TV Diary
This HBO miniseries from "Enlightened" creator Mike White is pitched as a 'satire' and it's about mostly wealthy people on vacation in Hawaii. But it's not quite a mean funny "Succession" thing, there's a little more empathy and gray areas in how the characters are depicted, with great performances from Jennifer Coolidge, Connie Britton, Natasha Rothwell, and Steve Zahn. But I think the standout of the cast is Australian actor Murray Bartlett, who I'd never seen before. There's an ominous scene in the first episode that implies that one of the main characters will die, so I'm not sure what this is all building to, but the first two episodes are fantastic.
"Schmigadoon!" has sort of a Pleasantville via "The Good Place" premise where an affluent modern couple on a hike walk into a town that's basically a 1950s musical. It's a funny idea and there are a lot of funny people in it (Cicely Strong, Keegan-Michael Key, Kristin Chenoweth, etc.) but it's a little slow going, it took me until the second episode to really get some laughs out of it, but I feel like it could really go somewhere if they continue to escalate the heightened reality or have some kind of explanation for what's going on.
This British series is about a woman seeking revenge after her son is killed in a hit-and-run, it's well made but obviously the tone is quite dark and I'm finding it a little dour and difficult to get into.
The first TV spinoff of What We Do In The Shadows is one of the funniest shows on TV, so I'm happy to have another one, about the dumb cops from the movie investigating other supernatural phenomena. One of the novel things about this franchise is the pretty impressive special effects and gore being inserted into a dry mockumentary context where you don't usually see them, but it's all kind of window dressing to make the droll performances funnier.
I think I only watched a few episodes of the original "Gossip Girl" when it started, but I was always kind of bitter towards The CW for canceling "Veronica Mars" and then premiering a show a few months later with Kristen Bell doing voiceover. If the dialogue on the original was too clever by half, the 2021 "Gossip Girl" is just doing backflips to impress you with of-the-moment references. The twist to make the show partly from the perspective of the teachers works, though, and I'm amused by the meta aspect of one of the teachers being Tavi Gevinson, who was an avatar of precociously cosmopolitan late 2000s teens as much as "Gossip Girl" was. It's weird that she's 25 and one of her students is played by a 27-year-old, though.
I've always found "American Horror Story" to be a really frustrating show that never lives up to its potential, often because the most promising stories kind of fall apart once they're stretched out to a full season of television. So I was intrigued by "American Horror Stories," a spinoff where each episode is a self-contained story, and then annoyed again when the series opened with a 2-part episode that continues the first season 'Murder House' story. But the third episode was a decent new story and gave me a little more hope for the series.
g) "Titans"
My primary frame of reference for these characters is Cartoon Network's wonderfully goofy "Teen Titans Go!" so I was just kind of curious to see this much more serious and grown up live action series that started on DC Universe a couple years ago and just started airing on TNT. I thought the first episode had some good stuff aside from the infamous scene where Robin says "fuck Batman," but doesn't really seem worth keeping up with to me.
This Netflix show from Spain takes place in the 18th century is kind of a period piece romance story, but there's a lot of sort of ugly gross (but probably historically accurate) stuff in the first couple episodes that makes me wonder if it's not really supposed to be very romantic at all.
This Mexican sitcom on Netflix is pretty good, it's driven by a lot of broad old-fashioned humor about neighbors hating each other but it's also a pretty class conscious show about a struggling lower class family winning a contest and moving into a mansion and getting looked down on by their rich neighbors.
This Netflix coming-of-age comedy's first season last year was really enjoyable, glad to have it back, the first new episode kind of took things in an unexpected direction but in a good way that feels like they're going to let Devi grow up and change a bit from the first season.
I loved the first season of "This Way Up" way back in 2019 but it's easy to kind of forget a lot of shows from before the pandemic ever existed so it was nice to be reminded, I wasn't sure if this would get a second season. The first season worked well with Aisling Bea being this big personality and Sharon Horgan being her straight man, so one thing I don't love about the second season is they have a lot more separate A and B storylines, it's more like a show with two parallel protagonists now. But it's still a really funny and at turns poignant show.
The third season of "In The Dark" kind of makes me feel like the second season of "Search Party" where these likable characters have been pulled so far into so many dangerous situations that the show has kind of become more stressful and depressing to watch than anything else. "Search Party eventually rebounded from that and found its comedic voice, though, so I hope "In The Dark" will too.
I'm used to TV spinoffs of Disney and Pixar movies being these sort of iffy scaled-down things where the animation doesn't look as good as it did in the feature and some of the voices are different. So Disney+'s "Monsters At Work" is refreshing because they got Billy Crystal and John Goodman and other actors from Monsters, Inc., and the TV budget animation looks about the same quality as the feature budget animation looked 20 years ago thanks to technology advances. It's also cool because Monsters University was a prequel so this is finally a continuation of where the original movie left off. It's sort of a workplace sitcom with Ben Feldman voicing the awkward, overeducated new guy, so in a way it feels like an animated "Superstore."
Loren Bouchard's Apple+ series "Central Park" feels like an attempt to make a "Bob's Burgers" that's not "Bob's Burgers," with a slightly heavier focus on music and characters breaking into song. It's a good show, but it does have that uncanny valley quality where the funniest parts are the ones that feel the most like "Bob's Burgers" (Cole is basically Eugene if he was voiced by Titus Burgess, which is great). There was a mild controversy over Kristen Bell voicing a black character, and they recast the role for the 2nd season, which is fine, but I do miss Bell's comic timing a little and her casting was sort of consistent within a show where two white women are voiced by Daveed Diggs and Stanley Tucci.
A very weird but entertaining anime series on Netflix about all the gods of the different religions getting together and deciding to hold a battle royale with human to decide whether they'll eradicate mankind.
This Hulu miniseries is just 6 half hour episodes of Paul McCartney and Rick Rubin talking about music and songwriting, mostly Beatles records and the occasional solo or Wings track. And it's really just a really wonderful opportunity to hear stories straight from McCartney, as they lean over a mixing board and isolate instruments and talk about performances and choices and even hear things from the session that were cut out of the final song. The love of music and creating is so palpable in this and it's just so inspiring to soak in, I loved every minute. I also liked the directorial choice to have the McCartney/Rubin scenes in black & white while all the archival footage of the Beatles and other musicians is in color, kind of a nice reversal of the way past and present are usually visually presented in a documentary.
A couple months ago CNN aired "The Story of Late Night," a miniseries that was really entertaining despite the fact that very few of the dozen or so late night hosts that it was primarily about participated in the interviews. So the follow-up "History of the Sitcom" benefits from the fact that it's about a lot more shows with much bigger casts so there's usually a cast member from just about every major sitcom of the past 50 years that was game to talk about it, although the structure of the show is more topical than chronological in terms of what each episode is about.
r) "Cat People"
This Netflix show, or at least the first couple episodes I watch, is not so much about people who own cats as it is about people who've turned their cats into a career, including a guy who raps about his cats and moved from Baltimore to Portland, where he feels more understood. Some of the profiles are charming but I dunno, to me cats are just chill companions to hang out at home with, I can't really relate to this people.
This Netflix docuseries kind of follows Naomi Osaka during and after that point that she became super famous very fast, and you really see what kind of toll that takes on a young athlete. It's a very empathetic portrait, and it comes at a good time when she's going through weird stuff like assholes like Megyn Kelly attacking her.
"Behind The Attraction" is a Disney+ show about the history of various rides and attractions at Disney parks, so obviously it's sort of a puff piece about corporate IP. But some of the stories are pretty interesting and I just went to Disney World last year. The show is narrated by Paget Brewster, who kind of puts on the kind of sarcastic, brassy personality she often plays in sitcoms, which is a surprising choice, but it gives a little flavor to a show that could easily be too bland.
u) "Heist"
This Netflix series about famous crimes is one of those weird shows that mixes documentary with extensive scripted reenactments, so you've got one of the real people doing talking head narration while an actor plays them in a dramatization of the events. I can never really get into these kinds of shows, it makes me wish they stuck to one approach or the other.
This Netflix show features extensive interviews with a woman in Brazil who shot and dismembered her husband. I guess convicted murderers don't often get a chance to tell their side of the story and I don't know if I would say they shouldn't, but it's a pretty uncomfortable watch, I'm not sure how I feel about it.
So many TV shows are adaptations or extensions of podcasts now that it seems dumb to put the ungaingly "the podcast tapes" subheading on such a snappy title. But obviously Ronan Farrow's coverage of Harvey Weinstein was a huge deal and it's interesting to go back to the victims and other journalists that wrote about this story and look at how it all unfurled and why it took so many years for Weinstein to experience consequences.
This Amazon show is interesting only in that there are dozens of these kinds of reality shows about conceited careerist rich people in America and it's a little novel to see one that takes place in Australia and see what that culture is like in Sydney.
This Netflix series is about the family of the CEO of a modeling agency who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community. So some of the time it's just a run of the mill reality show about an affluent New York family while at other times it's very pointedly about some unique culture clashes.
This Netflix show lost me right in the first episode when Andrew Sullivan showed up as one of their interviewees. I don't know how you expect to credibly tell stories about people like Adolf Hitler when one of your talking heads is the most prominent mainstream proponent of race science, get the fuck out of here with that shit.
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on Friday, July 23, 2021 at 11:49 AM.
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