Have you ever been at a loss as to what to watch? Too many shows to pick from? We’re here to give you our opinions on what we feel is worth watching. Check it out and then let us know in the comments below what you’re choosing for tonight!
Phoebe’s Choice
My favorite new dark comedy is on tonight on Showtime: On Becoming a God in Central Florida. This Kirsten Dunst vehicle follows the struggles of a young widowed mother who works at a water park outside Orlando in the 1990s. Krystal Stubbs, (played by Dunst), is also burdened with crippling debt after her husband died while attempting to commit auto insurance fraud. Last week started with her back at the water park, where she took the water aerobics instructor job for the extra $64 a month because the house was under foreclosure till she could pay the fine on her alligator poaching tickets. Did I mention this show is awesome?
Krystal, along with her baby Destinee, lived in the supply room of the water park now. She kept the house shuttered and was lying to the neighbors, telling them it was under renovation. Because she was stuck with her husband’s FAM merchandise, she had to distribute the pile of boxes piling on her lawn. That is the other huge theme in this show… FAM. It is a pyramid scheme, get-rich-quick organization based on Amway. When she dropped off the new shipment to an older woman named Mimi, she found her husband’s secret. He’d bought tens of thousands of the FAM products himself, to look more successful, keeping them hidden at Mimi’s.
Cory, her husband’s old friend and “upline†supplier of FAM goods, was throwing a rally soon, and Kristen wanted to do a speech during it. She wrote an angry monologue about how FAM destroyed her family and made her homeless. Meanwhile an older man on his houseboat took advantage of a live news report about to happen near him. He showed up to talk and fly a sign about how FAM was a predatory cult that would take everything from you. Krystal found her neighbor and co-worker Ernie moping around the water park alone at night, and she did him the “favor†of taking the half-off tickets that he was having trouble getting rid of.
When Cory tried to deny Krystal the chance to make her speech, she locked him in a closet and went up anyway. She changed her speech though and instead decided to stick with FAM and gave out all the half-off tickets. The news reporter from before showed up to investigate FAM and decided to try to interview Krystal. The next week, she had dozens of people signed up for her aerobics class, so she’d make a lot more money on that job now. Also, she used knowledge of her boss’s peeping hole that he used to look into the women’s locker room to blackmail him into buying ten thousand dollars’ worth of FAM product. The man who photobombed the news had his houseboat burned into the sea – he escaped but his parrot died. In the end, Ernie decided he wanted to join the FAM team and become part of Krystal’s “downline.â€
This show reminds me a lot of Kidding, with the slow escalation of darker and darker drama tinged with absurd comedic moments. This fall looks good for dark comedy!
On tonight’s episode, “Manifest Destinee,†stricken with a bird disease; Krystal goes on an odyssey; a collection of vintage motivational tapes changes Cody’s destiny; Ernie tries recruiting.
Check out Krystal’s odyssey tonight on Showtime at 10/9c.
I’ll also be watching Pennyworth, Preacher, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and Ballers.
