TV Diary
My wife saw the trailer for Ridley Scott's new space epic "Raised By Wolves" and got excited about it, so I decided to finally look into how to get HBO Max. On the upside, it comes free with the HBO subscription in my cable package, but on the downside, Xfinity's cable box doesn't support HBO Max yet, so I have to watch their shows on a computer. Still, it's been kind of nice to lay in bed on Thursdays watching "Raised By Wolves" on my laptop. It's a very strange show -- a hundred years in the future, Earth is destroyed in a war between atheists and members of a religion that doesn't exist yet, and two androids are sent in a spaceship to another planet to birth and raise a bunch of human embryos. Ridley Scott has always had a particular way of depicting human-like androids played by actors, and the ones here, played by Amanda Collin and Abubakar Salim, give great eerie performances. There's a lot of strange twists and turns to the story, 70% into the season I'm still kind of undecided on whether I love it or find it to be just a very odd little show.
b) "Pure"
The British series "Pure" was already canceled by the British channel that produced it before its only season was released in the US by HBO Max, but it's pretty good, a quick 6 episodes worth checking out. Charly Clive plays a woman with OCD who has a constant stream of intrusive sexual thoughts, sometimes obviously it's played for awkward laughs but mostly it's a pretty empathetic character study. Irish actress Niamh Algar is one of the leads on both "Raised By Wolves" and "Pure," so I feel like she should have some weird title like 'the queen of HBO Max.'
c) "Frayed"
"Frayed" is another British import on HBO Max, about an Aussie woman in the 1980s who'd started a posh new life in England and then has to move back to Australia with her family after her husband dies. The whole premise feels very "Schitt's Creek" but tonally it doesn't really cohere that much for me. Ben Mingay's scenes are really funny but a lot of the rest of the show drags.
By the time the second season of "Search Party" finished airing on TBS almost 3 years ago, I had really started to feel like the show had run out of steam and its comedic tone had soured a little with the increasingly dark plot. But then the show moved to HBO Max for its third season and seemed to attract a bigger and more enthusiastic audience, so I'm giving it another chance and enjoying it, although it feels weird to go so long between seasons, and is unfortunately something we'll deal with a lot because of these long Covid hiatuses. It still feels a little like the hilarious scenes with John Early and Meredith Hagner clash with the murders driving the storyline, but the show is walking that tightrope better now than before, and the lawyer characters played by Shalita Grant and Louie Anderson are hysterical.
My 5-year-old's favorite author besides Dr. Seuss is Mo Willems, he's just obsessed with the Pigeon and Elephant & Piggie books. So I was pretty thrilled to see HBO Max put up a bunch of Mo Willems stuff last week: "Don't Let The Pigeon Do Storytime," a live special directed by Bobcat Goldthwait of Willems and a bunch of comedians performing his work at the Kennedy Center, and over a dozen animated shorts based on his books that I guess were released elsewhere online years ago. It's funny to hear Willems voice the Pigeon after I've read the books to my son hundreds of time and come up with my own voice and style of delivering the lines.
My family loved the first 2 seasons of "Infinity Train" on Cartoon Network, it kind of has that smart, sensitive, highly serialized vibe of "Steven Universe" but I got into it more because I found it funnier and the seasons are much shorter and more digestible. It moved to HBO Max for the 3rd season, so my kid watched the whole thing a couple times this week, and it was as sweet and funny and moving as the previous seasons.
g) "Woke"
Lamorne Morris was so consistently great for 7 seasons of "New Girl" that I was really rooting for his new Hulu vehicle. But it really feels like "Woke," about a black cartoonist who gets more socially conscious after being profiled and assaulted by police, would not have played very well in 2019 and it plays much worse in 2020. The cast has chemistry and there's good moments sprinkled throughout the show, but it mishandles the big stuff so much, particularly when his social awakening is represented by him beginning to hear black markers and bottles of malt liquor speak to him about pro-black politics, it's just really stupid.
h) "Ratched"
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is a great movie and all but I don't really get the idea of basing a whole series around one of its supporting characters, especially with the marketing that calls Nurse Ratched "one of the world's most iconic characters," I mean, c'mon. Ryan Murphy has done a lot to make Sarah Paulson into a bona fide star, but at this point I want someone else to make vehicles for her, it's getting so boring and she has a wider range than he does.
i) "Away"
Every time I watch the new Netflix series "Away," where Hilary Swank leads the first manned mission to Mars while her family goes through crises on Earth, I think about Hulu's 2018 series "The First," where Sean Penn leads the first manned mission to Mars while his family goes through crises on Earth. "Away" isn't bad, and I hate to give Sean Penn credit for anything, but "The First" was a much better, more compelling show.
This Netflix show is a raunchy comedy about a Canadian woman raising a kid in England, it's funny here and there but feels kind of broad and obvious.
This British import on Peacock imagines a modern world where Africa (here called 'the Aprican Empire' for some reason) colonized Europe hundreds of year ago, and black people are the historical oppressors of white people. I'm kind of amused that Roc Nation co-produced this show and tried to promote it along the lines of being kind of an uplifting show for black viewers because it hasn't really been received that way at all. A lot of the show is just kind of a 'star crossed lovers' soap opera about an interracial romance, but even when it does deal with larger themes, it really doesn't feel like they've gotten across whatever they were trying to say here.
l) "Transplant"
One of the millions little ways that this year is different from every previous year of our lives is that instead of a flood of new network shows debuting in September, there's a small trickle, most of them international productions acquired to air in the US. So pretty much the only new scripted series on NBC this month is "Transplant," which started airing in Canada back in February. The stupid/clever title refers to the main character being a Syrian doctor who starts working in a Toronto hospital after coming to Canada as a refugee, but it's a good show, definitely one of the better medical dramas I've seen in recent years.
m) "Coroner"
"Coroner" is another Canadian show, picked up by The CW to fill their schedule. An okay show, but a little dry, and I think Serinda Swan just lacks screen presence or something, she can't really carry a show.
Apparently the original "Van der Valk" series, about a British detective solving crimes in Amsterdam, ran in the UK back in the '70s and '90s, and this is just a modern reboot with a new actor. I have no frame of reference for the original, but I like this, Marc Warren is kind of a charmingly terse, reserved screen presence.
This Netflix series is an odd little show where a teenage musician plays a song that conjures the ghosts of the 3 members of the band who died 25 years ago after eating some spoiled hot dogs (like, seriously, I have no idea what this show's opening scene is about other than trying to scare kids out of buying food from street vendors). It's kind of cartoony and silly in some moments but really earnest in others, I don't know if tweens or whoever the target audience is would actually like this show, but it's kind of charming for what it is.
Another South Korean show that wears me out with these 70-minute episodes. Kind of a nice relatable romance story, would watch it more if the episodes were shorter.
q) "The Boys"
There's something very fitting about Aya Cash from "You're The Worst" joining the cast of "The Boys" for its second season, since they're both kind of by definition about characters who are huge assholes. The main difference is that "You're The Worst" gave its characters some occasional redemption, while "The Boys" just gives them lethal superpowers. Antony Starr really deserves awards, Homelander is one of the most charismatically, horrifyingly awful characters on TV right now and he plays it so well, and the show has kept supplying these big creepy gorey moments like his scenes with the shapeshifter, but things like the Hughie/Starlight relationship still kind of ground the story and give you someone to root for.
r) "A.P. Bio"
I thought "A.P. Bio" had really hit its stride in the second season, especially with the addition of Elizabeth Alderfer, the show kind of needed someone Glenn Howerton's character liked and got along with so it wasn't just him condescending to and deceiving everyone all the time. So I was disappointed and then relieved when NBC canceled the show last year, and then decided a month later to do the 3rd season on Peacock. I kind of think of "A.P. Bio" as being the show "Community" would've been if the whole series was more like the pilot, and it was just Jeff Winger being miserable in flyover country (also, both shows have running gags about people being mean to David Neher). "A.P. Bio" did do one "Community"-style meta episode this season, however -- the ostensible episode was only a few minutes long, with many many 'previously on A.P. bio' and 'on the next A.P. Bio' segments before and after it. I also really enjoy the music choices on this show -- The Ramones as the theme song, The Specials and Tom Waits in recent episodes, etc.
s) "Enslaved"
This EPIX docuseries is pretty interesting, Samuel L. Jackson hosts and he gets together with historians to research the African slave trade and find out about his own ancestors, and they take scuba divers to discover sunken slave ships. I think it's cool that a big Hollywood star did a project like this that's very research-based instead of just making another violent period piece slavery movie.
t) "The Vow"
"The Vow" is an HBO miniseries about the NXIVM cult that made headlines a few years ago when "Smallville" actress Allison Mack was arrested for sex trafficking connected to her role in the cult. I'm not up to date with all the episodes that have aired so far but it's pretty weird, sometimes unintentionally funny stuff.
u) "Sing On!"
This Netflix show is a very goofy singing competition hosted by Titus Burgess where the aim is to sing pop songs as accurately (i.e. as close to the original singer's performance) as possible -- not imitate then, just nail the notes and the timing, which is measured semi-scientifically like video games like "Rock Band." So it's really just competitive karaoke, but I like the way the rules and the eliminations work, it's fun to watch.
I only watched this Netflix show this week because I had a coupon for a local bbq restaurant and knew I'd be able to satisfy the cravings I got from watching it. I was kind of amused at how tough the judges were on the competitors, though, I guess I just expected barbecue people to be more laid back than other cooking competition shows.
I haven't seen much of Alyson Hannigan in the half decade since "How I Met Your Mother" went off the air, and if I was a famous redhead I probably wouldn't host a show about pumpkins, but this pumpkin carving competition on the Food Network is kind of fun, I'm always really interested in food-based sculpture.
x) "The Soup"
E!'s latest reboot of "The Soup" only did 5 shaky episodes with new host Jade Catta-Preta before they had to shut down production like everyone else in March, and they didn't come back until July. But it feels like they're finally starting to find their groove a little bit, the show made my wife laugh really hard for the first time the other day. I just like seeing them dig through terrible reality shows I've never even heard of for clips.
As a childhood dinosaur nerd, I was always slightly snooty about the fact that Jurassic Park wasn't strictly about dinosaurs from the Jurassic period. So I'm irritated and amused that the latest animated spinoff for Netflix simply puts both Jurassic and Cretaceous in the title, when those are two mutually exclusive periods of time. But it's also just a crappy show, boring with mediocre computer animation and more focus on the stock teenager characters than the dinosaurs.
z) "Leo & Tig"
An animated show on Netflix that was made in Russia about a leopard cub and a tiger cub, my 5-year-old has watched it a bit, I think the animation is really cute.
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