a) "Little Fires Everywhere"
I like to joke that after "Big Little Lies," Reese Witherspoon went and optioned every novel about suburban strife with 'little' in the title that she could find. But really, it's hard not to compare this Hulu miniseries to Reese's previous HBO series and find it inferior in every way. I think the pleasant surprise of this show is the younger members of the cast, though. The scenes with the daughters played  by Jade Pettyjohn and Lexie Underwood feel a little more authentic and engrossing while it's actually the scenes with their moms played by the more seasoned Witherspoon and Kerry Washington that feel like a Lifetime movie.

b) "Devs"
I was really looking forward to Alex Garland's first TV series and it's lived up to my expectations so far, it has that same kind of fusion of weird dreamy moody high concept sci-fi and good old fashioned suspense as Ex Machina and Annihilation. I feel like it's risky territory, though, it can really feel like way more or way less than the sum of its parts depending on how the conclusion of the story lands -- but at this point, a couple weeks from the finale, I'm really intrigues, this week's episode was kind of amazing because they disrupted the cat-and-mouse game and just put everybody face to face in a surprising way. I really enjoy the contrast between Sonoyo Mizuno, Jin Ha, and Cailee Spaeny as these young beautiful earnest geniuses and Nick Offerman and Zach Grenier as these terrifying cutthroat tech giant guys, with Alison Pill not quite one or the other. Someone pointed out that Offerman looks like the killer from "Too Many Cooks" and now I can't unsee it, but it kind of works in context of the character.

c) "The Plot Against America"
David Simon's new miniseries, like "The Man In The High Castle" or "The Handmaid's Tale," is based on a novel written years ago that imagined an alternate path of history in which America became a fascist nation, adapted for television at a time when it feels shall we say increasingly relevant. In this case, Philip Roth's 2004 novel The Plot Against America puts forward the premise of Charles Lindbergh running for president against FDR and winning, and becoming allied with Hitler. But the way the story is told, largely though the eyes one of family (a fictionalized version of Roths family in the book, with different names in the show), reminds me a bit of last year's intriguing and frustrating miniseries "Years And Years," which did something similar with a fictitious head of state's ascent to power. The cast, including John Turturro and Winona Ryder, is impressive, and it has the highest production values of any Simon series to date (credit to director Minkie Spiro). But after 3 episodes it kind of just feels like the storm clouds are gathering, I'm anxious about where the story is going but I'm not on the edge of my seat yet.

d) "Feel Good"
"Feel Good" is the kind of show you see pretty often these days: a comedian plays a character based on themselves who does standup comedy and has the same first name and everything, but it's more or less a drama with intermittent comic relief. And the main romantic plot of "Feel Good" is a lot like another one of those shows, "One Mississippi." That said, I enjoyed it, Mae Martin really dug deep and told a complex personal story pretty well in six episodes.

e) "Breeders"
"Breeders" reminds me a lot of other frank, realistic FX comedies about parenting, from "Married" to "Better Things," but maybe a little blunter and meaner, a bit more cursing in front of very young children, and maybe getting some extra transgressive kicks out of Martin "Bilbo Baggins" Freeman being the one doing most of the cursing. It has grown on me over the first few episodes, though. I liked the small role by Michael McKean, although it seemed unnecessary to me that they made him Daisy Haggard's American father when he's got a perfectly good This Is Spinal Tap accent in his arsenal (apparently Michael Gambon was originally cast in the part so the character was probably going to be a Brit). Patrick Baladi, who seems to do a lot of British TV but nothing I've seen since the original "The Office," gets a lot of the biggest laughs on some episodes of "Breeders."

f) "Duncanville"
FOX has put a lot of animated sitcoms about middle class families on the air over the years -- once or twice a decade, they hit with something that can air for years and years ("The Simpsons," "King of the Hill," "Family Guy," "Bob's Burgers") but they've thrown a lot of stuff at the wall that hasn't stuck. This season had two: "Bless The Harts" starring Kristen Wiig, which I hated, and "Duncanville" starring Amy Poehler, which I kind of dismissed early on out of FOX Sunday night animation fatigue, but it's started to grow on me. I don't think it has enough really distinctive about it to make it a long-running hit, but the writing is sharp enough to get some laughs out of me.

g) "Twenties"
I feel like Lena Waithe has turned a corner where she gets more criticism than praise, and much of the criticism is deserved. But where I think some of her more serious and ambitious projects have fallen short and featured weird choices, I think her lighter shows like "Boomerang" and now the more autobiographlcal "Twenties" play to her strengths, just very straightforward comedic shows about black millennials' careers and relationships that are about as good as the more popular "Insecure." Jonica T. Gibbs is really entertaining in the main role, and I'm very amused that Big Sean plays a new agey character named 'Tristan' who wears moccasins, does yoga, and doesn't own a phone.

h) "Unorthodox"
A Netflix miniseries about a woman from the orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn running away to start a new life in Berlin, the first episode was kind of slow but I found it interesting, gonna try to finish it.

i) "The Pale Horse"
I know that British television has a tendency towards fewer episodes than American TV, but I think it's pretty silly that this BBC miniseries adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel is just two 60-minute episodes. It's really just a feature film that's been arbitrarily broken up, but if I did look at it as a movie, it wouldn't b ea very good one. And it's weird to say something I didn't really enjoy should've been longer, but I feel like the suspense and ominous atmosphere of dread that "The Pale Horse" does get across pretty well would've been more effective if they'd let the story play out across more episodes. I suppose I should just be happy that it didn't waste more of my time getting to that anticlimactic villain reveal.

j) "The Letter For The King"
One of my favorite things about the Lord of the Rings movies was the New Zealand shooting locations, it's just a perfect green, unspoiled, vaguely otherworldly place to film a fantasy story. So being shot in New Zealand is one of the things right off the bat that the new Netflix fantasy show "The Letter For The King" in it (I wonder if the Serkises had anything to do with it -- Andy Serkis has a recurring role and his daughter Ruby Ashbourne Serkis is the female lead). It's a pretty charming show, has a bit of the playfully modern dialogue like "The Witcher" but isn't as broad with the humor or as adult in the content, more of a family-friendly coming-of-age story.

k) "The English Game"
A miniseries about the origins of modern football in England is a pretty good idea, and I felt like the first episode kept to the spirit of what I was hoping it would be. But by the second episode it kinda felt like they were pumping up the drama instead of just kind of capturing the cultural moment and the quirks of the process and I lost some interest.

l) "ZeroZeroZero"
I had to wonder if there was some kind of intentional homage going on when (SPOILER WARNING) "ZeroZeroZero" started off, like The Usual Suspects, with Gabriel Byrne getting shot over a boat full of coke. Seems like a decent crime epic if you're into that kind of thing.

m) "Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker"
This is pretty good so far, the direction is a lot more playful than I expected, not at all a straightforward biopic kind of story.

n) "Vampires"
It's illustrative of just what an insane amount of product Netflix is generating that in the last 4 months alone they've released the first seasons of "Dracula," "V-Wars," and "Vampires." I don't know if I need any new vampire shows, much less 3, but I think "Vampires" is the best of the three. It's French, and it has kind of a clever angle where there's a teenage half vampire/half regular human who's not really sure which side of the family she favors.

o) "The Valhalla Murders"
This Icelandic murder mystery on Netflix feels like it came out of a 'Nordic crime drama' generator, right down to the color palette, not a bad show but it just feels like such a familiar vibe at this point.

p) "Freud"
I don't know why this Austrian show is about a fictionalized version of Sigmund Freud that helps a psychic investigate a serial killer, it seems like a wacky Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter-type thing but the show is taking itself too seriously to own the weirdness of the premise.

q) "Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness"
This docuseries is currently becoming a big pop culture phenomenon, and I get it: Joe Exotic is an absolutely ridiculous person and some of the details of the story are absolutely insane. The highlight of the series is the song and music video he made which accuses his nemesis of murder and shows a lookalike of her feeding her husband's flesh to tigers. That said, I'm not that intrigued about what's happened with these shitty people and may not finish the series, I don't really care about any of them and the thought of a bunch of animals being in the care of these assholes and possibly being neglected or mistreated bums me out.

r) "It's Personal with Amy Hoggart"
British comedian Amy Hoggart, who's a regular on "Full Frontal," has her own show on TruTV now that is somewhat like "Nathan For You" -- attempting to help real people (in this case individuals with personal issues, not businesses) in a documentary format but with weird comedic twists. It's a bit more warm and touchy-feely, though, the people he's helping aren't really the butt of the jokes (I know people love "Nathan For You," but I've never really gotten into it). I kind of like it, there's this sweet sincerity to the show that works. And Hoggart this very dry sense of humor that works well with her animated singsong style of speaking.

s) "The Most Dangerous Animal Of All"
Lots of true crime shows are straightforward screen adaptations of a book or podcast, and I think that's what the plan was when FX went to make a series out of Gary L. Stewart's best-seller The Most Dangerous Animal Of All: Searching For My Father and Finding the Zodiac Killer. Instead, the producers of the show started to dig into the inaccuracies and half-truths of the book, and the show became a debunking of the book it shares a name with, and pretty much concluded that the guy's father could not be the Zodiac Killer as he claimed. As someone with a lot of skepticism for the genre, I kind of enjoyed watching the true crime craze eat itself here, as people are forced to admit that major publishing houses really don't fact-check their non-fiction books.

t) "100 Humans"
I find this show kind of irritating. Three TV personalities put on white labcoats and pretend to be scientists while conducting these little experiments with 100 people -- way too small a trial group to get conclusive results about anything -- and then claim to "answer" big questions about human behavior or age or gender. Some of the topics are interesting, I would love to see someone else conduct the surveys in a proper way and not for a pseudoscientific reality show.

u) "Black Monday"
The series "Black Monday" is a fictionalized account of the 1987 stock market crash known as 'Black Monday.' In March 2020, there were two crashes, two weeks in a row, that were so big they were referred to as 'Black Monday I' and 'Black Monday II.' The night before the latter, Showtime premiered the second season of "Black Monday," so...fun timing for a comedy show about stock crashes! I loved creator David Caspe's previous show "Happy Endings," but it can be a little weird to hear the silly punny rapid dialogue that felt so natural coming from wisecracking millennial friends on "Happy Endings" in the mouths of '80s stock traders -- like, nobody talked remotely like the characters on this show 32 years ago. But Regina Hall and Andrew Rannells are having a lot of fun with this dialogue, so I still kind of enjoy it even as they kind of awkwardly mash the sitcom vibes up with a gritty cable show and have long dramatic gunfights or show Horatio Sanz's penis for some reason.

v) "Manifest"
I'm only a little into the second season of "Manifest" but my interest in the show was never super strong and it's waning. I appreciate that they're not trying to lean into the "Lost"-like premise too much with increasingly intricate and escalating mysteries, and just kind of keep the show focused on the characters and the one central mystery. But that doesn't make for very engaging television, at least with this bland cast.

w) "Grown-ish"
I like that even though it's about a different generation and a different demographic than my experiences in school, "Grown-ish" is largely about a lot of kind of universal college experiences and things that people go through around college age. It'll never be as good a show as "Black-ish" but it's at least a lot better than "Mixed-ish."

x) "Brockmire"
After several sitcoms ("Parks & Recreation," "New Girl," "Casual") jumped forward 2-3 years into the future for their final seasons, "Brockmire" upped the ante by setting its 4th and final season in the 2030s. But it's extremely depressing, in ways that they didn't intend, that the dystopian future they predict in the next decade (news headlines like "another outbreak" and "food shortage riots") kinda resembles what's been going on here in 2020. That said, morbid misanthropy has always been the territory that "Brockmire" excels at, and there's been some good humor in there, along with a kind of sweet storyline where Brockmire has become a dedicated father after all his misadventures.

y) "Superstore"
It was interesting to hear that "Superstore" has been renewed for a 6th season but America Ferrera will be leaving the show after the 5th wraps up in a couple weeks. She's always kind of been the glue of the ensemble and a necessary foil for Ben Feldman's sometimes annoying character, could still see it being a good show without her but maybe more realistically if they add a new cast member or two than giving Feldman more screentime. The show is still at the top of its game, though, I respect that they haven't shied away from addressing how management treats labor at these big box stores. The recent storyline with Carol was kind of nuts.

z) "The Magicians"
Last week I called this one of my favorite shows of the past 10 years, so I was pretty eagerly anticipating last night's series finale. And even though they weren't sure if season 5 would be the last one when they wrapped it, they made the episode knowing it could be last, and it definitely felt like a great way to close the show, I loved the endings particularly for Margo, Zelda, Penny, and Eliot. I think some of the best TV shows are ones where none of the cast is well known before it but everyone goes onto have long careers, and I'd love to see pretty much everyone on TV or in movies again, but for now they really are those characters to me. This season had a lot of really entertaining stuff that made me feel like they still had a lot of gas in the tank creatively to keep going, though, last week's musical heist episode was great and so was the time loop episode. I was also amused that "The Magicians" recently became the first show that I've seen use the word "dickmatized" on television, although it only beat "Twenties" there by a couple weeks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 02, 2020 at 1:34 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.