a) "Good Omens"
I remember reading Good Omens as a teenager and being really entertained by it and imagining how readily it could be adapted into a really fun movie. But now that I'm finally seeing it adapted onscreen as a miniseries, I have to admit my distant memories from 20 years ago are kind of foggy, I feel like I'm vicariously excited for how happy teenage me would've been to see this. But it is pretty well done, you probably can't ask for better leads than David Tennant and Michael Sheen, and Frances McDormand as the voice of God is somehow perfect.

b) "Catch-22"
I remember reading at most half of Catch-22 as a teenager and liking the book's sense of humor but somehow not being compelled to read on as I had with Vonnegut's absurdist reflections on WWII. I'm really impressed by this Hulu miniseries, though, it feels like they really captured the voice of the book and got a great cast, great meaty role for Christopher Abbott after he chewed his leg off to get out of "Girls," and really memorable turns by newcomers Daniel David Stewart and Lewis Pullman (son of Bill!). What really surprised me is that out of the trio of older actors playing commading officers, Kyle Chandler really upstages George Clooney and Hugh Laurie. Also, the flight scenes are really shot interestingly, looks a little different from anything I've seen in a World War II movie before.

c) "The Name of the Rose"
I've never read The Name of the Rose, so I'm not really sure where the story is going, but it's great seeing John Turturro and Michael Emerson act opposite each other, they're both incredible. Turturro being in another miniseries just kind of makes me wish that "The Night Of" had been turned into a multi-season series, though, I would've really loved that.

d) "The Hot Zone"
My wife read Richard Preston's The Hot Zone as a teenager and it was one of the formative experiences that made her want to study viruses and infectious diseases, so it's fun to watch this with her and get her running commentary. Her theory is that the people that cooperated with the TV adaptation got to be a bigger part of the narrative, and Nancy Jaax might not have done everything that they Julianna Margulies do in the show. But hey, it's Hollywood, sometimes it makes sense to kind of twist the truth so you have more of a main character to experience the story through.

e) "Fleabag"
The first season of "Fleabag" was so good and self-contained, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge has so many other projects going on, that I didn't get my hopes up that it would ever return. But the second season is really fantastic, took the whole thing in an interesting new direction and kind of put some clever new wrinkles in the conceit of Waller-Bridge breaking the fourth wall to address the camera in the middle of interacting with other characters in the 'reality' of the narrative. There were so many times I just laughed out loud, more than almost any other show recently.

f) "Gentleman Jack"
This show is about  Ann Lister, a British woman who lived semi-openly as a lesbian in the 1840s, which is pretty interesting in and of itself. But what I found really fascinating is that Lister left behind a diary with millions of words about her daily life. And while I'm usually wary of shows that use the main character's first person voiceover narration as a storytelling crutch, I really kinda wish they'd done that for "Gentleman Jack," since there's so much text in the actual person's words available to draw from. Instead, they just occasionally have actress Suranne Jones address the camera, very similarly to "Fleabag" in the middle of dialogue scenes, and it happens so sporadically and with so little payoff that it just doesn't feel like they committed to the choice, like it's just a whim. Also the theme song that plays over the credits is just awful.

g) "When They See Us"
It's morbidly amusing that Felicity Huffman plays probably the most contemptible person she's ever played in "When They See Us," and it's come out so soon after the biggest scandal of her life broke and people are looking at her as a bad person in real life for the first time. The young actors playing the Central Park 5 in this seem to be giving the most impressive performances, though, they've really done a good job of communicating what a horrible and confusing situation these kids were in.

h) "State of the Union"
Each episode of "State of the Union" is about 10 minutes long, and consists of a British couple in a troubled marriage (Chris O'Dowd and Rosamund Pike) meeting in a pub before a therapy appointment and kind of planning out what they'll discuss in that week's session, written by Nick Hornby and Stephen Frears. Having read High Fidelity, I regard Hornby's insight into relationships with suspicion, but he's got an ear for dialogue, and by the end of the 10 quick little episodes I really found it kind of engrossing and well done, Rosamund Pike really is an amazing actress. I wouldn't have minded if they'd done full half hour episodes, but it's kind of easy to imagine these dialogue-driven one-on-one scenes being padded out with the stuff you'd usually see in a show about a marriage, and it's kind of refreshing to feel like they trimmed the fat and just did the good parts. I'm also amused that in their marriage, as in my marriage, the husband is a music critic and the wife has a postgraduate degree in biology.

i) "It's Bruno!"
Each episode of "It's Bruno!" is about 15 minutes long, and consists of a guy walking his dog in New York. Even though it's somewhat a joke about dog people and their obsession with their dogs, it also feels like the show itself is too self-involved to realize that it's not interesting, it's just an incredibly pointless charmless series of sitcommy vignettes that, despite being shorter than a normal sitcom, still feels kind of padded and drawn out.

j) "Huge In France"

k) "What/If"
The first episode of "What/If" can be described as a gender swapped version of Indecent Proposal, with Renee Zellweger in the Robert Redford role. It's possible the story goes somewhere else entirely from there, but I haven't gotten that far yet, it was really just so unpromising. I might try to watch more and hope it gets interesting, just because I adore Jane Levy and don't want her to have wasted her time in something bad.

l) "The Society"
In "The Society," a group of high schoolers are bused out of town on a class trip, and when they return to their hometown that night, the entire town is empty, all of the adults and other people are just gone, all the buildings are vacant.

m) "High Seas"
This Netflix import from Spain that takes place in the 1940s reminds me of another recent Netflix import from Brazil, "Most Beautiful Thing," that took place in the '50s. Both have a real glamorous look and melodramatic vibe that really conjures the era well, this one's more of a mystery, I haven't watched it much yet but it seems interesting.

n) "Tuca & Bertie"
I've never really been into "Bojack Horseman" so a similar-looking show created by one of that show's animators probably didn't have a high chance of appealing to me, but at least it's not another animated sitcom about depression. But it still has that weird flat affect to it, it stars Tiffany Haddish and Ali Wong, two people who have big personalities and their own perspectives and can be very funny, and yet they just kind of blandly read their dialogue here, it's just a drag.

o) "The Red Line"
Between Clooney in "Catch-22," Margulies in "The Hot Zone," and Noah Wyle in this, the last few weeks have been very big for miniseries with actors from "ER." "The Red Line" is by far the weak link of that trio, though, it kind of reminds me of self-important early 2000s Oscar movies like Traffic and Monster's Ball that kind of revel in tragedy and try to make something profound out of the interconnectedness of people's lives, I never cared for that kind of thing.

p) "The New Negroes with Baron Vaughn and Open Mike Eagle"
I've never really heard Open Mike Eagle's music, but I know Baron Vaughn from other TV shows, so I'll just call this show a "Grace And Frankie" side project. It's mostly a showcase for black standups with Open Mike Eagle doing a new song and video at the end of each episode, I've seen a lot of the comics before but Candice Thompson was new to me and I really enjoyed her set.

q) "Games People Play"
Lauren London has such a beautiful, luminous screen presence, I'm surprised it took this long for her to get a starring role in a series, it's kind of unfortunate that this show premiered so soon after Nipsey Hussle's murder and she kind of became this tragic figure and probably didn't promote the show as much as she otherwise would have. It's one of BET's better recent scripted shows, they've started to step things up on that side, but it's kind of a soap opera, not really my thing.

r) "Selling Sunset"
This Netflix reality show about luxury real estate brokers in L.A. has such a perfectly oily douchey vibe, with these two kind of creepy middle-aged twin brothers and the young women who work for them, it just emanates wealthy awfulness.

s) "Paradise Hotel"
I'm so used to terrible reality shows enjoying lots of success that it's kind of refreshing when something like a reboot of the infamously bad 2003 reality show "Paradise Hotel" flops so hard that FOX canceled it after a few episodes and aired a truncated season.

t) "Jailbirds"
Considering that one of Netflix's first big successful series was "Orange Is The New Black" and they now produce a billion documentary shows, I'm surprised it took this long for them to make a docuseries about women in prison. It's pretty well done as a character study of individual prisoners, but kinda too sad for me to watch more than an episode or two of.

u) "The Wrestlers"
A Viceland docuseries about, uh, wrestlers, obviously. Seems pretty well done but I don't think I can bring myself to care about the subject matter even a little.

v) "Portals To Hell"
Given his experience with reality television and that he's the son of the prince of fucking darkness, I suppose Jack Osbourne is as good a choice as anybody to co-host a Travel Channel show about famously haunted buildings. It's a good idea for a show, it kinda makes me want to go to some of these places myself, I hadn't heard of a lot of them.

w) "Bug Diaries"
I've watched this show a bit with my bug-obsessed 4-year-old, it's pretty cute. Jason Alexander plays a cicada in one episode and Wallace Shawn plays a spider.

x) "Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas"
I respect Wyatt Cenac's commitment to being just about the only topical comedy show from a "Daily Show" alum that doesn't have a studio audience, and the second season has had some pretty interesting subjects. But I think even in the 'deep dive' genre of these shows that focus on one topic for all or most of each episode, I tend to enjoy John Oliver and Hasan Minhaj's shows more.

y) "The Last O.G."
This show has settled into a comfortable groove, it's pleasant to watch, but Tracy Morgan really seldom gets to be as funny as he usually is in everything else, and the same can be said for Tiffany Haddish.

z) "The Chi"
It's been weird to watch most of the second season of "The Chi" after the story broke that lead actor Jason Mitchell has been fired from the show (and at least one other project) for harassing women on the set. I never really thought he followed through on the potential he showed in Straight Outta Compton, though, his guest spot on "Forever" was a really engaging episode but he seemed to struggle witih the dialogue, and he never really felt like a convincing center of a big ensemble on "The Chi," I think it's possible the show could carry on and perhaps even improve doing the next season without him.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 07, 2019 at 2:27 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.