a) "American Vandal"
I really adore this show, it's basically a spot-on parody of every recent "true crime" docuseries except it's about an asshole teenager who's been accused of spray painting dicks on all the cars in his high school's faculty parking lot. I wasn't sure if it would have legs after the initial joke was established but it's really just consistently hilarious because of the contrast between the subject matter and the execution, which is so beautifully detailed.

b) "The Confession Tapes"
It's kind of funny that a week before Netflix released "American Vandal," they released another show that's basically a perfect example of what it was parodying. It's an intriguing story but I really just can't watch too much of these shows.

c) "The Deuce"
I think that a big part of David Simon's television legacy has been that he's done shows about cities you haven't already seen a hundred shows about like Baltimore and New Orleans, full of talented, relatively unknown actors of color who went on to bigger things. So I have to admit I rolled my eyes really hard when I found out that his next project was yet another show about '70s New York, starring a pair of white movie stars as overexposed as James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal. But once I got over that, I let myself enjoy the first couple episodes of the show, which have that great old "The Wire" pacing and style of using a whole big ensemble (with more than a few "Wire" actors) by bouncing between dozens of short scenes in a given episode. I really liked the scene where James Franco's character got stopped by people who he owed money to and convinced them that it was actually his twin brother that owed them...and then I was disappointed to realize he was telling the truth and that Franco is Winklevossing in this show.

d) "Disjointed"
I have been a Chuck Lorre apologist from time to time and I think that his association with "Two And A Half Men" has kind of obscured how many of his shows have centered around women with big personalities ("Roseanne," "Cybill," "Grace Under Fire," "Mom"). So I thought that him teaming up with Kathy Bates for a Netflix series had some potential, but this show is just deeply, deeply lame, just a bunch of boring characters spitting pot jokes at each other that would be too obvious for even "That '70s Show." Also I feel bad for the music writer Maria Sherman that one of the characters on this show shares her name.

e) "The Orville"
I have never defended Seth MacFarlane to the extent I've defended Chuck Lorre, but I have some mild affection for some of the hundreds and hundreds of episodes of different shows he's churned out for FOX. But regardless of how profitable he's been for the network, it seems hopelessly indulgent for them to do an hourlong live action "Stark Trek" homage featuring his big unsettling face (granted, I actually thought A Million Ways To Die In The West was one of his better projects but it was certainly one of the least successful). There's a fair amount of his typical style of humor in this show, but it feels like they play it straight a whole lot of the time and there's just n reason this needs to have 60 minute episodes other than that that's how long episodes of "Star Trek" that had actual plots were.

f) "The State"
I'm a little amused that there's a show with the same name as the '90s MTV sketch show "The State" except it's a miniseries about ISIS. It's a little weird to see a dramatization of ISIS that has some nuance and some sympathetic portraits since that's kind of not allowed in our news or public discourse right now, but it's probably good to have something like this out there.

g) "The Vietnam War"
I like to think about how weird "a Ken Burns documentary about Vietnam, scored by Trent Reznor" would've sounded 20 years ago, but from what I've seen the score is pretty subtle and fits more than I would've expected even given Reznor's other excellent scores in recent years. It feels like a good time to look at Vietnam in this kind of detail, lately or maybe just since 9/11 I get the sense that it has receded from the national psyche, whereas growing up in the '80s and '90s it kind of hung over everything. I don't know how much of it I'll watch, I never get super far into these Ken Burns things, but the first part was interesting.

h) "Greenhouse Academy"
I was amused by Netflix's description of this show as "for ages 11 to 12" because, like, isn't that a really narrow demographic? But then I watched an episode of this adolescent soap opera about a kid who enrolls in an advanced school after his astronaut mom dies in space and I was like, yeah, a kid would really have to be an exact age to not be too young or too old to be interested in this, it really does have a narrow appeal.

i) "The Tick"
I never read the comic book they're based on, but at this point I've really enjoyed all 3 TV versions of "The Tick." This one's a little better than the previous live action attempt and not as classic as the cartoon, but they're all pretty close in sensibility. I've long thought that superhero satires are kind of more played out than serious superhero stories in terms of the same angles being mined over and over, but "The Tick" is one exception that really works, due in large part to the sheer creativity of the characters and The Tick's dialogue.

j) "The Sinner"
This really turned out pretty well, not quite on the level of "The Night Of" but I felt a similar level of satisfaction with the finale and how the miniseries resolved. I'm not the biggest fan of stories that hinge on memory loss, and memories recovered at a narratively convenient moment, but the way the whole thing was unspooled was well done, great performances by Biel and Pullman, and I also thought Joanna Adler was a real standout in a smaller role as a detective in the later episodes.

k) "Midnight, Texas"
This show is really not particularly good and kind of makes me miss "True Blood"'s better days, but there were one or two episodes where there were some good guest characters and it showed some potential.

l) "People Of Earth"
I thought it was a little odd last year when TBS had the cast of "People of Earth" appear on "Conan" last year minus the top billed actor of the ensemble, Wyatt Cenac. And then halfway through the second season, they abruptly killed off Cenac's character, basically cementing that his character was no longer the protagonist of the show. It's not a bad thing per se, although I've never had really strong feelings about this show, as unique and charming as it sometimes is, it feels a little rudderless with or without Cenac and I'm a little surprised it's been renewed for a 3rd season.

m) "One Mississippi"
This show left a bigger impression on me in the 2nd season than it did in the first, but I think I also liked it less. It tackled a lot of big issues in just 6 episodes, often sensitively and admirably, but rarely with subtlety or humor, and the daydream/fantasy sequences seemed to stick out more as just unfunny and poorly executed. Plus the show increasingly became a will-they-or-won't-they story about Tig Notaro's character and the character played by Tig's real life wife, which just felt kind of indulgent. The John Rothman/Sheryl Lee Ralph storyline was pretty charming, though.

m) "Better Things"

o) "Vice Principals"
The first season of this show made me increasingly uncomfortable with how it quickly turned into a show about white guys acting out resentment against a black woman who was their boss without really confronting that subtext in any self aware way. The second and final season seemed to be more or less resolving that storyline and leading the characters in a different direction, but still, I think I'm just tired of Danny McBride doing the same dumb asshole routine over and over and over.

p) "Con Man"
Alan Tudyk crowdfunded this a couple years ago as an autobiographical web series about an actor who was in a beloved sci fi series ("Spectrum" instead of "Firefly," etc.) going to Comic Con and other conventions, and SyFy just picked it up and started airing the episodes that had already been online. It's pretty fun, the episodes are brisk and short (SyFy fits 2 into a 30 minute timeslot) so it's a little more slight and silly than your average sitcom, but it works for the subject matter. I particularly like Sean Astin's frequent cameos as himself, I wish he did comedy more often.

q) "Ballers"
I continue to be kind of confounded by the existence of "Ballers" and the idea that the biggest action star in the world has made multiple seasons a middling HBO sitcom about advising pro athletes. Like, imagine if Arnold Schwarzenegger was also the star of "Arli$$." The show can be mildly entertaining in a pointless way, though. I liked the episode where Richard Schiff's character had a brother played by Steven Weber, as far as I'm concerned you could give those guys a spinoff.

r) "You're The Worst"
Almost any show that is centered on one relationship is gonna go through all the possible phases of the relationship in the course of the series, even a show as unusual as "You're The Worst." And the last season ended with a combo of two big phases, the proposal and the breakup, so now we're getting the main characters actually apart for once, and it's been kind of fun. And they finally got Edgar and Lindsay together, albeit in a pretty different way than what was teased at the end of the first season. Still a really insanely dark and funny show, it's just amusing to see them move the chess pieces around in the traditional way.

s) "Rick And Morty"
Dan Harmon clearly makes television that inspired a unique amount of passion, and I totally get that because I really enjoy those shows. But just as fan devotion got kind of obnoxious and smug over the course of "Community"'s run, it already feels like "Rick And Morty" has started to surpass that in its third season. But again, my complaint is not really with the show, recent episodes like "Pickle Rick" and "Morty's Mind Blowers" have been hilarious and impressive in the conceptual creativity and dialogue writing.

t) "Halt And Catch Fire"
TV used to be an all-or-nothing business where any show that wasn't canceled in its first year would try to go the distance for 7 or 8 seasons and the long tail of syndication profits and basically stay on the air long enough to fall off. So it's kind of refreshing to see cable networks increasingly let modest hits and critical darlings wrap up after a handful of seasons instead of, like, trying and failing to break them to a bigger audience and then abruptly canceling them without a chance for narrative closure. "Halt" using their 4th and final season to jump forward chronologically is at least pretty novel, and I still really enjoy watching these characters and appreciate the addition of Anna Chlumsky. But man, it's still just kind of goofy watching a bunch of fictional characters "invent" the internet instead of getting anything resembling the real story.

u) "The Strain"
"The Strain" is another show that wrapped up with its 4th season, and I think by the end I was just so burnt on the whole premise and was just watching it as a force of habit. But I did appreciate that the show ended with the death of the main character I found really dull and unlovable while the 2 main characters I liked a lot more walked off into a happy ending together.

v) "The Mindy Project"
"The Mindy Project" opened its 6th and final season to a callback to the pilot's otherwise long ago forgotten premise that Mindy is obsessed with romantic comedies, which made me think of how many times this show has changed cast members and relationships while still more or less delivering a particular style of humor very consistently. Ultimately I'm just there for the one liners, but it is a little wearying to go through the latest relationship drama, this time with her most boring and unfunny boyfriend of the show's history, who she got married to and is now almost immediately divorcing.

w) "Episodes"
"Episodes" is another show that recently returned for a final season, and it may be the only one of these going out on a high note. The first 4 seasons were about Matt LeBlanc trying to revive his career and winding up stick in a terrible network sitcom called "Pucks!" and in the 2 years since the last season of "Episodes," the real LeBlanc has begun starring in a network sitcom called "Man With A Plan" that's possibly worse than "Pucks!" is made out to be. So "Episodes" has turned to having LeBlanc become the host of a ridiculous game show called "The Box" and that plot has been pretty hysterical. I'm increasingly weary of Hollywood satires where stars have their cake and eat it too by playing unflattering versions of themselves, but LeBlanc is just really funny in this show.

x) "Broad City"
I'm kinda glad this show took a longer than usual break between seasons, I needed to start to miss it a little. It's still really good but I feel like they've just kind of embraced their cultural cachet in that boring way where there's always celebrities getting cameos and there'll be a whole episode where RuPaul is in the A plot and Shania Twain is in the B plot and they really could just focus on the main cast.

y) "American Horror Story: Cult"
I have started most seasons of "American Horror Story" and have only finished one of them, the one last year, which I thought really ended in a self indulgent tailspin. And I don't think I'll last much longer with this one. The idea of tackling the political landscape of America in 2017 in this way has potential but Ryan Murphy just does everything with an incoherent, chaotic sensibility that I just don't enjoy at all, I still don't think he even really understands the genre of horror. The Billy Eichner role has at least been entertaining though.

z) "The Daily Show"
Jon Stewart has been proven right in the sense that he was right that if he left "The Daily Show" just before the election cycle, that would prove to be enough of a ratings boost to provide the next host with a launching pad for a long tenure. But I don't think Stewart has been vindicated much in his choice of Trevor Noah, but he's gotten ratings good enough that I think we're stuck with his lightweight approach for the foreseeable future as "Daily"'s various cousins and offspring run circles around it. I remember the other night he ended a pretty serious segment with the punchline "genocide Milli Vanilli," and I just felt like that was Trevor Noah in a nutshell, those flippant meaningless little pop culture analogies.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21, 2017 at 8:37 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.