The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Thursday, August 20

Hello, everyone!

A little bit of trivia to start, if you want to answer some. The Europa League 2020-21 season started yesterday and continues today with the preliminary qualifying round with 16 teams. Guess where they’re from based on their names:

1. SP Tre Penne; 2. SC Gjilani; 3. Lincoln Red Imps FC; 4. FC Prishtina; 5. FC Santa Coloma; 6. FK Iskra Danilovgrad; 7. UE Engordany; 8. FK Zeta; 9. Glentoran FC; 10. HB Tórshavn; 11. St Joseph’s FC; 12. B36 Tórshavn; 13. Coleraine FC; 14. SP La Fiorita; 15. NSÍ Runavík; 16. Barry Town United FC

Ramble of the Day

over the last several months, I have stumbled upon perhaps Hollywood’s most prolific series of films: Lifetime’s The Wrong series. Produced by actress Vivica A. Fox, who also makes cameos in each of them, the anthology series uniquely tells stories of murder and deception by introducing the wrong type of people into our protagonists’ lives. We’re talking about stories like The Wrong Roommate, The Wrong Boy Next Door, and and The Wrong Cheerleader. The series started in 2016 and is 17 films strong so far, following the Lifetime principles of being low quality in almost every aspect and ridiculous on top of that.

The Wrong series is pretty amusing in its own right, though; allow The Soup’s Jade Catta-Preta and Fox herself to demonstrate:

(Isn’t the best part when Fox chimes in correcting our protagonists and saying the movie’s title?)

The film series, and Lifetime movies generally, has been described as a modern day version of fables by Patrick Serrano, the host of a Lifetime movie recap podcast, that puts the onus on the protagonist and in its own way, the audience. “It’s on you. You chose the wrong wedding planner. You chose the wrong tutor,” Serrano said. As for Fox, she plays authority figures who is the audience figure in the film, questioning house sitters and wedding planners and affirming their bad choices at the end of each film.

Of course, an important aspect of The Wrong series is that the films aren’t very good. The montage by The Soup proves as much and the author of the OprahMag.com piece, Elena Nicolaou, describes the movies as such: “Watch enough, though, and the movies blend together in a blur of creepy string music and paranoia, all serving to emphasize their shared world-view: Trust no one, especially people who seem too good to be true.”

Everyone seems to be a good sport about it, though. The network commissioned Sisqó to re-record his “Thong Song” in service of a marathon of The Wrong films, appropriately titled “Wrong Song,” which is currently stuck in my head because I watched it while doing research for this Hoddle. Fox herself seems to be a good sport about it, mentioning how hard it is to be right all the time, thanking psychopathic stepparents while accepting a fake award, and playing along with some new Wrong scenarios. (The Wrong Dispensary is perfect in that Lifetime humor way.)

Fox and the Wrong crew have created a perfectly silly product, a special sauce that has no right being enjoyable even as a bad product but somehow delivers.

tl;dr: Lifetime’s got a series of movies produced by Vivica A. Fox — The Wrong movies — and it’s somehow amusing because everyone’s clearly in on the joke.

Stay informed, watch this: Elaine Quijano on Aesha Ash, the first Black female teacher at the School of American Ballet in New York for CBS Evening News
Gia Kourlas also interviewed Ash about her journey and being a Black woman with mostly White colleagues in ballet for The New York Times

Links of the Day

Barcelona hired Ronald Koeman as the team’s manager, making his return to the club after a six year playing spell.

The FA will allow non league men’s clubs and third and fourth division women’s clubs in England will be allowed to fill 15% of stadiums from Saturday.

CBS All Access reportedly picked up the U.S. rights to the women’s Champions League tournament to conclude the 2019-20 season.

Transfer updates: Reading signed Jess Fishlock on loan from OL Reign; Sheffield United signed Aaron Ramsdale from Bournemouth; Dortmund signed Reinier from Real Madrid; Bristol signed Emma Bissell from Manchester City; Aston Villa signed Ben Chrisene from Exeter City

A longer read: Mike Henson interviews Başakşehir’s Demba Ba on his demand of recognition and solidarity with Uighur Muslims in China for the BBC