Alan Tudyk is the kind of unusual comic talent that's uniquely qualified to star in a show about an alien disguising himself as a human and integrating himself into a small town. There's a lot of ways to play that kind of role, and there are notes of Vincent D'Onofrio in Men In Black at times in Tudyk's performance, but mostly he brings his own sensibility to it. What actually makes "Resident Alien" work, however, is that most of the humans in the town are well rendered human beings, or at least entertainingly written TV characters, and the show still works when Tudyk is offscreen. 

I still miss "30 Rock" and am admittedly an easy audience for any somewhat similar show that Tina Fey wants to throw on the air, but I'm really enjoying this so far. The cast is gelling quickly and I love that they've got one of the funniest people from "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," Vella Lovell (with her co-star Gabriella Ruiz guesting in a recent episode), and one of the funniest people from "Speechless," Kyla Kennedy. I'm also really enjoying Holly Hunter's character, who oddly reminds me a lot of Kix frontman Steve Whiteman. There are occasional misfire jokes about wokeness or L.A. or politics, but generally they're just firing off great absurd zingers. 

Like "Transplant," this is a Canadian medical drama that NBC picked up to fill out their lineup during the pandemic, but a bit more of a generic "Grey's Anatomy"-type soap opera one. I am now smitten with Nicola Correia-Damude after her recurring roles on "The Boys," "Coroner," and "Nurses," someone please make her a series regular. 

This UK miniseries that Hulu is streaming in America is pretty good, makes a good argument for the British tendency towards brevity because it packs some gripping suspense and mystery into 4 episodes and then gets to a pretty satisfying resolution, where I could easily imagine a U.S. version pointlessly stretching the story out to 10 episodes or more. Bertie Carvel is great as the creepy guy from the protagonist's past who shows up on their doorstep one rainy night, had never seen him in anything before. 

For some reason I don't want to pick on Ed Burns -- I have a soft spot for She's The One, a decent movie to while away a couple hours on cable now and then -- but his mediocrity as a writer/director is even palpable in a half hour series where I thought maybe water would find its own level and he'd find a groove he never got into with his feature films. Just a completely listless period piece soap opera with paper thin characters squabbling and screwing in the bathroom and making important life decisions that are of absolutely no interest to the viewer. 

A show about Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke as lifelong best friends seemed like a decent idea to me, but I pictured something maybe a little more comedic, this is a very treacly thing based on a novel. There's a lot of jumping around the chronology -- Chalke and Heigl in 2003, or sometimes I guess in the '80s with big feathered hair, or scenes with teen actresses playing the characters in the '70s, the whole thing just feels really muddled and low budget. 

I know actors pride themselves on being able to play other people and sometimes play villains and unsympathetic characters, but man, white actors who play slave owners, I don't know how they do it. Kind of pains me to see Hayley Atwell play a slave owner in Jamaica in "The Long Song" because I adore her, but she really commits to playing an unflattering character. 

Another recent PBS show, apparently a remake of one from the '70s, about a small town British veterinary surgeon. Kind of pleasant to just watch some low stakes drama about whether to put down a horse or not. 

Two actors from "One Tree Hill" made this "Curb Your Enthusiasm"-style autobiographical satire where they play two actors who used to be on a show about vampires, and I'm just kind of watching dopey show business people try to be self-deprecating, these himbos aren't funny. 

This is a weird show, it wants to be kind of irreverent about Emily Dickinson's era while still reverent enough about her work to gear each episode around the origin of one of her poems, but so many of the jokes are so goofy and wacky they could've been used in "Another Period." Still, Toby Huss and Jane Krakowski play Dickinson's parents and I'll watch them in anything, and I'm amused that the second season has introduced a character named Henry Shipley. 

This HBO series from Spain is really cool and gnarly, lots of religious supernatural stuff and good visual effects. Megan Montaner is gorgeous, too. 

This is the most entertainingly original game show I've seen in a long time, I really enjoy how they contestants have to answer trivia questions together as a team while trying to out the imposter among them at the same time. And Craig Ferguson is the perfect host for this sort of thing, he's just having a lot of fun with the whole silly format, I miss his late night show. 

Another Netflix reality show about debauched rich people, they're all starting to kind of blend together for me. 

Obviously Richard Ramirez is pretty famous as serial killers go but I realized as I was watching this that I didn't really know much of any details about his crimes, pretty grisly stuff. 

A Netflix show where people who've had near death experiences or were clinically dead for a period of time and then revived recall what happened to them, I kind of feel like once you hear a couple of these stories you've heard them all but it's still pretty fascinating. 

Some crazy footage in this show, although it seems weird that they got a D-list comedian, Matt Iseman, to host it, and even weirder to realize he was considered famous enough to compete and win on "Celebrity Apprentice." 

At a time when new conspiracy theories are popping up every day, each one crazier than the last, it's kind of cool to see a show go back through the big ones of the past like JFK assassination theories and sort through what's fact and what's speculation. 

It's kind of a cool idea for NatGeo to go and investigate the black market of all sorts of things, from guns to fentanyl to tigers, and actually talk to the people doing this stuff, some really crazy shit in this series. 

TV production schedules tend to be all or nothing, even in a pandemic, but I'm surprised that "Euphoria" is one of the only major shows to do something like this, a couple of special episodes during the unexpectedly long break between the show's first and second seasons. I'm also kind of cynically assuming that some of the motivation here was to have something eligible for this year's Emmys to maybe get Zendaya another statue. That said, "Part 1: Rue" is by far the most I've ever enjoyed "Euphoria," although I think it's funny that the best episode of Sam Levinson's show is mostly people talking at a diner around Christmas, an (unintentional?) echo of his father's classic film Diner. "Part 2: Jules" is good too, although I think the long scenes set to Lorde and Billie Eilish songs kind of bordered on self-parody. 

This horror anthology series on The CW wasn't great in its first season and it feels like it's gone downhill in the second season, focusing more on generic monster stories, fewer mysteries and narrative twists. 

"Shameless" was always a show about people just scraping by and using whatever's going on to scam and cheat each other, so I'm kind of glad they decided to do COVID-19 storylines for their 11th and final season. I'm glad it's going off the air, though, it's just not as good without Emmy Rossum, and I'm annoyed that they seem to be working on a redemption arc for William H. Macy's Frank Gallagher, who I still just hate as much as you can hate a fictional character and think he deserves a painful death. 

My kid liked this too, don't really like the animation style of it but it's pretty cute. 

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