TV Diary
As someone who aged out of the coveted 18-to-34 demographic a few years ago, I just barely have firsthand memories of "Perry Mason" as a popular TV property, when Raymond Burr made TV movies as the character 3 or 4 times a year until his death when I was 11. So I'm pretty curious why a gritty prequel miniseries about Perry Mason is something HBO would get behind in 2020 -- it was originally developed as a Robert Downey Jr. vehicle, and what's-his-name from "The Americans" doesn't exactly bring the same kind of starpower to it. And this is more of an edgy prequel reboot than anything that nostalgic older fans of the Burr series would go for anyway -- there's a disturbing image of a dead baby about 30 seconds into the first episode, some full frontal male nudity soon after. But hey, it's fun to watch John Lithgow and Stephen Root in old timey thin mustaches, and Tatiana Maslany is playing a big over-the-top preacher character, so you could do worse for gritty cable drama these days.
Really enjoying this Netflix show that's made in Spain but with mostly English dialogue and has this weird convoluted premise about an orphan who dies and then comes back to life with mystical powers and joins an ancient order of nuns. There's a lot of engaging character-driven stuff where she makes friends and gets mixed up in their problems so it doesn't get too bogged down in weird mythology, and Alba Baptista is just incredibly cute.
Michaela Cole was obviously really talented and creative based on "Chewing Gum" and I thought she showed real dramatic chops in "Black Earth Rising," but "I May Destroy You" feels like it's really beyond anything she's done up to this point, really impressive and unique show. The 5th episode this week kind of took the story to where I think other people might end it, with a victim standing onstage and calling their rapist out in public, but there are 7 more episodes to go so I'm interested to see where the story is going from here, it feels like Coel has made this really textured, realistic world and is trying to explore some gray areas in really charged subject matter.
The Montreal-based French language Netflix series "Can You Hear Me?" has a bit of the same feel as "I May Destroy You" -- it's a funny, character-driven show about young women going about their daily lives, but then these moments of remembered trauma sneak up on them and cast a pall over everything else. "Can You Hear Me?" is a little broader in the comedy, but it works, Florence Longpre gives a really fearless performance, just throws caution to the wind and makes Ada this kind of unpredictable character that can do or say anything.
e) "Big Dogs"
The Amazon crime drama "Big Dogs" reminds me of the recent final season of "Brockmire," in that they try to be really bleak and dystopian, but what they filmed back in 2019 doesn't seem quite so far off now. In a way the bleak and crime-ridden New York City of "Big Dogs" seems like '70s NYC in the modern day, with a bit of 1920s mixed in (with criminals running underground speakeasies that play jazz music). Some of the dialogue is a bit clumsy and on-the-nose, but I liked Brett Cullen's big over-the-top monologue at the top of the first episode more than almost anything else in it, so I wouldn't mind if there was more of that.
f) "Stateless"
It's kind of a dated notion to consider any film actor 'too big' or 'too good' to do television, but it felt notable when Cate Blanchett did "Mrs. America," and now she's in another miniseries for Netflix in the same year. And it occurs to me that I've seldom seen her actually play an Australian as she does in this show, where she's sort of a cult leader with Dominic West, a Brit who I've often seen struggle with an American accent but sounds pretty convincingly Australian here.
You don't really think of "Masterpiece Theatre" as being an especially horny program but so much of the stuff I've seen on there has been these glamorous romance novel sort of stories, including "Beecham House," which is about this handsome Englishman in India in 1795, being very noble and dashing. Not bad but kinda boring.
After enjoying things like "Disenchanted" and "Miracle Workers: Dark Ages" recently, I was ready for another wacky medieval satire. But Hulu's "Crossing Swords" is from the same people who did "Robot Chicken," a show I've never particularly enjoyed, and it does a lot of the same edgy gross out humor, not into it.
It amused me that one of the modern touches in this latest reboot is the babysitters throwing shade at Care.com.
I remember reading about Michelle McNamara's work as a true crime blogger when she died in 2016, and it's cool to see that her husband Patton Oswalt and others helped posthumously publish her book on the Golden State Killer and this HBO docuseries. It's pretty engrossing, the way they dive into the history of this guy who murdered at least a dozen people and raped many more, through the lens of McNamara's research on the case, you get these bittersweet remembrances from Oswalt about his wife and also these awful firsthand accounts from the killer's survivors. And literally the day after the first episode aired, Joseph DeAngelo Jr., who was arrested in 2018, pled guilty to the murders, so this whole thing is really still just now unfolding.
I am, for some reason, one of the people Padma Lakshmi follows on Twitter, so on the off chance she sees this, I just wanna say hi to Padma, I like the show. Honestly, though, "Top Chef" was always one of the few reality shows I really enjoyed and kept up with for multiple seasons, and this show is a very refreshing look at local American cuisine and the way American immigrants put their own twist on traditional dishes from other countries, it's really thoughtful and well made and it makes me hungry every time I watch it. I particularly like the way they don't shy away from politics and will kind of let them bleed through naturally in the show, like the San Antonio episode where they have to stop filming so often because of border patrol helicopters overhead that they finally just talk over the helicopters and acknowledge how much that's an omnipresent part of life down there.
A British cooking competition show on Netflix, feels like they're trying to make it stand out with a really light fanciful colorful aesthetic, but for the most part the show is the same old same old.
Apparently this show was first done in Japan and then Mexico, but I really enjoyed the Australian version that was released in the U.S. on Amazon. Basically, the concept is that 10 comedians are locked in an apartment for 6 hours and try to make each other laugh, and whoever doesn't laugh the whole time wins a big cash prize. Other than the hose, Rebel Wilson, I wasn't familiar with any of the comics in the show, but you pretty quickly recognize everyone's style of humor, who's a prop comic and who does characters and who does snarky sarcasm and who does absurd unexpected things. Some of the contestants are really funny people I'd love to see in more stuff, some of them were a little obnoxious, and some people actually got eliminated for being too passive, but overall it's a lot of fun to watch. I hope they do it in America, it's so easy to imagine famous U.S. comics having a ball with the format, but I'd also happily watch another season of the Australian version.
Kind of a "Mythbusters"-y show where people who make products for doomsday survivalists test them out, lots of silliness and blowing stuff up, always entertainment value in that.
A really brilliant Netflix family game show where they just do the classic game everyone plays at home and blow it up to a larger scale -- obviously it's not real lava, but the obstacle course is flooded with red liquid and you have to jump from one piece of furniture to another. Just delightfully silly, I'd love to be on this show with my kids.
p) "Say I Do"
A Netflix reality show where they find couples whose wedding day didn't go according to plan and a team puts together a better wedding for them in the course of a few days, very sweet and touchy feely show.
Feels kind of nostalgic to watch a show shot in 2019 about restaurants in a tourist town, at a time when we can't go to restaurants. But I used to live in a beach town and work in kitchens in the summer, so maybe it's all too familiar to me, because I just didn't find it interesting, or maybe I just didn't like the people the show was about.
r) "The Search"
A Netflix miniseries based on the true story of a 4-year-old Mexican girl who went missing for several days and then her body was found in her bedroom. A pretty well done, engrossing show, but a horribly sad story, don't think I'll finish the series.
s) "Reality Z"
A new Brazilian adaptation of "Dead Set," a show Charlie Brooker created before "Black Mirror." I haven't seen the original show, which might have been novel in 2008, but a zombie horror comedy taking place on the set of a reality show, I dunno, it feels a little stale to do now.
Considering how many chaos has been wreaked by earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan and surrounding nations in recent years, it seemed like a bold idea to make an anime series with the premise of a huge earthquake sinking Japan into the ocean, and it specifically happening this year. It's pretty good, but man, what a bleak concept.
A South Korean show about a film special effects artist who begins a relationship with a humanoid robot who is programmed to be the perfect boyfriend. Very strange, kind of droll and funny show, one of those foreign programs that it's hard to imagine being made in America, at least not without being done in a much less earnest, more satirical way.
v) "My Mister"
Another South Korean show, a much more down-to-earth adult drama kind of thing.
I was never very into The Grudge, the American adaptation of the Japanese horror movie Ju-On, but this spinoff series is good, really creepy.
As with most Ryan Murphy shows, I had very mixed feelings about the first season of "The Politician," but I liked the concept that each season would focus on a different election in a guy's political career, and the last episode of season 1 kind of jumped forward to offer a promising taste of what season 2 would be. So I'm enjoying this season more than the first, and there are some really entertaining moments, like the Nancy Meyers jokes in the second episode, but there's still a lot I roll my eyes at.
A lot of networks have shuffled around their schedules during the pandemic, pushing back seasons of shows so they don't run out of things to air while production is shut down. Showtime had the weirdest decision, however, to just pause "Black Monday" in the middle of the second season, airing 6 episodes, pausing for over two months, and then coming back with the last 4 episodes. In any event, I'm glad it's back, the show's mix of period piece drama and really silly dialogue still confuses me sometimes, but it's enjoyable. And the ensemble is even better with people like Xosha Roquemore and Dule Hill and June Diane Raphael in the mix in the recent episodes.
My 5-year-old has been obsessed with rhyming words, I think partly from all the Dr. Seuss books we read together, but also just the general affinity kids have for rhyming. So I like this Netflix show, it's really cute and feeds his rhyming obsession.
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on Thursday, July 09, 2020 at 1:05 PM.
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