TV Diary
I was prepared to root against this show for a long time, both because I found Scarlet Witch and Vision to be kind of a boring soap opera B plot in the Avengers movies, and because I really liked Elizabeth Olsen's other show "Sorry For Your Loss," which hadn't even been canceled yet when "WandaVision" was announced. But now it's here and there's lot of excitement around it, and I've liked the first episodes, although it surprised me just how far they took the whole classic sitcom pastiche thing before starting to let the seams show and start to point towards what the rest of the series is going to be like.
b) "Your Honor"
The first episode of "Your Honor" starts with a grueling, grisly depiction of a fatal car crash, and the whole sequence of events that it sets off for the rest of the miniseries feels like watching another car crash in slow motion, one horrible act leading to another and another. Bryan Cranston has done this whole "upstanding member of the community keeps making terrible decisions with deadly consequences trying to help his family" song and dance before and is predictably gripping, but it's packed with great performances: Michael Stuhlbarg, Hope Davis, Maura Tierney, Carmen Ejogo, a quietly menacing Tony Curran (Chet Hanks is in there too for some strange reason). I roll my eyes at "Your Honor" sometimes -- it's a New Orleans where the black characters mostly suffer and die as collateral damage when the white characters do wrong, where a few too many plot twists hinge on fairly contrived coincidences, and a self-consciously bleak place where the only music the main characters acknowledge the existence of is Joy Division and Leonard Cohen. But it's pretty damn gripping and I'm glued to the screen to see how this thing ends.
c) "Bridgerton"
I'm not too much the target demo for this show, but I enjoyed it well enough while my wife was binge watching it. Apparently each book in the series focuses on a different Bridgerton sibling and I feel like I might prefer future seasons more, I found the whole Daphne and Simon saga a little dull.
d) "The Wilds"
At this point, "Lost" is a whole genre and I'm kind of weary of shows about mysteries involving the passengers of a missing plane, no matter what the twist is. And this show, where a group of teenage girls are stranded on a desert island, just feels like a pure YA soap opera, really boring stuff.
e) "Selena"
I haven't seen the 1997 biopic to compare this Netflix series to, for that matter I don't really have any frame of reference for Selena's life and music outside of her episode of "Behind The Music." But this is pretty good, and I like getting a detailed story of her career's rise, it's nice to have it depicted in a multi-season show so that it's not all about just prologue to the tragic end.
This has a good cast and makes a good effort at being faithful to the spirit of the Hardy Boys books while sort of modernizing it (I think it takes place in the '80s) and making it moderately gritty (their mother dies in the first episode so the main big mystery is solving her murder) without going into ridiculous "Riverdale"-style camp. But I kind of wonder who this is really for, it's not really compelling to me as an adult and I don't know if a kid or teenager of a particular age would go for it either.
g) "Lupin"
I have no real frame of reference for novelist Maurice Leblanc's character Lupin besides the "Lupin The Third" anime series, but I like this new French series that kind of reboots it all with a new character that's a thief who's inspired by Leblanc's books. I always enjoy a good clever heist story.
h) "Sweet Home"
It's interesting to me that this is the first Korean series to really get a big audience on Netflix in the U.S., not sure why this one in particular struck a chord. But it's some pretty good apocalyptic horror, some cool gorey old-fashioned special effects, lots of fake blood and stuff instead of CGI.
i) "Equinox"
A creepy Danish show on Netflix, I found the first episode kind of intriguing but I haven't dived into the rest yet.
Another show about a teacher sleeping with a student, more pulpy and suspenseful than "A Teacher" but didn't feel kind of gross and irresponsible about it like that show.
The "video gamer finds himself inside a giant game" conceit is a little cheesy but this is a pretty neat show.
I feel like someone just tried to change the title of "Pretty Little Liars" just enough to be able to do their own young adult soap opera.
m) "On Pointe"
This Disney+ docuseries shot at the School of American Ballet is really great and engrossing, much more interesting to see the real ballet world than the fictionalized version on "Tiny Pretty Things." I get a little stressed out seeing young children work so hard in a competitive environment, but it's also exciting to see some of them make their dreams come true.
I have to admit I had only a vague idea of who Fran Lebowitz is before I saw this miniseries about her directed by Martin Scorsese, but she's a pretty witty, entertaining figure. Listening to New Yorkers talk about how special and/or awful living in New York is can really wear on me, though, I just don't care.
This is really great, fascinating stuff, I love hearing about all these little bands that started up in the '60s and became the Beatles and Stones of Mexico or Argentina and influenced all these different scenes, some really interesting characters and interviews.
Nicolas Cage, leaning into his status as an aging camp icon, hosts this Netflix series in which talking heads discuss curse words with a little academic rigor and a lot of "Best Week Ever"-style irreverent fluff. One of the talking heads is the lexicographer Kory Stamper, who wrote a book called Word By Word that I've been really enjoying lately.
q) "Tiger"
This miniseries about Tiger Woods was alright, although it kind of felt like fitting his whole life and career into 3 hours was a little surface level compared to something like "The Last Dance." They covered everything I already knew but I didn't feel like I learned a lot or gained a lot of nuance, although the stuff at the end about his comeback was particularly gratifying to watch after the low points.
This Netflix show takes an interesting scientific approach to trying to imagine what alien life would be like on other worlds, really cool ideas in here.
Jenna Lyons is kind of an odd, entertaining person to watch, makes this show about fashion and 'lifestyle' and 'design' a little more interesting to me than it otherwise would be.
When I was a kid the Bermuda Triangle seemed like such a serious intimidating thing, which is funny to think about it now, but it was cool to see a show go into the whole legend and dissect it.
The second batch of episodes Netflix released of this show based on the podcast of the same name is a little more interesting than the first batch. I particularly liked the episodes about The Killers and Nine Inch Nails, both of which had entertaining interviews with producers Flood and Alan Moulder which made me think you could do a great documentary just talking to those guys. I thought it was weird that you could talk about "Hurt" in granular detail for a half hour without ever mentioning the big loud ending, though, I always loved that part. The Dua Lipa episode surprised me because I kind of assumed that they built "Love Again" around the White Town sample but it was actually one of the last things they added after the rest of the song was written.
v) "Servant"
"Servant" is an outstandingly creepy show where a couple mourning the death of their infant son cope by getting a lifelike 'reborn' doll, and the mother takes it too far and acts like it's real, hires a weird mysterious nanny, then a real baby appears in place of the doll -- and then things really start to get weird. Lauren Ambrose is great at playing a woman who's kind of lost it but still has the same personality as before, exec producer M. Night Shyamalan lends a Philadelphia setting and his great sense of tension to the handful of episodes he directs, and Tobby Kebbell's character is some kind of cutting edge chef who's making a different bizarre dish in every episode, giving the whole thing kind of a horror gourmet vibe like "Hannibal." I just got Apple TV+ recently and watched the whole first season of "Servant" right before the second season started. And I have to say, the first season felt like a really good, complete arc and I wouldn't have minded if the show ended there, but I'm glad they kept going, I'm curious how far they can kind of stretch this premise to a breaking point.
I'm glad that one of the best network shows of the previous season is finally back, and they've kind of pushed the story forward and put every character in a slightly different place than they were before. Having Max become friends with Mo and no longer be a co-worker of Zoey are both good changes, I really like Jee Young Han's addition to the cast, and phasing out Lauren Graham's character is acceptable, she never totally fit into the show that smoothly.
The third season of "Search Party" was so good and I'm trying to not hold it against the show for not finding some narratively incoherent way to permanently add Shalita Grant to the cast. That said, the first three new episodes kind of bummed me out more than they entertained me, a bit more like season 2, having Dory imprisoned by her stalker kind of feels a little too convincingly depressing and claustrophobic.
I like that they've really stuck to the serialized plots, makes it feels less like a Futurama rehash, especially splitting up the main characters into completely different storylines in some of the new episodes.
z) "Hilda"
My kids didn't take much interest in this when the first season debuted on Netflix, but my 5-year-old who has spent the last few months watching a ton of "Infinity Train" and "Steven Universe" is now the perfect audience for a whimsical animated fantasy like "Hilda." I really love this show, the whole animation aesthetic and color scheme and odd little touches like Hilda's pet deerfox Twig, and there were some pretty poignant episodes in this season.
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