Agent Palmer

“Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?” isn’t just a small documentary series on Netflix about one ad campaign. This is a nostalgia fest of 90s culture, a deeper look into the Cola Wars, and a showcase of documentary-making about a court case.

In 1995, Pepsi launched their “Pepsi Stuff” campaign. At the end of the launch commercial, it displayed on screen that for 7 million Pepsi points, you could get a Harrier Jet. John Leonard took that seriously, and what happens from there is documented in this series.

Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds bought a Welsh football club, or soccer team if you prefer the American lexicon. It just so happens to be the third oldest professional football club in the world, Wrexham AFC. Why Wrexham? Why Rob and Ryan? Those two questions and many more can be answered, to some degree, in Welcome to Wrexham.

The series Welcome to Wrexham is part business documentary, part travel documentary, part history documentary, and part sports documentary with a throughline of the human condition.

From the very beginning of the series, The Bear from FX is a tense, anxious, anxiety-ridden tale of heartbreak, depression, passion, food, and change. Because of that, I didn’t binge it. I couldn’t have even binged it if I wanted to. The episodes are so raw that I need the time in between, even if it was a day, to calm down.

It’s well written, brilliantly acted, and insofar as I can tell, it’s the closest real-world depiction of many descriptions from Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential that I’ve ever seen on any screen.

My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman is simply brilliant. If you have Netflix, it has likely been suggested to you as a touted original series, but if you are a fan of people in general – not just celebrity or long form conversation, comedy, or anything, just people – then this show is built for you.

He definitely hand selected the cream of the crop for guests, but these celebrities and personalities are people, and David Letterman gets everything out of them.

They’re back with a new season or series (depending on who you ask) on Amazon Prime. Along with their long-overdue revival comes The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks, a two-part documentary about their decades-long journey from origins to success, failure, and everything else in between.

I have yet to watch the new material, and I will, but a few months ago, I started rewatching the old stuff.