a) "Miracle Workers"
This show, where God and his angels operate like a disorganized bureaucracy manipulating the lives of people on Earth, is difficult not to compare to "The Good Place," and that comparison doesn't flatter it. But I do enjoy the absurdity of Steve Buscemi as a lazy, disheveled God, who uses a Tinder-like app to try to find a new prophet to speak to, and has to be talked out of destroying Bill Maher's penis. The main plot, where a couple of angels try to save the Earth by getting two awkward nerds to kiss, although Geraldine Viswanathan is absolutely charming (Daniel Radcliffe's role seems kind of bland and beneath him, I don't know why he bothered). I just kinda wish instead of doing a one-off 7-episode miniseries that tries to make that plot seem interesting, they'd just do an ongoing series that focuses on the inherent humor of the premise more.
b) "The Umbrella Academy"
Even though I don't really read comics, I always thought it was so badass that Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance had this whole other successful career with comics and I was really anticipating this show. After watching a few episodes, though, I'm still kinda waiting for it to click, Robert Sheehan is really entertaining and there have been a few great action setpieces but a lot of the characters are just kind of dull. Also it kind of feels like Way made
The Royal Tenenbaums with superpowers, complete with the adopted sibling romance.
c) "The Order"
This show about a college student who joins a secret order and enters a world of monsters and magic was rolled out by Netflix just a few weeks after "The Umbrella Academy" and makes me feel like we're really being inundated with a lot of TV right now from a genre that I'm tempted to describe as 'sexy young adult Hogwarts,' with "The Magicians" and "Deadly Class" (ok, "The Umbrella Academy" isn't really about a school, but these shows still kind of fall into a particular category). "The Order" is by far the weakest of all these shows, but it's kind of promising, I've liked Katharine Isabelle in other shows and she seems well cast as a villain.
d) "Workin' Moms"
I always had a crush on Catherine Reitman from her occasional 30 seconds of screentime on "Black-ish" so I'm glad that the Canadian sitcom she created and stars in is now available on Netflix (the first season, anyway, hopefully the other 2 seasons that have aired in Canada will hit Netflix eventually too). And it's really really good, kind of gets the blunt warts-and-all comedy about motherhood right in all the ways that the Australian show "The Letdown" aimed for but didn't quite hit the mark. The whole cast is impressive, particularly Dani Kind and Jessalyn Wanim.
e) "The Passage"
My wife read some of the novels this show is based on so sometimes she kinda gives away a bit of where the story is going and I'm pretty interested to see how long the show stays on the air and how far into the story they get to go. FOX putting Mark-Paul Gosselaar on a new show again so soon kind made me mad about them canceling "Pitch" all over again, but I'm really pleasantly surprised at how he's turned out to be a reliably compelling actor. Babcock is really the most interesting character in the show to me, though my wife says the character was a guy in the books and in the show Babcock is a teenage girl played by Brianne Howey.
f) "Black Monday"
I always thought that "House Of Lies" was beneath Don Cheadle, so I really rolled my eyes when I saw that after it finally went off the air, he signed up for another Showtime comedy about a sleazy fast talking businessman. But "Black Monday" feels like a very different show to me, in part because it's an '80s Wall Street period piece, and in part because it was co-created by David Caspe of "Happy Endings" fame. "Black Monday" very much has the same kind of clever, absurd dialogue as "Happy Endings," just with way more jokes about cocaine and '80s movies, and in some ways it kind of clashes with the concept of the show, which is constantly counting down to the historic titular stock market crash and, it's often implied, possibly the death of the main character. But it's more enjoyable than not, with Cheadle and Regina Hall and Andrew Rannells and Casey Wilson firing all this ridiculous dialogue at each other.
g) "Flack"
I forget sometimes how crappy the production values can be in British television until I see a show like this, where the first episode looked like a student film, which was especially jarring because I'm used to seeing Anna Paquin in major movies or a big budget show like "True Blood." I think maybe subsequent episodes looked a little better or I got used to it, though. There have been some pretty funny bits here and there about the life of a PR flack. But tonally I feel like the show is kind of caught between being a trashy satire and being something a little more serious and woke with higher dramatic stakes, to a lesser degree than "Black Monday."
h) "The Widow"
On Amazon's "The Widow," Kate Beckinsale plays a British woman whose husband dies in a plane crash in Africa, but the more she learns about what happened, the more she realizes that not all is as it seems. It's kinda dour, I don't know if I care enough to keep watching and solve the mystery.
i) "White Dragon"
On Amazon's "White Dragon" (called "Strangers" in the UK), John Simm plays a British man whose wife dies in a car crash in Asia, but the more he learns about what happened, the more he realizes that not all is as it seems. OK it's really not that much like "The Widow," but I couldn't help but notice the parallels when these shows came out on the same service 3 weeks apart. "White Dragon" is a little more intriguing to me, partly because it gender flips the more common 'man turns out to have had a 2nd family the wife knew nothing about' story, but I haven't watched too much of it yet.
j) "American Soul"
I was looking forward to the idea of a lavish period piece series about the history of "Soul Train." And then I watched the first 5 minutes of the "American Soul" pilot, which featured an elderly Don Cornelius sitting at home watching Gladys Knight on an old episode of "Soul Train" and putting a gun to his head, and I just soured on the whole thing. What an absurdly bad way to tell Cornelius's story. And the rest of the first couple episodes I watched really were not good enough to overcome that start.
k) "The ABC Murders"
I've only watched 1 of the 3 episodes of this so far, but I enjoy John Malkovich in almost anything and a detective in a mystery is an especially good fit for him. Agatha Christie wrote 30 other novels about Malkovich's character, Hercule Poirot, so hopefully they'll bring him back for more of these.
l) "Tropical Cop Tales"
This is one of those Adult Swim shows from the 'unceasingly loud and aggressively unfunny and pointless' end of the spectrum, I actually really like the visual style of the show and can imagine maybe a slightly less absurdist, more traditionally satirical half hour version of this show really appealing to me, but as is I just kind of hate it.
m) "Weird City"
I haven't bothered with the first couple free episodes of an original series from YouTube Premium (formerly YouTube Red) since the entertaining "Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes On Television," but I figured I'd check out this anthology series produced by Jordan Peele. I really, really hated it, though, I'm surprised that it's gotten mostly positive reviews. For a sci-fi show that takes place in a city of the future where a wall literally separates the haves from the have-nots, its social commentary is surprisingly toothless. Everyone just walks around like their absurd dystopia, where people buy crystal meth-infused pomegranate juice from vending machines, but it's all kind of sitcommy and goofy, not even
Idiocracy-style broad satire, and I just hated the stories in the first 2 episodes, especially the repulsive Michael Cera one.
n) "Northern Rescue"
Even though I think it's kind of annoying for people to act amazed at the similarities between siblings, I have to admit it's very hard to watch Billy Baldwin (excuse me, William Baldwin, as he's billed) in this Canadian drama without feeling like I'm watching an uncanny valley simulation of Alec Baldwin. They've always been the 2 most similar of the Baldwin brothers, but as they get older it's especially striking. Show seems kind of boring though.
o) "Losers"
I feel like this Netflix doc series about profiles in losing is a really great idea, well executed. I often think about how at any given moment, at least the half of the people playing in a team sport or competition lost their last game or match or whatever. In most other professions and pursuits, there are good days and bad days, but it's not so black and white, you don't have to see things as a loss. In sports, though, sometimes you just lose, and I like how they highlight stories of people who found another path after a big loss.
p) "Dating Around"
This Netflix show kind of feels like a refreshing take on the hoary old dating show format, you just watch someone go on 5 blind dates and at the end you see which person they choose to go on a second date with. There's no narration, no host, no interviews, you just see how they interact and kind of find yourself guessing or hoping who they pick, it's stupid and voyeuristic but I feel like here and there you see some genuine emotion.
q) "The Giant Beast That Is The Global Economy"
There are so many shows with funny people doing deep dives about big, complex issues that this Amazon show with Kal Penn talking about world economics seems to have already faded into the background. But I was impressed with what I've seen, the angle that it's this big intimidating topic that people really need help getting their heads around is, I think, pretty correct for most people and certainly for me, and they made it pretty entertaining and digestible.
r) "Presidents At War"
This History Channel miniseries about the military experience of POTUSes is interesting, although I think the big takeaway that will stick with me is how weird it is to see pictures of Richard Nixon as a young man but still that big ugly prematurely old-looking Nixon head.
s) "The Gifted"
I liked the addition of Grace Byers to the cast, but for the most part season 2 of "The Gifted" was just a bigger slide towards being less and less interesting to me than the first season was. It's occasionally entertaining, but it's a big ensemble and some of the characters are just dull to me. Also, Erg, the mutant who has one eye he sees through and one with an eye patch covering it that he blasts energy beams out of of, really has the character design they should have given Cyclops in the first place.
t) "Corporate"
The first season of "Corporate" was solid but I still kinda dismissed it as 'dark Dilbert' or whatever latest satire of office culture. But I have to admit that the second season has been great, every episode has just taken apart some topic or another (dogs in the office, going out on a weeknight, bosses invading employees' privacy) in some hilarious creative way or another.
u) "I'm Sorry"
This show has also really grown on me after 2 seasons. There are so many shows about the life of comedians and comedy writers and so on, but what "I'm Sorry" kind of nails better than others is the idea that someone who comes up with funny, dirty, inappropriate jokes all day can't always shut it off when they're talking to their kids or parents at school, etc. I miss Jason Mantzoukas not being around in the second season, but Andrea Savage and Tom Everett Scott have great obnoxious married couple banter.
v) "Crashing"
"Crashing" is very much of a piece with other shows about the lives of comedians, and when it debuted I found the initial format of each episode being about a different famous comic hanging out with Pete Holmes and playing an unflattering version of themselves kind of wearying. But by the end of the third season, I felt like the episodes stopped feeling so formulaic and it had really grown on me. I'm not surprised it didn't get renewed, but I think they ended on a good note. After one season about Pete's wife cheating on and leaving him and one season about him dating someone who barely seemed to like him, I was actually rooting for his relationship this season before it all kind of went awry in a way that was somewhat dramatically satisfying. Pete Holmes should've known that showing his ass on HBO and having sex in clothing store dressing rooms was not what people tuned in for, though, it felt like they were just forcing the premium cable content at a certain point.
w) "High Maintenance"
I like to make fun of this show a lot because it's almost like the endpoint of decades of TV made under the assumption that every single thing that happens in NYC is interesting (actual dialogue: "What happened?" "New York happened. She got me." "She gets you, but then she gets you"). But now and then there's a pretty entertaining episode like the Cat Cohen one, I love her. I really just do not care about 'The Guy' or find it charming that he doesn't have a name, or that they gave him a girlfriend and got Britt Lower all disheveled and hipstery for the part.
x) "Documentary Now!"
Everybody involved in this show has a bunch of other projects, but I'm amused that the guy with the most writing credits on the third season, Seth Meyers, is the one who literally hosts a talk show 5 nights a week. It's been really great so far, though, the 2-part cult episode got off to a slow start, but then the 2nd part after the twist was maybe the funniest episode they've ever done, and the musical cast recording episode was also just fantastic, I can't believe John Mulaney wrote all those hysterically perfect songs just for the episode.
y) "Broad City"
I feel like "Broad City" has been gently rolling down hill from the first season where it felt kind of fresh and exciting, so right now seems the right time for them to do a final season and move onto other things. They're both such great performers that I'm more interested in seeing them do other things at this point. A couple of the recent episodes have been good, though, Ilana Glazer is still occasionally just an insane force of nature.
I've had a love/hate relationship with this show for the last 9 seasons, and with Emmy Rossum's last episode airing this week, I'd like to think I'm probably done with it. She was really the glue of the show, I don't think it makes sense without her (in fact I was always hoping they'd kill off William H. Macy if the show ever continued without one of the main stars). But I have to admit, they did a good job with these last few episodes of giving Fiona a nice arc to go out on, kinda hitting rock bottom and then getting to start over while also giving Lip a chance to kind of grow up and step into her role in the family. Maybe Emmy will finally get a well deserved Emmy out of this.
