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. 

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. 

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. 

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.