a) "Doll & Em"
I gave this a couple episodes, but I think I got the idea and don't have much of a will to keep watching. A couple of pretty middle-aged English ladies doing the mockumentary comedic caricature of themselves thing that Americans ran into the ground a decade ago, no thanks.

b) "The 100" 
For a show on the CW based on a young adult novel, this is kind of a respectable Sci-Fi show, more on the level of SyFy's better shows. Or at least, I was impressed by the pilot, I haven't really kept up with it, although my wife has and says it's been good.

c) "Broad City"
Well this pretty quickly became one of my favorite new shows, I'm already bummed that the first season is over. A couple of the later episodes had tangents that didn't totally pay off for me, but for the most part it just seemed to get funnier and funnier as it went along, particularly the hurricane episode and the wedding episode. Also it's pretty cool that Abbi Jacobson used to live in Baltimore and went to MICA.

d) "Inside Amy Schumer" 
Another Comedy Central star who went to college around here! I'll spare you another telling of how I briefly knew Amy Schumer at Towson, though. It still trips me out that she's kind of famous. This show is still cool, though, I think in the new season premiere there was one sketch that was a little stale but everything else felt like she's just hitting her stride and kinda finding a space somewhere beyond mere shock humor or absurdity for absurdity's sake.

e) "Enlisted"
I was pretty dismissive of this show at first, but it has grown on me big time. One of those sitcoms that has a lot of heart while also being almost cartoonishly silly, but fuses those two elements together in a way that works. Really strong cast, too, great to see Keith David just go for it in a comedic context.

f) "Hollywood Game Night" 
This primetime schedule filler is so self-evidently not must see TV that I only ever stumble into watching it for a while by accident, usually halfway into the show after they've introduced everybody. So the game for me is mostly trying to figure out who half of these minor celebrities even are or if I've ever seen them before. It is kinda fun, though.

g) "Brooklyn Nine-Nine"
Definitely feel like this show has come into its own by the end of the season. It shouldn't be so easy to make me laugh just having Andre Braugher say things like "oopsy doodle" and "kwazy kupcakes," but it is.

h) "Episodes" 
This will never be a great show but it is a good one. And the longer it drags on and the characters' misadventures in network television get more ridiculous and pathetic, the more that aspect of the comedy grows. This season was a little hit and miss, though, I hope that there's more John Pankow next season and that Leblanc gets to be a little more over the top again.

i) "Community"
It was weird when they recently had back-to-back episodes guest starring the creators of "Arrested Development" and "Breaking Bad," it was like a dog whistle tribute to the way Dan Harmon coming back to the show is the tipping point for TV fans to obsess over showrunners and behind-the-scenes guys. This season has been really fun, though, I think the way they kinda rebuilt the ensemble dynamic in the absence of Donald Glover and Chevy Chase has been mostly refreshing, although some of the theme episodes are a bit much, even the "G.I. Joe" one, as much as it made me laugh.

j) "The Colbert Report"
I have mixed feelings about the whole #CancelColbert ordeal -- he'd been doing the Asian racism thing as a running gag for years, initially to lampoon Rush Limbaugh, but every time he trotted it out it got further removed from that context, and a little less funny and a little less defensible. Still, the controversy itself became pretty absurd, and it raised the bar pretty high for how he would address it on the show, and I thought he killed it with that whole episode.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 06, 2014 at 2:10 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.