TV Diary
a) "Maniac"
There's something very 2018 about two movie stars who launched their careers together in a goofy high school comedy a decade ago reuniting for a pretentious dystopian Netflix miniseries. This got off to a slow start for me, as someone who mainly watched it for Emma Stone, since she's barely in the first episode and the fun doesn't really start until the half of the show that takes place in fantasy dreamworlds. But then it gets pretty entertaining to watch Stone have a ball playing 4 or 5 wildly different characters. Jonah Hill too, I guess, I just kind of don't care about him or ever get anything out of his performances? The show wound up being a little more emotionally and narratively cohesive than I expected, but I still enjoyed it more from the standpoint of being a weird conceptual thing. I was really amused by Justin Theroux's character doing voiceover in the opening episode because basically doing his Lord Garmadon voice from The LEGO Ninjago Movie.
b) "Single Parents"
"New Girl" creator Elizabeth Meriwether's new show is pretty promising, I like the cast and the premise and it kind of puts a new enough spin on a show about parenting, being largely about the parents but also having some charming moments centered around the kids that aren't too cutesy. It's a show I have a hard time seeing surviving the first season, but I'm kinda rooting for it.
c) "The Neighborhood"
Back when "New Girl" started, Schmidt was the early breakout character and I kind of always assumed Max Greenfield's career prospects would be bright after the show. Instead, Jake Johnson is getting all the roles in big movies and Greenfield is on a hacky CBS sitcom where he does a more straightlaced version of the energetic overachiever Schmidt character in an 'odd couple' kind of dynamic with Cedric The Entertainer.
d) "Happy Together"
Likewise, Damon Wayans, Jr. was someone who was so entertaining as a member of an ensemble in both "New Girl" and "Happy Endings" that I was excited at the prospect of him starring in a new show, but "Happy Together" just has the CBS stench of formulaic lameness all over it. Wayans and Amber Stevens are funny together, but the whole premise where they're friends with an Australian pop star who looks like Harry Styles, it's weird, and that kid's just not funny.
e) "Mr Inbetween"
I already wrote quite a bit about this show in my Complex piece about TV hitmen, but I feel like I avoided saying too much about whether I thought the show was good. It's growing on me, but 6 episodes for a season is pretty short, so I feel like there's more to explore about this character that I guess they can get to in the next season. The finale was interesting because all these things were happening to Ray that he'd kind of done to other people, but then he just gets out of trouble in a badass tough guy way and it felt like there was no dramatic tension or redemption, just a tough guy pulling off a daring escape.
f) "The Good Cop"
A cop show starring Tony Danza and Josh Groban doesn't seem like the most promising thing on its face -- although I've always been impressed by Groban's sense of humor in his TV appearances, and he's good here even though I was initially disappointed that he's more of a straight man to Danza than a comedic presence. This show from "Monk" creator Andy Breckman is really well made and entertaining, though (I always liked "Monk" but kind of held it at arm's length, the cartoonish depiction of OCD irritated me). Danza, once again playing a character named Tony because he seems to like the running joke that he's too dumb to answer to another name, is really pretty great as the dirty cop who gets out of prison and is kept in line by his by-the-book cop son, the whole cast just has really good chemistry.
g) "The Haunting Of Hill House"
This show is kind of what I wanted the first season of "American Horror Story" to be before I realized how uninterested Ryan Murphy was in typical moody horror tropes. But a more slow-moving, ominous kind of horror series is maybe not as great an idea as it was in my head -- movies in this style require you to be on edge and uneasy for maybe 2 hours at most, and keeping that up over a 10-episode series can be kind of exhausting (I think -- we've only watched 3 episodes so far). It's growing on me, though, I liked that certain things that other shows would have put in episode 1 aren't really revealed until episode 3.
h) "The Romanoffs"
I never had especially high regard for "Mad Men" and kind of gave up on it after one season, and Matthew Weiner's debut feature Are You Here kind of solidified my impression that he's not actually much of a storyteller. So I'm not surprised that his expensive anthology series for Amazon is a big weird bust. All 8 episodes of "The Romanoffs" are standalone stories than run about 85 minutes, loosely connected by the conceit that the characters are or claim to be descendants of the Romanov family -- it makes me wonder if, after the failure of Are You Here, Weiner realized that he wouldn't get many more chances to direct feature films and basically tricked Amazon into giving him $70 million to make 8 mid-budget movies. I always made the charitable assumption that "Mad Men" was about inveterate womanizers because of the setting, but the first two episodes of "The Romanoffs" are both about guys bored with their relationships who have wish fulfillment affairs, so maybe that's just what Weiner is interested in.
I already wrote quite a bit about this show in my Complex piece about TV hitmen, but I feel like I avoided saying too much about whether I thought the show was good. It's growing on me, but 6 episodes for a season is pretty short, so I feel like there's more to explore about this character that I guess they can get to in the next season. The finale was interesting because all these things were happening to Ray that he'd kind of done to other people, but then he just gets out of trouble in a badass tough guy way and it felt like there was no dramatic tension or redemption, just a tough guy pulling off a daring escape.
f) "The Good Cop"
A cop show starring Tony Danza and Josh Groban doesn't seem like the most promising thing on its face -- although I've always been impressed by Groban's sense of humor in his TV appearances, and he's good here even though I was initially disappointed that he's more of a straight man to Danza than a comedic presence. This show from "Monk" creator Andy Breckman is really well made and entertaining, though (I always liked "Monk" but kind of held it at arm's length, the cartoonish depiction of OCD irritated me). Danza, once again playing a character named Tony because he seems to like the running joke that he's too dumb to answer to another name, is really pretty great as the dirty cop who gets out of prison and is kept in line by his by-the-book cop son, the whole cast just has really good chemistry.
g) "The Haunting Of Hill House"
This show is kind of what I wanted the first season of "American Horror Story" to be before I realized how uninterested Ryan Murphy was in typical moody horror tropes. But a more slow-moving, ominous kind of horror series is maybe not as great an idea as it was in my head -- movies in this style require you to be on edge and uneasy for maybe 2 hours at most, and keeping that up over a 10-episode series can be kind of exhausting (I think -- we've only watched 3 episodes so far). It's growing on me, though, I liked that certain things that other shows would have put in episode 1 aren't really revealed until episode 3.
h) "The Romanoffs"
I never had especially high regard for "Mad Men" and kind of gave up on it after one season, and Matthew Weiner's debut feature Are You Here kind of solidified my impression that he's not actually much of a storyteller. So I'm not surprised that his expensive anthology series for Amazon is a big weird bust. All 8 episodes of "The Romanoffs" are standalone stories than run about 85 minutes, loosely connected by the conceit that the characters are or claim to be descendants of the Romanov family -- it makes me wonder if, after the failure of Are You Here, Weiner realized that he wouldn't get many more chances to direct feature films and basically tricked Amazon into giving him $70 million to make 8 mid-budget movies. I always made the charitable assumption that "Mad Men" was about inveterate womanizers because of the setting, but the first two episodes of "The Romanoffs" are both about guys bored with their relationships who have wish fulfillment affairs, so maybe that's just what Weiner is interested in.
This show reminds me a lot of "13 Reasons Why," in both its premise and how I let the first episode or two pull on my heartstrings a little bit until I started to feel really repulsed by them. In a weird way, these shows about people committing suicide and leaving behind breadcrumbs to communicate with people they knew from beyond the grave are like a microcosm for emotionally manipulative TV, the way you've just been laid out this plan for how someone wants you to feel that you can still, ultimately, rebel against. And beyond that, I just think it's a really awful and irresponsible way to depict suicide.
j) "God Friended Me"
"God Friended Me" is the most widely ridiculed new show of the fall, just based on its title, but I'm pretty sure if the people making fun of the title watched it they'd have plenty more to make fun of. Brandon Micheal Hall, who last year played the bright-eyed idealistic young rapper-turned-politician in the cheesy but likable "The Mayor," is now the bright-eyed idealistic podcaster whose life is changed when God friends him on Facebook. And they do a decent job of turning this absurd premise into kind of a sweet inspirational little fantasy show like "Early Edition," it's still just so goofy. Violett Beane is really lovely, though.
k) "FBI"
This show is notable in the sense that Dick Wolf has finally taken up all of the available programming real estate on NBC and no has no choice but to bring a show to CBS. So it's kind of in his formula but that's never really been my thing. I feel like I'm beating up on CBS a lot because there are 6 of their shows in this post and I don't have anything positive to say about any of them, but all the jokes and stereotypes about CBS are pretty much true. They have exactly one primetime show I like, but I fell behind on "Mom" and haven't watched it regularly in years.
l) "I Feel Bad"
I at least expect hackneyed sitcoms from CBS, but "I Feel Bad" is almost shockingly bad by NBC's still pretty respectable standards. It feels like a full-length version of one of those commercials that's made to look and feel like a 30-second excerpt of a sitcom, just stock characters going through the most cliched sitcom situations with no real sense of timing or chemistry. And it only took like 3 episodes for the A plots and the B plots to feel like two different shows, where the main character is at home with her family and then they cut to some unrelated thing her wacky co-workers who you don't care at all are doing.
m) "The Cool Kids"
FOX has taken quite a turn as a network, because in the space of a few months they went from having a solid lineup of live action comedies ("Brooklyn Nine-Nine," "New Girl," "The Last Man On Earth" and "Ghosted") to an outright terrible one ("The Cool Kids," "Rel," and the return of "Last Man Standing"). "The Cool Kids" is full of comedy veterans playing irascible old folks in a retirement home, so it's not unpleasant in its predictability, but it's also pretty worthless. And David Alan Grier has that really bad fake gray hair that I associate with that one Tyler Perry TV show and rap videos where they pretend to be old people.
n) "Hilda"
A really charming Netflix animated series based on a graphic novel about a blue-haired girl in a Scandinavian fantasy world full of monsters. My 9-year-old only watched a handful of episodes before he lost interest but I really like it, might have to watch the rest myself.
o) "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat"
Interesting, different kind of food show that kind of takes a more elemental approach to cooking and how and why things taste good.
p) "All American"
Very boilerplate high school sports show on The CW, really didn't hold my attention. Taye Diggs has finally started to age, but he's almost 50, so good on him.
q) "New Amsterdam"
I think I only have room for at most one generic sexy doctor show in my life at any given time and my wife and I have been watching "The Resident" so I don't think I'll stick with this. It's a little weird to see Tyler Labine as a gray-haired head of psychiatry after the last decade or so of him playing every kind of goofy slacker.
r) "Magnum P.I."
With "Hawaii Five-O" and "S.W.A.T." and "MacGyver" reboots going strong, CBS is continuing to revive every campy old action series of the '70s and '80s. And since I have no reverence for the original show, I really don't care that the new Magnum is hispanic and doesn't have a mustache or that Higgins was rewritten as a woman, I mean, whatever, guys, go nuts. I feel bad that Zachary Knighton from "Happy Endings" is a sidekick on this show, though, he deserves better.
s) "Lethal Weapon"
This cheesy reboot of a hoary '80s franchise was humming along well for 2 seasons when all hell broke loose and their Riggs, Clayne Crawford, turned out to be as unstable as Mel Gibson and got fired. The third season kicked off with Riggs dying and Sean William Scott joining the cast as a new character, but the Stifler era may be short-lived, because Damon Wayans is such a good Murtaugh that he said he's too old to do this show and is leaving after they finished the 3rd season. Sean William Scott is way better than Clayne Crawford at this light-hearted action stuff, so I kind of like the new version of the show better, but it's still aggressively mediocre and unnecessary.
t) "The Amazing Human Body"
A cool PBS miniseries, I don't feel like I learned much new watching it but I liked the visuals and the way they presented the material, might be a good educational thing for kids to watch.
u) "The Hunt For The Trump Tapes With Tom Arnold"
Tom Arnold has always been kind of knowingly ridiculous, kind of acting like he knows he stumbled into a career in show business and hamming up his lack of polish. And so his weird 'investigative' show for Vice is kind of an exercise in self-deprecation where he just kind of stammers through interviews and monologues about finding any dirt at all on Trump that might possibly have the consequences that none of the other unearthed dirt has. It's depressing to watch and kind of realize just how desperate our situation has been that I feel any hope at all for Arnold to succeed in his mission.
v) "9-1-1"
The first season of "9-1-1" stuck 3 very talented lead actors (Angela Bassett, Peter Krause, and Connie Britton) with the worst, most clumsy and perfunctory dialogue the Ryan Murphy/Brad Falchuk meat grinder could give them. So I wasn't surprised at all to hear that one of them, Connie Britton, tapped out for the second season, and they brought in someone a little closer to the show's level, Jennifer Love Hewitt, to replace her. It's a fun pulpy little show and I like the cast, but man they really should hire better writers.
w) "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"
It's exciting to see "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" head into its 4th and final season and see just where they can still take the story at this point. Season 3 was really its darkest yet, but the rock bottom that the new season has opened with has a little more levity to the story, so I'm enjoying the whole ridiculous prison plotline.
x) "Fresh Off The Boat"
Constance Wu has been one of the funniest women on television for years now and I hoped that her huge box office success with Crazy Rich Asians would lead ABC to really value "Fresh Off The Boat" more. Instead, they moved it and another one of their best comedies, "Speechless," to Fridays, a longtime no-man's-land of network television, and I don't care if they're calling it 'TGIF,' it seems bad to me. I enjoyed the little nod to "Full House" in their season premiere, though.
y) "Last Man Standing"
Some of my music nerd friends side eye me blogging about TV, which I totally understand, and a while back one of them roasted me on twitter and told me to go write about "Last Man Standing," which I suppose is reason enough to actually do it because who cares, I'm not cool. I shamefully watched a number of episodes of this show in its original run on ABC, mainly because Molly Ephraim is a babe, and she's not on the new FOX version of the show, but I kind of respect that they just brazenly recast her character with someone who's a foot taller and has a different hair color and just made a meta joke out of it.
z) "Murphy Brown"
It seems like one of the recurring themes of old sitcoms being revived, from "Will & Grace" to "Roseanne," is that they're all very eager to timestamp the new episodes with constant references to Trump and jokes about "fake news" and so on. "Murphy Brown" was actually about politics and current events in its original incarnation, so it's at least not as forced here, but it's possibly the worst of all these reboots, just completely unnecessary and flattening the modest charms of the original show (and my favorite part of the old show was Eldin, but Robert Pastorelli died in 2004).
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