a) "Future Man"
I'm only 4 episodes into this new Hulu show (and am generally irritated with Hulu for starting to adopt Netflix's strategy of releasing entire seasons at once, I like getting one pellet to digest per week). But it's really great, "Misfits" and "Crazyhead" creator Howard Overman making his first show with an American cast and crew. The premise of a modern day loser finding out that the video game he's been playing is real and that he has to go on a special mission to save the world is not terribly original, but the execution of the idea, with Eliza Coupe and Derek Wilson in insanely committed performances as video game warriors named Tiger and Wolf who have come to life.

b) "SMILF"
I've never been a single parent, but as a parent I kind of look at single parents with a sense of awe and respect and think they don't get enough respect in our culture, so I appreciate shows like "SMILF" or "Better Things" that give a sympathetic, funny warts-and-all portrayal of single parenthood. Frankie Shaw made a short film about her experiences as a mom, and then adapted it into this Showtime series that she stars in, which is pretty impressive, but the show has a low key charm, I'm still kind of waiting to see if it has legs beyond a strong pilot.

c) "Godless"
I think it was a bit of a mistake for this Netflix miniseries to be promoted as being principally about an 1880s mining town populated almost entirely by women after a mining accident, because you don't really meet most of the female characters until the 2nd episode, and the male characters still drive most of the action and dialogue. But otherwise, I find it really engrossing and well acted, and after 3 episodes I'm still not entirely sure what the arc of the whole 7 episodes is going to look like.

d) "Damnation"
This show about 1930s Idaho has better than average production values for the USA network, and the first couple episodes were promising, but I have to admit that I lost a lot of interest in it after I started watching "Godless," which is a little similar and a lot more gripping.

e) "She's Gotta Have It"
The idea of Spike Lee going into series television is interesting, although I'm not sure why he went for an update of one of his first films instead of a new idea. It's pretty odd to see someone besides Spike play his 'Mars' character, especially in the present day but still wearing Mars's extremely '80s outfits, I don't know if we're just supposed to process him as a big retro dork now or what. There have been some funny and bold moments in the episodes I've watched, but Lee's directorial style and sense of humor are I think more suited to features, it really wears thin as a serialized show that purports to have some kind of plot.

f) "Marvel's Runaways"
Between Marvel's half dozen shows on Netflix and the other half dozen on networks, the MCU is officially way harder to keep up with on TV than it is in the movie theater. And while the Runaways aren't entirely like The X-Men, I'm not really chomping at the bit for another team of superpowered angsty teens, and have really gotten very little out of the first couple episodes of the show.

g) "Marvel's The Punisher"
I will forever associate Jon Bernthal with the Tony Danzaesque sitcom meathead he played on "The Class," so I wasn't really impressed with him when he popped up as The Punisher on "Daredevil" last year. And The Punisher in general is kind of a bland character by Marvel standards who they've brought to life in a very self-serious way for this series. I like the supporting cast,though, particularly Amber Rose Revah.

h) "There's...Johnny!"
I never subscribed to Seeso, which I guess means I'm part of the problem of Seeso recently shutting down, but this show was produced by Seeso and then Hulu picked it up when it ended up with nowhere to air. Paul Reiser created this show as kind of love letter to Johnny Carson, about a teenager who writes a fan letter to Carson and then moves to L.A. to work at "The Tonight Show" in the '70s And Ian Nelson, the kid, is the kind of bland 'new kid in town' protagonist who I always roll my eyes at, and the show is totally dull and earnest for the fist ten minutes or so until he gets to the studio and meets the wonderful Jane Levy (from ABC's "Suburgatory") and the rest of the cast and the whole thing livens up considerably. One of the things I really like about the show is that they recreated the "Tonight Show" set so faithfully that they can weave footage of actual Carson-hosted episodes of the show in and kind of tell fictionalized backstage stories about those episodes in a clever, seamless way. It beats the hell out of "I'm Dying Up Here" having a Carson played by someone who looks and sound nothing like Carson.

i) "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel"
This was the clear standout of the 5 pilots Amazon released in March, so I'm happily unsurprised that it's the one that got a full series order. And I've ended up kind of sitting around today watching almost the whole season, Rachel Brosnahan is really just a sensational performer and almost makes it plausible for a 1950's housewife to walk onstage at a comedy club and kill the crowd just free associating. She finally bombs in the 5th episode, which seems like a long time for the other shoe to drop. But it's a very snappy, entertaining show, and I say that as someone who never took to "Gilmore Girls."

j) "Hot Date"
I always had an enormous crush on Emily Axford when she'd appear on "Adam Ruins Everything," so I was happy to see that she got her own show on the POP network. It's sort of a sketch show but in a "Portlandia" format where 2 people, Axford and Brian K. Murphy, play virtually all the characters in a series of vaguely overlapping narratives. It's a pretty entertaining show, both of the stars just throw themselves into every character and the wigs are good enough that sometimes you forget that it's the same actors over and over.

k) "If You Give a Mouse A Cookie"
I've read all these books to my sons, "If You Take A Mouse To School," "If You Give A Moose A Muffin," all of 'em. So I was really happy to see Amazon make a series out of them, retaining the aesthetic of the book and casting voices for all the characters perfectly for some new stories. It's cute, my toddler watched every episode in the course of a couple weekends.

l) "Alias Grace"
This is quite good but also an inadvertent argument for why Zachary Levi should never be in a period piece. Everyone else in the cast is great and helps immerse you in the place and time, and then Levi comes in with his beard and period garb and sounds totally wrong and is really just a distractingly bad actor.

m) "S.W.A.T."
CBS was able to make modern "Hawaii Five-0" reboot into a cash cow so that should probably be able to do the same with this. Shemar Moore looks like Sheriff Clarke with that beard, though, ugh.

n) "Drop The Mic"
A James Corden spinoff where you get ridiculous staged celebrity rap battles like Rascal Flatts vs. Boyz II Men. You can tell that they pretty much have a rapper on staff who writes everything the guests say and coaches them on how to say it, which is fine, that's obviously the only way to make a show like this work. But it really takes all the fun out of the idea of a rap battle when someone responds to something their opponent said 30 seconds ago with the perfect comeback because the same person composed it all.

o) "Scared Famous"
A VH1 reality show where 'celebrities' you probably have never heard of unless you watch other VH1 reality shows stay in a hokey haunted house and try to 'survive' to win cash for the charity of their choice. It's kind of entertaining but it would be better if anyone on this show besides New York from "Flavor of Love" had any real screen presence to fake act their way through this nonsense. Method Man hosts "Drop The Mic" and Redman hosts this show, which feels like a pretty strong cautionary tale about what happens to great rappers when they start dabbling in television and comedy.

p) "Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes On Television"
Ryan Hansen was hilarious on "Party Down" and "Veronica Mars," so I'm happy to see him get his own show, even if it's on YouTube Red and I'm not gonna pay them to keep watching after the free first two episodes, funny as they were. It's kind of a meta thing where Hansen plays himself in a program where young actors work as cops, and it's all knowingly ridiculous with lots of self-deprecating jokes about Hansen's career and references to people confusing YouTube Red with the porn site RedTube. And Samira Wiley is a really great straight man foil for Hansen.

q) "Most Expensivest"
I have questions about how Vice was able to take Action Bronson's online show to the Viceland cable channel without changing the name of "Fuck, That's Delicious," but 2 Chainz had to change "Most Expensivest Shit" to just "Most Expensivest" in the transition. It's a fun show, but as much as I love 2 Chainz as a rapper, he's not as engaging as a host as I'd hoped.

r) "The Mick"
This show is really solidly in the middle of the pack of network sitcoms right now, I'll probably never stop watching it until they cancel it, but I'll never be that thrilled about it. "The Haunted House" was one of their best episodes to date, though, it's more interesting when they delve into how the kids are seen by classmates at school.

s) "Search Party"
The first season of "Search Party" was an entertaining little neo-noir comedy about some aimless millennials convincing themselves that they're in a missing person mystery story. Then the season ended with a character dying, which I respected as an artistic decision. having this dark turn of events at the end of a silly shaggy dog tale where suddenly shit gets real. But the problem is, now season 2 opens with these goofy characters being traumatized and having to bury a body and keep an awful secret, and it's a totally different show and the genie can't just go back in the bottle. John Early and Meredith Hagner are still capable of being really funny at surprising moments, but I'm not sure if the show can totally sustain itself from here.

t) "Stan Against Evil"
The second season has been quite good, I think they've figured out that when you have John C. McGinley on your show you just gotta give him weird rambling monologues as much as possible.

u) "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency"
If Douglas Adams came back to life, you could show him this series and he'd recognize absolutely nothing from his novels besides the name of the character Dirk Gently and the vague concept of him being a 'holistic' detective. And that's a shame, because those books were pretty good, and I think it can be generally agreed upon that Douglas Adams had a better imagination than Max Landis.

v) "Lady Dynamite"
Toward the end of the first season of "Lady Dynamite," Maria Bamford started dating a guy, Scott, and in the second season he's basically the second lead and they live together and get married. So it's a slightly different show now, but still pretty funny and unique. I had trouble placing Scott's accent and it turns out the actor, Olafur Darri Olafsson, is Icelandic, it's really interesting to hear his actorly take on playing an American.

w) "The Girlfriend Experience"
The first season of "The Girlfriend Experience" left me a little cold as this bleak half hour drama. But I'm much more on board with the second season, which is now an hour long with each being broken up into two stories that have nothing to do with each other or the first season. One of them has a bit of political intrigue with Louisa Krause as an escort who helps a Democrat operative blackmail a Republican operative, and the other features Carmen Ejogo as a woman who gets placed into witness protection and starts seeing a weird, untrustworthy John played by Harmony Korine. I don't care for Korine as a filmmaker, but as a character who's supposed to give off unsettling vibes, he's really well cast. And Carmen Ejogo gives a really impressive performance, I'm looking forward to her starring in season 3 of "True Detective."

x) "The Last Man On Earth"
I've been let down by this show for longer than I was ever entertained by it, but this season has been quite good, especially the run of episodes with Kristen Wiig and Chris Elliott. It's like they finally figured out that they don't need to make every character besides Will Forte a straight man. But even the episodes since then, I feel like they've kind of worked out the relationships between the characters a little better than they have in the past.

y) "Shameless"
When other shows get more cruel and puerile over the years, it's depressing, but with "Shameless," it kind of feels like part of the point to see how low they can go, and this season they're dealing meth and calling ICE on people. I miss Fiona being a ho, though.

z) "MythBusters"
"MythBusters" really always more about what cool stuff they could prove or learn than the cast of the show, but it is weird to see Discovery just plug a different pair of weird nerdy dudes into the show and just carry on as if it's all the same. I liked the experiments they did in their first episode, though, there's probably still a lot of subject matter left for the show to explore.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29, 2017 at 2:16 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.