This is Mike Flanagan's third supernatural horror miniseries for Netflix with a sort of repertory cast of actors repeating in each one. The first two, "The Haunting of Hill House" and "The Haunting of Bly Manor," had similar enough titles that I thought of them as installments in an anthology series, but I suppose it's worth looking at them all as distinct series. I wasn't wild about the previous ones, although I liked "Bly Manor" a little more, but "Midnight Mass" has my attention a little more so far, the reveal of the supernatural element caught me a little by surprise because it's a bit different from the other Flanagan shows. Hamish Linklater is such a great, underrated actor, love what he's doing in this. 

Exec producer and director John Wells, who just finished 11 years as the showrunner of "Shameless," sometimes makes the Netflix miniseries "Maid" feel like another irreverent tale of adventures in poverty and scraping by. But the occasional attempts at a lighter tone just kind of serve to underline how heartbreaking the story is, based on a memoir of a young mother's experiences leaving an abusive partner and taking a job cleaning houses to support a young daughter. And that first episode is just soul-crushing in a way that made me want to keep watching more episodes just to see some glimmers of hope for this character. Margaret Qualley has mostly had supporting roles up to this point that haven't really required much heavy lifting in her acting, but I think she's got the perfect sincerity and vulnerability for this kind of role where you're just watching this character endure so much and wishing for something better for them. 

Back in June, FX did something I'd never seen before: they announced a premiere date for a new show before it had a title, it was just "Untitled B.J. Novak" on their programming schedule. A few weeks later, they finally gave the show the most vague title possible, and now the show's here and its entire concept still seems vague now that I've watched multiple episodes. Anthology series have been big for horror and sci-fi fantasy and much more rare in comedy, and with his little intro segments it feels like B.J. Novak is presenting the show as sort of a comedy "Twilight Zone." On paper, it seems like it has potential, but in execution it's just a mess, every episode feels like either a shrunk down version of a middling feature (the Lucas Hedges episode) or a sketch that goes on way too long (most of the others). The Jon Bernthal episode was definitely the worst, though, I gave my TV the finger when the last scene ended. And there are only 5 episodes instead of 6 because apparently Novak wrote an episode for an extremely expensive and extremely retired actor, Jack Nicholson, and didn't have a backup plan when he turned it down. 

This NBC drama has a Sliding Doors-type premise, looking at 3 different paths a guy's life could take after college graduation. But it feels like they've tried so hard to be true to the title that everything has this incredibly generic sheen to it: it's a show about a handsome central casting white guy who might become a heroic nurse with a pretty blonde wife, a famous rock star with a pretty brunette wife, or an unmarried heroic cop. It's hard to tell what the point of the show would ever be besides toggling between these 3 parallel storylines, 

I guess this is a prequel to Da The Vinci Code and Nate from "Succession" is playing the younger version of the Tom Hanks character. Not my thing but it's always good to see Eddie Izzard on TV. 

Like the O.J. Simpson season, this installment of "American Crime Story" revisits a story that was basically a daily obsession for the entire country for a year or two, and as someone who lived through the 1990s, I have a pretty limited appetite for revisiting this stuff at length. But the O.J. season was elevated by some inspired casting and acting, which "Impeachment" lacks. Sarah Paulson's terrible Linda Tripp has deservingly taken most of the criticism, but Clive Owen and Beanie Feldstein are in my opinion bigger disappointments, if anything their hollow performances make the Clinton/Lewinsky affair feel even less like something that happened in real life. 

This FOX medical drama is now in its 5th season and my wife has always really been the fan of the show that keeps us watching, I like the ensemble cast but find Matt Czuchry really unlikable. Anyway, last week they killed off a major character, who'd just had a baby and survived a stabbing in the last season, and my wife was properly fed up enough to talk about stopping watching the show now, which would fine with me, much as I like Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Manish Dayal on the show. 

Oats Studios is Neill Blomkamp's production house and this is a Netflix anthology of shorts, I don't know if Blomkamp directed all of them, but he did the first, "Rakka," co-starring Sigourney Weaver, which is pretty good. I feel like District 9 didn't totally survive its transition from the Alive In Joburg short to a feature film and ended up kind of bloated and overgrown, so I like the idea of Blomkamp doing more shorts. 

The Korean import "Squid Game" is at this point the biggest foreign language show Netflix has ever had, maybe on their way to being one of their biggest hits ever. And it's a great creepy spectacle, especially that first episode where you watch the horrifying game start to unfold. I haven't finished the season yet so I'm not sure how I feel about it entirely, but the cast is great, really elevates the show beyond just this dark cruel thing where innocent people are constantly getting slaughtered. 

This Netflix show from Spain about Holocaust survivors finding Nazis is pretty good, feels like a better version of Amazon's big overhyped disappointment "Hunters." 

I really liked the first episode of this French crime drama on Netflix, haven't had a chance to watch more yet but it's promising, good stylish direction. 

A cutesy little cartoon about birds on Amazon, it skews a bit too young even for my 6-year-old but I'm glad Kristen Bell remains booked and busy. 

I guess in the post-"Masked Singer" reality TV landscape FOX will just put the weirdest singing contest idea pitched to them on the air, although the avatar singer concept actually works better than I expected and the real weird spectacle is Grimes at the judges' table next to junk TV lifers like Nick Lachey and will.i.am. 

In the 6 years since Jon Stewart stepped down from "The Daily Show," he's been this oddly ubiquitous non-presence -- the topical comedy landscape is still much as he redefined it, on a dozen shows mostly hosted by people he once hired and brought to prominence, only occasionally resurfacing to do cameos on one of them, Stephen Colbert's CBS show. Stewart signed a big 4-year HBO deal that ultimately resulted in nothing after some kind of animated news satire and a standup special were announced and then tabled, and he did some very admirable advocacy work for 9/11 first responders. But y'know, he did 4 shows a week for ages and I respect that he had to drop out of the grind, and I'm not surprised that now that he's finally got a new show, he's not only following the format of John Oliver's show but going one better and only doing a new episode every TWO weeks. The first episode felt a little rusty, but the whole burn pit subject matter was interesting/horrifying, and I loved how he got crickets on his first joke, an obscure crack about his early MTV vehicle "You Wrote It, You Watch It" that only I remember. 

While post-"Daily Show" comedy is thriving all over television, Trevor Noah is just barely keeping the original flagship show still going, and Comedy Central's attempts at other topical comedy shows have gotten progressively worse in recent years, culminating in this pathetically corny attempt to seem woke by yelling the word "cracker" as a punchline every 30 seconds. Charlamagne Tha God is and always has been a shock jock who says a lot of asinine and horrifying stuff, and it's amazing to me that he's been able to rebrand as a vaguely pro-social justice media personality who gets to interview presidential candidates and shit. 

Sculpture is my favorite form of visual art, especially mixed media stuff that repurposes materials, so I'm really enjoying this Netflix show, which is kind of a reality competition thing but really just feels more like a celebration of the creativity of the artists on the show, it's fun to watch and I root for everybody. 

Billy Milligan was a campus rapist who became the first person acquitted of crimes due to being diagnosed with multiple personality disorder in the 1970s. I have a real aversion to the way Hollywood bullshit like those James McAvoy movies deals with this subject matter, so I'm really not looking forward to the upcoming Apple series where Tom Holland plays Milligan, but it's interesting to see this Netflix docuseries about it that deals with the facts and has a few decades of hindsight and distance from what happened. 

This feels less like a documentary series and more like a SpaceX promotional video, felt gross watching a little of it. 

This Showtime docuseries about the Iran-contra scandal is pretty good, although it feels like they lay it on a little thick acting like it's an obscure story compared to Watergate or whatever. 

I'd never heard of LuLaRoe but all these MLM schemes that prey on women seem so pervasive now, it's interesting to hear the story of how it works in detail. 

This cute Peacock show lets kids take the lead on a family DIY project to make their backyard more fun. It kind of makes me feel guilty because we have this tiny backyard that we do nothing with and I'm always discouraging the kids from wanting to play back there.