TV Diary
Between "The Flight Attendant," the acquisition of DC Universe and "Harley Quinn," and streaming rights for "The Big Bang Theory," it feels like HBO Max has made a surprisingly aggressive push to corner the Kaley Cuoco market. The first 3 episodes of this miniseries are pretty strong, though -- feels appropriate to share a platform with "Search Party," similarly plunging frivolous characters into life-and-death situations way out of their depth and mining it for both comedy and some suspenseful drama.
b) "Wayne"
One of the interesting things about Hollywood's 2020 production shutdowns is that we're now seeing shows produced for streaming services nobody watches migrating over to platforms that people do use. YouTube Premium's experiment in scripted series seems to have already run aground, and "Cobra Kai" became a hit when Netflix picked it up, so I'm guessing we'll see more of their shows picked up elsewhere, like "Wayne," which is so entertaining that I'm really glad it's now on Amazon. Mark McKenna plays the title character, a Boston teenager who burns down his house after his father dies and goes on the run to Florida with a girl and a dirt bike. It's all very violent and over-the-top but also kind of sweet and clever, sort of feels like an American "The End of the F****** World." Amazon, please rescue"Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes On Television" from YouTube Premium next.
A new show created by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, starring Frost with Pegg showing up for roughly one minute per episode in a bad wig. They've always done their own comedic twists on genres that were more loving homages that happened to features jokes than satires, and "Truth Seekers" very much follows that tradition -- large stretches of the show are pretty straightforward paranormal investigation drama with interesting premises and cool special effects, and even the comic relief tends to be kind of small conversational quirks. So it could be funnier, but I'm not complaining.
In this British series on HBO Max, Billie Piper plays a celebrity whose sex tape has been hacked. And it's interesting to see something that happens so often these days told as a fictional story from the victim's point of view but still be kind of irreverent and funny, and allow the protagonist to be both flawed and sympathetic.
e) "Small Axe"
"Small Axe" is kind of an anthology series but it's also 5 new feature-length films directed by Steve McQueen, each of them about Caribbean immigrants in London in the '60s and '70s. Widows is one of my favorite movies of the last five years, so I'm excited to see all of these, the first one Mangrove was pretty good, I knew nothing of the Mangrove Nine trial.
This FX miniseries about British nuns in the Himalayas is pretty good, lots of cool-looking moody abstract cinematography setting the tone of the dark psychological story. Also notable in that the director, the writer, and the novelist who wrote the source material are all women, and it features one of Diana Rigg's final performances.
On paper this Hulu series about a guy looking for his sister in Syria and joining an all-woman anti-ISIS force sounds really exciting, but I found the first episode a little slow, might take a while to get my interest.
In this show, a woman goes back to her hometown in Ireland, secretly working to advance a company's agenda to quell protests against the wind turbines they're building. And I don't know, since I don't see anything wrong with wind farms and think people who have a problem with them are generally climate change denying idiots, I'm anxious about where they're going with this story and what the point is going to be. That said, it's mostly a charming, character-driven dramedy with great scenery.
This Nickelodeon show about 5 kids that sneak onto a spaceship and end up in space is obviously made for kids and is not entirely realistic, but it's pretty well made and presented like a big budget cable drama with good acting and production values, surprisingly my 5-year-old and I both found it pretty engaging.
j) "Big Sky"
I had been kind of impressed by David E. Kelley's midcareer transition from frothy network legal dramas to moody prestige TV murder mysteries like "Big Little Lies" and "The Undoing." "Big Sky" splits the difference by having a dark, creepy story about a trucker kidnapping women, but it's on ABC and feels weirdly cheap-looking and sanitized in that way the old broadcast networks feel now when they take on material that seems more suited to cable. In any case, I'm always happy to see Kylie Bunbury on TV, I'm still mad that "Pitch" only lasted one season and this suits her better than "Brave New World."
I'm kind of surprised at what a phenomenon this miniseries became by the time the finale aired last night, because I felt myself rapidly losing interest in the story over the course of the 6 episodes. The first episode was moderately exciting because of the simple tension of introducing a fairly charming character with no apparent connection to a grisly murder and a vague sense that they might have done it. And then the next 5 episodes right up to the end just piled up evidence that yes, they did it, with the final confirmation saved until the last moments with no real suspense to speak of.
Baby Yoda mania reached my 11-year-old son's school and he'd been lobbying me for the past year to get Disney Plus so that we could watch "The Mandalorian" -- he had a Baby Yoda shirt and Baby Yoda socks before he'd even seen an episode. I was skeptical about whether he'd actually like the show, he's only seen some Star Wars movies and his interest in non-animation hasn't gone far beyond Transformers movies yet. But he's really loving it, it's obviously not a super serialized show, a lot of the episodes are kind of standalone adventures, and it's grown on me more than I expected. There's just so many great turns by familiar character actors, and they've made good use of the Star Wars universe as a canvas to tell stories in without really touching the big epic story arcs of the movies too much.
Extremely weird Swedish comedy on Netflix where a woman at a publishing house and the IT guy get into this gross competition of daring each other to do crazy things at work, after he catches her masturbating in the office and tries to blackmail her. I guess they're trying to make a quirky dark comedy here but the whole thing is just kind of mortifying.
The Spanish series "The Minions Of Midas" on Netflix is based on a short story written over a hundred years ago but the story of a media magnate getting political threats over a sensitive story feels pretty easy to update to something relevant now. It's pretty gloomy, though, not too suspenseful or gripping.
o) "Ethos"
This Turkish show on Netflix is another one that kind of feels like it's telling pretty universal stories that could take place anywhere, including America, kind of a drama of the intersecting lives of people from different economic and religious backgrounds.
This Disney Plus docuseries tells different obscure behind-the-scenes stories from the history of Marvel comics and adaptations, which is a pretty great idea. I've only watched the first episode, about a Japanese "Spider-Man" series in the '70s, which was full of robots and flying cars and all sorts of non-canonical stuff, which apparently some Marvel execs hated but Stan Lee really appreciated and defended. The interviews with everyone involved were great, just hearing about how this happened and how they were proud of this thing that became kind of a campy curio, it's cool.
In 2003, Showtime aired a biopic called The Reagans, which landed there after conservatives put pressure on CBS not to air it because it was 'too political.' In 2020, Showtime is once again airing something under the same title, but the docuseries "The Reagans" is very much a deliberate and unvarnished look at Reagan's political legacy, and I'm really glad they're putting all his racist dog whistles and bullshit out in the open with no right wing hagiography.
This is one of the most interesting true crime shows I've seen in recent years, directed by Madison Hamburg, investigating his own mother's unsolved murder when he was a teenager 10 years ago. In the first episode, his father seems incredibly guilty when they present the initial facts and he has an incredibly uncomfortable encounter asking his dad these tough questions he refuses to answer. But apparently in subsequent episodes some other pretty compelling suspects emerge, so I'm interested to see if he winds up really solving the mystery by the end.
s) "The Pack"
I don't watch "The Amazing Race," so I'm really not into this Amazon show where a bunch of airheads basically do 'The Amazing Race" with their dogs on their team helping them complete tasks. Listening to 'dog moms' and 'dog dads' talk about their pets is my idea of hell, frankly.
Some good stories in this CBS docuseries about Silk Road and a scammer lady who conned people with 15 different names in 16 states.
Now The CW is airing the second season of this anthology series with kind of modernized fairy tales that was originally on CBS All Access, and I really don't like it as much as the first season, weaker cast and weaker storylines. I guess it's kind of interesting that they gender flip Beauty And The Beast with a singer whose face gets mutilated.
v) "Coroner"
Another previously produced show that The CW picked up that has quickly moved into its second season. Don't love the show but I feel like it's gotten better since the first season, and I'm enjoying the arc with Nicola Correia-Damude, she's fine as hell.
I have been catching up on the 2 seasons of this now that I have HBO Max, it's pretty damn good, really enjoy the cast, even if Brendan Fraser is just a disembodied voice in a robot body most of the time. Diana Guerrero's performance as Jane gets a lot of praise, and she is pretty great in the role, but much like the movie Split, I really just don't care for comic booky superhero depictions of characters with multiple personalities, it feels like a gross gimmick that's going to date really poorly. But I particularly love April Bowlby in this show -- I always suspected she was capable of more than the kind of stock ditzy character she played on "Two And A Half Men," and she does a great job in "Doom Patrol" of playing sort of a caricature of a '40s movie star but also rendering her as a really three dimensional character with a lot of pathos.
I watched the first season of this for a few episodes when it started, but my wife and I have been catching up on all the seasons on Netflix this year. Sometimes it feels a little too much like "The Walking Dead" with zombie-like vampires instead of zombies, but generally it's pretty good. Sometimes I recognize little flashes of Neil LaBute's voice from his feature films but mostly he's kind of conforming more to the SyFy house style.
y) "Animaniacs"
I was surprised at just how much Hulu's new episodes of "Animaniacs" look and feel exactly like the old '90s series, but then it was always very much of its time in a way and not durable enough to do a hard reboot with a different style of animation or humor. So it's just "Animaniacs" with current references, including occasional Trump stuff that makes me cringe. It was probably wise for them to winnow the show down to just the Warners and Pinky & The Brain, I really have no desire to see Scorsese pigeons or Catskills squirrel again. My 5-year-old loves it, or at least he loves the "Animaniacs" and "Pinky & The Brain" theme songs.
My 5-year-old has a knack for finding all sorts of obscure cartoons on Netflix, and I kind of dig this weird show where frogs go to war with scorpions and spiders, it's very dramatic but still cute. Reminds me of, like, Legends of the Guardians: The Owls Of Ga'Hoole.
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