a) "Good Girls"
It feels like there's a whole genre of contemporary TV based on the "mild-mannered normie is drawn in to a violent life of crime" premise, with ones with female protagonists as a thriving subgenre with shows like "Claws" and "Search Party." But even as familiar as the story arc is, it feels a little like the "Good Girls" pilot kind of rushes into three struggling moms deciding to commit armed robbery with very little hesitation or deliberation. And in the second episode it already feels like they're just accelerating the action as quickly as possible, I kind of wish they'd just slow down. Still, with three lead actresses as engaging as Mae Whitman, Christina Hendricks and Retta, I feel like this show has a chance of finding its footing. And Manny Montana is a really compelling antagonist, volatile and unpredictable but with an intelligence and odd sense of humor, he really steals the show every time he pops up.

b) "Hard Sun"
This new one from the creators of "Luther" seems to stick closely to the hyperviolent British cop show formula -- the first episode actually opens with a vicious fight scene where, at one point, someone bashes someone else's head with a teapot. But what's at stake in the show is the revelation that humankind is about 5 years away from being wiped out, so it's interesting to see that kind of apocalyptic premise dropped into a show like this, even if it feels like it's mostly driven by pretty boilerplate violence and antihero tropes.

c) "Everything Sucks!"
There's a lengthy TV tradition of thirtysomething creators making nostalgic shows about adolescence that take place 20 or so years earlier, when they were growing up -- "The Wonder Years," "Freaks & Geeks," "The Goldbergs," and so on. And now that I'm in my 30s we're starting to get shows like that about the mid-'90s when I was growing up like "Fresh Off the Boat" and now this Netflix series "Everything Sucks!" which is about high school freshmen in 1996, the year I started high school. So I expected to identify pretty strongly with this show, but it really just feels like the constant '90s alt-rock music cues are doing all the heavy lifting of evoking the period. And as much as I like to make fun of high school shows that are full of actors in their 20s, the kids in this show are the right age for the parts but are just not seasoned enough as actors to carry the show, it's not compelling at all.

d) "The Alienist"
For some reason someone wrote a novel about someone killing prostitutes in New York around the same time as Jack the Ripper, and for some reason TNT made a big lavish limited series about it instead of a Jack the Ripper show. The production values are impressive but I don't really care about the story and the cast is boring.

e) "Seven Seconds"
"The Killing" showrunner Veena Sud's new show, again a dreary thing about a dead child (you should see how often my wife gets mad at me because I put on a new show and there's dead kids in it, like it's my fault that people love to kill kids on TV now). It's not so much a mystery because the show opens with a cop running over a kid and his co-workers deciding to cover it up, so from there I guess it's just a matter of the truth running out, but it's all just really sad and dark and I don't think I'll get past the couple episodes I've watched.

f) "The Chi"
Another show where a kid gets killed in the first episode to set forward the action for the rest of a series. Every episode has a couple of charming little moments of humanity brightening it up, but I feel like this show just doesn't have enough of a sense of humor or a grasp of the scope of what it's trying to do to really manage all the characters and all the dark storylines going on in here.

g) "Channel Zero: Butcher's Block"
It's a shame that SyFy's anthology horror series "Channel Zero" doesn't have as many viewers as "American Horror Story," because it's 3 seasons in and consistently better at actually doing the horror genre justice in series form. This season has a lot of really gross cannibal stuff that they've filmed with great lighting and detail, I believe they actually hired a production designer from "Hannibal" for that stuff.

h) "The Oath"
Crackle, now Sony Crackle as of a few weeks ago, remains the runt of the litter of TV streaming services, recently losing their most famous show, "Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee" to Netflix (also they have ad breaks, and way more of them than Hulu, mostly for their own shitty programming). But they keep cranking out cliched gritty prestige TV dramas, and "The Oath," about a gang of corrupt cops played by Sean Bean and "True Blood"'s Ryan Kwanten, is reminiscent enough of "The Shield" that it's like 10 trend cycles behind. I don't know why they'd bother to make a show exec produced by 50 Cent that has a mostly white cast and holds little appeal to the "Power" fanbase. One scene in the first episode features a knockoff of "I'm Shipping Up To Boston," probably the 100th one that's appeared in a gritty cop show since The Departed.

i) "The Frankenstein Chronicles"
Sean Bean is also in this series that's aired two seasons in the U.K. since 2015 but just came to Netflix in February, meaning that two shows starring Sean Bean debuted in the U.S. just 16 days apart. Interesting twist on the premise but I don't really feel compelled to keep watching.

j) "Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and Notorious B.I.G."
I'm amused that this show starring Josh Duhamel as a cop investigating the Biggie and Tupac murders is on at the same time as Duhamel's Taco Bell commercials where he's investigating the mystery of nacho fries with equal intensity. But really it just feels like Duhamel and Jimmi Simpson and all these other actors are wasting their time on a story that we all know doesn't come to any kind of satisfying resolution, we just get a bunch of unimpressive scenes of the umpteenth actors who don't convincingly portray Pac and Big along with flashes forward to detectives years later who still haven't arrested anyone for their killings.

k) "Death Row Chronicles"
I really wish that half of the resources for film and TV and book projects about Death Row/2Pac/N.W.A. were allocated to some other less overexposed chapters of hip hop history. But this BET docuseries is pretty well done, there's still some good anecdotes and footage being uncovered here that I haven't seen a thousand times before.

l) "The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale"
I watched "The Soup" faithfully pretty much the whole 11 years that Joel McHale hosted it, and really felt its absence in my weekly routine the last couple years since E! abruptly cancelled it. So I'm pretty pleased that Netflix basically let McHale pick up where he left off and go straight back into mocking clips in front of a green screen. It feels like they're leaning a little away from current events and more into reality shows, probably just so the episodes remain evergreen for Netflix bingeing, but that works. I think they're still getting back into the groove, because I laughed a lot more at the last couple episodes than at the first one, but Mini Black Mirror is already a classic.

m) "Sundays with Alec Baldwin"
This is also kind of a reboot of a show the host did previously, although MSNBC only aired "Up Late with Alec Baldwin" for about a month in 2013. And putting this on a nice simple set with a couple of people having a conversation in comfortable chairs really does a lot to make it feel more relaxed and inviting than the MSNBC show. I'm not sure when the series will really start airing weekly but I enjoyed the pilot that was aired after the Oscars this week where he interviewed Jerry Seinfeld and Kate McKinnon. It was kind of funny to watch a pilot on ABC that consisted almost entirely of people who've had their greatest television successes on NBC talking about "SNL" and "The Tonight Show" and "Seinfeld."

n) "Our Cartoon President"
The Trump presidency is kind of this gross vortex of things that are so inherently funny but also demand to be taken somewhat seriously that it's really hard to to know how to judge comedy about it. Comedy Central's "The President Show" grew on me more than I expected it to, and I still enjoy Alec Baldwin's "SNL" sketches more often than not, but at a certain point you spend so much time in a week thinking about Trump and hearing jokes about him and you just don't want to hear another word. And that's about where "Our Cartoon President" comes in, a pottymouthed Showtime series co-created by Stephen Colbert. I generally think Colbert has the best Trump material in late night these days, but I don't know why he felt the need to even do this clunky heavyhanded show. There have been a couple inspired moments but it mostly just feels unnecessary and grating, even if making Trump sound like Peter Griffin is more or less appropriate.

o) "Ugly Delicious"
A Netflix food show, kind of the same as other travel shows about food I guess except the hosts are not as hyped up as Guy Fieri. I haven't watched every episode but I heard they didn't even talk to any black chefs in the New Orleans episode, which seems odd.

p) "The Trade"
Showtime's docuseries about the opioid crisis, which is well made enough, but I have about the same problems with that this piece points out, in which it focuses on the victims and on criminal drug cartels and doesn't really look at how the pharmaceutical industry helped cause this crisis. It's basically a Trump administration assessment of the situation.

q) "Slutever"
Viceland's show based on Karley Sciortino's titular sex column, which is actually really refreshingly casual and plainspoken, Sciortino just finds a way to talk about this stuff without any hangups or playing up the kink factor while still being kind of playful and sex-positive and drawn towards pleasure and away from inhibitions or stigmas.

r) "Black Card Revoked"
A lot of big comedians have reasonably funny siblings that also get into the business, but man Tony Rock did not really get much of Chris's talent at all, he's just so boring anytime I've seen him. Now he hosts this goofy BET game show where people answer black culture trivia questions to keep their 'black card.' I feel like the show would be more entertaining if the contestants were white, but then it would just be the 'I know black people' sketch from "Chappelle's Show."

s) "Talk Show the Game Show"
TruTV's weird meta game show about talk show tropes is back for a second season and still very entertaining. I think the judges, Karen Kilgariff and Casey Schreiner, deserve a lot of credit for getting in odd little one-liners and being antagonists to the contestants.

t) "Unikitty!"
One of Cartoon Network's newer shows my sons watch, very hyper and weird and with surprisingly smudgy, amateurish animation. I like it, but Cartoon Network has a habit of just rotating 4 or 5 shows at a time and it's certainly not on the level of "Teen Titans Go!" or "The Amazing World of Gumball."

u) "The Tick"
I liked the 6 episodes of "The Tick" that Amazon released last year but thought it was kind of a short season, so I'm pleased that there turned out to be 6 more episodes to fill out the season this year, with a 2nd season on the way in 2019. My enthusiasm is dimming a little, though, I just haven't felt as engaged with these new episodes, they're still finding the right halfway point between manic cartoony humor and the earnest live action performances.

v) "Jessica Jones"
In the two and a half years since the first season of "Jessica Jones," Netflix has aired 5 other seasons of its Marvel shows that I haven't enjoyed nearly as much, so I'm glad to have it back. I'm only a couple episodes into the new season since it only came out today, but I've been enjoying it, particularly the big where Jones had trouble telling people with superpowers from mentally ill people who thought they had superpowers. This show really has some sharp, funny dialogue and abrupt plot twists, which I think will save it from having a sophomore slump in the absence of its memorable season 1 villain like "Daredevil."

w) "High Maintenance"
This show is pleasant but so fundamentally uninteresting to me. If anything the fact that the husband and wife who created the show are now divorced but still making the show together is more interesting that anything that's happened in the show's second season.

x) "The Path"
I can't believe I'm still even watching this show at all in its 3rd season, it has really been so consistently boring for a premise with so much potential and such an experienced cast. I hope it gets cancelled soon and Michelle Monaghan gets a better gig.

y) "Another Period"
I feel a little blase about this show at this point. But now and again there are episodes that just make me laugh out loud from front to back and appreciate what an odd, fertile little niche of humor they've created in this whole contemporary reality show-style sendup of the early 20th century.

z) "Drunk History"
I'm kind of impressed that this show still has gas in the tank in the 5th season, the season premiere with Tiffany Haddish and Amber Ruffin from "Late Night with Seth Meyers" was one of their best yet.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 08, 2018 at 3:02 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.