Distractions

There is no escaping the political situation and impending clusterfrak this country and the world is facing, but just to keep sane I've indulged in pop-culture distractions lately. Some highlights:

• Lower Decks has come back strong in its fifth and final season. I rather enjoyed the Klingon sibling rivalry in the latest episode ("A Farewell to Farms") and the setting of a world newly post-scarcity partying hard while burning all their money in a prior one ("Shades of Green").
• I've also been enjoying the series Shrinking on Apple+. I watched one with my dad while I was down in California and found that it really is impossible to make any sense of it coming into the middle cold, but that's easily taken care of—just start at the beginning. Jason Segel and Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams, all wonderful as therapists that are more screwed up than their patients.
• Superman and Lois is in its final season as well, and it's been . . . fine. I mean, at the end of last season they killed Superman, so picking up from that was a mess, and the show had its budget cut by a ton and they had to lose some supporting characters, but I'm still enjoying it because I'm a big nerd.
• Season two of The Diplomat (Netflix) is just as excellent as season one was. I binged its six episodes in one evening. It might be weird to seek escape from real-life political turmoil in a fictional political mystery/thriller/drama, but I nevertheless recommend it. Great stuff and a big cliffhanger making us suffer the wait for season three.
• I haven't seen any of The Penguin yet. HBO Max, which I don't have access to. Anyone know if it's any good?
• I dug out some old novels from my bookshelf to reread, including some Heinlein books. I just finished Friday, which I first read in 1988 and had almost completely forgotten. Now I'm halfway through Job, which I must have read around that same time in the late ’80s but have no recollection of, so it's like a brand new read now. Kind of unfortunate timing in that Job is a sort of multiverse story and we've been inundated with such premises in our pop culture of late. I was going to reread I Will Fear No Evil, but apparently I don't own a copy of that one. Thought I did. I guess I borrowed it from someone else when I read it in high school; maybe I'll pick one up used somewhere. Heinlein was an interesting character, a real dichotomy of political leanings (mostly libertarian, with an unpleasant penchant for people going armed as a measure of civilization, but also in favor of regulations protecting civil rights and equality) and a brilliant futurist while still retaining a shocking-by-today's-standard level of sexism—Friday and Job are among his later works, published in the early 1980s, while most of his catalog comes from the ’50s and ’60s—in nearly all of his characters. But all of his stories have big ideas, big romance, big personalities, and fine writing if sometimes a little scattered. Some of my earliest sci-fi reads were his YA books, and I'd be curious to revisit one or two of those to see how they hold up.

Anyone have other recommendations for good distraction media? I think we're going to need a lot of it.