a) "Jett"
I put on this Cinemax series kind of expecting that at best it'd be a trashy sexy summer diversion crime drama with Carla Gugino. But it really exceeded my expectations, lot of clever plotting and Elmore Leonard neo noir vibes (probably not a coincidence, since creator Sebastian Gutierrez did screenplay for the adaptation of The Big Bounce and wrote for the "Karen Sisco" series starring Gugino). The dialogue is really snappy but there's some dark moments that kind of keep it from becoming too breezy or predictable. And Gugino gets a more complex role than the femme fatale she's played a hundred times -- a master thief who gets out of jail and tries to live a normal suburban mom life and gets forced to go back to pulling heists.

b) "Too Old To Die Young"
I haven't seen Drive or any other Nicolas Winding Refn movies, mostly because they didn't seem like something I'd enjoy, and his new series for Amazon seems to confirm that suspicion. The first couple episodes I watched ran over 90 minutes, and the last episode is only 30 minutes, so not only is this show guilty of streaming drama sprawl, but also the whole annoying variable episode length trend. And everything just goes so incredibly slowly, with these long lingering scenes with minimal dialogue that comes off more pretentious when it seems to punctuate several minutes of silence. I mean, I don't need every show to adhere to familiar TV rhythms, but it almost feels like he's going for some eerie Lynchian thing and just really falling short. It was especially glaring after watching "Jett," which manages to do the whole artsy crime drama thing with lots of stylized lighting without getting indulgent or boring.

c) "Los Espookys"
I wasn't sure what to expect of a Spanish language HBO comedy where the only familiar name is Fred Armisen, who I feel like I've had my fill of at this point. But "Los Espookys" is incredibly funny, I laughed out loud so many times during the first two episodes, particularly at almost anything Tati (Ana Fabrega) said. I can be a bit lazy about reading subtitles, but when the dialogue is this consistently funny, it's worth watching attentively. And the whole premise of a group of friends starting a business of using horror effects in practical situations (staging an exorcism to make a priest look good, scaring people out of a house so that they won't get an inheritance) is just incredibly entertaining.

d) "American Princess"
After a few years of moving toward making pretty impressive scripted series, Lifetime has spent the last year canceling those shows or letting them continue elsewhere ("UnReal," "You," "Mary Kills People") and focusing back towards Lifetime original movies. So I was pleasantly surprised to see the premiere of "American Princess," a series that is a bit frothier than other recent Lifetime shows but has a lot of personality and quite a few 4-letter words. The premise is kind of a stock runaway bride thing where a woman gets cheated on on her wedding day and decides to kind of blow up her life and go work at a renaissance fair. It's nice to see Lucas Neff from "Raising Hope" land on another good show, and Australian actress Georgia Flood is really charming and has a convincing accent as the titular American princess.

e) "Euphoria"
Son of Barry and "Euphoria" creator Sam Levinson is the latest 2nd generation writer-director to join the ranks of Sofia Coppola, Jason Reitman, Jake Kasdan, Max Landis, etc. And it would be an understatement to say that "Euphoria" is a different kind of coming age story than, say, Liberty Heights. Right now all the talk around this show is about all the edgy transgressive stuff with sex and drugs and high schoolers, but I'm interested to see if there's really a show there once the shock value wears off. Right now it all feels like this generation's American Beauty, pushing the envelope in a very timely and self-congratulatory way, there's even a scene where a teen couple jokes about plotting a murder and I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be a tip of the hat to American Beauty or not.

f) "City On A Hill"
"City On A Hill" has frequently been likened to "The Wire" if it took place in Boston, a comparison I was wary of right off the bat. While Kevin Bacon's scenery-chewing performance as FBI agent Jackie Rohr feels like an almost even broader variation on McNulty, and Seth Gilliam (Carver from "The Wire") pops up here and there, I'd prefer to just set that thought aside and take the show on its own terms. It's not bad so far, although I cracked up when the first episode of the show about Boston ended with a song by the band Boston playing while the "produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon" credit flashed on the screen.

g) "NOS4A2"
Zachary Quinto wears a lot of makeup and prosthetics in this show to play an old immortal monster who feeds on the souls of children or whatever, and he looks like crap, the makeup department failed on this one. I'm not sure if the show would be good if not for that, but it doesn't help.

h) "Songland"
The idea of doing a reality show competition for songwriters instead of singers is cool on paper but it very easily could have been a mess, and I'm happy to say that "Songland" really got the format right -- in particular that each episode has a different set of writers pitching to one particular pop star, instead of an ongoing tournament or anything like that. And even though it necessarily gives you a very quick and selective peek at the creative process, it can be fun to watch Ryan Tedder or Ester Dean offer notes or arrangement suggestions in real time and start playing with the song before they've even decided whether it's proceeding to the next level of the competition. I don't think they always end up with the best song, but the results have been overall pretty decent so far -- I think Kelsea Ballerini ended up with the best song and Meghan Trainor ended up with the most potential for a hit.

i) "Holey Moley"
While ABC is reviving lots of old school game shows for their summer programming, the standout is this kind of unapologetically silly new show that treats mini-golf like an epic sport with a couple of commentators, one of them Rob Riggle, calling the game. It's absolutely ridiculous but it leans into it, so it works.

j) "Trinkets"
A new Netflix teen drama about girls who shoplift, good premise but the execution felt a little dull to me. Brianna Hildebrand is good, though, I was impressed by her on the second season of "The Exorcist."

k) "The InBetween"
A new NBC show where a woman who can see and speak to dead people helps a police detective solves murders. I'm so tired of these shows, it's weird how supernatural procedurals have become such a repetitive predictable genre.

l) "Blood & Treasure"
CBS's new Romancing The Stone knockoff summer action series is crappy even by CBS standards, just lousy production values and bland mannequin actors.

m) "Chambers"
With all the movie stars doing television these days, Uma Thurman seems like the perfect kind of interesting risk-taking actress to come in to the TV world and do great things. But for whatever reason, she's had this kind of embarrassing run of giving perfectly good performances on unloved network shows like "The Slap" and "Smash." The highlight of her TV career so far was a great recurring role on the underrated "The Imposters," but that show was on Bravo and practically nobody saw it. And her latest indignity is "Chambers," a show that Netflix canceled less than 2 months after releasing the first season. "Chambers" wasn't bad per se, the whole melodrama of Sivan Alyra Rose playing a teenage girl who gets a heart transplant and starts having visions of the girl whose heart she got is pretty well done. But Thurman, who plays the donor's mother, really doesn't have a very interesting role, at least in the first episode, I feel like Uma needs to get on the next season of "Big Little Lies" or something, someone please get her into a good TV project.

n) "Bonding"
Netflix has been doing more and more comedies with really short episodes, and so far "Bonding," which runs between 13 and 17 minutes, has been one of the best examples of that. It's about a dominatrix who enlists her comedian best friend to be her leather-bound BDSM assistant, and it's nice to see a show just focus on two characters and not have a whole supporting ensemble with their own B plots to pad it out to a traditional sitcom length. Obviously, contrasting the BDSM world with more traditional social interactions is the central joke of the show, but it's not the worst joke to base a show on.

o) "Special"
Another Netflix comedy with little bite-sized 15-minute episodes, you could watch the whole seasons of these shows in the time it takes to watch a movie. There are so many shows where the disabled character isn't played by an actor with that disability, so it's refreshing to see writer/creator/star Ryan O'Connell, who has cerebral palsy, make a really bluntly funny show about his life and portray it on camera.

p) "No Good Nick"
This Netflix show is really strange, it's shot like a Nickelodeon sitcom and has a laugh track, but it has kind of a serialized plot about a teenage con artist getting herself adopted by a family so that she can rob them. I kind of respect that they're trying to do something different and blur genres a little, I really wanted it to be good since Sean Astin is the dad, but the humor is still kind of too cheesy to enjoy as an adult.

q) "Traitors"
I like how this British show opens right at the end of the World War II and hinges on how instead of everybody breathing easy and celebrating peace there was all this other stuff going on with loyalties between nations and espionage and traitors, it's an interesting moment in history.

r) "Historical Roasts"
A few summers ago I worked at a comedy festival in D.C. that included a roast of James Carville with a bunch of the Comedy Central roast guys like Jeff Ross and Bob Saget. And it was fun to be a part of that world for one night and basically have these guys bringing me script changes and asking me if the dirty version of a joke or the dirtier version was funnier. The humor was often only political in the broadest strokes, but it worked for the needs of the occasion. And Ross's latest show on Netflix is a little disappointing because it feels like it just doesn't quite function as well as that night did. Once you have Bob Saget dressed up as Lincoln and John Stamos as John Wilkes Booth, it becomes some whole goofy over thing. If the person being roasted is pretending to be someone else, you can't even look to them for genuine reactions if a cutting joke is being made about them personally, it kind of cancels out the point of the roast.

s) "Klepper"
I thought Jordan Klepper's clueless white guy persona on "The Daily Show" was really funny, as was the amped up paranoid persona on his short-lived "The Opposition with Jordan Klepper." But the latter got canceled, so now Comedy Central is trying something different, having him do a weekly show where he does field pieces and sheds the satirical persona to be a little more earnest and honest. It's a well made show, he's covering important topics, but it's a little boring, and I miss "The Opposition."

t) "The Aquarium"
I love aquariums and I'm happy that I live near Baltimore's National Aquarium and have been there dozens of times. So I like Animal Planet's new reality show filmed in an even larger place, the Georgia Aquarium, it's really fun to get a behind-the-scenes look at how these places function and how handlers have to, say, convince a bunch of seals to ride a freight elevator.

u) "Nature's Strangest Mysteries: Solved"
Another new Animal Planet show, has some pretty amusing footage and weird trivia, but the production values of the show feel kind of slapdash.

v) "Chip And Potato"
A Netflix kid's show about a pug that my kids had zero interest in, and usually nothing is too cutesy for my 4-year-old.

w) "Vida"
The first season of "Vida" was great but felt too short at only 6 episodes, so I'm glad they're up to 10 episodes for the second season. For a show that grapples with a lot of emotions and big issues, the sex scenes often feel kind of gratuitous, so I'm amused that the second season opened with a super gratuitous and lengthy orgy scene that ended with Lyn declaring she was going to abstain from sex for a while, although I don't think the show is actually going to commit to toning that stuff down.

x) "The Butcher"
I kind of love this new History Channel competitive reality show about cutting meat, it's really entertaining to see all the usual reality competition tropes applied to something like this, and these people really are talented. I can't watch it hungry, though.

y) "Forged In Fire"
This other longer-running History Channel show about people who make knives has a similar appeal, although I don't like it as much as my wife, who for a while was watching it every time I came home late from working at night.

z) "Attack On Titan"
Another show my wife has been watching a lot when I work late, so I'll come in halfway through an episode and be lost. I'm still a total anime novice, though, I think I'd have a hard time following this show even if I tried, it seems really strange.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 28, 2019 at 1:10 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.