Staff Picks: Catch a 100 Foot Wave and a GTA IV playthrough

Longtime readers of The A.V. Club may remember a time when we used to publish Staff Picks—curated recommendations from our writers based on what they’re currently watching, playing, listening to, or reading. As we continue to revive classic series and introduce new ones, we’re putting Staff Picks back in the rotation. Look for them every other Saturday (on off-weeks, we’ll have a new AVQ&A) .

This week, we have two very different but equally great picks for you from staff writers William Hughes and Emma Keates, who tout a YouTube series featuring a comedian who’s found a new and exciting way to play Grand Theft Auto and an HBO docuseries for those who want to keep the Olympics vibe going all year round.

William Hughes

GTA IV: The Fast Traffic Playthrough (YouTube)

In a world where just about every hopeful gaming streamer seems obsessed with finding a gimmick, it’s rare to stumble into a genuinely excellent idea. So imagine my recent surprise when The Almighty Algorithm pointed me toward a new YouTube series by Australian comedian Tom Walker, with one of the most genuinely hilarious premises I’d ever seen a streamer adopt. Walker—who I’ve quickly become a big fan of, thanks to a combination of genuine wit and a clear joy in subjecting himself to some truly terrible gaming ordeals—was playing through 2008 crime gaming classic Grand Theft Auto IV, with one key difference: All of the other cars were moving very fast.

Not “sports car” fast. Not even “moving plane” fast. Bullet fast. And just as lethal.

As collected in what are now eight YouTube edits of his streams (and counting!), Walker has essentially created an automotive version of hell for him and hapless, frequently pancaked protagonist Niko Bellic to suffer through. With every car in the game world except his modded to go from 0 to 10,000 in less than a second, the viewer gets to watch Walker suffer through a world where death is lurking at every intersection, and where every single effort to simply cross the street becomes a horrifying war with the God of Cars. The effect is to take even the simplest of actions from the base game of Grand Theft Auto IV—running errands, making deliveries, and, yes, taking your various needy friends and romantic partners bowling—and render them as Herculean efforts. Walker, meanwhile, is the perfect tour guide through this gas-powered Tartarus, offering up an indefatigable resistance to frustration even as the game seems to find ever-new places to spawn a car that will demolish all his progress quicker than the blink of an eye.

It’s not just that Walker has created something extraordinarily difficult with this modded version of the game—even as he sometimes takes several hours of condensed work just to clear a single one of the game’s early missions. It’s that he’s made an incredible piece of digital slapstick, a joke-telling machine where the joke, inevitably, is “And then a car hits everyone at the single worst possible moment, exploding all parties.” It’s the only appointment “television” in my life at the moment; I’m still working to get through The Bear, but every time I see a new video of Walker desperately trying to convince “the cars” not to take something from him, I know I’ve got my evening entertainment set. (Meanwhile, I’m also halfway convinced that this would make an incredible premise for a video game, period. Masocore games already delight in taking very simple actions and rendering them into horrifically complicated and painful quests; making a version of Frogger that’s basically a horror game with cars as the killers stalking you has a ton of gameplay potential.)

Emma Keates

100 Foot Wave, seasons 1 and 2 (Max)

If this year’s Olympic Games have shown us anything (well, other than that French pole vaulter’s… you know) it’s that surfing is really fucking scary. Once dismissively characterized as a sport for bushy blonde California bros hangin’ ten and catchin’ barrels, the awesome and blood-curdling power of Teahupo’o, Tahiti’s “Wall of Skulls,” seems to have finally awoken the rest of world (and Colin Jost) to the unbelievable feats—and almost unfathomable risks—these athletes undertake every day. But if Tahiti represents the frothy beginning of a new chapter for big wave surfing—at least in the eye of the landlocked public—its prologue was written over a decade ago, when a man named Garrett McNamara hopped on his board and rode a monster, 78-foot wave straight into the history books from the coast of a small Portuguese fishing village called Nazaré.

McNamara’s journey to conquer this watery Everest—and almost drown a million times in the process—is chronicled to gorgeous and heart-pounding effect in HBO’s 100 Foot Wave, a docuseries that feels sort of like the lovechild of Planet Earth and The X Games, with a little early-series Game Of Thrones “anyone could die at any moment” anxiety mixed in for good measure. (It’s obviously worse here because this is, you know, real.) Directed by Chris Smith (American Movie, Tiger King) and accompanied by a lovely score from Philip Glass, 100 Foot Wave is largely made up of the type of jaw-dropping drone footage that almost physically compels you to turn to a friend and ask how the hell they got lucky enough to catch that particular flip or fall or rescue on camera.

In just one episode we see both McNamara’s record-breaking ride and an insane earlier attempt to surf a temporary “wave” created by a collapsing iceberg in Alaska (we also learn very quickly that our star does not possess a single ounce of self-preservation in his body). Big wave surfing as a sport has to rely solely on this sort of wide-angle footage to analyze the height of its fleeting mountains; luckily for the filmmakers, it’s not like the people in charge of the awards can send someone out there with a 10-story measuring tape. The powers that be apparently do this by comparing the height of the water to the presumed height of the surfer, a measurement the documentary illustrates by literally stacking a photo of a dude on top of himself over and over to determine the final number. Even the 101 course is awesome. 

Over the course of the series’ two seasons (with a third on the way), we also get intimate portraits of the rest of Nazaré’s elite, a group comprising some of the sharpest, most impressive athletes I’ve ever witnessed, who also occasionally drop lines like “I think I was just put on this earth to surf big waves” without a glimmer of sarcasm.

100 Foot Wave has been around since 2021, but if you still need a push to finally make the drop, consider this: the Olympics may be ending this weekend, but the joy of rearranging your entire personality around a sport you’d previously never heard of doesn’t have to. I came to Paris (a.k.a. my couch and a Roku streambar) feeling like I might as well be one of the judges scoring the athletes as they defied both death and the occasional whale sighting on the Tahitian reef. By 2028, you too could almost impress your friends and family with your definitely faulty, but delightfully gained knowledge of a profoundly stunning sport.