Not saying that they're *not* selling out for the love of the game. I don't know these people. But Hank Green made a video last year about why celebrities sometimes take these seemingly stupid commercial deals. It *might* be more complicated than that.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHzr...

It's that feeling of connectedness and community that really makes Inside something special. How it reminds us not that everything will be okay, but that everything *can* be okay. Not that we shouldn't despair, but that we should remember to despair together.

And I just think that's neat.

But, even though it doesn't give any answers or tell everyone that everything's going to be okay, it also has a quiet warmth to it that I can't quite describe. It's not saying that the world isn't going to fall apart. Instead, it reminds the viewer that they aren't alone in feeling that it will.

It would've been so easy to make a special like this and have it purely be about how much everything sucks and how nothing is going to get better, but Burnham didn't do that. Yes, the show is certainly filled with doomerism and jokes about the inevitable, upcoming apocalypse.

The dread and discomfort elicited by this song's presentation are wrapped up in the story of Burnham's *successful* mental health journey. Of someone breaking down completely and going through a personal crisis that nobody reading this thread can fully understand, and then coming out the other side.

Except that the framing narrative of this section of the special is Burnham's recovery from trauma. The "joke" is that he was having panic attacks on stage and took a few years off to get better, and now that he feels like performing again, he can't. But he *does* feel like performing again.

So, we find ourselves in this weird situation where isolation is a shared experience. Watching this silly, edgelord teenager from the late aughts do a stupid dance in his room. Holding each-other's hands through a worldwide trauma that we're never going to fully recover from.

And you realize after a second that everyone in the world is going through this experience right now. We're all at the same shitty concert and the band won't stop doing encores. We've all got the same feeling of hopelessness. The same dread. The same knowledge of how fragile everything really is.

Except, there is a crowd, isn't there? When Burnham picks up his handheld camera and swings it wildly around his bedroom, filming an audience that isn't there, millions of people were watching. Millions of people were staring at their screens, solemnly nodding. Empathizing. Unshaven. Hair uncut.

Burnham emphasizes that feeling with his canned applause and his laugh tracks, but he really hammers it home in the beginning when he's doing nothing but staring right into the camera. Locking eyes with the viewer. Making that one-on-one connection that emphasizes the fact that there is no crowd.

He's unshaven. Hair uncut. Standing in his bedroom, alone, singing into a microphone for nobody. And that's something that every single person who lived through Covid can relate to. The feeling that the world got smaller. That standards got lower. How it felt like the world was hibernating.

when we can hear the sound of an audience laughing, an audience cheering, just the usual sounds that one would hear if they'd gone to a Bo Burnham concert. But, of course, there's nobody around. There's a dirty, cluttered bedroom. Burnham is wearing an old t-shirt and boxers.

There are a lot of parts of this sequence that I could really sink my teeth into, but the one that strikes me most is near the end when Burnham walks up, grabs the camera, and starts waving it around like he's filming his audience at the end of a long concert. There are a few times during the song

(To be fair, I went through all the shows that could possibly have been nominated, and Solo Leveling does still somehow make it into my top ten. It was a terrible year for anime.)

(Allow room for two prequels. Megone and one that's just called M3gan 2.)

(This is an ad campaign running on Hulu that *seems* to be saying, "People think Tinder is just for hookups, but you can totally find a life partner here, too!" But what it actually says is, "It's great to be wrong about Tinder," and that just doesn't seem like a great way to get customers to me.)

Then again, there's also a scene where a man proposes to a woman, and they had him saying, "This man is my fiance. I'm going to marry him." So. . . maybe *just* have them committed.