TV Diary
It was a delightful surprise that Steve Martin created his first TV series at the age of 76, and that's kind of an affectionate sendup of the true crime podcast phenomenon with Martin Short. Instead of going for a full-scale Three Amigos reunion with Chevy Chase, they understandably went with a different third wheel, and while I'm not a fan of Selena Gomez as a singer, she's got decent enough comic timing that she doesn't drag the show down. It's also kind of sweet to watch a show about two old men forging a platonic friendship with a young woman, but it's mostly a really funny show with a decent little murder mystery driving the story.
In "Y: The Last Man," every human man, and every male of every other species, suddenly dies all at once, and women and girls are left to keep everything going and figure out how to reproduce. The only cisgender man left in the world, Yorick, is a dopey lovelorn New York guy with a pet capuchin monkey, so basically Ross Geller from "Friends." But there's a lot of world-building and interesting questions raised in the first 3 episodes, I'm curious to see where this is going. In recent years there have been things like "The Leftovers" or Avengers: Infinity War where a massive number of people suddenly cease to exist, but "Y: The Last Man" feels a bit more visceral and difficult to watch because half of the population is bloody corpses rotting in the streets.
The FOX dramedy "The Big Leap" is about a fictitious FOX reality show called "The Big Leap" where amateur dancers in Detroit compete to star in a production of Swan Lake. It's kind of a weird mix of folksy and inspiring and also a barbed satire of reality TV where a conniving and calculating producer is trying to orchestrate and manipulate the onscreen drama, like a slightly less gritty "UnReal." The cast is charming and makes it work, particularly Simone Recasner and Teri Polo, but the tones clash sometimes and it's a little weird to see a FOX show kind of gleefully send up the "American Idol"-style reality competition genre.
Philipp Meyer's novel American Rust was published over a decade ago. But Showtime's miniseries airing in 2021 makes it feel a little like an accidental follow-up to "Mare of Easttown," since they're both about small town Pennsylvania cops who have a bunch of complicated personal entanglements in the murder they're investigating. The first episode sets things up well and I'm happy to watch a show where the leads are Jeff Daniels, Maura Tierney, and Bill Camp, but it is a little dour, don't know if it's going to be as addictive and watchable as "Mare."
I'd never seen the original Scenes From A Marriage, or for that matter anything by Ingmar Bergman, because I'm kind of a philistine. But I liked the first episode of this, you can't ask for a better pair of leads than Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac and the fourth wall-breaking opening scene was kind of a fun flourish -- you see Chastain walk onto the set, get prepped for a scene, and get into character, and then you still totally get immersed in the narrative because she's just that good of an actor. I've started watching the 1973 original too, just to get some frame of reference and see what was changed and what wasn't.
Remaking old IP about white guys and gender bending and/or race bending the character is cool and generally only pisses off the right people, but I have to admit I did roll my eyes a little when I heard about Disney+'s "Doogie Howser, M.D." reboot about a teenage Hawaiian girl, Lahela. But this is an incredibly charming and perfectly cast show, developed by "Fresh Off The Boat" and "How I Met Your Mother" writer/producer Kourtney Kang, with the shrewd decision to place the show in a world where the "Doogie Howser" series exists and Lahela gets the 'Doogie' nickname because, naturally, she's a teen doctor. I watched the original show when I was a kid and still have a soft spot for it, and they got the tone just right with this version, they even did a good new version of the ol' Mike Post theme.
I'm not really familiar with Julie Delpy's work as a write and director, but I like this Netflix series she created, feels like a very relatable, down-to-earth sort of thing about four middle-aged friends who are all going through their own situations and crises and leaning on each other.
h) "Dive Club"
I assumed this Netflix show about teenagers solving a mystery would be campy but it's not entirely. It is a little frothy and uninteresting for me, though.
Kristen Schaal is now one of the vampires on "Shadows," which is just about one of the only ways that one of the funniest shows on TV could get better at this point. I like the way they've evolved the Guillermo character over time, in the early episodes I thought he was kind of a boring straight man character but the whole vampire slayer bloodline story makes him a lot more interesting and complicates his relationship to everyone else.
I had mixed feelings about the first season of "Back To Life" in 2019 and kind of felt like a self-contained 6-episode story, so I wasn't really expecting it to come back for a second season. But now that they've kind of hashed out all the tragedy of Daisy Haggard's character's backstory, it feels like the show can focus a little more on being a dry comedy of manners, so I like it a little more now.
k) "A.P. Bio"
Now that Paula Pell is also on "Girls5eva" but is also still on "A.P. Bio," she's basically the queen of Peacock, which has a better sitcom lineup than NBC proper at this point. The last season of "A.P. Bio" started to toy more with "Community"-style one-off conceptual episodes, and they've leaned into that more and it works, I don't think it would work for "A.P. Bio" to keep doing things the way season 1 was over and over. I am bummed that they kind of wrote Elizabeth Alderfer out of the show, though, she was the best possible foil for Glenn Howerton's character.
l) "Billions"
Every season of "Billions" is a carefully calibrated 12-episode arc, moving all its characters around the chessboard to start at one place and wind up in new, unexpected spots. So it was one of the most frustrating examples of a show's production schedule getting interrupted in 2020: they shot 7 episodes of season 5 before the pandemic hit, and this year they shot the remaining 5 episodes, so it's just on for a month again until who knows how long. But I'm glad to finally return to these stories and these characters, this season has been really great, although I'm amused that Paul Giamatti decided to shave his beard during the pandemic so now his character looks really weird clean-shaven for the first time and they had to just quickly acknowledge it and move on. And I continue to enjoy how music pops in "Billions," particularly the little shout out to Van Halen's "Atomic Punk" in the latest episode.
I've never been a big fan of Mark Ronson's work, but he's a good choice to host a show like this Apple TV docuseries where each episode focuses on a different aspect of music history and recording technology (sampling, reverb, drum machines, etc.). He's got some great interviews with the usual music doc suspects like Paul McCartney and ?uestlove, but I think my favorite moment is Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy explaining that he'd have engineers turn up the faders on all the empty channels on the mixing board because "I want the noise...the noise to me is what glues all those samples together so that it all sounds like one." Ronson's narration sometimes gets a little pretentious ("I've learned that reverb that is really about our relationship with the world") but for the most part it's really good, even the episode about AutoTune didn't feel too redundant after watching the AutoTune episode of Netflix's "This Is Pop."
n) "Frogger"
Frogger was one of my favorite arcade games when I was a kid (still is, but I more often encounter the modern knockoff Crossy Road now). So I was curious to see how Peacock would adapt it into a live action reality show, since it wouldn't really make sense to have people actually dodge literal traffic. But what they did do, an obstacle course where the main objective is not to fall in water, and occasionally get on a conveyor belt with small non-moving vehicles that cannot run you over, feels a little like a cop out. But it's fun and knowingly silly and one of the hosts is Damon Wayans Jr.
"Top Chef" is one of the few reality competitions I ever really enjoyed and watched multiple seasons of, and this is a great idea for a spinoff. I love seeing families cook together, it makes me think about how fun it is to let my kids help out in the kitchen.
When Hulu announced that they were making a reality show about the D'Amelio family, two of whom are among the most popular accounts on TikTok, a lot of people made a show of being offended that they would get a TV show, as if it's not a no-brainer for media companies to try to get a piece of the popularity of people who have over 100 million followers. And a lot of the first episode of "The D'Amelio Show" is about Charli D'Amelio and Dixie D'Amelio embarking on show business careers while dealing with constant backlash from a public that can't believe that popular TikTok creators can get TV and music deals. I suppose it's a little recursive and self-pitying but I genuinely feel bad for them and think all the outrage about kids who dance and do silly things on TikTok having careers is dumb, let them do what they do, it's not the end of the world.
A Netflix reality show about two women who buy cheap old motels and renovate them into cutesy Instagram-friendly inns, they talk like Lorelai Gilmore and the whole show is very cursed and difficult to watch.
There have been so many 9/11 documentary things in the last few weeks, I watched one episode of this Netflix one and I think that was enough for me, I was 19 when it happened so I remember it all pretty well and have not really gotten much out of revisiting it, although this series seems as well made as any.
My 6-year-old son started watching the first season of "Lego Masters" with me last year and was very fascinated by the idea that there are adults who play with Legos and build big complex things with them. And he recently asked to watch it again so we started catching up on the new season. I like that one of the teams is two sushi chefs who see similarities between building Legos and preparing sushi.
A new Adult Swim show where Maria Bamford plays a reanimated zombie of a teen mom, obviously very weird and very Adult Swim. Not super into yet but I wanna give it a chance to grow on me because I love Bamford.
u) "Q-Force"
This Netflix animated series is about a group of queer spies, it's a little clever but also feels very dated in some ways and makes me cringe more than laugh.
v) "Dug Days"
Up is one of my favorite Pixar movies so I was pretty happy to hear that there would be a spinoff series on Disney+ about Dug the dog (Pixar animator Bob Peterson, who writes and directs the show), who now lives with Carl (Ed Asner). It's an adorable, hilarious little show and it debuted a few days after Asner died, glad he was able to do this little handful of episodes before he passed.
Both my kids have loved "Octonauts," an adorable long-running cartoon about a cat and polar bear who have a submarine and go around meeting deep sea creatures. And now there is an equally adorable spinoff where they also have adventures above ground with land mammals and birds and so on.
I was in the last generation of kids who grew up with the old original Hanna-Barbera cartoons still on TV all the time. But now that that stuff has been sort of culturally dormant for a while, "Jellystone!" is the attempt to reboot all the classic characters like Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound and Grape Ape in one show that's on Cartoon Network and HBO Max. It's fine, but it doesn't really have the feel of the old cartoons that I have some nostalgic affection for.
y) "Amphibia"
This show has been on Disney Channel for a couple years now but my kids have been watching it more and more lately and it's growing on me, kind of hits the same niche as "The Owl House" really well.
z) "Clarence"
My 11-year-old son never really watched this Cartoon Network show when it was on in the mid-2010s, but now that it's over, he's gotten really into it, and I kind of get it, it's a great chaotic vision of what middle schoolers are like.
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