TV Diary
There's a bitter irony to indigenous people being pretty much the last minority to get some significant representation TV, but 2021 has felt like a pretty notable year between "Reservation Dogs," "Rutherford Falls," and "Trickster" (if nothing else it's progress from a woman of Asian descent playing the most prominent Native American character on "Yellowstone"). But the Taiki Waititi-produced "Reservation Dogs" is, aside from all that, just a really funny, relatable show about broke teenagers getting into a trouble in a small town. Great Lee Hazlewood and Stooges needledrops, too.
b) "Mr. Corman"
At Joseph Gordon-Levitt's peak as a movie star, he cashed in his name recognition on a flawed but enjoyable directorial debut, Don Jon. 8 years later, he's returned to series television for the first time since "3rd Rock From The Sun" with another passion project that feels similar in a lot of its strengths and weaknesses, although the title character is a bit more of a blank slate everyman than the bigger broader protagonist of Don Jon. After two episodes, I'm not totally sure what to make of "Mr. Corman," especially since the second episode was a bit more tense and darker in tone than the first. Is this an aspiring musician's heroic journey back to pursuing his ambitions after giving up? Are the weird fantasy moments leading to some kind of nervous breakdown? I'm a little intrigued but also a little frustrated by the ambiguity about exactly what this show is going for.
I don't think Emily Mortimer had done much behind the camera before besides writing and creating her autobiographical comedy series "Doll & Em" a few years ago, so this 3-hour miniseries WWII period piece feels a pretty ambitious directorial debut for her. It's really good, though, it's interesting to me that the source material, Nancy Mitford's novel, was published in 1945, so there's a sense that this story came straight from how life was in Europe just before and during the war. It's very light and playful at times, with surprising modern rock music dropped into the soundtrack here and there (excellent uses of The Who's "Blue Red And Grey" and T. Rex's "Dandy In The Underworld") and great performances from Lily James and Emily Beecham, which makes the inevitable tragedy of the story hit harder.
If you told me that Syfy's next scripted series would be a show about selling haunted houses called "SurrealEstate" starring the really bland handsome guy from "Wynonna Earp" and "Schitt's Creek," I would've dismissed it outright. But the first episodes of this have been promising, there's a humorous little spark to it and decent visual effects.
e) "Dr. Death"
This true crime drama stars Joshua Jackson as a neurosurgeon who harmed and killed patients in some crazy malpractice cases. Jackson isn't anyone's idea of a particularly great actor but I think what really undermines his performance as a villain here is that some of the good guy doctors he works with are played by Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater, both of whom would've sunk their teeth into a role like this a lot more (I mean, Baldwin kind of already did it in Malice, which makes his presence here feel all the weirder).
f) "Hit & Run"
After "Your Honor" and "The Beast Must Die," this is the 3rd drama series I've watched in the past year about someone seeking revenge after a loved one was killed in a hit and accident. I think this is the weakest of the three, but really the reason I'm unlikely to watch it past the first episode is the woman didn't look both ways crossing the street so I can't bring myself to feel that bad for her.
I love the whole comedy anthology format "Miracle Workers" turned into with this great cast including Steve Buscemi and Danielle Radcliffe playing different characters in different settings each season. This season is off to a good start, possibly as funny as last year's "Miracle Workers: Dark Ages" was, I hope they do like 10 seasons of this show.
h) "Ted Lasso"
Although Jason Sudeikis rightfully gets most of the credit for how charming "Ted Lasso" and his titular character are, the show had a great ensemble from day one. And it feels like the second season is wisely set on emphasizing that with sturdy B plots where Ted is often offscreen but you don't miss him, because Rebecca and Sam and Keeley and Roy and Jamie are all such engaging characters in their own right. After all, you can't do the fish-out-of-water thing forever, and now that Ted is more or less accepted by the club, you can't just keep showing everything through his wide-eyed perspective. That said, the third episode was far far better than the first two, so it hasn't been quite as consistent as the first season.
Glad this show came back for a second season, just a good relatable, silly comedy and Alexa Davies is adorable.
j) "Grown-ish"
It's funny, I think the soap opera nature of the plots on "Grown-ish" finally wore my wife down and now she's like, every character on this show is an entitled brat, I can't stand any of them, and I mean, she's not wrong I guess. But it's a show about college kids, I like that they're mostly just making the mistakes that people that age make.
k) "Sky Rojo"
This and Hulu's short-lived "Reprisal" have been trashy, heavily stylized crime dramas that I've been enjoying lately, I'm glad Netflix had two seasons of "Sky Rojo" in one year. The second season kept up the ridiculous pace of the first with all the violent setpieces and double crosses, and the finale had a pretty big "holy shit" moment I didn't see coming.
I didn't even know this show came out in 2020, I'm surprised it took over a year for the Netflix algorithm to bring it to my attention because we've definitely watched some of Iliza Shlesinger's standup specials on there. It's pretty good, hit-and-miss like most sketch shows are but every episode has a sketch or two that really knocks it out of the park.
m) "The Prince"
I fucking hate most 'adult cartoons,' especially ones that satirize contemporary public figures. And "The Prince," which is about the British royal family, is just awful, possibly even worse than that "Our Cartoon President" Trump thing, just deeply deeply unfunny.
One of my favorite things about having Disney+ is having all the Pixar and Disney shorts, sometimes my son and I will just watch a bunch of favorite shorts for an hour. So I was excited to find this series that premiered earlier in the year and just released a second season, which is all animated shorts preceded by brief interviews with the filmmakers. They're very short but often delightful, I really recommend it. Songs To Sing In The Dark is amazingly imaginative and original, and I'd totally watch a full-length feature of Puddles and a series of Dinosaur Barbarian.
When I saw that Disney+ was doing this new Chip 'n' Dale series, I immediately sort of assumed it would be a reboot of the "Rescue Rangers" cartoon I grew up on, or possibly based on that Blur album. But it's really a throwback to the original Chip 'n' Dale shorts, with no dialogue and sort of retro animation, a little like "The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse." It's not bad, my kid likes it.
A really zany, entertaining show where a horse from a serious 'action' cartoon winds up in an alternate universe that's more of a silly "My Little Pony"-style cartoon full of centaurs, really odd and funny stuff.
Sometimes I wonder if animators are just competing to come up with the strangest things to make the main characters of a cartoon show -- this cute Cartoon Network series is about a raincloud and his pet walrus delivering mail.
"Spongebob Squarepants" creator Stephen Hillenburg always dismissed the idea of spinoff series, so multiple spinoffs going into production after his death in 2018 has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. I explained some of this to my 11-year-old son and I think it was one of his first experiences with seeing how artists can be betrayed by the corporations they work for. But anyway Patrick was always my least favorite character and this show seems pretty worthless.
I never saw this when it originally aired in 2014, but apparently it was Cartoon Network's first miniseries. And it's really delightful, with a voice cast including Elijah Wood and John Cleese. Wirt and Greg remind me a lot of my 2 sons, who are all about "Gravity Falls" and "Infinity Train," and loved it and watched it multiple times recently.
Something weird happened a few years ago where the phrase "fuckboy" went mainstream but people were really adamant about denying its homophobic roots as a synonym for f****t and insisting that a fuckboy was simply a jerky kind of guy that straight girls dislike dating. And so now we have "FBoy Island," a horrible dating show on HBO Max where a bunch of guys, half of them "fboys" and half of them "nice guys," compete for the affections of three women who have to figure out who is who. It almost had the potential to be kind of a satirical look at a certain kind of guy like VH1's "Tool Academy," but it's just kind of ceaselessly dull and stupid. The worst part, however, is that they I guess don't want to say "fuckboy" so they only say "effboy," over and over, as if the cast was coached to say it as often as possible and never use any other synonyms for a douchey or undesirable guy.
This is the kind of show that I can't imagine ever would've happened if not for COVID-19, but Kevin Hart needs to work and so he'll do an interview show while he can't tour or he's waiting for a movie to go into production. And Kevin Hart is about the last person you'd expect to do a no-frills Charlie Rose-style interview show with one guest per episode, so it's kind of novel. He dials down the energy a little more than I expect and really tries to connect with the guests, there's still something very facile and show biz about these conversations and sometimes he just can't turn off the standup instinct when he should, but I'll give him points for making an honest effort.
v) "Untold"
As someone who doesn't really follow the NBA but enjoys hearing about some of the big stories, "The Last Dance" was great, and the first episode of Netflix's sports docuseries "Untold," about the infamous 'malice in the palace' night, hits the same sweet spot. Crazy story, had never really heard about it in detail before and it seems like they shed some new light on the whole situation.
This HBO Max docuseries about an independent TV station in rural Nevada is pretty charming for at least the first 8 minutes until they reveal, admittedly unsurprisingly, that the station owner is a huge MAGA fuckhead. Some of the actual journalists on the show become even more sympathetic after that, but it's kind of a hard watch since he's definitely the focal point of the show.
I guess Paris Hilton was always sort of playing a character with her public persona but it feels like people will accept that kind of thing a little more readily than at the height of her fame. It's weird to see Kim Kardashian on her cooking show on Netflix, though, now that Paris is kind of in the pop culture rearview as Gerry & The Pacemakers to Kim K's Beatles. It's a silly little show but I don't know if Hilton just thinks not being able to cook is way way funnier than it actually is.
I feel like I've seen a lot of the stuff in this Netflix docuseries in other shows so it's not that interesting to me.
This CBS show has pretty much the same concept as the show "Celebrity IOU" on HGTV did last year, except that show had big deal movie stars like Brad Pitt and Melissa McCarthy and this show has, like, Lauren Alaina and Jesse Tyler Ferguson.
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on Thursday, August 12, 2021 at 10:01 AM.
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