a) "Lodge 49"
AMC has been the home of big archetypal popular cable dramas that I have no particular interest in for so long that I was pleasantly surprised that they've aired 2 of my favorite odd, difficult to categorize new shows of the summer, "Dietland" and now "Lodge 49." Neither the creator nor anyone in the cast is especially well known (Paul Giamatti is an executive producer, and makes a tiny cameo in one episode where a character is listening to a book on tape read by Giamatti). But the lead actor, Wyatt Russell, is the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, though he has a bit more of an Owen Wilson vibe. The only thing I saw him in before this was 22 Jump Street, where her out-airheaded Channing Tatum, and in "Lodge 49" he plays a surfer who joins a strange fraternal lodge at a time when his life is adrift after his father dies and he's unemployed and injured. I feel like these characters and this story easily could have been a half hour comedy with a lighter tone on another network, which I ordinarily might mean as an insult, but I really like how "Lodge 49" imbues this strange and sometimes silly story with an undercurrent of melancholy and desperation.

b) "Disenchantment"
Matt Groening's new Netflix series being a fantasy satire seems like a good companion piece to the sci-fi of "Futurama," and it's easy to see, say, the little demon voiced by Eric Andre as the new Bender. But where "The Simpsons" and "Futurama" mimicked the episodic nature of family sitcoms and "Star Trek" by finding the most ridiculous way to hit the reset button at the end of every episode so they can start the next one where they started the others, "Disenchantment" is more serialized, which makes a bit of sense given the fantasy genre. I got a few chuckles out of the first couple episodes but I'm still getting a feel for the show.

c) "Random Acts Of Flyness"
Terence Nance is reportedly poised to make the jump from festival circuit buzz to directing the new Space Jam movie, but in the meantime he has this very unusual, difficult to categorize show on HBO at midnight on Fridays. It's almost like sketch comedy but there are these hairpin turns from silliness to gallows humor to dead serious social commentary, tonally it reminds me of De La Soul Is Dead more than anything else. But what I really like is that it doesn't hold your hand at all, a lot of the scenes don't automatically announce their premise, or announce it only to immediately subvert it or kind of let it gradually turn into something else entirely.

d) "Carter"
This Canadian show is similar to ABC's summer series "Take Two" in that it's about an down-on-their-luck actor who played a cop on TV and starts solving real life crimes. But the character is portrayed as a dimwit played by Jerry O'Connell who returns to the town where he grew up, so it had a bit of a vibe of my beloved short-lived "The Grinder" as well. It could stand to be a bit wittier and a lot more original, but it's kind of genial and mildly promising.

e) "Insatiable"
This show got a huge amount of pushback and protest from the moment the first trailer came out, and after watching a couple episodes and trying to give it a fair shake, I definitely get it. It feels like they tried to make a 'woke' 'meta' high school comedy that mimics a lot of the more problematic tropes of the genre but they hit the wrong tone and ended up with this shrill, obnoxious thing that's kind of knowingly shitty but not better than what it's made in response to. It's a shame, because I could see this being pulled off in a smarter way that would actually be funny, but they're still stuck on this broad, smug Not Another Teen Movie era of meta teen movies.

f) "Art Prison"
I thought this thing that aired on Adult Swim a couple weeks ago was a new series but I guess it turned to be just a one-off, which makes sense, since it's a Dan Harmon creation and basically a full 30-minute version of the 'pilots' he used to regularly make for Channel 101 and "Acceptable.TV." It stars Randall Park from "Fresh Off The Boat" so I should've known he wasn't taking on another series regular gig. I liked it, though, it kinda ran with the inherently ridiculous premise stated in the title and crammed every conceptual joke and '80s TV trope they could into it while still having a nice coherent procedural plot.

g) "Marching Orders"
This Netflix documentary series is about an HBCU marching band, and watching it really takes me back to doing high school marching band, and how exhausting and stressful it was and how I decided not to keep doing it in college. It's fun to see people do it at a high level like that, though, it really takes an amazing amount of effort to do this stuff. Plus I kind of like that the episodes are like 12 minutes long so they kind of tell the story in these little vignettes that don't go on and on like reality TV often does.

h) "All About The Washingtons"
Rev Run had a weird little second act as a reality star about a decade ago where "Run's House" made his whole family into celebrities. Now he's got a sitcom on Netflix that just feels like a thinly fictionalized version of his life and his old show where he plays aging rap pioneer Joe Speed. He even performs a faux-Run DMC song in it. I dunno, it's pretty mediocre, but I guess he just wanted to do more TV.

i) "Mega Man: Fully Charged"
I put on an episode of this for my son to check out, but he's never played a "Mega Man" game so he didn't really get it. He also kept asking me if Mega Man and the other characters were robots or people or cyborgs and I thought I knew but then I was wrong and it was really confusing.

j) "Ronny Chieng: International Student"
"Daily Show" correspondent Ronny Chieng apparently did a sitcom for a network in Australia that Comedy Central recently started airing, the first episode was pretty entertaining.

k) "Making It"
Nick Offerman and his "Parks & Recreation" character have become these avatars of folksy mr. fix-it DIY culture so it was a pretty shrewd move for NBC to have Offerman and Amy Poehler host a "Projecty Runway"-style reality competition show for handmade crafts. Not really my thing but I do like it better than most shows in this style because the hosts have the improv skills to say funny things on the fly and there's very little of the usual reality show backbiting, everyone is really nice to each other and it's refreshing.

l) "Castaways"
In the early 2000s there was this weird zeitgeist that sprung up around the 'desert island' trope where suddenly we had a blockbuster film (Cast Away) and one of the biggest reality shows ("Survivor") and one of the biggest scripted shows ("Lost") all playing with the public's imagination about the scenario of being stranded on an island. It's been a while since that happened, but ABC decided to revisit the genre with a "Survivor"-style reality show that essentially tries as much as it can to feel like "Lost." I actually thought it was a scripted show the first time I saw an ad for it, because they use pretty high quality cinematography, more like a drama than a reality show. They put each person on a different part of the island and don't tell them where other people are or how many there are, and before they get to the island they shoot some footage of their lives on the mainland, which gets used basically as very "Lost"-like flashbacks. It's an interesting show from a conceptual standpoint but kind of odd, I feel like any attempt to merge reality shows and scripted dramas tends to lose out on the best of both formats.

m) "Wrecked"
The TBS show "Wrecked," now in its third season, is also kind of a metacommentary on the desert island tropes of "Lost" and other shows, except as a broad comedy. It kind of reminds me of "The Last Man On Earth" in the way they can just strand a small set of characters and just put them through whatever ordeal has comedic potential, although both shows often fall short of that potential. I like this season so far, though, having the characters meet a friendly rich guy who turns out to be a 'most dangerous game'-type psycho has been pretty entertaining.

n) "Yellowstone"
This show has grown on me a little, all the ridiculous power struggles between some mostly awful people. I don't think I really hate-watch Wes Bentley, though, I just hate watching him period. It's pretty messed up that the most prominent Native American actor is played by an Asian-American, but Kelsey Asbille is gorgeous and she's really one of the only sympathetic characters in the show, what happens to her is so sad.

o) "Love Is___"
This show is sweet but Clarke Peters and Wendy Davis are much better actors than the people who play their characters 20 years younger, so sometimes the flashback stuff just feels like a cheesy romance novel.

p) "Kim's Convenience"
A pretty enjoyable Canadian sitcom about a Korean family's convenience store that recently came to Netflix, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee is a funny dude.

q) "Swedish Dicks"
I think one of the most entertaining things about this show is that they really keep getting Keanu Reeves to show up for occasional cameos. Peter Stormare is such a charismatic weirdo, though, it's fun to see him ham it up as the star of something after decades of memorable supporting roles.

r) "Detroiters"
This Comedy Central sitcom struck me as really genial and likable in its first season but it rarely actually made me laugh. But I kept hearing enough praise for it to come back for the second season, and I'm starting to like it more, the Farmer Zack's episode in particular I thought was the funniest to date.

s) "The Sinner"
I get kind of annoyed with how often TV shows now are marketed as a miniseries or 'limited series' but then, if successful enough, return for multiple seasons and kind of admit they were just a TV series that didn't want to be called canceled if they didn't continue for more than a year. But I was happy to hear that "The Sinner" was returning, the first season wrapped up the Jessica Biel storyline pretty conclusively, but doing an anthology series where Bill Pullman's character investigates other cases is a great idea, especially since this one features current cable drama MVP Carrie Coon. The story is really creepy and I'm not enirely sure where they're going with it but it's pretty gripping so far.

t) "Snowfall"
I respect this show more than I enjoy it, it's ambitious and does a lot of things well but there are just so many different characters and storylines and they aren't all memorable. But the way you kind of always now the show is going go sink deeper and darker as the crack epidemic progresses makes for some compelling moments.

u) "Outcast"
Between his arc on "Luke Cage" and the return of "Outcast," we've ended up with a nice little summer of Reg E. Cathey's final performances. In fact I think I like "Outcast" most for all the great little character actor moments from Cathey and Brent Spiner and M.C. Gainey.

v) "Insecure"
The outcry over Jay Ellis not being in season 3 of "Insecure" is kind of silly and overblown, but I get it, they made him a major character for two seasons and even "Girls" knew to keep Adam Driver in the show when he was not dating the protagonist of the show. It's cool, though, the new episodes have had some good laughs, although I still sometimes feel like Issa Rae has some of the overacting habits of a YouTuber. And I kind of roll my eyes at the Twitter fan service of stuff like last night, when they had a scene reenacting a popular video of how Chris Brown reacted when gunshots broke out at a concert.

w) "Casual"
I had mixed feelings about "Casual" for so long before I started to finally really genuinely like the show by the end of the 3rd season. So it was bittersweet to find out they'd be wrapping up the series with an abbreviated 8-episode 4th season. I rolled my eyes a little that they followed the example of "Parks & Recreation" and "New Girl" and did a time jump ahead 3-4 years for the last season, similarly in part to fast forward the lives of characters who were just starting relationships or marriages or parenthood. But "Casual" had an entertaining twist of some wishful thinking about life after the Trump administration, with characters making mention of news stories about cabinet members and GOP leaders turning up dead or rotting in jail.

x) "Ballers"
There's probably no show on TV that I make more jokes about than "Ballers," but I have to admit it's grown on me a little. Introducing Russell Brand as a wacky new antagonist is really the most "Entourage"-lite thing they could've done, though.

y) "Suits"
The last season of "Suits" ended with, obviously, Meghan Markle leaving the show, but it also marked the departure of two more major characters, played by Patrick J. Adams and Gina Torres. So they're now in the position of really trying to justify dragging the show into the 8th season, and I don't mind that they've been done it partly by giving more screentime to Dule Hill and Wendell Pierce and Amanda Schull. The big news, though, is that Katherine Heigl joined the cast, and I kind of like Heigl in spite of her terrible reputation and feel like she should be able to get into a new niche on TV after movie stardom didn't work out for her, but this ain't it, they just kind of introduced her character as an unsympathetic irritant to the characters you already like.

z) "The Venture Bros."
It breaks my heart a little that "The Venture Bros." is never really gonna have a zeitgeist moment like "Rick & Morty" or something, but it's still honestly one of my favorite shows ever and I'm so glad that after 14 years Adult Swim keeps bringing it back for new seasons. So far season 7 seems to be kind of taking the show back a little bit to the characters and settings of the early seasons a little bit, I love seeing more of the Order Of The Triad again. So far my favorite little one-off gag of the new episodes was a superhero called Mr. Fahrenheit The Supersonic Man who looks like Freddie Mercury.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20, 2018 at 12:24 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.