well enough that we decided to binge the last three seasons over the course of about two weeks so that we could move on to the new show more quickly, and we watched the original series finale on Wednesday. The show holds up completely for me, and in many ways feels ahead of its time, both in terms of how it depicts the worst excesses of capitalism, politics, and law enforcement, and the technological capabilities of the team. I'm really looking forward to moving on to the new series and seeing how it gets updated for the smart phone, post-Trump era.

Olympics update: I stayed up way too late last night to watch the women's gymnastics qualifiers and a few major swimming finals. The fact that Simone Biles can be having an off night, to the point that even I was able to notice, and still finished as the top qualifier for the all-around and got into all four apparatus finals is testimony to just how amazing she is. The women's 400m freestyle had a pretty thrilling finale, with Ariarne Titmus's come-from-behind win over Katie Ledecky. The Olympic swimming rivalry between the US and Australia is a pretty fun one, because although you can tell everyone wants to win, there's also no long-term heat over it -- they're also all friends and colleagues, and it feels like there's no real hard feelings afterwards. It helps that I don't have any personal investment in Team USA coming home with lots of medals -- I'm in this for the sports stories, not the jingoism. So far today, I've watched some archery, some badminton, and one diving event ( cutting spoilers for events that may not have aired on US prime time TV at time of posting )