TV Diary
Thursday, April 26, 2018
a) "The Last O.G."
Tracy Morgan has had a few supporting roles since he recovered from his accident a few years ago, but it's nice to see him really come back with a starring vehicle. "The Last O.G." is about a guy from Brooklyn getting out of jail after 15 years and coming back to his gentrified neighborhood, and finding out he has two kids. So a lot of it is that fish-out-of-water stuff with a guy getting his family back, it's kind of sweet, I wish it was laugh-out-loud funny more often but it has its moments. It seems like kind of a waste to put Tiffany Haddish in a straight man kind of role just as she's becoming a major comedy star, though.
b) "Trust"
There's a weird Armageddon/Deep Impact thing going on where this miniseries about the abduction of John Paul Getty III debuted 3 months after the release of All The Money In The World. It makes me kind of wonder if instead of recasting Christopher Plummer in Kevin Spacey's role they could've just combined these two projects and inserted Donald Sutherland's footage from "Trust." Of the episodes I've watched so far, Brendan Fraser was only a major presence in one of them, and that was by far the best episode, it was really fun to watch him hog the spotlight in a way he hasn't in a long time, a really entertaining performance. Mostly, though, the Danny Boyle direction is really indulgent, the show is good but I have mixed feelings.
c) "Rellik"
Another dark Cinemax series, with the same female lead, Jodi Balfour, from another dark Cinemax series, "Quarry," that was canceled last year. Given the rash of attacks and killings in recent years of people being splashed with acid, which is really terrifying, doing a series about the hunt for an acid serial killer is a pretty good premise. And Richard Dormer plays a detective who survives an attack, so he's doing the whole series with his face made up to look really badly scarred. Pretty intriguing, well directed show, but man that title is cheesy.
d) "Lost In Space"
Doing a modern update of a campy '60s show like "Lost In Space" half a century later seems like an odd prospect to me, especially if you're going to have state-of-the-art special effects and a cast of respectable actors like Molly Parker and Parker Posey. A lot of the time, it looks and feels like a 21st century prestige sci-fi show, and then you get a fan service nod like "danger, Will Robinson," and it kind of feels like they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. I think I'd prefer a completely new show with this cast and crew about a group of people lost in space that's not called "Lost In Space," or a reboot that more fully embraces the tone of the original "Lost In Space."
e) "Howards End"
Hayley Atwell is really delightful and I'm glad to see her back on TV after she had 2 series canceled back-to-back, even if it's just for a 4-episode miniseries. I've never read Howards End or seen any other adaptation so I have no real frame of reference, but I was a little surprised how involving it's been so far.
f) "The Letdown"
This Australian show is kind of a dark comedy about motherhood. But for what it's worth, the mother in the room, my wife, got up and left about 10 minutes into the first episode, so maybe it's a little too dark, at least for her taste. I can't say I found it particularly funny even at the times when the scenes about what it's like to have a newborn in the house were relatable.
g) "Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas"
When I heard that Wyatt Cenac would be doing a topical weekly series for HBO, I kind of assumed that it would hew close to the format of "The Daily Show" or the several other shows currently hosted by "Daily Show" alumni. But there's no desk, no green screen, no studio audience, and in the first two episodes, he mentions Trump just once to say he's going to focus on other topics. It's also a lot quieter, with a kind of quirky, droll sense of humor -- tonally it reminds me more of NPR or a more highbrow podcast. I don't love it, but I like it and feel like I actually heard some stuff that I don't hear in 5 other shows, so it's a welcome addition to the late night landscape.
h) "Rapture"
A Netflix series where each episode is a 1-hour documentary about a different rapper. Pretty well done stuff, feels more like a casual snapshot of a recent moment in Nas's or T.I.'s career rather than an overview, which is probably smarter than if they were trying to tell their whole life story.
i) "For The People"
Shondaland's latest entry in the endless parade of sexy lawyer shows is nothing special, although those lawyers certainly are sexy (Jasmin Savoy Brown took off her glasses from "The Leftovers" and got a little glammed up and, I mean, wow). I like the focus on the SDNY Federal Court, though, it leaves a lot of potential for more interesting than usual legal stories.
j) "Station 19"
Amidst all the sexy lawyer shows, sexy firefighter shows are really starting to be everywhere, and this is the ABC/Shondaland addition to "Chicago Fire" and "9-1-1." I didn't even realize when watching this that it's actually a "Grey's Anatomy" spinoff, it didn't occur to me that that was likely since it also takes place in Seattle. I guess it's nice that Jaina Lee Ortiz quickly got another network job after the cancellation of "Rosewood," but that was a better show.
k) "Deception"
Another fairly dopey ABC procedural with the twist that the guy from "Cooper Barrett's Guide To Surviving Life" plays a disgraced famous magician who uses his expertise in creating illusions to help the FBI solve crimes. The pilot was actually better than the goofy premise deserves, but the ceiling for a show like this is just not very high.
l) "In Contempt"
Another sexy lawyer show, this one kind of feeling to me like BET's answer to "Ally McBeal." Kind of knowingly lightweight but pretty funny when it wants to be.
m) "Troy: Fall Of A City"
I like that the second sentence in this show's Wikipedia entry is "The series has received an overwhelmingly negative response from users on the IMDb website." It has a decent amount of visual flair, but yeah, not good.
n) "The Boss Baby: Back In Business"
As someone who took his kid to see The Boss Baby in the theater, and actually had nice things to say about it, I was not thrilled to see that Netflix made a series of the show. None of the voice cast from the movie is involved, and the quality of the animation is a bit lower, but I was pleasantly surprised that the show more or less retains the wit and comedic sensibility of the movie.
o) "Craig of the Creek"
A new Cartoon Network show that my kids and I both adore, really charming and funny and does a great job of evoking that phase of childhood where you go out exploring the neighborhood and everything feels like an adventure.
p) "On My Block"
This is kind of a good, perceptive coming of age show, but it's also kind of a soap opera that I'm not interested in enough to watch more than a couple episodes.
q) "McMafia"
This is probably the best possible time to be doing a show about the Russian criminal underworld, but I dunno, this feels kind of boring. Also, I know it got the name from the book it's based on, but "McMafia" is a terrible name.
r) "In Ice Cold Blood"
It's so weird to think that Ice-T has been a TV cop for almost 20 years and it's basically the defining feature of his public profile at this point. This show is basically a boilerplate TruTV true crime thing telling the story of a murder with news clips and reenactments, the presence of Ice-T doesn't really do much to make this genre of TV more interesting to me.
s) "Brockmire"
This show's main appeal is Hank Azaria stringing together obscene but strangely literary monologues together in an old-timey baseball announcer voice, which is really something I never get tired of. So I'm glad the second season just kind of rebooted the story and put him in a slightly different context but still is pretty aware of what makes the show work.
t) "Mary Kills People"
This show got off to a strong start last year but my interest dwindled a little by the end of the first season. I've only just started the second season, but it seems pretty promising, Des's storyline with the introduction of Rachelle Lefevre's kind of manipulative femme fatale character should be good.
u) "The Arrangement"
My wife reads romance novels sometimes for kicks, and one thing she's told me is a pitfall of those books is that they'll often throw some plot device in there to endanger the relationship or make the guy seem dangerous that actually just turns the reader's sympathies against him so that the story ceases to be romantic. And I feel like that's a little bit of the balancing act that "The Arrangement" is dealing with, the first season did a good job of making it seem like Kyle could either be an unwitting pawn or a villain while still making Megan's relationship with him feel kind of real. But increasingly in the second season I kind of want them to stop playing coy with that and let the other shoe drop.
v) "A Series of Unfortunate Events"
I liked the first season of this, but it can be a little exhausting to watch so I've only watched a little of the second season so far. The addition of Lucy Punch and Nathan Fillion is promising, though.
w) "Westworld"
I grew up with network shows usually only going on hiatus for 3-4 months in the summer, but nowadays cable shows run for maybe 10 weeks and then you wait 9 months for the new season. So when a show like "Westworld" takes 16 months to follow up the first season, it really just feels like a lifetime ago since this show had me glued to the screen and I'm still kind of easing back into it. The premiere this week had a few cool scenes but I'm still waiting to see if it'll really hold my attention again. I'm a little bummed that there'll be a lot less of Anthony Hopkins and Jimmi Simpson.
x) "Atlanta"
Another show where the 16-month break after the first season seemed almost like a luxury of the show's acclaim and popularity. I haven't caught up with all the new episodes yet, but it's been good so far. The first season had kind of an uneasy balance between the slice of life stories, the music industry satire, and the weird surreal breaks from reality, but now that they've established that kind of anything-goes ethos, I'm cool with it. Brian Tyree Henry has really been amazing this season in just being able to make scenes funnier just with little facial expressions, I loved the episode with the barber that was just one long farce with him being dragged along.
y) "The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth"
Showtime's "The Circus" was a pretty good document of the 2016 election because even if they treated it a little too flippantly like a horse race like most other media outlets, their weekly half hour documentaries at least dug in and showed you a slightly different perspective. The show has been less essential as a chronicle of the Trump administration, and last year one of the three hosts, Mark Halperin, got caught up in a #MeToo scandal. So now the show is back this year, with a woman, Alex Wagner, in Halperin's place, which is a good call they deserve some credit for. There was an awkward moment, however, where one of the other hosts kind of vaguely mentioned what's been happening in the country and "in society" since the show's last episode, and like, motioned toward Wagner, but they never really addressed it. But I liked what they did on Russia, which included actually going to Russia and speaking to people on the street and outspoken critics of Putin.
z) "New Girl"
"Parks & Recreation" did a 'jump forward' 3 years for its 7th and final season that mostly served as a platform for some silly jokes about the near future. "New Girl" is also doing a 'jump forward' 3 years for its 7th and final season. But here it feels like the point was that, since "New Girl" started out as a show about 30-year-olds living like college students, now they're kind of skipping forward to have them actually start living like they're almost 40. So Schmidt and Cece have a baby and Winston and Aly have one on the way, and so on. It sounds stupid, and it kind of is, but I would say the show is as good now as it's been for the last couple seasons that it's been past its peak while still enjoyable.
