WHY WYMZ?

I recently started Hacks. At first, I didn't want to believe the hype. To be fair, anytime a Bravo gay tells me to watch something, I do everything in my power not to. Even though 90% of the time they are spot on with their recommendations, that remaining 10% is a LOUD 10%. But I recently moved across the country, and I'm starting over with no friends, no family around me, just lots of mountains, moose, and trees. And now I miss kinda those Bravo gays.

I watched the whole first season in one sitting. The characters are deep wells of regret, and sometimes you're left wondering why you invested several hours of your evening into the binge just for none of the characters to get their true happy ending. It's painful to sit through sometimes, but at least you're sitting through someone else's pain.

Something in the show really hit me. It's the line Deborah Vance has about having to claw your way to the top, and even then, it still never gets better. It was grim. It was enraging. It felt incredibly too real.

At 28 years old, I'm far from the top of any industry that I've ever claimed to be in. But I've been in the room, used like a Swiss Army knife, contorted and distorted for whatever purpose the person who signed my check had for me on any given day.

It's ironic. Stale environments: cubicles, conference rooms, the never-ending Google Meet call with terrible lag. I've had some of the biggest rushes of my life here. Whether I thought I was changing the world or just felt important because I knew information someone else didn't, it really didn't matter.

But as my ambition rose, I realized what was missing. Whimsy.

The internet's new drug of choice is the endless scroll. And, like so many of you, I am fully captured. Political content can be too heavy, too verbose, and, at the same time, lacking. The selfie our favorite artist takes gets way more attention than the hours of work poured into the artwork on the jacket for the records they just pressed. And tech news often feels like we're watching our bits of humanity traded at the expense of the bottom line–in real time.

I won't pretend all that isn't true. Actually, I might not even say it enough. But WYMZ is about finding that bright pink spark in a sea of fire. It doesn't get much deeper than that.