a) "Barry"
I tend to be pretty cynical about the whole weird genre of 'hitman comedy' that's survived pretty persistently in the two decades since Pulp Fiction spawned its first wave of imitators. But Bill Hader's track record is pretty much spotless in my book, and I really enjoyed the first episode of this. He's always had this vibe of being the consummate character actor guy who thrives with impressions and oddball supporting roles, so it's been fun to see him try on stuff like a straightforward love interest in Trainwreck and now a lead role in "Barry" and see him very quickly get comfortable outside his niche. The pilot had some really great little moments that set up the tension between the violent drama and the comedy, obviously that's going to be the main engine of the action but I think there could be more to this show eventually.

b) "Life Sentence"
The first episode of "Life Sentence" opens like one of those sweet inspirational movies where a young woman has a terminal cancer diagnosis and lives every day she has left to the fullest. And then, her treatment works and she's healthy, and she basically has to live with the long term implications of the things she didn't think she'd be alive to worry about, like marrying someone she barely knows, and she founds out how much her family put their lives on hold to take care of her. It's a really entertaining, creative show, I didn't enjoy the second episode as much as the pilot, so I'm not sure just how much they'll sustain the spark of the initial premise, but it's still pretty promising.

c) "Alexa & Katie"
"Alexa & Katie" is kind of more like the sweet inspirational cancer stories that "Life Sentence" satirizes, but done as a family sitcom about a teen girl with cancer and her best friend who's helping her through it. I mean, the humor on the show is a little cheesy, but it's nice, I'm glad it exists and there's probably someone out there that could really use a show like this to relate to.

d) "Here And Now"
I have always regarded Alan Ball with a lot of suspicion. American Beauty was a shitpile, "Six Feet Under" was kind of off-putting to me, and "True Blood" worked for me because the whole idea was so over-the-top and entertaining that anything ludicrous about the dialogue or characterization just kind of suited it. But "Here And Now" is a somewhat straightforward show about a somewhat normal human family, so Alan Ball not being able to create realistic characters that behave believably is more of a problem here. There's a whole mysterious aspect of the show where one character either has some kind of mental illness or hallucinations or there's some magical or supernatural explanation for what he's experience, which is kind of intriguing, but I can't imagine it's going to be explained in any satisfying way.

e) "Rise"
Jason Katims is another creator I have mixed feelings about. I enjoyed "Parenthood" well enough, but I always had a distaste for the solemn tone of "Friday Night Lights" (my reaction to the pilot inspired perhaps the biggest reader backlash this blog has ever experienced). "Rise" is tonally pretty similar to "FNL," and people have had a lot of criticisms about Josh Radnor's character (that he's a straight guy based on a real person who was gay, that he strongarms a job from the more qualified Rosie Perez character) that seem like they could be fatal flaws for the show. It has some degree of earnest charm, though.

f) "Champions"
"The Mindy Project" just ended, kind of on an underwhelming note, a few months ago, and now Mindy Kaling is launching a new NBC sitcom, with some of the same supporting players and her in a recurring guest role. It's cute and has some snappy dialogue but it feels like the kind of forgettable thing I stop thinking about the moment an episode ends.

g) "The Looming Tower"
This is a miniseries about FBI and CIA counterterrorism efforts in the years leading up to 9/11, and Jeff Daniels plays John O'Neill, a guy who was trying to warn everyone about attacks from Bin Laden and Al Qaeda and died in the WTC. The Jeff Daniels portrayal of O'Neill in "The Looming Tower" is pretty layered and ambivalent, you see him have a romantic night with his girlfriend before you see him go home to his wife and kids, so he's not painted just as a saintly tragic hero. But the whole cast is really good, I loved Bill Camp in "The Night Of" and he's excellent here as well.

h) "Krypton"
Given the success of the show about Gotham before Batman, a series about Krypton without Superman is a decent idea. But the space epic aspect of the Superman origin story has never really interested me and this has a pompous stuffy air to it that reminds me of one of the worst comic book shows in recent memory, "Inhumans," even if there's slightly more going on in the acting and writing to make it mildly entertaining.

i) "Alex, Inc."
I tend to be a bit cynical about podcasts, and I remember laughing derisively when I heard that there was a podcast called StartUp that existed to document the host's own podcast business. So that podcaster's life being adapted into a sitcom starring the extremely punchable Zach Braff just seems designed to be insufferable. But Braff brought along a writer/producer from "Scrubs," Matt Tarses, who gives the show a similar breezy silly tone that really works well, and the show co-stars Tiya Sircar, who was recently hilarious on "The Good Place," so I'm enjoying this a lot more than I expected to.

j) "Instinct"
A show where an author and former spy's books are used as the inspiration for a serial killer, and he gets enlisted by the police to try and help catch the killer. Kind of an interesting premise and fun to see Alan Cumming headline a CBS procedural, but not really that eager to keep watching.

k) "Collateral"
It was already announced that this 4-episode BBC series wouldn't be returning for a second season before it hit U.S. Netflix, and while it puts a lot of work into making the murder of a pizza delivery guy into a gripping mystery, I didn't really feel compelled to finish it after a couple episodes.

l) "Final Space"
This TBS animated series opens with a guy pretty much alone on a ship hurtling through space with two non-human sidekicks, one of whom is a man-sized cat. So I immediately thought of "Red Dwarf," whether or not that was a genuine inspiration for this show. It's not very funny or very sci-fi though, it's just kind of a cartoon sitcom in space.

m) "Living Biblically"
Someone wrote a stupid book where they tried to live a year by all the rules in the Bible, and now it's been adapted into a doofy CBS sitcom where a guy tells his wife that referring to Beyonce as a "goddess" is worshiping false idols. I'm bummed that Jay R. Ferguson got the lead in this after the cancellation of "The Real O'Neals," a much better and funnier show about a family struggling to uphold traditional Catholic values in the complicated modern world.

n) "Apple & Onion"
I have raved before about "The Amazing World of Gumball," one of the best shows on the Cartoon Network, and one of their artists created this show which has a less dazzling visual aesthetic but a similar surreal approach and voices by Richard Ayoade and Eugene Mirman, pretty good.

o) "Counterpart"
This show would be great even if it had nothing going for it besides those great scenes where J.K. Simmons plays two versions of the same character from parallel universes, meeting each other and figuring out all the little ways they differ. But all the spy intrigue is as cleverly structured as any show with less of a sci-fi concept, and because you're still figuring out the rules of this world as you go, there are all sorts of weird surprising revelations along the way, every couple episodes it feels like they pull back the curtain and change the way everything works. I also love how one world is Alpha world and the other is Prime world, like people on both sides think they're in the 'real' version of Earth.

p) "Santa Clarita Diet"
The first season was my #3 favorite show of 2017, and so far the second season is even better. I just love the way Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant manage to ground this insane, gorey story in a really warm, realistic, loving family dynamic.

q) "Love"
I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with "Love," even when it's really enjoyable and watchable, it can be frustrating and not all that funny to watch a show that's so reliant on awkwardness and embarrassment and misunderstanding as the engine for almost every store. And Paul Rust isn't like a realistic nerd at this point, he's more like a white Urkel. And it feels like they're really ramped up trying to make Mike Mitchell's character more pathetic and undeserving of Claudia O'Doherty's character. I haven't finished the third season yet but I'm kind of glad it's the last season.

r) "The Magicians"
This show was very good from the jump but I really think it's grown the beard in the third season. Even my wife who's read the books has started to admit that it's a good thing that the show's writers have kind of allowed themselves to take the characters and the stories into some new directions. Some of the one-off experimental episodes, like the musical episode and the one with 6 short stories from the perspectives of 6 different characters, including a soundless story from the perspective of Marlee Matlin's character, have been really cool and ambitious. I'm glad Jade Tailor has been in this season more, too, I have such a crush on her.

s) "Superstore"
This show has been really one of the most dependable network sitcoms lately, it was probably a mistake that I left it off my year-end list. And I tend to be really weary of TV love triangles, so I've been surprised at how well the plot with Kelly Stables has worked, I kinda hope she becomes a permanent addition to the cast.

t) "Ash vs Evil Dead"
I feel like this show has always been kind of silly and underwhelming even as it's created its own little world and cast of characters beyond what was in the movies. But I've been enjoying it lately, I like when Bruce Campbell gets to amp up the ego and absurdity of the Ash character.

u) "UnReal"
The first season of "UnReal" was a classic and the second season was kind of a textbook sophomore slump, so after a longer than usual hiatus, it's been fun to have the show back and trying really hard to right the ship. If season 2 went off the rails partly because of how it handled the 'first black suitor' plot and season is much more comfortable handling the story possibilities of the 'first suitress' plot, then perhaps that's kind of a predictable situation where a show made by white women is better at addressing gender than race. But in any event, the dark, sickly twists of this show are as addictive as ever, and Caitlin FitzGerald from "Masters of Sex" is really perfect for what her unique role requires. Brennan Elliott is so good as the cheeseball host, too, it's not an important character but it's just one of those little details where he nails every corny monologue.

v) "Silicon Valley"
I have always been kind of neutral on "Silicon Valley," it's good at what it does but I kind of roll my eyes when people say it's the best comedy on television or whatever. But I really enjoyed the season premiere, excellent use of their usual seesaw between optimism and humiliating defeat. I think that TJ Miller's whole ridiculous interview last year about how him leaving the show was going to be good for the show was all lying and mock humility, but he may have been right anyway, removing Erlich from the equation just gives them one less repetitive element to run into the ground.

w) "The Garfield Show"
Over the years the rapper Curren$y has tweeted many times about how much he hates "3D Garfield," which I assume means this awful 3D animated show that aired 5-10 years ago. Recently one of my kids found the show on the Netflix menu and started watching it, and it really is just ghastly to look at, and I'd like think the old "Garfield & Friends" cartoons were funnier as well, so every time they put it on I just think about Curren$y.

x) "The Voice"
A few months ago Kelly Clarkson released her first album that doesn't directly profit the producers of "American Idol," some 16 years after she won the show. So I'm not surprised that as the show is coming back, she's decided to go be a judge on the show that helped kill it off. I haven't had any interest in "The Voice" in a while but I watched some of the new season just to see Clarkson on there. But it just made me so sad to see them all have to act like there are any stakes in the show when nobody has ever gotten a real consequential career out of "The Voice."

y) "American Idol"
"American Idol"'s death on FOX was well overdue, and I'm appalled that ABC has brought it back so soon, when nobody even had time to miss it, and they're just sticking to all the old formulas and standing by Ryan Seacret even though he should be getting fired by a bunch of people right now. The judges' table with Katy Perry is so uncomfortable, I feel bad for Lionel Richie that he has to sit with those clowns.

z) "Roseanne"
I think the last time I got nostalgic for "Roseanne" was less than a decade ago, watching hours of reruns while up with my oldest son when he was a  newborn. So I get why people are clamoring to have this show back, even if it ended with a legendarily awful season and its star has turned out to be a pretty awful alt-right conspiracy kook. In general I'm pretty against revived classic TV shows, but I will say this works better than most, partly because it's fun to see great performers like John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf return to their iconic roles. And the whole 2 Becky running gag has been amusing. But a lot of stuff just feels forced or off in little ways. One of my favorite old Dan Conner scenes was how he reacted when DJ wore a bunch of women's hairclips ("How do I look?" "Beautiful" "Boys aren't supposed to look beautiful" "Damn beautiful"). So made me sad that the new season has recurring jokes about how uncomfortable Dan is with a non-gender-conforming grandson.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30, 2018 at 12:42 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.