Gloss: Here for It, #360
Hi! It's R. Eric Thomas. From the internet?
Hi!
I demand to know what the lip gloss budget is on the television show Paradise.
HELLO! This has consumed my thoughts for weeks and I cannot be silent anymore.
Minor spoilers follow for Paradise but rest assured I do not actually know what's going on in the plot, per se, so I couldn't really spoil it for you if I tried.
I love a television show where the lore is so complex that I just stop trying to figure out the big mystery and let the colors and shapes glide over my eyeballs like I'm a six-month-old doing tummy time in front of an iPad playing Ms. Rachel.
Bloop bloop, brain still developing!
Paradise is like Lost in that there's a big central puzzle that is maybe supernatural but the show is created by the same person who created This Is Us, so everyone is very nice and has a very interesting backstory. They're always like "Oh, maybe I'm time traveling. But first, allow me to tell you a story about the kind nun that raised me..."
I love it. And, unlike, This Is Us no one has been killed by a malfunctioning crockpot, so the shareholders of the InstaPot company can put away the Xanax.
The basic premise of Paradise, which is finishing its second season tomorrow, is that there's been a global catastrophe that has wiped out most of the world's population. A small group of people is living in a mountain bunker that resembles the old world--stores, streets, fake sky, Wisteria Lane-vibes, et cetera.
At the beginning of the second season, the lead character, Xavier (Sterling K. Brown, an actor who as more charisma than should be allowed by law) sets off into the ravaged outside world to find his wife Teri (Enuka Okuma), three years after the disaster that wiped out all electronics and caused major tsunamis and, I think, some kind of nuclear bomb-type cloud cover (again, I'm not super-sure. I was born mere weeks ago and I am just working on object permanence at this time.)
Things are bad in the outside world because of the whole apocalypse situation but honestly not as bad as one would think. Everyone's clothes are kind of apocalypse chic--muted colors but not a lot of wrinkles. We're doing ironing at the end of the world, henny!
Honestly, I'm not sure how I survive without my steamer and a little bit of fabric softener, but I guess it's like vacationing in Europe in an Airbnb with a weird box that apparently is a washing machine and a bunch of clothing lines for drying. You show up in Florence like, "girlina, I don't think this is going to work out so well!" but by the end of the trip you're like "Every garment I own must be kissed by the sun! Tell that Snuggle Bear to kiss my ass goodbye!"
Anyway, on a recent episode, Sterling K. Brown was getting very close to finding Teri. Exciting! And he's been traveling in the post-disaster world for weeks surviving on boiled rat or something and fighting off bands of rapscallions of the sort one finds in an end-of-the-world situation.
(How does one join a Mad Max-style gang after an apocalypse, me wonders. I'm famously never going to find out because I am opting out of the end of the world. I am taking PTO that day. You will not find me fighting a child for the last bag of Scandinavian Swimmers at a burnt out Trader Joe's. Can you imagine?! Actually, if I did have to traverse the barren landscape with a gang of people with eye patches and mood disorders and we came upon an abandoned Trader Joe's I'd probably be like, "I dunno gang, there's just a lot of preservatives in this food. Let's keep going until we find, like, a Whole Foods.")
Okay, so, Xavier has had to survive in the elements for weeks with literally nothing because his backpack got stolen (by children!!) and his plane crashed and he was riding a horse (!) and it's all a lot and yet in a pivotal scene Sterling K. Brown shows up on screen looking like this:
YA BOY IS FRESH TO DEATH, HENNY!
Call Lil Mama cuz his lip gloss is poppin'!
I love that somewhere along the way he parked his horse outside the shell of a Sephora and went digging for a tube of Fenty Beauty Gloss Bomb Universal Volumizer. Honestly, slay. It's called priorities, look it up!
The man's smackers are slick! Out here looking like a rainy street in a romantic film about Pareeee. Out here shining like the top of the Chrysler Building as described by Miss Hanigan in Annie. Out here glimmering like the placid surface of an ocean at golden hour as observed from the kitchen of a beach house in a Nancy Meyers movie.
This is the programming I'm trying to see! Yes, there are no resources in this world and everything is randomly dusty but let's keep our Black people moisturized! If I'm going to watch an end-of-the-world show, I want to watch people who had the foresight to hoard tubs of cocoa butter and maybe a little hyaluronic acid serum, as a treat!
I don't turn on my television to look at ashy elbows and wrinkled clothes! I'm trying to see beauty! I'm trying to see glamour! I'm trying to see at least three coats of Paula's Choice Pro-Collagen Peptide Gloss Lip Balm. JUICED UP! How you gonna be kissed by the sun with chapped lips! Let's be serious!! HELLO!
Lately on Asking Eric
You can find my daily advice column in over 100 newspapers across the country as well as online!
I don't turn on my television to look at ashy elbows and wrinkled clothes,
Eric
