This week, A.V. Club Editor-In-Chief Danette Chavez highlights a rousing basketball documentary and Features Editor Jen Lennon shouts out a medical mystery anime series.
Although it won’t dethrone The Last Dance as the reigning basketball documentary, Michael Tolajian’s We Beat The Dream Team offers an engrossing look at a lesser-known (and slightly contentious) moment in sports history. Part of this story you likely already know: In 1992, after suffering defeats at previous Summer Olympics, the U.S. assembled the greatest basketball team ever assembled to try to save face on the global stage. And so, the Dream Team was born: Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, John Stockton, Karl Malone, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin, David Robinson, Charles Barkley, Clyde Drexler, and Christian Laettner all prepared to take on international players, with Chuck Daly as their head coach.
The Dream Team won the gold at the Barcelona Summer Olympics, naturally, but Tolajian’s doc reexamines the pressure they felt and the measures taken to ensure that victory. “Iron sharpens iron,” intones We Beat The Dream Team narrator and Basketball Hall Of Famer Grant Hill, who was on the Select Team that accomplished the eponymous feat. He and his teammates—including Chris Webber, Penny Hardaway, Bobby Hurley, Jamal Mashburn, Allan Houston, Rodney Rogers, and Eric Montross—were determined to play their best against the pros, who tried to put the college athletes in their place.
The outcome of both the 1992 Summer Olympics and the scrimmage between the Dream and Select Teams being public knowledge at this point robs We Beat The Dream Team of none of its vigor. It’d be worth a watch solely for the archival footage of multiple generations of basketball greats competing against each other, or to entertain a crackpot theory on the same level as the infamous “flu game.” More than anything, though, the doc tells a rousing story of seizing greatness. Hill is a charming guide down memory lane, at once humble and forthcoming about his prowess on the court. As he and coach Roy Williams note, the USA Select Team was hardly made up of scrubs; they were all promising athletes, several of whom would go on to play in the NBA, and they were intent on giving their opponents a run for their money. In talking heads, Hill and some of his former teammates admit that being edged out of playing in the Olympics by the pros—prior to 1992, only amateur athletes could participate—lit a fire under them as much as any bragging rights they might be due. The USA Select Team proved you should not only meet your heroes, but take the opportunity to beat them.
Jen Lennon: The Apothecary Diaries (Crunchyroll)
The Apothecary Diaries isn’t the only medical mystery anime in the game right now (Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective also exists), but it is easily the most compelling. The show, which is currently airing its second season on Crunchyroll, takes place in a fictional country inspired by Mid-imperial China during the Tang Dynasty and follows Maomao, the daughter of an apothecary who lives in the pleasure district outside the Imperial Palace. Maomao and her dad run a modest business providing herbal remedies to people in the area, including courtesans at the local brothels, until Maomao is kidnapped and sold as a worker to the Imperial Palace. She tries to keep a low profile and pretend she can’t read while quietly serving out her two-year contract in the rear palace, where all the Emperor’s concubines live, but she’s quickly found out and dragged into solving various mysteries around the palace. Jinshi, an uncommonly attractive eunuch who helps run the rear palace, is usually the one who seeks out Maomao’s help, and he eventually starts to fall in love with her, even though she remains oblivious.
Despite its lighthearted title, The Apothecary Diaries frequently subverts expectations by exploring the seemingly unending ways in which women are marginalized and preyed upon in this society, from makeup made from deadly ingredients to the fact that women can’t become doctors. Maomao has to defer to the palace doctor despite being vastly more knowledgeable than him, and though the show portrays him as a well-meaning hack who’s always willing to listen to Maomao, it never shies away from the fact that, in a more just society, Maomao would be in his position instead.
By taking place in the rear palace, the show finds a clever way of centering women in a male-dominated society and providing fertile ground for mysteries that an apothecary is uniquely suited to solve. Between the concubines jockeying for position and outside political threats, poison is a near-constant threat, and illnesses are often more complex than just a common cold.
While the mysteries are intriguing, the show’s refreshingly honest portrayal of sex work is what makes it really stand out. Maomao is frank and direct when speaking about the brothels where she grew up, and the show never treats sex as lurid. Maomao respects the courtesans and the woman who owns the Verdigris House, the town’s most exclusive pleasure house, as businesswomen, and the show respects them, too. Similarly, it presents the Emperor’s concubines without judgment and gives them all distinct personalities with unique motivations. The Apothecary Diaries (which is based on a light novel series written by Natsu Hyūga) is the rare kind of cozy comfort watch that also has something to say.
