TV Diary
I was never a huge fan of the mockumentary style of sitcom that became ubiquitous after "The Office," and in the last few years it seemed to be falling out of fashion. But "Abbott Elementary" and the Paul Feig-produced "Welcome To Flatch" are two of the best comedies of 2022 so far so I guess there's still some life in the format. "Flatch" is about a fictional rural town in Ohio, and it feels like an affectionate satire of how strange small towns can become when everybody knows everybody. Sean William Scott plays against type as a priest and Aya Cash is like the opposite of her character on "You're The Worst," but there's this great cast of odd hilarious supporting characters, including Krystal Smith, Chelsea Holmes, Taylor Ortega, and William Tokarsky (the killer from "Too Many Cooks," finally in a real sitcom!). FOX just started airing it last week, but the first 7 episodes are all on Hulu and are worth watching.
b) "Minx"
"Minx" is another excellent new show produced by Paul Feig about a woman with an idea for a feminist magazine meeting a pornographer and getting talked into making erotica for women in the early '70s, kind of an alternate history about something getting started a year or so before Playgirl existed. Thematically, it reminds me of some other recent period piece shows like "The Deuce" and "Physical," but after watching a couple episodes of "Minx," I think it's already miles ahead of those shows, just way more entertaining and more inventive in turning its concept into a story with characters and a context. Part of that is that Ophelia Lovibond and Jake Johnson have great chemistry and their characters are constantly pulling the idea in opposite directions, part of it is I think creator Ellen Rapoport and Feig just really know what they're doing and hit the mark.
c) "Bust Down"
Peacock's "Bust Down" is an incredibly funny show, co-created and starring four Black comedians including Chris Redd from "SNL" and Langston Kerman, who's a writer and recurring actor on "South Side." It has a bit of the same sense of humor as "South Side" but has its own tone and rhythm that's a little more blue and a little more over-the-top. It's kind of surprising to see something that feels this current with a Lorne Michaels exec producer credit, but in some ways it's also an old-fashioned workplace sitcom, like if "Taxi" was about low level employees at a midwestern casino.
When there were two competing biographical Aretha Franklin projects last year, there was really never any question that the feature film would outshine the TV series in every way. But Hulu's miniseries about Elizabeth Holmes, starring Amanda Seyfried, is good enough that the upcoming feature with Jennifer Lawrence and directed by Adam McKay may feel unnecessary by the time it arrives. I think Seyfried's always deserved meatier roles and it's great to see her totally kill this in her sort of deceptively airy way. I never saw the HBO documentary about Theranos, which is probably better because I'm not looking at her performance in terms of accuracy of the impersonation (The Social Network benefited from coming out back when we all had a more vague sense of what Zuckerberg looked or sounded like). And I also don't know all the details of the story already, and am finding it way more engrossing than I expected to, it's really just jaw-dropping how far they took this scheme before it fell apart. And there's a lot of great supporting performances, from Alan Ruck and William H. Macy and Bill Irwin and Laurie Metcalf and Bashir Salahuddin and Camryn Mi-Young Kim.
This is another one of those true crime shows where they treat the story of an actual murder as a dark comedy and the whole tone just feels distasteful. Renee Zellweger wears a fat suit and they really play up the tacky Missouri yokel thing with most of the characters, it's just bad. Judy Greer is probably the one person who doesn't embarrass herself but I just wish she wasn't in it at all.
The latest series created by Sharon Horgan is kind of a horror comedy where Courtney Cox plays a novelist who moves into a haunted house with her family (weirdly I don't know if the title is a deliberate allusion to The Shining or the parallels are not deliberate at all). The first couple episodes I've watched haven't knocked it out of the park but I like the weird mix of tones and think it has a lot of potential.
g) "DMZ"
This HBO Max miniseries based on a comic book is about a dystopian future where another civil war has divided America into two countries and Manhattan is a demilitarized zone between them where Rosario Dawson is a medic looking for her missing son. Coming so soon after "Station Eleven," it feels very goofy to watch this cheesy apocalypse where a bunch of cyberpunk gangs in the future are dancing to "Swagga Like Us," of all songs. But I like Hoon Lee's character, the idea that this normal quiet working class dude just robbed a bank when everything started going to shit and made himself into an apocalyptic warlord who runs Chinatown.
"Our Flag Means Death" is about a real historical figure, the "gentleman pirate" Stede Bonnet, an 18th century aristocrat who left his comfortable life to live to become a pirate and was for a time on the same ship as Blackbeard. And they go all the way silly New Zealand comedy with it, with Rhys Darby as Stede Bonnet and Taika Waititi as Blackbeard. It's pretty great, they had a lot of fun with the obvious comedic potential of the story.
i) "Pivoting"
Back in 2018, there was this mass exodus of live action comedies on FOX (the end of "New Girl" and "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" going to NBC, etc.), and they've had a small number of pretty lousy sitcoms like "Call Me Kat" since then. But with "Welcome To Flatch" and "Pivoting," FOX finally has a promising sitcom roster coming together. "Pivoting" is about 3 women who kind of upend their lives in different ways after the 4th friend in their group of best friends dies -- one of them leaves their job as a surgeon and works at a grocery store, one decides to have an extramarital affair, etc. Eliza Coupe is one of the best comic actresses working today so it's always great to see her, but so far "Pivoting" is hit and miss, some episodes are hilarious and some just feel like they're trying too hard to be irreverent.
I already went pretty in-depth about this show in my Consequence review, but I will add that there were a lot of good bit parts from Gary Gulman, Murray Hill, and Rachel Feinstein.
Apparently "The Blacklist" is still on the air in its 9th season and renewed for a 10th, but "The Endgame" feels like NBC looking around for a successor, with Morena Baccarin as kind of a glamorous lady version of a criminal mastermind-type character like Red Reddington. It's kind of a show, but kind of campy in a half-assed way, I wish they'd just go all the way to making Baccarin's character into a Bond villain.
I feel like the pilot of this FOX show was pretty strong and had a promising fish-out-of-water premise with a normal working class woman getting sort of pulled into this criminal underworld. But it was all downhill from that episode, especially when Oliver Hudson showed up, he really just oozes network TV mediocrity.
m) "Grand Crew"
This NBC sitcom has a very light, goofy energy and they occasionally get in a good sharp line, but I don't know, the sets look distractingly weird and cheap even by sitcom standards and it just doesn't quite click most of the time.
n) "Fairview"
"Fairview" airs alongside "South Park" on Comedy Central and has similarly hideous little bobblehead characters talking about hot button issues of the day in this dopey, condescending way. The main difference is that "Fairview" is exec produced by Stephen Colbert and it has a much more smug liberal POV than the more politically chaotic perspective of "South Park," and there are a few times "Fiarview" gets in a clever line about recent events, but I just hate the look and overall tone of the show too much to want to give it any credit.
o) "Naomi"
"Naomi" is yet another DC comics adaptation on The CW, but so far it doesn't seem too tied into the existing plot lines of all their other shows that I can just watch it by itself. It's not that great, thoug.
I always get confused when a network's shows are all over the place in terms of production values and the caliber of acting. OWN has some really high quality shows like "Queen Sugar" but then I'll see something like "The Kings of Napa" that's a couple whole brackets below it, barely better than a soap opera in terms of the look of the show and the performances.
q) "Good Sam"
"Good Sam" is a network medical drama that is unfortunately not about a hospital called Good Samaritan -- that's right, it's about a doctor named Sam who is good. Sophia Bush is a generic hot person who's never really been in anything I've wanted to watch for any other reason than that Sophia Bush is in it, and while I tried to give "Good Sam" a chance, it's really just kind of stupid.
r) "Sanditon"
I enjoyed the first season of this PBS series adapted from Jane Austen's uncompleted final novel, but it felt like kind of a self-contained story that didn't necessarily need to continue, and co-star Theo James didn't return for the second season. So in the first new episode they kill off his character and promptly introduce a new love interest, and I'm sure they lost some viewers there but I dunno, it still seems like an enjoyable little show worth watching.
s) "Shenmue"
I've never been too into anime, especially compared to my wif eand my oldest son, but this new Adult Swim show is decent, apparently it's based on an old Sega Dreamcast game.
Now that "Central Park" has been going for a couple years I feel like I can say it's never gonna reach the level of "Bob's Burgers," partly because they spend a lot more time and effort on songs but they tend to be less comedic or memorable or entertaining. But I like it, I'll watch it just for the Titus Burgess character.
This insane cartoon on Netflix got a second season but apparently it's not gonna get a third, that's a shame, I liked it. But then I don't know how much its sense of humor really appeals to kids, and it's not a typical 'adult animated sitcom' like "Bojack Horseman" or whatever.
Apparently this Disney Channel series made over 100 episodes from 2015 to 2019 and I never heard of it at the time. But lately both my kids have become obsessed with it and have been watching it all the time, it's pretty clever and funny.
The popular Twitter account One Perfect Shot features memorable or striking frames from different films. For HBO Max to turn that idea into a half hour series means extrapolating that very simple idea into a whole thing where a film's director walks you through everything in the movie and in their career that lead to that shot, which is a decent idea. But they've focused on current filmmakers who get to pick the film, so you get Patty Jenkins talking about Wonder Woman and Aaron Sorkin talking about The Trial of the Chicago 7, instead of some iconic moment from a classic. I'm not sure how to feel about the high tech parts where they create a 3D version of the scene where the director can walk you into the freezeframe and show you the characters and the environment from every angle, it's kind of cool but also a little cheesy. Again, it might be exciting if it was about a movie I gave a damn about it.
"Is It Cake?" is another show that wouldn't exist without Twitter, to be specific, those viral tweets from a while back of people cutting knives into cakes that look uncannily like non-cake objects. Game shows have gotten really over-the-top and absurd in the last couple years, often resembling "SNL" game show sketches, and some of them feature actual "SNL" cast members like "Is It Cake?" host Mikey Day. I like that the show is both a competition to make the cakes that can fool people, and a competition to guess what's a cake and what isn't, but obviously it's all pretty ridiculous and doesn't stay entertaining for very long.
"Watch Out For The Big Girl" is a '90s Baltimore club classic by Jimmy Jones, who passed away in 2021 (here's my 2008 interview with Jimmy). So it's kind of cool that a pop star like Lizzo named her new reality show after the song, and the show's theme song is a cover of it. In the show, Lizzo auditions plus size dancers to perform with her in concert, and I like that there's an emphasis on everyone trying their best and trying to break the mold and overcome preconceptions, so there's not a lot of the usual reality show drama and fighting, Lizzo is really supporting and rooting for these women and even if they don't all get into the final squad it's not really about eliminating most of them or pitting them against each other.
z) "Animal"
I like this Netflix nature doc show where each episode features a different celebrity narrator and a different species or type of animal. But I think they're getting a little too cute with the pairings in season 2, Andy Serkis from Planet of the Apes narrates the episode about apes, Anthony Mackie (The Falcon from the MCU) narrates an episode about birds, etc.
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on Friday, March 25, 2022 at 1:10 PM.
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