TV Diary
I was amused that NBC's tagline for its new streaming service Peacock is "great entertainment is finally free," considering that NBC has been broadcasting free of charge for like 80 years before subscription streaming became the trendy new thing. But since Peacock is free with my cable plan, unlike Disney+ or Apple+ or CBS All Access, I've been watching their their initial slate of scripted shows, all of which are UK-based shows co-produced with British networks. I've never read Brave New World, but my wife has, so she was at least able to give me an idea of where they stuck to the source material and where they took liberties. It's interesting to see an adaptation of one of the earlier dystopian novels and how different it is from modern visions of dystopias -- I think the show kind of struggles to make Aldous Huxley's belief that a future where everyone's polygamous and on mood-lifting drugs would be so awful resonate with modern sensibilities . I mean, certainly, the story gets darker as it goes on, but a show where Jessica Brown Findlay and Kylie Bunbury regularly get glammed up and go to orgies doesn't seem that scary to me, honestly.
"The Capture," a Peacock show that aired in the UK on BBC One last year, is kind of an interesting surveillance state thriller, where a camera at a bus stop catches a guy committing a crime that he doesn't remember committing and it sets off this whole crazy sequence of events. I haven't finished it yet so I don't know if the story is resolved well yet, but I'm glad they renewed it for a second season, presumably with Holliday Grainger's character working a different case.
Another Peacock show that already aired in the UK a few months ago, "Intelligence" is a comedy where David Schwimmer plays the brash ugly American sent from the NSA to work with British agents at the GCHQ. Even though "Friends" in general and especially Ross Geller have aged really poorly for me, I remember finding it odd that Schwimmer kept relatively quiet in the decade after the show went off the air, while Aniston was doing movies and everyone else starred in multiple series. And his memorable one-off appearance on "30 Rock" made me think maybe he had some more good comedic roles in him, and I was disappointed when he finally did a couple drama series in 2016. So "Intelligence" is kind of the comedy vehicle I at once point hoped to see for him, and it's not bad, the dialogue is at times sharp, but the humor is a little broad and predictable.
d) "Maxxx"
In this British comedy on Hulu, O-T Fagbenle plays a washed up former boy band star, and Chris Meloni plays the exec helping him try to make a comeback. It's all a pretty standard broad and silly showbiz satire, but I'm enjoying it, Fagbenle is hilarious.
e) "In My Skin"
This British series about 16-year-old whose mother is mentally ill is good, some nice little comedic moments amidst a pretty dark story, great lead performance from Gabrielle Creevy.
f) "Get Even"
Another British show about teenagers, but a lighter more stylized one where a group of girls band together to get revenge on bullies. I feel like this show could either go uphill or way downhill from the promising first episode.
g) "Cursed"
Katherine Langford in "13 Reasons Why" was probably one of the best performances I've seen in a series that I absolutely abhorred in the last few years, so I'm glad she's the lead of a totally different Netflix series now. "Cursed" is kind of the Arthurian legend told from the perspective of the Lady of the Lake, which is a great idea on paper, but we've found the execution a little underwhelming. We've taken to referring to the show as "moistened bint" or "watery tart."
Given that ABC's slate of family sitcoms has actually been pretty good the last few years, it's painful just how rote and cliched this one is, I feel embarrassed for Jane Curtin and Guillermo Diaz for being a part of this. And they try to make the humor a little more barbed and edgy here and there, which just kind of makes it worse, especially in the first episode, which partly centers around a young child going to the hospital with a prolapsed rectum.
My 10-year-old son has developed kind of an impressive ear for recognizing voice actors across different cartoons and movies. And when I put on this new anime-style Transformers series on Netflix for the kids, it took him about 5 seconds of Optimus Prime dialogue for him to declare his disappointment that they didn't get "the real Optimus," and he was right, this is one of the few times someone besides Peter Cullen has voiced Optimus Prime since the '80s. I like the animation style, it's probably one of the better recent Transformers series, but the absence of Cullen and Frank Welker definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.
This Mexican show on Netflix is interesting, it's kind of a tawdry crime thriller but cleverly written with a lot of meta stuff with characters who are obsessed with true crime.
This Brazilian show on Netflix had the fortuitous timing, I suppose, of coming out when a horror story about teenagers spreading a fatal disease amongst each other is very relevant. But the mystery disease is like super herpes, someone will catch it from kissing, immediately getting marks on their face, and then die. The tone of the show is a little weird and light but it's a pretty scary depressing premise.
l) "Signs"
I thought the most memorable thing about this Polish crime drama is that it's dubbed in English but Netflix decided to subtitle the word "police" every single time "policja" appears on a car or uniform, dozens of times in the first episode sometimes every few seconds. It was really, really annoying.
m) "The Twelve"
This Belgian series about a murder trial has a pretty novel structure, where each episode is from the perspective of a different juror. I haven't watched enough to see how it holds up over the whole season, but the first episode was good.
I have very mixed feelings about this show, it kind of feels like it uses so many familiar tropes, about teams of superheroes and coming-of-age stories and time travel, that it's constantly reminding me of other things. But it also feels like they're going for broke with some splashy big moments, and the way the first season ended with the apparent end of the world and the second season kicked off with everyone getting sent back to the early '60s has been pretty entertaining.
o) "Hanna"
I've liked this show more and more as it goes along, I think simply because it takes the story so much further down the road than the movie went. And almost every episode has a big action scene where Hanna just destroys someone or a whole team of people in combat and it never stops being entertaining. I wish there were more of those deadpan funny moments where Marissa and Hanna are out in public and have to blend in and start bickering and acting like a mother and daughter.
p) "The Chi"
"The Chi" didn't entirely gel in its first two seasons, and then between seasons a bunch of crazy stories came out about Jason Mitchell, who played the lead character Brandon, and they had to fire the star that creator Lena Waithe had hailed as 'the black Tom Hanks.' So season 3 is kind of a light reboot, with Emmett (Jacob Latimore) carrying on Brandon's catering business and hiring new chef Dom (who I didn't realize was La La Anthony for several episodes, she's a better actor than I realized). And it more or less works, they have good chemistry. Waithe has also finally swooped in with her own recurring role, although she's only had maybe 3 minutes of screentime so far in 7 episodes, which is absolutely fine since she hasn't learned to act any more than she could on "Masters of None."
q) "Don't"
The big 4 broadcast networks have fully committed to filling their summer schedules with game shows in the last few years, mostly reviving shows that have been around for decades. But I will give ABC credit for slipping this odd little meta game show where Adam Scott is the host, and executive producer Ryan Reynolds keeps popping up as a disembodied voice to comment on the show or interject weird little asides. It still functions as a real game show, there's just a lot of entertaining silliness and fourth wall breaking along the way. If you've seen the Deadpool movies you already know whether you enjoy or hate the Ryan Reynolds brand of snarky humor, I find it moderately amusing.
r) "Outcry"
This Showtime docuseries is about a pretty crazy case in which a Texas high school football hero was convicted of sexually assaulting a 4-year-old, spent a couple years in prison, and was then exonerated when it turned out the evidence was thin and it seems very likely that the kid's friend who looked eerily like him was really responsible. It's interesting because even though I came out at the end believing he was probably innocent, I still really disliked him and most of the people who campaigned for his case to be overturned, maybe it's just the whole weird Texas high school football culture and how cultlike the activist movement on his behalf was.
I was a little apprehensive about Netflix doing a show about the relationships and dating lives of people on the autism spectrum. But this was really well done, at least what I've watched so far, really charming and empathetic and shows a range of people with different experiences, some of them incredibly sweet and funny and some of them having a little further to go to have some luck in dating.
This show has been pretty fun, they've had a nice cross section of different famous show business geeks taking sides in different debates about sci-fi and fantasy and horror, sometimes it all feels a little too structured and scripted, but it works.
Networks have been kind of casting about for different ways to generate new programming with celebrities that are stuck at home in quarantine. And this TBS show, a bracket competition where comedians compete to make the funniest video shorts, seems like a decent idea on the surface, especially since the "SNL" 'at home' episodes turned out surprisingly good for the most part. But most of the material on here has been pretty dire, the scripted Jason Sudeikis sportscaster-style host segments are often the best part of the show.
This show has already been around in the UK for a couple years (as "Celebrity Call Centre," natch), but it obviously was a useful idea to pick up right now as, again, networks want to keep churning out content with celebs at home. This show is pretty terrible, though, there were 5 alleged celebrities in the episode I watched but I had to google to figure out who 4 of them were, and executive producer Nick Cannon kind of imploded his career within days of it premiering.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a paleontologist, and I was interested to watch this show on Discovery. But it's all about how searching for dinosaur fossils out west in places like Wyoming and Montana has become big business, and all these ranchers and non-scientists are super competitive about it now, and the show treats it like "Storage Wars" or something, it's lame.
This Travel Channel show is about the lore of different regions, hauntings and paranormal activities, they go to Bulgaria and talk about vampire legends, and go to Haiti and talk about voodoo and zombies, but it's all pretty well researched and not too sensationalized, good show.
A History Channel miniseries about the last days of WWII and the way the Allied nations kind of jockeyed for power amongst each other in the immediate aftermath, I'm not a big history buff but what I watched seemed pretty interesting.
My wife is a big history buff who knows a lot about European royalty, so this PBS show was fun to watch with her running commentary and her occasional surprise at something she didn't know. Lucy Worsley is a fun host, she kind of manages to make little-known historical tidbits feel like tawdry celebrity gossip, which I suppose it is in a sense.
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