Christopher Miller, one half of the Lord & Miller team that directed 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie, created this Apple TV+ series that's both a broad comedy and a murder mystery that twists into yet another genre in each episode. A pop star (played by Dave Franco) dies at his house after a high school reunion, and a cop (Tiffany Haddish) interviews all his high school classmates who were at the party and could be the killer. In the first three episodes, Sam Richardson is a lovelorn character whose recollection of the night's events plays like a rom com, Ike Barinholtz is a macho jerk who remembers everything an action movie, and Ben Schwartz is an aspiring musician who tells his story like a musical. It's all pretty creative and energetic, and John Early steals a lot of scenes, but it's also a little exhausting. 

The Suicide Squad was a much better movie than its predecessor, and that's largely thanks to James Gunn and the new additions to the cast. So it was a pleasant surprise when a spinoff series about John Cena's character debuted just 5 months after the movie, with Gunn writing and directing almost the entire season. And it's just a wildly entertaining gorey little action comedy with a hair metal-heavy soundtrack, including the completely absurd title sequence where the entire cast dances like it's the frigging "Cosby Show." DC Comics adaptations get a lot of flak, some of it deserved, for taking themselves a lot more seriously than the comparatively lighter, brighter MCU, but I like that they've made room for more overtly comedic things like this and the "Harley Quinn" animated series. 

There have been a few shows in the last few years with autistic characters that have handled the subject matter pretty well, but "As We See It" is a really singular and impressive show. The three main actors are all on the spectrum and give incredible performances of characters, all in their 20s and living in an apartment together with an aide that's helping them lead adult lives without their families. And those characters are drawn with a lot of complexity, particularly Sue Ann Pien as Violet, each of them dealing with their own issues and setbacks. And Jason Katims, formerly showrunner of "Friday Night Lights" and "Parenthood," is just incredibly good at these poignant tearjerker moments where you really feel every character's personal triumph or breakdown and genuinely, true to the title, get a glimpse of what life is like for them and empathize. Sometimes it's a little too much to take because things seem to come to a head in almost every episode, but maybe that's just because I liked this show so much that I watched several episodes in a row. 

Last year I watched and really enjoyed Australian director Abe Forsythe's Little Monsters, which followed in the footsteps of the established zombie comedy genre but had its own unique voice (he'ss also directing the next RoboCop movie that Neill Blomkamp was at one point attached to). Forsythe's Peacock series "Wolf Like Me" is a bit like Little Monsters in that it's got a lot of elements of modern horror I've seen before, and this "person trying to hide that they're a werewolf" thing has been done many times, but I found it really memorable and distinct. The biggest surprise is that Josh Gad is a compelling dramatic lead and has real romantic chemistry with Isla Fisher, there are moments of comedy but it's largely kind of a moving story about loss and fate. It's nice to see Fisher in anything after she's been in so little over the last decade, and she's great in this, but it was a little disappointing to see her play an American in a show that takes place in Australia, let her use her delightful real accent, dammit. 

I'm not really sure why the Star Wars powers that be decided to launch their big wave of Disney+ series with "The Mandalorian," a show inspired by the popularity of Boba Fett but not actually about Boba Fett, and then turn that character into sort of a spinoff series after "The Mandalorian" became popular. It all feels kind of backwards. And while "The Mandalorian" managed the unlikely feat of establishing the protagonist's personality and making viewers care about him when he's always wearing a helmet, it feels harder to connect with Boba Fett in "The Book of Boba Fett" despite him not wearing the helmet most of the time. It's still a pretty entertaining show, though, I have always adored Ming-Na Wen and I think this is a great role for her. And I've enjoyed the episodes with Danny Trejo and Sophie Thatcher from "Yellowjackets" as a badass biker cyborg. 

When I saw that Kristen Bell was starring in a parody of a certain trendy wave of psychological mystery novels/movies like The Woman in the Window and The Girl on the Train, I was really excited, I thought this was gonna be hilarious. But satirizing a genre that is by nature slow and portentous can be tricky, you can't necessarily go joke-a-minute like a Zucker Brothers movie, and "The Woman" may have erred too far in the opposite direction -- my wife actually had to ask me several minutes into the first episode if it was a comedy, which is not a good sign. It picks up the pace a little after a couple episodes and I have hope that it's building to bigger laughs by the end, but it's not quite what I anticipated. 

This is a pretty interesting creepy show on Netflix where a video archivist restores a bunch of tapes from the '90s and finds this footage made by a woman who disappeared. I haven't gotten too far into  it yet but it seems pretty cool. 

I try not to dismiss shows just because they have similar premises to shows that already did it well, but "In From The Cold" kind of is "The Americans" if it was a trashier, weirder, more lowbrow Netflix show. And honestly, that's not a bad thing, I like a good lurid spy thriller, and Margarita Levieva from "The Deuce" is really gorgeous. 

This ABC miniseries is about the tragedy of Emmett Till and how his mother Mamie Till-Mobley became a civil rights activist. And while they tell a complicated story sensitively and Adrienne Warren is great as Till-Mobley, it just felt like the bright, chintzy ABC production values fell way short of what this could've been, it's easy to imagine HBO or something doing this a lot more justice. 

Last week Consequence published my list of the 10 best Showtime series ever -- a few hours later news broke that two shows on the list, "Black Monday" and "Work In Progress," had been canceled. But I'm glad that the highest current show on my list, "Billions," is getting a chance to wrap things up with its 6th and final season. Season 5 surprisingly ended with Damian Lewis exiting the show, and I'm interested to see how they fill that void. Corey Stoll's character is primarily in his place right now, and is well written enough that I think it's still a compelling show, but I'm still kind of hoping that the show ends with Asia Kate Dillon's character arc going somewhere interesting. 

Apparently this Peacock show is adapted from an Australian series where normal people sit down with the two hosts and tell the best story of something that happened to them, and actors dramatize it. The U.S. version is hosted by Ed Helms and Randall Park and has a lot of familiar American comedy people in the dramatizations, so it reminds me a lot of "Drunk History" -- minus the drinking, of course, but it's still pretty silly and playful. 

I haven't seen "Critical Role," which is a web series where professional voice actors play Dungeons & Dragons, but apparently this is a spinoff of that on Amazon Prime. I'm really enjoying it, I just started playing D&D once a week with my wife and her family the last two years and I feel like I'm still getting the handle of it all but it's fun to see this kind of thing animated and kind of relate the story to what we've done in our game. 

The latest Korean hit for Netflix is about a zombie outbreak in a high school, and it's pretty fast-paced and entertaining, they really hit the ground running and get some novelty out of isolating the action on school grounds. 

This Brazilian show on Netflix feels like a lot of American shows, a bunch of hot young people working at a resort, just a sort of blank sexy nothingness. 

This Danish series on Netflix is about a small town that's become a tourist attraction after a meteor landed there, but then a teenage tour guide starts to find out the real truth about the meteor. The first episode is really entertaining, looking forward to watching more of this. 

Few pop stars of Janet Jackson's huge level of success have been more private and guarded about their personal life, and I think for good reason. So it was pretty surprising that she decided, at 55 years old, to do a 4-part documentary talking openly for the first time about a lot of her life and career. I've only watched the first part but it's really interesting to hear the Jackson family saga from her perspective, even though I think she's very diplomatic about her father and everything it still feels very revealing. I'm looking forward to getting into the later episodes and hearing more about her classic albums. 

This CNN miniseries sets out to be sort of a course correction to the conventional wisdom about Marilyn Monroe. Every writer or historian or actor or filmmaker they interview for the doc is a woman, they look really critically at her work and her life story and the historical context, and explain what was great about her performances and how she carried herself as a public figure, it's pretty cool. 

This Netflix docuseries is about a conman who posed as a British spy, pretty crazy story, can't believe I had never heard of this guy before. 

Mexican food is pretty much my favorite kind of cuisine, so watching this show on Netflix is really appetizing but also kind of torture, I can only watch so much of shows like this if my stomach isn't full. 

A pretty cool Netflix show looking at the nightlife in cities like Tokyo, Seoul, and Mumbai, sort of an interesting lens through which to learn more about these places I've never been. 

"The Simple Life" kind of minted a particular kind of stupid reality show about rich privileged celebrities attempting to do normal working class jobs, and E!'s "Relatively Famous: Ranch Rules" is kind of a bottom-of-the-barrel new version where the children of David Hasselhoff and Ray Parker, Jr. work on a farm. Pat Benatar's daughter is a babe, though. 

This show is about the famous 'Hype House' in L.A. where a bunch of popular young TikTok creators live together in a mansion. It's kind of a well made reality show in that it just kind of neutrally depicts these people's bizarre ridiculous lives, but I still find it pretty hard to watch. 

This Netflix show is about soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo's wife, and it's kind of endlessly glamorous and aw-shucks about this luxurious life she married into. And maybe I'm just pulled into the show because she's really beautiful but it's kind of nice to see a reality show about rich and famous people who actually seem happy and just kind of feel like, well, I hope they continue to have a nice life. 

I grew up on all the Jim Henson shows but I think "Fraggle Rock" is even closer to my heart than "The Muppet Show" or "Sesame Street," I just have so many fond memories of watching it at my grandparents' house because they had HBO and would tape episodes for us. So I was excited but apprehensive about Apple TV+ doing a new version, and I'm happy to say that it feels just like the old show. Even though most of the voice actors are different now, they did an insanely good job with all the characters sounding the same, other than that Doc has been replaced with a young woman it feels like it picks up exactly where they left off in the '80s. 

This Apple TV+ animated series is based on Cece Bell's graphic novel about losing her hearing as a child and growing up deaf. And it's a really affecting story and it's nice to see this done in a way that kids would be able to understand, and the sound design of simulating the hearing loss is really well done, clever things like making voices more faint when the lights are dim and she can't lip read. 

"We Bare Bears" was one of my kids' favorite Cartoon Network shows that ended its run a couple years ago, and there were frequent flashback episodes of the three titular bears as little cubs. So it was kind of a no-brainer spinoff to do a new show that's just that, and it's pretty cute but I don't think it's as funny as the original series. 

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »