a) "High Fidelity"
I thought it was clever casting when I heard that a series version of High Fidelity would star Zoe Kravitz, and wondered if they'd make her the daughter of Lisa Bonet's character from the movie. But she's the new John Cusack and it's really just as close as possible to the source material but grafted onto a new location (New York) and flipping the gender, race and/or sexual orientation of most of the characters. That really helps get the whole thing away from the sad bastard white guy cliches of both the story and the musical references, although everyone's taste is still distractingly Gen X-ish, and Da'Vine Joy Randolph and David H. Holmes in particular do great work reinventing the record store clerk characters even as they're saying a lot of the same lines near verbatim. The weak link is Kravitz, who I gotta say just doesn't have enough personality to really pull of the character who constantly addresses the viewer, or even her mother's effortless aloof charisma, but she's good enough that she doesn't get away when the show works, which is most of the time.

b) "Briarpatch"
I'm kind of glad this is actually pitched as an 'anthology series' in its first season (presumably future seasons will be based on other Ross Thomas novels), I'm starting to get tired of anticipating a second season of a show continuing the story and then getting a whole new cast and/or story. This is promising so far, though, I'm enjoying the southern noir vibes and there's some good flashy direction and music supervision -- the scene set to "High Pressure Days" by The Units was so good and memorable.

c) "Miracle Workers: Dark Ages"
Now this is something that I'm really glad turned out to be an anthology show. The first season of "Miracle Workers" was nice enough, but the 2nd season, where they do a Monty Python and the Holy Grail-style silly take on the dark ages, is just hysterically funny. And since it's the same cast from the first season, you get the rare story medieval period piece with colorblind casting. I still have a big crush on Geraldine Viswanathan but I feel very self-conscious about her character being named 'Al Shitshoveler' because it sounds like a mean nickname for me.

d) "The New Pope"
Another sort-of second season of a show under a slightly different title, "The Young Pope" continuing with Jude Law's character and John Malkovich playing his successor. People actually tell the new Pope that he looks like John Malkovich and the whole vibe of the character kind of feels like what Malkovich would be like if he was made Pope. But the broader moments like when the Pope meets with Marilyn Manson are always balanced out by a lot of more surreal and ambiguous moments, in a way this show is more like "Twin Peaks" than anything else on TV, it feels like there's a lot of strange subconscious level stuff going on under the surface.

e) "Kidding"
The fact that the 2nd season of "Kidding" was pushed back 3 months and is now being run with 2 episodes a week makes me wonder if Showtime has already given up on this show and is just waiting until it's done airing to announce its cancellation, which would be fine with me, I feel kind of ambivalent toward it all. I hate that Jim Carrey plays Mr. Pickles with the same dopey voice whether the character is performing on TV or living his day-to-day life, it reminds me of how his Andy Kaufman talked like Latka Gravas 24/7, it's like once Carrey commits to a stylized delivery for a character he can't modulate it at all.

f) "Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens"
Awkwafina has been in enough enjoyable movies now that I try not too judge her comedy rapper origins too harshly, but I really just wish she wasn't still calling herself Awkwafina, and they're really twisting the knife putting her stage name in the title of her new show (which, by the way, should never be done with anyone's name -- like, imagine if "Frasier" was called "Kelsey Grammer Is Frasier" or something, it's stupid). This show is okay but it kinda feels like Comedy Central said "hey we're losing 'Broad City,' can you do pretty much the exact same show?"

g) "68 Whiskey"
This show about soldiers in Afghanistan opens with two people fucking in a supply closet, and one of the main recurring storylines of the first few episodes is that the woman can only cum from being fingered and the guy trying really hard to give her a vaginal orgasm. So yeah, that's what this show is like. It can be kid of charming and character-driven but I can't tell if they're depicting what life is actually like out there or if they're just dropping "Grey's Anatomy"-type stories into that setting.

h) "Katy Keene"
This "Riverdale" spinoff seems mercifully tonally pretty different from "Riverdale," kind of reminds me of The CW's underrated previous Lucy Hale vehicle "Life Sentence." But mostly it's just a bag of "young people making it in the big apple" cliches that opens with the cursed Taylor Swift song "Welcome To New York," I relate to Katherine LaNasa's character more than the starry-eyed young folks.

i) "Outmatched"
It continues to blow my mind how quickly FOX went from having the strongest live action sitcom lineup of the big 4 networks to the weakest. Their latest "Outmatched" would be notably obnoxious even on CBS, with a canned laugh track braying at every joke on the overcooked premise that two parents are unreasonably distressed that all 3 of their children are gifted prodigies. It's annoying, too, because there's a kernel of a decent show in there, there will occasionally be a pretty cleverly constructed joke where a character confuses Captain Marvel with the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel or something.

j) "Indebted"
Given the amount of nostalgia for Fran Drescher and "The Nanny" in recent years, it should be a no-brainer to build a new sitcom vehicle around her. But it feels like NBC dropped the ball with this cheesy show about grandparents who go broke and move in with their son's family. The whole cast, including Steven Weber and Adam Pally, is solid, it's just all kind of lazy and hacky and the 2nd episode even echoed the plot of "Outmatched."

k) "Lincoln Rhyme: Hunt For The Bone Collector"
I never read Jeffery Deaver's The Bone Collector or saw the 1999 adaptation, but apparently Denzel Washington's character was named Lincoln Rhyme, as I learned from the ungainly title of the new TV adaptation. Russell Hornsby has a great voice and kind of commands the screen even from the confines of a wheelchair, so the show is well cast considering that I'm sure most people saw the Denzel movie and would hold it up to that. I'm not finding the story very interesting, though.

l) "9-1-1: Lone Star"
The original "9-1-1" is the most ludicrous show on television with the most overqualified cast, so I was at least glad that nobody as good as Angela Bassett is embarrassing themselves on the Texas-based spinoff, but I still kind of feel bad for Rob Lowe and Liv Tyler anyway. All you really need to know about this show is that there was an episode titled "Studs" where the storylines included a fight at a male strip club, a fire at a bull semen factory, an incel protest at a women's shelter, and Rob Lowe suffering from erectile dysfunction.

m) "Deputy"
"Deputy" is not as ridiculous as "9-1-1: Lone Star" but it's not far off, and features Stephen Dorff telling higher-ups that they live in an ivory tower and need to get in touch with their "inner deputy." I'm kind of glad Dorff has found his level again after getting maybe a little too much prestige from that last season of "True Detective."

n) "The Expanding Universe Of Ashley Garcia"
It made a lot of sense when I realized this Netflix show was created by Mario Lopez, it's very much a teen sitcom in the "Saved By The Bell" mode, but not too derivative, with a pretty charming cast.

o) "October Faction"
This Canadian horror series on Netflix has potential, there's the bones of a good SyFy original series there, but the casting really falls flat and the visual effects are weak. The first two episodes were directed by Director X (the Hype Williams protege who directed Superfly and a million great music videos) but even those kind of look drab and low budget.

p) "Thieves Of The Wood"
A Dutch show on Netflix about 18th century highwaymen, I tried to watch it a couple times but could not get into it at all.

q) "Seven Worlds, One Planet"
The BBC and David Attenborough's latest docuseries about Earth is as gorgeous as ever, with one episode dedicated to each continent, and the first one that aired in America was the Australia episode, filmed before the wildfires destroyed some of the places depicted in the show. That really emphasized for me just how special these shows are and how much they're documenting a world that we are rapidly losing.

r) "Lego Masters"
I have kids who fill my house with Lego creations, so I enjoy watching this FOX show where adults compete in crazy elaborate Lego competitions. It's kind of like "Project Runway" where the Tim Gunn figures are professional 'brickmasters' who design sets for Lego, I really adore Brickmaster Amy and her Scottish accent. It feels like the contestants were cast for TV more than for skill and the producers have dressed them up to be different stereotypes and play into them as much as possible, though. 

s) "The Explosion Show"
There have been so many different spinoffs and derivatives of "Mythbusters" since the original show ended, and this one with Tory Belleci amusingly just zeroes in on the controlled explosions that were always a highlight of "Mythbusters" and does nothing but that. They still get some science content in there but it's mostly just things going boom.

t) "McMillion$"
I'm kind of glad I never read the big article about the McDonald's Monopoly scam back when it came out so I can enjoy the HBO documentary series without knowing the story already. The main FBI agent they talk to for this, Doug, is really entertaining, they kinda got lucky having such a goofy guy to tell a lot of the story.

u) "The Pharmacist"
A Netflix true crime show about a small town pharmacist who decides to solve his son's murder. Haven't gotten to the end of it yet but it's hard not to feel for the guy and admire his resolve.

v) "True Life: Crime"
I really rolled my eyes at MTV doing a spinoff of their old "True Life" documentary series to get in on the true crime trend and having Nev from Catfish present the show like Robert Stack on "Unsolved Mysteries." It's especially weird because since they usually pick deaths or incidents that were the object of social media fascination and kind of focus more on it going viral and speculation than what they know about what actually happened.

w) "Murdered By Morning"
Another true crime show, going moment by moment through the last hours of a murder victim's life. The first episode where they played a victim's 911 call really made me feel awful, I don't have the stomach for too much of this stuff.

x) "The Owl House"
This is probably both my kids' favorite new show of the last few months, really charming, creative fantasy show about a teenager studying to be a witch, has a bit of the same appeal as "Infinity Train." And now my 4-year-old loves one of my favorite songs, Madness's "Our House," because it was used in the Disney Channel's ads for "The Owl House."

y) "It's Pony"
Another show my kids are enjoying, some of the dialogue is really silly and funny.

z) "The Adventures of Paddington"
This animated series has the same voice actor, Ben Wishaw, as the great recent Paddington movies but is otherwise not really in the same style, but it's still pretty cute and charming, I've always loved Paddington Bear. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 18, 2020 at 2:47 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.