HBO Max's "Amsterdam" takes place in Mexico City, following the lives of a Beach Boys-obsessed musician, Martin, and his actress girlfriend, Nadia, and the adorable stray dog they adopt together. And by the delightful end of the first episode, when you find out why the show is called "Amsterdam," I was hooked, and really enjoyed watching an episode of this show every day for the past 10 days. A lot of the show is about a couple breaking up even though they really love each other, and I think I found it really bittersweet and moving in part because I know a couple like that and they've been on my mind. But the whole thing is so exquisitely written and acted, I think a lot of people would compare this to American shows about twentysomething hipsters (at one point the characters on "Amsterdam" do watch an episode of "Girls," after all). But what it bring to mind the most for me is "Better Things," it hits a lot of the same sweet spots and kind of mixes poignant moments with banal daily life in a similarly warm, empathetic way. 

Obviously all the MCU movies and Disney+ series are all pretty family-friendly, but this one feels a big more geared toward kids than the others. It's charming and sweet, but the Kate Bishop parts of "Hawkeye" were a lot more entertaining in this lane. 

I enjoyed the 2009 film of The Time Traveler's Wife, and I like this HBO series even moreso, partly because there's more space to explore one of the most unique and thought-provoking depictions of time travel that I've ever seen in any sci-fi story (my wife has read the novel and I gather that both adaptations stay fairly close to the source material). One thing about the series is that it dwells a little more on how many times Henry visits his future wife Clare as a child -- if it happened once or twice, I'd be like, okay, that's kind of sweet, but it does get a little weird that he visits her dozens of times, and to the series' credit Henry outright says "I groomed you" at one point and feels suitably awkward about it. Nevertheless, it's such an engrossing story and they did such a good job of building a coherent narrative out of something that necessarily jumps around chronologically a lot, Rose Leslie and Theo James and Desmin Borges are so good in this. I hope it gets a second season since they didn't really go through the whole story in the first season. 

It's weird to watch a show after listening to its soundtrack for a couple months -- the excellent album of music Jarvis Cocker composed for "This Is Going To Hurt" has been out since March, when the series started airing on the BBC, but it didn't air in America until June. But I like the show too, Cocker's songs are definitely a good fit for its tone, kind a medical drama done as a dark comedy. I didn't realize until after I watched the first episode that the lead actor is Ben Wishaw, who played Paddington 2 in Paddington 2, which is kind of wild. 

This '70s period drama starts pretty interestingly, a series of murders and crimes on and around a Navajo reservation, which seems to provoke some tension between the tribal police and the police from outside the reservation. Seems like a more realistic and hard-boiled look at some of the things "Yellowstone" deals with. 

A popular YA book that's now an Amazon series, I was ready to bail on this after one episode if it was too cutesy or soap opera-ish, but it's pretty charming, good dialogue and fleshed out characters. 

I was very annoyed with this Netflix series about vampires when it opened with a theme song that references zombies. And the production values are pretty weak, the fight choreography is absolutely awful. But the dueling perspectives of the two protagonists and the double meaning of the title is pretty clever, gotta hand it to 'em there. 

I reviewed the first 4 episodes of this for Consequence back before it started airing, and I get the impression other people like it a lot more than I do. And now that I'm catching with the later episodes, it feels like it's become even more aimless and corny in parts, although Naomie Harris and Jimmi Simpson are good in it, and there are occasionally entertaining sequences like the shootout with the nuns. Every since I realized Alex Kurtzman co-wrote Michael Bay's first two Transformers movies I just see the painful forced levity of those movies in every comic relief moment in "The Man Who Fell To Earth." 

I also reviewed this one, and I don't think anybody has found it good. I found it likable, at least, but it just feels shoddy even from a story standpoint. Melissa McCarthy's Amily is such an inconsistently depicted character, and the McCarthy/Falcone love storyline kind of gets upstaged by the more convincing Ana Scotney/Usman Ally plot. 

A British legal drama, seems well made but I haven't really been hooked by the story yet. 

I haven't been into season 3 quite as much as the first couple seasons so far, but this week is the highly anticipated "Herogasm" episode so that's probably the big one they've been kind of building up to. And I feel like I finally actually care about the titular 'boys' as much as the supes, the show has started to balance out the storylines better. Some of the gore in this show is just insane, though, I have a pretty high tolerance for gross stuff but they really push the envelope, especially since it's a series and you kind of never know when there's just going to be an ocean of blood and mutilated flesh in any given scene. 

The first season of "Rutherford Falls" was excellent but felt like a pretty complete narrative, so they kind of had to find a whole new storyline for the second season, I guess we'll see if it's as good. But in terms of the joke writing, I've gotten some good chuckles out of the first couple episodes, Jesse Leigh is kind of the secret weapon of the show who gets the best lines. 

This is a really compelling and at times realistic show about parenthood, but man in the second and third seasons it really feels like they've piled on the misery without enough comedy balancing it out, these characters are just going through every kind of crisis you could imagine. Jordan A. Nash's character Jacob is a bright spot, though, that kid is a star. 

I watched the first season of "Stranger Things" and didn't feel strongly enough to keep up with it. But recently, my 12-year-old son decided to check it out, I imagine season 4 was the talk of middle school, and he watched the whole series. I didn't catch up with everything with him, but I kind of liked some of the storylines in the later season a little more than the first season, seems like they kind of got into a groove, and of course it was fun to see the "Running Up That Hill" stuff that put the song back on the charts. 

This is Apple+'s first foreign language series, sort of, the dialogue is a mix of Spanish and English, which is cool, feels realistic since so many people go back and forth between both languages. Pretty dark story, Rosie Perez is on a good run of highly stylized crime shows between this and "The Flight Attendant." 

This Danish show on Netflix is about a fertility doctor who inseminates herself with her ex-boyfriend's sperm. Kind of horrifying stuff, but it's a comedy where she's the likable protagonist! Decent show but I don't think it would survive the scrutiny if this was an American show. 

A mother is obsessed with proving that her daughter who's accused of murder is innocent in this French psychological thriller. I haven't finished it yet but it's pretty dark, suspenseful stuff, not sure where the story is going to go. 

Everyone on this Brazilian mystery show is really hot, however apparently the English translation of the original Portuguese title is 'Condo Ladies' and I kinda wish Netflix called it that instead. 

A true crime docuseries about Latter Day Saints fundamentalists, which seems like a pretty zeitgeisty topic these days, but I dunno, I don't really care. 

Really funny title on this Norwegian true crime docuseries, but I dunno, seems like a pretty easy question after watching a little, he's definitely a crook! 

This Netflix docuseries stuffs a whole lot of stuff into one show, swatting and hacking and conspiracy theories and MAGA, but it manages to put it all into one pretty coherent if terrifying narrative. 

This ABC series has a gimmick of kind of giving you 'both sides' of a criminal case and letting you, as the viewer, trying and figure out what the truth is. And I realize that's what a lot of journalism and true crime entertainment does now, but making it so explicit here really rubs me the wrong way, do not care for it. 

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