TV Diary






The 5 seasons of "The Kids In The Hall" that aired in the late '80s and '90s are some of my favorite comedy that's ever been made, so the news that they'd produce a new season of sketches for Amazon Prime was huge news that I anticipated the same way some other folks anticipated "Twin Peaks: The Return." Of course, there were reasonable concerns that they wouldn't be able to recapture past glories, but I loved the live show I saw in 2014 and would definitely rather them do new sketches than another experiment in the vein of "Death Comes To Town" or Brain Candy. And this isn't classic KITH front to back, but it's got enough of that old magic to make me happy. I definitely prefer them performing sketches live with an audience, which probably was never gonna be an option post-COVID, but they made good use of their Amazon budget to make a lot of these sketches into ambitious little mini-movies that often feel more fully realized than the weirder season 5 filmed sketches were (Dave Foley's post-apocalyptic radio DJ who only has one record to play being a favorite). My biggest laughs were more from these unexpected little lines than the big concepts, and I could've done without some of the meta stuff, but I thought they struck a good balance of old and new (weirdly, the best returning characters from the original series were the waiters from the fancy restaurant). And it felt like they were still trying to push the envelope, sometimes creatively and sometimes just getting away with things they never were able before, like a lot of full frontal nudity (including two of the Kids). I don't like the "friends of Kids In The Hall" segments, though -- they aren't really funny, and just feel like a lame excuse to shoehorn in some celebrity cameos, mostly mid-level "SNL" people. 

"The Pentaverate" marks the return of another Canadian comedy icon that I kind of grew up on, Mike Myers (and they're not unrelated, of course -- Mike's brother Paul wrote the definitive Kids In The Hall biography). And like the Kids, Myers shows his dick in the new series! But my expectations were a lot lower, given that I haven't enjoyed much from Myers since the first Austin Powers movie. "The Pentaverate" mostly works, though, a long weird riff on a throwaway joke from So I Married An Axe Murderer. with Myers getting as perverse and esoteric and occasionally immature as he wants to be. Also, Orbital did a cool spy movie score for the show. 

c) "Shining Girls"
It's possible, likely even, that I'm kind of dumb, or just not paying attention, but it really took me a while to understand the concept of this show (and, I guess, the novel it's based on). There's a serial killer but he's, like, a time traveling serial killer? Who needs to kill to remain an immortal time traveler? But it's interesting to see Jamie Bell play a psycho, and to see Amy Brenneman play a punk rocker. 

d) "The Baby"
I love this British miniseries on HBO Max, it's this insane thing where this mysterious infant is somehow cursed and everyone who cares for him has a grisly death, except for this one hapless woman who's somehow immune. It's both really dark and kind of cute and charming, and I have really no idea where the story's going but it's a really funny and well paced sort of supernatural mystery. 

e) "Under The Banner Of Heaven"
I'm still kind of on the fence about Andrew Garfield, he was good in Tick, Tick...Boom! and The Social Network but is weirdly flat in a lot of other things, including this FX miniseries. But the rest of the cast (including Wyatt Russell from "Lodge 49," Daisy Edgar-Jones from "Normal People," and Billy Howle from "The Beast Must Die") is really compelling and I'm curious where this story is going. 

f) "Candy"
Like the recent "The Thing About Pam," Jessica Biel's new miniseries "Candy" is the true story of a suburban mom who murdered her friend. But where "Pam" felt like it was just irreverent to the point of being distasteful, "Candy" treats its characters and their tragic story a little more gravity, even with everybody elaborately costumed to look like they live in 1980s Texas. 

g) "Ridley Road"
This PBS miniseries is about a moment in early '60s Britain when Nazi sympathizers
Agnes O'Casey is really good in this, one of her first roles, looking forward to seeing more of her. 

h) "A Very British Scandal"
It was a little confusing for "Anatomy of a Scandal" and "A Very British Scandal" to debut within days of each other, and even moreso because the latter is a sequel to "A Very English Scandal" but it's about Scottish duke and duchess so maybe "A Very Scottish Scandal" would've been a better title? Claire Foy and Paul Bettany are excellent actors but I'm kind of lukewarm about this so far. 

This British show on Netflix is a gay coming-of-age love story, very charming stuff, excellent cast, although it kind of feels weird to have Olivia Colman kind of just there in the margins to lend name recognition but not do much. 

j) "61st Street"
Courtney B. Vance won an Emmy playing Johnnie Cochran, so it feels kind of like very specific typecasting for him to play a defense attorney for a star athlete accused of murder in "61st Street." But mostly this just reminds me a lot of Peter Moffat's last legal drama, "Your Honor," which started off pretty compelling but got kind of stupid at the end, so I'm not getting very invested in it. 

k) "How We Roll" 
Pete Holmes has this incredibly wholesome vibe that he always plays against interestingly and subversively in his standup and his HBO series "Crashing." But it seems kind of inevitable that he'd end up in a more straightforward CBS sitcom like "How We Roll," where he plays a guy who gets laid off and decides to gamble on supporting his family by becoming a professional bowler. It's a charming little show, definitely makes me cringe a lot less than other CBS comedies, but unfortunately it just got canceled after airing for only 6 weeks. I've never really watched "Scandal" so I wasn't familiar with Katie Lowes but she's adorable. 

This is probably the show I was most sad to see canceled last week, alongside "Pivoting," "In The Dark," "Dollface," "Queens," and "The Big Leap." So I'm savoring the last few episodes of the 2nd season, Holly Hunter and Vella Lovell are great in it. That said, "Girls5Eva" is the stronger of the two recent Tina Fey productions that carry on in the "30 Rock" tradition, so I'm glad that's the one that got renewed. 

This was one of the best mid-season replacements last year, I'm glad that it's been picked up for a 3rd season, the cast is really solid and it feels like they've found their footing and aren't shoehorning Topher Grace slapstick bits into every episode as much. My wife soured on the show during the first season and doesn't watch it with me anymore, she finds Caitlin McGee's character obnoxious, which I don't really understand. 

n) "The Flight Attendant"
The first season of "The Flight Attendant" was an excellent surprise, but I think I like it even more in the second season. Zosia Mamet and Denis Akdeniz get to be more part of the action and make a really entertaining trio with Kaley Cuoco, and the twist with the Griffin Matthews character and the end of the first season has turned him into a much more interesting character. And Cuoco's little 'mind palace' fantasy segments, which were not my favorite part of the first season, are much better when it's multiple versions of Cassie arguing with herself. 

A lot of shows had longer than usual breaks between seasons because of COVID, but "Atlanta" was an extreme case, off the air for almost 4 years. But they filmed both the 3rd and 4th (and final) seasons during the break, with Donald Glover periodically popping up to boast that he was making the best television since "The Sopranos." With the third season wrapping up this week, I would say his hype is pretty overblown, but it's been a good, interesting run. In the more traditional episodes, Brian Tyree Henry as Al and Lakeith Stanfield as Darius are two of the best characters on TV, and the former has gotten a lot of great moments lately. But there have also been 3 or 4 episodes that are little standalone morality plays about race featuring none of the show's regular players and center on white (or white passing) characters. Considering that "Atlanta" last aired around the time Childish Gambino's "This Is America" had been released, I wasn't really looking forward to Donald Glover trying to make more grand statements about racism, but these episodes have mostly avoided that kind of empty provocation and have had a pretty sharp satirical edge. I'm interested to see how they wrap up the series later this year. 

Season 6 has had some really interesting, unexpected storylines, but I kind of miss how the show used to have the whole ensemble together more often. Everybody is kind of siloed into solo storylines now and I haven't seen Dani Kind much at all in the first few episodes. 

It kinda feels like 3 seasons in this show hasn't really found a following at all. It has its moments, though, I feel like Robin Thede has this hammy, cheesy sort of performing style that reminds me of, I don't know, Billy Crystal more than anything else. 

"Saturday Night Live" has such a huge cast (21 people! On a show that started with a cast of seven!) that it feels like it can only ever change very slowly with the yearly trickle of departures and arrivals. And yet the 2021-2022 season feels like it's had the biggest change in a long time, mainly because so many of the new recruits had Twitter followings and brought kind of a younger sensibility to the show (James Austin Johnson, Sarah Sherman, and the Please Don't Destroy guys, although 2/3rds of them are offspring of '90s "SNL" writers). Maybe it's because Kate McKinnon and Pete Davidson have missed a lot of episodes this year, but it felt like those new people, and relatively new people like Bowen Yang, have gotten to really establish themselves this season. I think Chloe Fineman's amazing impressions still don't get enough credit or screentime, though. 

One of the most interesting and original Korean shows I've seen on Netflix lately, sort of a musical fantasy drama, with some really impressive direction pulling off the weird fusion of genres. 

A Spanish show on Netflix where people go to a secret island for a launch party for a soft drink but things are not as they seem -- cool premise, I need to watch more of this. 

This is Netflix's first Nigerian series, which is kind of surprising that that took this long, a thriller about family secrets coming to the surface, haven't gotten too much into it yet. 

A charming Korean show on Netflix about three siblings in dead-end jobs, kind of feels more like a dramedy than a soap opera, I like the dialogue. 

w) "Wild Babies"
A nature doc show on Netflix that is just about animal babies, and since it's explicitly about babies you can kind of watch it without that stress of wondering whether it's gonna be one of those dark nature shows where you occasionally see a baby animal get eaten or something. 

x) "Meltdown: Three Mile Island"
This Netflix miniseries is one of those docudrama things that mixes straight documentary-style talking heads and archival footage with dramatizations with actors. I feel like this approach has become more in vogue and respectable in recent years but I still just do not like it, reminds me of shit like "Unsolved Mysteries." 

y) "Would I Lie To You?"
British TV has all these comedy panel shows that have never really thrived in the same way in America, but U.S. networks keep trying to adapt them. The CW's version of the long-running "Would I Lie To You?" features host Aasif Mandvi and two teams of comedians who try to guess when someone's personal anecdote is real or made up. It's pretty flimsy light entertainment, but I enjoy it, they've had a lot of comics on there that I like. 

z) "Ziwe"
I liked the first season of "Ziwe" last year but it felt a little like a one trick pony that I didn't necessarily need to keep up with. But then the second season kicked off with episodes with Charlamagne Tha God and Chet Hanks that really perfectly illustrated how clever Ziwe is as an interviewer, really entertaining stuff. The constant mocking chyrons are also such a great running gag. 
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