TV Diary
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
I wish there was dozens of hours of footage of The Beatles recording some other album, because Let It Be is probably my least favorite of the post-'65 albums, and I'm kind of tired of the Let It Be/Abbey Road era looming ever larger in the band's pop culture profile and classic rock radio/streaming numbers. But even I have to admit that Peter Jackson put together an absolutely wonderful 8-hour epic with this footage and it's a delight to see how powerful the Beatles' musical chemistry was and how goofy they were with each other right up into their final year together. John Lennon is clearly a little more checked out than everyone else, but he still brings some great songs in (one of my biggest beefs with Let It Be is that "Don't Let Me Down" was relegated to a non-album B-side) and still the biggest and most relentlessly silly and clever personality in the band, Yoko's always by his side but Paul and everyone else are happy to have her there. And I think anyone who's spent a significant amount of time in recording sessions and/or band practices will appreciate the way they captured both the dull repetition and the sudden inspired payoff moments.
The title "The Sex Lives Of College Girls" isn't entirely a comedic bait-and-switch -- it's definitely more about the dating lives of the characters than it is about their academic careers -- but it's a pretty refreshingly down-to-earth sitcom that is very much about college life in 2021 but doesn't lean into "kids are so WOKE these days!" stuff too much and very much resonates with what being a college freshman felt like for me 20 years ago. As someone who watched and enjoyed all 6 seasons of "The Mindy Project," I think that this already has the potential be the best show Mindy Kaling has created, there's just great instant chemistry between the cast members, who are mostly relative unknowns (Pauline Chalamet is Timothee's sister and Renee Rapp was Regina in the Broadway version of Mean Girls, which seems like great preparation for the character she plays here).
c) "Hawkeye"
Jeremy Renner is about the last MCU that I'd particularly want to see in his own spinoff series, but a couple episodes in this is pretty decent, I find it more engaging than "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" at least. A lot of that is down to the supporting cast, including Vera Farmiga, Tony Dalton, and Hailee Steinfeld, who's once again playing the "girl who develops a rebellious streak after her father dies" role she's done in True Grit, The Edge of Seventeen, and Bumblebee.
As often happens when a fantasy or sci-fi novel is adapted for the screen, my wife has read the Robert Jordan books and I have not, so I'm kind of taking the "Wheel of Time" series at face value as a TV show but also getting a little bit of perspective from her about how it relates to the source material. It's interesting enough so far, Rosamund Pike is always a great screen presence, but I'm not really on the edge of my seat or anything and some of the visual effects look a little cheap, I kinda figured they'd spare no expense on this kind of thing.
I've only watched the original "Cowboy Bebop" here and there so I'm not subjecting Netflix's new live action series to much scrutiny, maybe the fanboys hate it for good reason, maybe they don't. But I think it's pretty enjoyable, I'm amused that Mustafa Shakir is playing Jet Black because I really became a fan of his from the show "Jett." And I don't really understand the criticism that they sanitized it or dialed down the dystopian elements, those themes are still pretty explicit.
f) "Wakefield"
This Showtime series about a psychiatric hospital in Australia is pretty excellent, moments of realism and moments of surrealism, little self-contained stories about patients and longer story arcs about the staff, pretty moving at times.
After NatGeo adapted Richard Preston's Ebola outbreak book The Hot Zone into a miniseries, they've spun it off into an anthology series, and this series is about the 2001 anthrax attacks. Even though I lived through 9/11 and all that stuff, I still feel like I really don't understand much about the whole anthrax scare. But apparently a researcher at USAMRIID killed himself in 2008 after being accused of perpetrating the anthrax attacks, Bruce Edwards Ivins, and Tony Goldwyn portrays him really compellingly in this.
h) "CSI: Vegas"
My wife and I used to watch the original "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" pretty faithfully before all the spinoffs like "CSI: Miami" made the franchise seem a bit silly and they started changing the cast of the original show. So it's kind of nostalgic for them to bring back William Peterson and Jorja Fox for another series with a new supporting cast, it's still an enjoyable show with a solid formula, even if it was novel at one point and just has its own set of police procedural cliches now.
i) "The Great"
This coming back for a new season around the same time as "Dickinson" had me comparing these shows to each other, and I think "The Great" is better at this historical satire thing, just has a sharper wit and a better idea of where the humor in the subject matter is. Nicholas Hoult is so funny as Peter III that I've been kind of been not looking forward to his character dying probably soon in the storyline and the show going on without him, but now they also have Hoult playing Yamelyan Pugachev, who impersonated Peter III and outlived him by a decade, which is kind of a brilliant way to keep him on the show.
j) "Hightown"
I enjoy Starz's seedy New England crime drama, glad it's back for a second season. Luis Guzman's guest star arc was great and came to an end sooner than I'd like, but the show is good at these crazy shocking moments punctuating the slow character-driven drama.
k) "Insecure"
I've always had mixed feelings about "Insecure" but I thought the 4th season wound up being their best to date, so it feels right that they're ending it with season 5, at the top of their game and at a point where the show's given everybody involved a lot of career opportunities. The last few episodes have been alright, I definitely prefer when it's a little more overtly satirical, the soap opera aspect of the show bores me a little.
Jordan Peele co-created "The Last O.G." and Tiffany Haddish signed on as one of the show's co-stars just before both of their careers went supernova, and I feel like the show never really benefited from that and became this reliable underrated show on TBS, which was already a pretty low profile channel. And Haddish never really got to be very funny on "The Last O.G." so it's just as well that she finally got too busy to shoot it and her character has been "in Europe" for season 4, and Da'Vine Joy Randolph is a good addition, such a perfect comic foil for Tracy Morgan.
m) "Gloria"
Netflix's first series from Portugal, sort of a Cold War spy thriller, kind of a slow moving story but great-looking stuff.
n) "Hellbound"
I still haven't seen Train To Busan but the director's new Netflix series is pretty sick, it's about these supernatural monsters who suddenly show up on Earth dragging people to Hell, but it's also kind of in a realistic world and focused on people who are grappling with this insane thing happening, it's pretty dark stuff.
Adult Swim doing an anime spinoff of Blade Runner seems like a cool idea on paper, and I like how they kind of put the story right between the original movie and the sequel, kind of like how "The Mandalorian" and Rogue One take place between the original Star Wars trilogy and the sequel trilogy. But I really just think the animation is hideous in "Blade Runner: Black Lotus," it looks like a cut scene from a bad video game, and they could've done something much more stylized and aesthetically appropriate with the same technology.
This Netflix animated series is a sort of droll autobiographical thing by an Italian guy who writes comics and graphic novels, he has a very familiar sort of dark cynical sense of humor but it's pretty well written and I like the visual style.
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers was an underground comic in the '60s about three stoners, and this animated series based on it just absolutely sucks, total dogshit. It has an Austin Powers-style premise where they got caught in suspended animation in the late '60s and wake up in the present day, so it's all the predictable culture clash past vs. present humor. But the problem is really the voice cast -- half of it, Woody Harrelson and John Goodman, is great and perfectly chosen, but then the other half is Pete Davidson and Tiffany Haddish, who totally have the wrong vibe for this and just ruin every scene they're in.
I've never read a Harriet The Spy book or seen any of the other adaptations, but this animated series on Apple TV+ is pretty cute.
s) "Animal"
This Netflix nature doc series is pretty enjoyable, each episode features a different narrator and a different type of animal (Pedro Pascal on octopi, Rebel Wilson on marsupials, etc.). It's a little whimsical but also pretty educational and full of amazing footage.
t) "The Line"
The whole story of Eddie Gallagher the NAVY Seal has always made me incredibly angry, this Apple TV+ docuseries is really well done but I don't know how much of it I want to watch, it's just so enraging and he's just maintaining his innocence through the whole thing.
I don't really go for documentaries about dumpster fires like "Tiger King" and the Fyre Fest docs as much as other people, but I see the appeal, and this certainly is pretty appealing on that front, there are some insane stories in this thing. It's also pretty hilariously apt that the opening theme music is Crazy Town's "Butterfly."
A little on-the-nose for Morgan Freeman to host a History Channel show about prison breaks because he was in The Shawshank Redemption, but it works. And he's at an age where it's probably a lot less taxing for him to do something like this than a movie, so they might as well take advantage of his gravitas.
'Lie detector' machines are stupid and very dangerously unreliable when used by law enforcement, but I suppose using them in a dumb reality show is harmless fun. And everyone on this Netflix show from Spain is insanely hot, which is really the point, I think.
This Amazon docuseries is about a teenage trans girl living in New Jersey. And I feel like at this point with the growing amount of scripted TV and film about trans characters, it's refreshing to just see a documentary about a real trans person that just shows them living their life and figuring out who they are and being supported by their family, kind of a simple but necessary thing to put out into the world right now.
Another Amazon docuseries, this one about Latin pop star Natti Natasha. It's about a point in her life where she's concealing her relationship because it's kind of what's expected is best for her career, but then she starts a family and has a kid, I don't know much of her music but it's relatively engaging and relatable for a little celebrity reality show thing.
I guess reality TV producers have caught onto the 2000s nostalgia enough to go running back to Paris Hilton, but this one doesn't have that entertaining self-aware comedic angle that her other recent series "Cooking With Paris" had.
