a) "In The Dark"
"Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" and "iZombie" are the only shows on The CW that I liked and they're both ending this season, so I thought I was gonna be done with the network for a while, but I feel like they just hooked me back in with "In The Dark." In fact it reminds me a lot of my favorite CW show, "Veronica Mars," in that it's about a young woman investigating the death of her friend, and there's a lot of snappy dialogue and gallows humor. But it doesn't feel derivative, it's very much it's own thing, with Perry Mattfeld playing a blind woman who kind of becomes a despondent, self-destructive, drinking and having one night stands, and then has to overcome all that to solve her friend's murder. It sounds heavy, but it's really entertaining and character-driven, really happy that it's already been picked up for a second season.

b) "Ramy"
I'm weary of streaming sitcoms that mix comedy with drama and social commentary, but comedian Ramy Youssef's series for Hulu gets the balance better than most other shows in recent memory. It's really charming, some of the 'son of immigrants caught between his family/religion and assimilating' stuff is very familiar, but I haven't seen it done with a Muslim from an Egyptian family before so it doesn't feel stale.

c) "The Act"
"The Act" debuted less than 3 months after the conclusion of "Escape At Dannemora," so it feels like Patricia Arquette is really finding a niche in true story miniseries where she plays a really flawed woman who gets in over her head. By that standard, "The Act" probably isn't quite as impressive as a series or as an Arquette performance, but it's really good, I hadn't read about the story before so I'm just kind of going through it interested to see what happens.

d) "Fosse/Verdon"
Even though I knew "Pose" was Ryan Murphy's final new show before his Netflix deal, I somehow just assumed "Fosse/Verdon" was one of his, just because it's on FX and seems like a natural follow-up to stuff like "Feud: Bette And Joan." As it happens, Ryan Murphy has nothing to do with "Fosse/Verdon," which is a good thing, it's better than he'd be able to pull off. I love when it really feels like you're getting a loving, detailed depiction of great artists and what made them great, I don't know a lot about musicals or choreography, but it really pulls you into that world. I had started to think I'm kind of over Sam Rockwell and find his bag of tricks too familiar, but he's really got a deft touch in this.

e) "I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson"
I had mixed feelings about Tim Robinson's Comedy Central sitcom "Detroiters," which was good but kind of straightlaced. But I laugh harder and much more often at his new Netflix sketch show, which is really just deranged and unpredictable. I like that the episodes tend to be just 16-19 minutes long, it helps with the kind of Adult Swim style and pacing of the show.

f) "Lunatics"
"Lunatics" is another Netflix sketch show where one actor plays lots of different characters, in this case Chris Lilley. Lilley is a huge star in his native Australia and I've seen small amounts of some of his previous shows ("Summer Heights High," "Angry Boys," "Ja'mie: Private School Girl") and didn't find them to be to my taste, and after watching "Lunatics" I can confirm that I hate Chris Lilley's face and his entire approach to comedy.

g) "Now Apocalypse"
This Starz show is really intriguing, it's full of hot people fucking but there's all this weird mystical stuff happening, I'm not really sure where it's headed but I'm curious. One thing I keep thinking is that Avan Jogia's character almost seems like a spinoff of Daniel Zovatto's character from last year's HBO show "Here And Now," this young long-haired gay guy who has visions that are either hallucinations or psychic premonitions. But "Here And Now" was a terrible bloated drama and "Now Apocalypse" is this strange and promising comedy.

h) "Lazor Wulf" 
Vince Staples has such a great deadpan wit in interviews and on Twitter that it seemed like a good idea on paper for him to do an Adult Swim cartoon. But he sounds more bored than deadpan here and the whole thing has such an ugly animation style and has this kind of bland indifferent vibe that I hate about some Adult Swim stuff.

i) "Our Planet"
I'm glad the Attenborough/Silverback Films team that made "Planet Earth" and "Blue Planet" keeps making new series, I've only watched a little of this new one so far but it seems to be up to their usual high standard.

j) "Hostile Planet"
This series is not from the Attenborough/Silverback team, which I guess is fine, it's not like they can own the word 'planet,' and there's some great footage in this show too. But I can't help but compare it and I don't like it as much, I think I'm just annoyed by Bear Grylls. Plus every nature documentary will have occasionally dark 'survival of the fittest' moments but this is kind of premised on that, so it can be a lot to take seeing baby animals die and stuff.

k) "Reconstruction: America After The Civil War"
As I mentioned last week, I've been reading an Otis Redding biography that is surprisingly detailed about the post-Civil War deep south and the generations before Redding was born, so I felt very primed to learn more in this PBS miniseries and it's really impressive. I feel like it's important at this moment in time to take such an honest inventory of the Jim Crow era and how hard the road was for black Americans after emancipation instead of just living in the idealized fantasy of constant progress towards civil rights.

l) "Gone"
A procedural where a grown up survivor of a child abduction is recruited to join an FBI missing persons task force, kinda dark and intense. But I find it distractingly weird that Chris Noth's noble lawman character has the same name, Frank Booth, as Dennis Hopper's psychopath in Blue Velvet.

m) "The Enemy Within"
This NBC drama is about a high ranking CIA official who's jailed for terrorism and then enlisted to help catch a terrorist, it's very dour and pulpy, not really my thing.

n) "Mexican Dynasties"
It's kind of novel to see a Bravo reality show about rich families in Mexico and see how much it's the same as their shows about awful American rich people, but once I realized that that's what this is I stopped watching.

o) "Larry Charles' Dangerous World Of Comedy"
This Netflix documentary series is a great idea because "Seinfeld" writer/Borat director Larry Charles kind of goes out to look at how comedy and satire are done in other countries that often don't have great free speech laws and how people can be really risking their lives.

p) "Turn Up Charlie"
It's funny to think that while Idris Elba is this action star and international sex symbol that people wanna look at in a certain way, he's also this goofy DJ/musician whose passion project is a sitcom about him being a goofy DJ/musician. This show isn't especially funny but it's kind of charming to see him play against type while also kinda being himself more.

q) "Desus & Mero"
The rise of Desus and Mero has been interesting to watch, as someone who can remember when they were just a couple of funny Twitter accounts. Their jump from Viceland to Showtime has been interesting because it's the first time that a lot of their fans have seemed to have mixed feelings, whether about the format of the show or going from nightly to weekly. But I'm actually watching them more now because I can actually keep up with a weekly show whereas when I know I won't watch every episode, I just end up not watching it for a while. It's fine that they do more pretaped segments but obviously the kind of loose unscripted stuff really the point of the show.

r) "Vice Live"
Of course, part of Desus and Mero jumping to Showtime was that they wanted more money and a bigger network and weren't happy at Viceland. So they made the kind of surprisingly bad decision to roll out a new nightly show the same week that "Desus & Mero" premiered on Showtime, and a couple months later it's already been canceled. It was a weird show, they had 4 hosts, 3 of whom had 'comedian' in their job description, but it kinda felt like they were too cool to put on a show, it was like a bored hipster version of "TRL." The only host I'd heard of before the show was Zack Fox, who's also Twitter famous like Desus and Mero were, but it felt like he just had no desire to be there or be funny.

s) "Lorena"
After all the prestige TV dramas about OJ and the Menendez brothers, I joked that we were gonna get a Lorena Bobbitt miniseries. But the true crime docuseries trend got to the story first. And I was kind of interested to see this story from a new vantage point, but the first episode kinda felt like I was just back in the '90s and there was this nervous tittering handling of the story, like they really didn't get the right people to work on this.

t) "Roswell, New Mexico"
I never watched the original "Roswell" but I figured I'd check out the new reboot while The CW is bringing back all its old shows. It cracks me up that the show doesn't still take place in the '90s but there's this whole thing where the main character loves Counting Crows and all the episodes are named after '90s songs.

u) "Better Things"
I was fine with Louis C.K. experiencing consequences for what he's done and a bunch of his projects getting shelved or canceled, but I did worry that "Better Things" would get lost or harmed in that process, since it's probably my favorite show he's co-created and it's much more about Pamela Adlon's voice and story. Really, I worried that she would just wanna stick with him and suffer a backlash for it, so I'm relieved that she started writing the show with other people and the third season is as good as the first two.

v) "Fam"
This CBS sitcom is really hacky and bad, but one thing I do enjoy a little about it is Odessa Adlon, who's Pamela Adlon's daughter, so it's fun to see her resemblance to her mom and her natural comic timing, and it's also amusing because of course one of the kids on "Better Things" is based on her.

w) "Schooled"
"iZombie" is going off the air this year, so we're currently in a very brief window of time where both Aly and AJ have primetime TV shows. I never got too into "The Goldbergs," partly because the show took place in such a broad, vague cartoon version of the '80s, so I suppose I can't be disappointed that its spinoff is an even more confusing caricature of the '90s, deliberately vague about the exact year and sometimes outright impossible (like one episode revolves around a character having grown up with the 1999 movie She's All That).

x) "Barry"
I thought it was a little overly precious that some people suggested, after the near-perfect first season of "Barry," that the show should just end there and not continue. Now, we're well into an amazing second season, and it's been renewed for a third, and part of the fun is seeing Bill Hader maintain this highwire act of kind of painting these characters into a corner and then finding an insane and unexpected way out of it. This week's episode was one for the books, it may have been too over-the-top for some people but I appreciate how far they're taking this thing. I keep waiting for the novelty of NoHo Hank to wear off but he's still just incredibly funny and strange.

y) "A.P. Bio"
This show has grown on me, but the boilerplate 'mean' comedy of the Glenn Howerton scenes kind of bores me, it's really at its best when you get scenes with Paula Pell and the trio of other teachers, they're really the secret weapon of the show.

z) "Veep"
I feel like "Veep" is going out guns blazing with this last season, they've heard the speculation that the show might not be as funny now that the Trump administration is a bigger shitshow than the Selina Meyer team could ever be, but they're just going for it. It does make me think more about the whole alternate timeline of the last 40 years that the show exists in, though.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 30, 2019 at 12:23 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.