TV Diary
It seems like on the heels of "Big Little Lies," David E. Kelley and Nicole Kidman set out to find another novel about murder and intrigue among affluent families and do something as similar as possible. Hugh Grant's casting feels like a meta storytelling tool like Ben Affleck in Gone Girl -- he's charming in the beginning, but when he disappears and is implicated in a grisly murder, you kind of go, well, OK, maybe he had a dark side, that tracks. I have no idea where the story is going, though, I'm curious what the twist is.
Anya Taylor-Joy in Thoroughbreds was one of my favorite performances of the last few years, and this Netflix miniseries further confirms her talent. Walter Tevis's 1983 novel The Queen's Gambit is about a girl whose parents are killed in a car crash at a young age, and she learns how to play chess from a janitor at the orphanage, and in the mid-'60s becomes a famous chess prodigy. Sometimes I find these kinds of shows frustrating -- I'd love to know the story of the most successful female competitive chess player in real life instead of this textbook dramatic story about an orphan with addiction issues. But Taylor-Joy's performance and Out Of Sight screenwriter Scott Frank's direction and writing really elevate the material, it's so good.
c) "Soulmates"
This AMC anthology series takes place in a near future world where matchmaking software has become so sophisticated that people believe a company called Soul Connex's test can really match you with your soulmate with 100% accuracy. Each episode is about a different relationship in this world -- someone who got married before Soul Connex and then gets second thoughts and takes the test, a woman who hacks a guy's account and claims to be his soulmate to stalk him and ruin his life, and so on. The stories are a little hit-and-miss so far, it feels kind of like a much gentler "Black Mirror" at times, but I've been enjoying it because the show is full of actors I love from other prestige cable shows (David Costabile, Sarah Snook, Sonya Cassidy).
I've only watched one episode of this Hulu anothology series so far, but it was not a terribly promising start, the story just kind of didn't land, and Kaitlyn Dever's southern accent was really bad. The production values and casting are promising enough, I'm gonna keep watching and see how it goes.
"The Haunting Of Hill House" really disappointed me with that maudlin ending with the corny voiceover, but I'm glad the cast and crew are kind of doing a "The Haunting of..." anthology series with different stories and characters, and so far I like this adaptation of The Turn Of The Screw a little more. Victoria Pedretti is good at really putting you in the shoes of the character and kind of feeling her anxiety, the whole thing with her seeing the figure in mirrors might come off kind of campy if her performance and the visual effects weren't so good.
The wave of coronavirus lockdown-themed scripted shows continues, this Netflix anthology series centers on a different person in each episode. Seems well written enough, but Mike Colter really didn't have the range to pull off what the performance called for in the first episode.
Like "Social Distance," this show takes place entirely in video chat windows during the pandemic, but it's otherwise a totally straightforward NBC sitcom about a diverse group of friends hanging out and zinging each other and a contrived will-they-or-won't-they unrequited romance. But I like the cast, I already had a crush on Otmara Marrero when she was in "StartUp" and even moreso in this. And the way the first episode ended, with an ER doctor joining the chat and talking about how horrible things are in the hospitals, really abruptly changed the tone of the show in a way that I thought worked well, I appreciated that they were able to pull that off.
My wife knows a lot about Greek mythology, so I think most of my entertainment value from watching this was her just griping about how many stupid liberties they took with the story and how it would've been better without those changes. But I am enjoying all these dark violent Netflix anime shows.
i) "Code 404"
This reminds me of Peacock's other law enforcement comedy imported from the UK, "Intelligence," but not as good. It kind of makes me wonder if British comedy has just been stuck on satires of cop movies for over a decade since Hot Fuzz.
j) "Devils"
This show takes place during the financial crisis in Europe in 2011 and weaves this big conspiracy storyline amidst real life events, which is really interesting, but I don't think the cast or the storytelling is up to the task.
k) "Helstrom"
I wouldn't have guessed this takes place in the MCU if I hadn't read that it does, it just feels like a good creepy supernatural show about demonic possession and the children of a serial killer. Maybe it will get more comic book-y as it goes along, though, I dunno.
This was on DC Universe last year and is now airing on The CW, another show that I think benefits from really trying to situate the comic book premise into a semi-realistic world where the main character is a CDC doctor in a town that happens to have a big green swamp thing.
Another underwhelming show from SyFy's Saturday night animation block, feels like someone just wanted to make a silly hipster hangout sitcom like "Broad City" and then settled for turning it into a cartoon.
Dystopian shows like this Netflix series from Spain, where a deadly virus accelerates inequality and fighting over limited resources, are inadvertently depressing in a way they don't mean to be because it takes place in 2045 but, y'know, don't feel that far off from our reality in 2020. In "The Barrier," they just make the division between the haves and the have nots more literal with an actual wall between the rich and the poor.
This Spanish series is good, kind of fits into the recent wave of stuff like Knives Out, tensions in a wealthy family boiling over.
I was intrigued that this show had some kind of supernatural twist on the story of the French Revolution. But "La Revolution" just kind of runs with the idea that the revolution was actually caused by a zombie-like epidemic that gives people literal blue blood, which all just feels a little too silly and trivializes the real societal conditions that led to the revolution.
q) "Warrior"
Cinemax had really been on a roll in 2019 with "Jett" and "Warrior," but unfortunately with Warner consolidating and focusing on launching HBO Max, Cinemax has pretty much stopped producing original series. So I was pleasantly surprised that a second season of "Warrior" got done before the COVID shutdown, it gives me hope that maybe the show will continue on HBO Max or somewhere else. So far the new season has continued with amazing fight scenes but the plot has lost my interest a little bit, it feels like it's spread a little thin among a really big ensemble instead of focusing on the leads.
r) "Fargo"
Every time a new season of "Fargo" premieres, I'm pulled in by the promising cast, and then I mostly roll my eyes at Noah Hawley's creative decisions and sense of humor (like, ugh, "antecedently"). I've enjoyed season 4 more than the other ones so far, though, Jessie Buckley and Jason Schwartzman are having a lot of fun in their roles and it's interesting to see Chris Rock play the heavy for once.
One kind of nice thing about animated shows having longer production timelines is that while a lot of my favorite network shows have not returned this fall, "Bob's Burgers" has continued to reliably entertain me. I love that Kevin Kline has been playing a ridiculous character named Mr. Fischoeder for going on 11 years now, he really has such fantastic comic timing, he's probably the "Bob's Burgers" character that makes me laugh every time he says a word.
t) "Wilmore"
I thought "The Nightly Show" was the best of the shows Comedy Central tried out in the timeslot after "The Daily Show" post-Colbert, so I'm glad Larry Wilmore has gotten a chance to do something similar on Peacock, this has been off to a strong start.
I've never been a really regular "Late Night with Seth Meyers" viewer, but every time I've watched it, Amber Ruffin has been the obvious breakout star, and I'm glad she finally got her own show. But she was always so great in front of an in-studio audience that "The Amber Ruffin Show," more than most other late night shows in 2020, really suffers from not having an audience for the performer to bounce off of. But her rapport with the announcer/sidekick guy works pretty well, so she's not totally alone out there, and I like the way she can kind of get away with talking about serious issues without dropping her really bright, energetic delivery.
After the success of "The Masked Singer," FOX went back and adapted another silly South Korean singing game show, and this one is just deranged. Basically, a bunch of people lip sync pop songs, and the contestant and a celebrity panel try to guess if they're actually a good singer or not based on their body language. The most entertaining part of the show is when the singers finally reveal their "true" voice, because sometimes someone will start singing in a cracked off-key voice, and the audience will explode in joyful applause like Kelly Clarkson just hit a high note if the contestant guessed they're a bad singer and win a cash prize.
There's a silly Armageddon/Deep Impact thing happening where Starz debuted their own docuseries about NXIVM just a few weeks after HBO's "The Vow." But, as a lot of other people have observed, "Seduced" is by far the better of the two series, and seems to get the real story and handle the gravity of the situation a lot better.
A CNN series where each episode profiles Michelle Obama, Nancy Reagan, Jackie O, etc. It's pretty interesting to have the focus on them and not their husbands, while also getting an insight on POTUSes via their wives, but I don't know if they realized how funny it is to have the show to have Robin Wright narrate the show because he was on "House Of Cards."
I've been getting my 11-year-old son Max Brallier's The Last Kids On Earth books for the last few months, and he's pretty into them, it's funny to see that there's now even kid-friendly twists on zombie dystopia stories. We checked out the Netflix animated series, but it's not that good, and in a way I'm happy to see my son prefer a book to the screen adaptation for the first time.
My 5-year-old watched this recent-ish (2015-2018) reboot a while back, and it brought back a lot of memories of the stupid '80s show I grew up on. I was really envious of him, though, that he could just ask me to google Dr. Claw's face, where we had to live with the frustrating mystery for years.
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