It’s Friday. Looking for something to switch up your weekend, or to give you an excuse to relax a little? That’s what the Weekend Reset is for. Each week we’ll pull together five things to get your weekend started. Could be something to read or watch, something to eat or listen to, or even something to do. Enjoy the weekend fellas.
WATCH: WandaVision
This has to be the strangest Marvel property yet, and I absolutely positively love it. Taken at face value, WandaVision bears ZERO resemblance to anything Marvel’s ever done before. Instead, the show is structured like a classic TV sitcom, and by classic, I mean, classic: the first two episodes are in black-and-white with a laugh track, and the jokes and storytelling clearly echo shows like I Love Lucy and Betwitched. But what’s so delightful is that — after the second episode — the show’s format evolves: suddenly, it’s in color, the costumes are super ’70s, and we’re in a proto-version of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Promotional materials have indicated that WandaVision will evolve through all of the classic phases of TV sitcom, which I’m really excited to watch. Of course, in the backdrop, there’s something sinister going on, a bigger mystery: how did Wanda and Vision — who seem to have had their memories wiped — get trapped in a sitcom universe? Who put them there? And how can they escape? Streams on Disney + with new episodes dropping every Friday.
DRINK: An Old Fashioned
With snow falling on much of the country, with winter at it’s peak, there’s something deeply comforting about a simple, familiar, warming whiskey cocktail. There’s little I can say here about the Old Fashioned that isn’t contained in the drink’s name. A staple in the ’60s that owes its recent resurgence, in large part, to Mad Men’s Don Draper, it’s a drink as simple as they come: Whiskey. Sugar. Bitters. Stir with ice. Pour into glass. Garnish with a cherry, a bit of orange peel, or both. I love the Serious Eats recipe for its simplicity — there’s no need to reinvent the wheel when the basics work. My two suggestions: 1) if you don’t have a sugar cube or superfine sugar, you can run a bit of regular sugar through a blender (I used my Nutribullet) to grind it into a fine power that dissolves more easily into the cocktail; and 2) don’t skip the step where you stir with ice, which both chills the drink down AND dilutes it slightly, which is necessary to achieve the right flavor balance. (Photo by Paige Ledford on Unsplash)