a) "Project Blue Book"
"Project Blue Book" is a scripted drama on the History channel about the real Air Force investigations of UFOs and unexplained phenomena in the '50s and '60s. And it's kind of funny how even though this is kind of the real X-Files decades earlier, the show itself feels derivative of "The X-Files," with the two investigators kind of framed as the believer and the straight-laced skeptic. It's kind of weird to see Aiden Gillen play a sympathetic protagonist as Josef Allen Hynek after being trained to hate him on "The Wire" and "Game of Thrones." But I particularly like that the show kind of has a running B plot about Laura Mennell as Hynek's wife and her interior life that's kind of linked to the main story.

b) "Sex Education"
"Sex Education" is a teen comedy about British schoolkids, with the twist that the virgin (possibly asexual?) son of a sex therapist ends up becoming an amateur sex therapist for students at school. It feels very broad and quickly turns the premise into a formula for each episode to follow, and kind of annoying derivative of American high school comedies. But it's also totally charming with a great, charismatic cast and I totally get why it's one of the first breakout hits of the new year.

c) "Derry Girls"
"Derry Girls" is a teen comedy about Irish schoolgirls and it doesn't feel Americanized at all like "Sex Education," which of course means it's a little less entertaining and accessible to me but I think I respect it more, if that makes sense.

d) "Butterfly"
I've only watched one of the three episodes of this British drama about an 11-year-old trans kid coming out, but so far it's pretty good, a little melodramatic and heavy handed but one of the more sensitive and empathetic portrayals of a trans character that I've seen on TV. I'm so used to seeing Anna Friel in "Pushing Daisies" that it still surprises me a little to hear her speak with her actual accent.

e) "Nightflyers"
I kind of would expect a George R. R. Martin adaptation to get a bigger platform than, like, a miniseries that SyFy burns off in a week in December where the only fairly recognizable actor in the cast is Gretchen Mol. But then, it's not like a spaceship drama like "Nightflyers" would necessarily appeal to a huge number of "Game of Thrones" viewers. "Nightflyers" does that trendy horror movie thing of opening with a scene from the climax out of context, so basically you see a piece of episode 9 at the top of episode 1, and then they rewind and tell the whole story. And I don't think it really worked, it just took a lot of the suspense and tension out of a story that was pretty bleak to begin with. And it just kind of reminded me of the weaker spaceship disaster movies in recent memory like Life and The Cloverfield Paradox.

f) "Diablero"
A recurring and I imagine annoying theme of these posts is me watching one of Netflix's foreign language imports for a couple episodes and then listlessly declaring that I lack the patience to watch more with subtitles or dubbed dialogue. "Diablero" from Mexico is fantastic, though, it's basically the great show I've been looking for and hoping for while sifting through all the other okay Netflix imports. The demon hunter premise isn't that unique or anything, but the dialogue is really sharp and delivered well by the actors who did the English dub, and director Jose Manuel Craviato has a great visual flair.

g) "The Protector"
Another Netflix import, this one a fantasy drama from Turkey, that I've been enjoying, partly because the two female leads are gorgeous and total badasses.

h) "7 Days Out"
I really enjoy this Netflix doc series where each episodes covers the last week of planning and preparation before a major event or something like the re-opening of a popular NYC restaurant. I've been working at huge conferences and conventions and things like that for years and I'm always fascinated to see how these big fast coordinated setups come together, it's cool to watch this show and be a fly on the wall instead of participating.

i) "The Shivering Truth"
A lot of Adult Swim shows are driven by an awkward or absurd comedic sensibility but are still essentially about comedy and levity, so "The Shivering Truth" stands out as maybe the first Adult Swim series I've seen that's fully on the side of being dark and unsettling and only intermittently silly. There's kind of a "Twilight Zone" sensibility to some of the stories and the narration, except with very short vignettes done in stop motion animation, and a lot of it more outright gross and gorey instead of thought provoking. On paper, that sounds like unique, intriguing TV, but I kind of hated it, it was ultimately just a surrealist "Robot Chicken" that was unpleasant to watch.

j) "Trigger Warning with Killer Mike"
I've long kind of looked at Killer Mike skeptically as a rapper who's very good at saying provocative things but doesn't necessarily have a coherent worldview that people would agree with if he communicated it clearly, which culminated in that whole mess with him casting his lot with the NRA propaganda machine and then apologizing for it. So I really rolled my eyes when I heard that he was going to do a show for Netflix called (ugh) "Trigger Warning." The first couple episodes exceeded my expectations, though, they were kind of like extended "Daily Show" correspondent segments where he'd take a simple idea to its natural extreme, like what happens when he only wants to give money to black businesses for a few days, or tries to use porn as an educational tool.

k) "Tidying Up With Marie Kondo"
I don't really fuck with self-help shows like this but I was so confused by all the Marie Kondo memes after this show came out that I watched it just to understand the "spark joy" jokes. I can see where her method of organization can be useful but it's a pretty goofy, repetitive show.

l) "Stand Up And Away! with Brian Regan"
Brian Regan is one of those rare comics who got really big as a standup without ever pivoting to something else like starring in a sitcom. And that's probably by design that he's just not interested in anything but standup, particularly since his new Netflix series basically consists of him doing standup routines and then kind of illustrating or expanding on the premises with brief sketches. It's not the worst idea, Comedy Central has done a few shows over the years that try to combine standup and sketches, but I feel like nobody's quite found the successful formula for doing it yet and the execution here feels stilted.

m) "Watership Down"
I read and enjoyed Watership Down when I was a kid and have never seen any of the previous screen adaptations, so I was curious to see this BBC/Netflix miniseries. The animation was just too awful for me to watch more than one episode, though, I don't know why they would get a voice cast with stars like James McAvoy and Ben Kingsley but have such cheap substandard digital animation.

n) "Vanity Fair"
I've never read or seen any previous iteration of Vanity Fair before this ITV/Amazon miniseries, so I don't really know how to judge this as an adaptation, but I wasn't terribly impressed with the cast or the production values.

o) "Hymn Of Death"
A Netflix import from South Korea, very treacly and dramatic, wasn't really into it.

p) "The Fix"
This show is kind of Netflix's attempt to bring the British comedy panel show to America, with a British host, the oily and unlovable Jimmy Carr, and mostly American/Canadian guests. The premise is kind of clever because each episode addresses a societal problem and lets everybody pitch a solution, but since it's a bunch of comedians who are looking to score easy laughs every 30 seconds, it kind of feels like the whole thing is just a facetious lark that wastes the energy that might have gone into actually coming up with some good ideas.

q) "Deadly Legacy"
This Discovery miniseries is about John Wayne Gacy, but it's really about a cold case detective who's trying to identify Gacy's 8 unidentified victims (he gets 2 of them by the end of the 3 episodes) and bring some closure to victims' families. It's kind of refreshing, in the era of lots of true crime docs and sometimes lurid stuff about serial killers, to see something a little more centered on doing right by the victims.

r) "The Innocent Man"
John Grisham's only nonfiction book, 2006's The Innocent Man, was kind of ahead of the curve of the whole explosion of true crime entertainment about wrongful convictions, so it makes sense that it's now a Netflix miniseries. But even though it's ostensibly an adaptaion of Grisham's book, it's also kind of continuation and commentary on it, with Grisham as one of the many talking heads. I thought this wove together the documentary aspects and the dramatized reenactment parts together a lot more satisfyingly than "Wormwood."

s) "Tidelands"
Kind of a cool Australian series with a weird mix of crime mystery and fantasy. I'd never seen Chris Hemsworth's wife Elsa Pataky in anything before, she's gorgeous.

t) "Pine Gap"
Another Australian show, kind of a dry political intrigue thing, found it boring.

u) "Bad Blood"
I always liked Kim Coates on "Sons of Anarchy" but his new series about a Canadian crime family is absolutely horrid, just some of the worst acting and writing I've ever seen, Paul Sorvino is laughable.

v) "1983"
This Polish series is kind of a "The Man In The High Castle" thing that supposes that a terrorist attack in 1983 altered the course of history and the Iron Curtain never fell in Poland, I don't think I know enough about Polish politics to find it interesting to be honest.

w) "Pete The Cat"
My kids and I didn't think much of the Pete The Cat books we'd read, but we enjoy the cartoon series based on the books a bit more, it's very charming. And the "go to sleep" song is my jam.

x) "Future Man"
"Future Man" is probably my favorite recent show that didn't make my last couple end-of-year TV lists (mainly because the first season came out in late 2017 and I watched most of it in 2018). And so far what I've watched of the second season has also been hilarious, with Derek Wilson continuing to be an incredibly funny breakout performer. The time travel storylines are starting to become dizzyingly convoluted, though. I feel like shows like this or "The Good Place" or even "Rick And Morty" are kind of leading us into this climate of comedies kind of fucking with your head with all these different layers of reality that are as hard to keep track of as, say, "Westworld."

y) "Angie Tribeca"
I've always enjoyed "Angie Tribeca"'s unapologetic throwback to wacky Zucker Brothers comedy, although over time I feel like its balance between jokes and reality has shifted to somewhere between "Police Squad!" and "30 Rock." The fourth season changed things up a little, with a nonsensical jump forward 20 years to explain a cast change, with Hayes MacAruther and Deon Cole out and Bobby Cannavale and Kiersey Clemons in their place.

z) "Friends From College"
"Two words: epic shitshow. People did not like it," is how Billy Eichner's character describes the events of the first season of "Friends From College" at the opening of the second season. And he might as well have been talking about the show itself, which got pretty terrible reviews and probably wouldn't have gotten a second season if Netflix was as cancellation-happy then as it is now. The show is slightly less aggraating to watch now, mainly because the characters who were getting cheated on found out about it, and the cheaters get to deal with the consequences. But it's not exactly pleasant either, even though the show is full of likable actors who've been fun to watch in other things, and even the customary scenes where the characters do something embarrassing or, like, get sprayed by a skunk and all start throwing up, are just kind of obnoxious and poorly plotted.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18, 2019 at 11:12 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.