TV Diary
a) "Rap Sh!t"
It's interesting to look back now at the 2015 Stereogum piece I wrote about the future of scripted television about hip hop in the wake of "Empire"'s success. Of all of the shows in development that I wrote about at the time, "Atlanta" was the only one that eventually made it on the air, and it wound up increasingly disinterested in storylines about the music industry or the life of a rapper over the course of its run. The quickly canceled "Queens" felt like a slightly more realistic take on the "Empire"-style rap soap opera, and "Dave" is kind of a more on-the-nose version of what people thought "Atlanta" was going to be. But 3 episodes in, I feel like Issa Rae's new show "Rap Sh!t" is pretty close to what I think a good comedy about aspiring rappers could be (not as good a show as "Atlanta," sure, but more on-topic). Aida Osman and KaMillion are both great leads, their 'if Rapsody tried to be a City Girl' group is inherently funny but it feels like the show isn't making rap or the current female rap zeitgeist the butt of the joke.
"Everything's Trash" is a new Freeform sitcom starring Phoebe Robinson, who co-hosts the "2 Dope Queens" podcast and HBO series with Jessica Williams. And it's pretty much just another sitcom about a podcaster, like "Rap Sh!t" it's very much in the world of Instagram and Twitter and all these social media buzzwords, but it feels like it doesn't have much of a story beyond that and the on-the-nose dialogue makes me cringe more.
I've never been that into "Nathan For You," or for that matter John Wilson or Joe Pera, that whole overwhelmingly mild flat effect style of dry comedy that some people adore these days. I had some hopes that "The Rehearsal" would be something different from Nathan Fielder, and in some ways it is a bigger, more ambitious and absurd show, but it also feels as close in tone to "Nathan For You" as possible, and that watching-paint-dry pace can really wear me down, especially on HBO where some of the episodes are over 40 minutes, and it sometimes feels like you're just waiting 10 minutes for that one big laugh that comes every now and again. Those big moments almost make it worth it sometimes, but I dunno, I can't say I'm in the fan club.
Melissa Barrera was good in "Vida" and In The Heights so I was looking forward to her new Netflix series "Keep Breathing." But carrying a story that's basically about one character surviving alone in the wilderness asks a lot of an actor, and the execution here feels a little hit and miss to me. I understand why shows or movies like this often go heavy on flashbacks to give the story more settings and characters but it's so rarely done well to make the main narrative more interesting.
"Paper Girls" is based on a comic book series that predates "Stranger Things," but it's about a group of midwestern '80s middle schoolers stumbling into a crazy sci-fi situation, so it's gonna have that vibe for people. I like that it's a little darker and more noir, though, good atmosphere in the first episode and kept me intrigued about the premise.
I don't know why Netflix decided to release 2 new "Resident Evil" series 6 days apart. But the animated "Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness," which I already wrote about, is really really bad. So they maybe they released it first to make the live action "Resident Evil" look better. I never really played the games or watched the movies so I don't have much frame of reference, but I like it, pretty good action movie production values, decent cast.
g) "SkyMed"
Aaron Ashmore and Shawn Ashmore are probably the most successful twin sibling actors that people don't necessarily realize are twins, because they've never done anything together and they've both been in a ton of supporting roles and moderately successful projects without becoming super famous, so you might just think you're seeing Iceman from X-Men every time. My wife insists she can tell the difference and prefers Aaron, but when I put on the first episode of "SkyMed," she guessed wrong that it was Shawn (I think Aaaron's beard threw her off). "SkyMed" is a decent Canadian medical drama, starring Natasha Calis from another decent Canadian medical drama, "Nurses," pleasant but I don't think I'll keep watching it.
"Ms. Marvel" was pretty good but honestly I don't know if it was any better than this much lower budget Disney Channel show about a 13-year-old girl and her uncle who become superheroes with magic luchador masks, it's goofy but charming.
Another entertaining Disney Channel superhero show, except it's about a family of villains. Apparently Isabella Pappas is an award-winning stage actress but she's good at this sort of campy comedic evil character, she really has a star quality.
j) "Farzar"
This new Netflix series is just the worst kind of 'animated sitcom for adults,' like "Family Guy" but much dumber with more swearing and sex jokes. I didn't realize until I put it on that it was created by the same guy as "Brickleberry," which would've let me know what to expect (and to not even try watching it).
Like many big animated films, Kung Fu Panda has had TV spinoffs without the big-name stars from the original movie, and the Kung Fu Panda shows had the distinction of a lead voice actor, Mick Wingert, who sounded eerily similar to Jack Black. So I kind of feel bad for Wingert that Jack Black once again voiced Po for this latest series on Netflix, but I mean, it is better to hear the real thing.
I thought this Netflix series about Thai boxing was a full-on drama but apparently it's a hybrid where the interviews are the real people in the stories, somehow I missed that. Maybe things are getting too blurry in this weird docudrama genre, or maybe I just wasn't really paying attention anyway.
I love seeing a sort of contemporary rock critic like Jessica Hopper who's only a few years older than me get a chance to directing a cable documentary series like this Epix miniseries. I've only watched two episodes so far but it's already covered a huge amount of ground, I particularly liked Kira Roessler's segment and Chaka Khan being really frank and unfiltered about the good and bad of her career.
I feel like anarchists have always been kind of a joke, at least the kind who identify as anarchists and try to build anarchist communities. And this HBO Max docuseries is about an annual anarchist convention and a community that's kind of driven apart by some of them getting really into cryptocurrency and trying to be, I dunno, capitalist anarchists, it's kind of hilarious.
The D.B. Cooper mystery is enduringly fascinating for good reason, but I feel like they didn't have anything new in terms of insight or research for footage to make this Netflix show worth making or watching.
I thought this was purely going to be about the Victoria's Secret brand being problematic but apparently the CEO was also close to Jeffrey Epstein, fucking yikes.
Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff is like a larger-than-life figure if you've ever spent any amount of time listening to '90s/2000s New York rap so it's cool to get a better sense of the whole story in this Showtime docuseries co-directed by Nas.
This is by far the less popular of the two What We Do In The Shadows spinoff series, but it's definitely worth watching, Officer Kyle Minogue is one of those ridiculous characters who gets funnier over the time as you see him react poorly in more and more insane situations.
s) "Physical"
The last few years, there have been so many period pieces on television that are essentially about fictional woman trailblazers in male-dominated industries, sometimes in parallel to real life figures but not really closely based on them -- "GLOW," "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," "Minx," even "Halt And Catch Fire" and "The Deuce" to an extent. Almost all of these shows are excellent and very good, but sometimes they can also feel like a very sanitized, idealized wish fulfillment that makes me curious of what the real women's stories from those settings were like. "Physical" feels darker and more ambitious than those other shows, and Rose Byrne gives a powerhouse performance as a woman suffering from bulimia and constantly being badgered with self-doubt and self-hate from a voice in her head, but I don't know if it's actually as good as those other shows, which tend to have a better idea of their comedic perspective and use their ensembles better. And "Physical" is one of the weakest of these shows in terms of feeling true to the period, in every episode Byrne seems to say something like "lifestyle brand" or "I feel very attacked right now" that nobody was saying in the 1980s.
"For All Mankind" is another Apple TV+ show that seems to buckle under the weight of its own ambition. Each season leaps forward a decade or more, so in three seasons we've jumped from the '60s to the '90s, in an alternate history where America and Russia's space race never ended and we wound up colonizing the moon and getting people on Mars much quicker than anything that's happened in real life (and once again, in this version of history we have more female astronauts and a female president in the '90s, so it's also kind of a feelgood feminist fantasy). Unfortunately, that means that the only characters that are still around fro the first season have to pretend to be much older with bad wigs and some of the best characters have already passed away. Watching season 3, I find myself missing Gordo and Tracy Stevens and hating all the storylines with their creepy son Danny.
u) "Westworld"
"Westworld" is probably the epitome of a show where ambitious doesn't necessarily mean better. The show's ratings and general place in the zeitgeist have really plummeted over the course of 4 seasons, I feel like the first season was a fairly complete storyline and some of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy's attempts to keep shifting the reality and keep you guessing have just exhausted or confused or alienate people. Personally, I'm just annoyed that Aaron Paul is now one of the main characters on the show, but there have been some pretty cool moments in this season so far, I'm still along for the ride even if the show definitely peaked early.
v) "Evil"
Now that I've finally gotten on board with Paramount+ I've been catching up on the 2nd and 3rd seasons of "Evil," and man, what an insanely creative and bizarre show. I wish they had a bigger budget because those CBS production values really look make the special effects look like crap sometimes, but the cast and the writing are superb so I can forgive it easily.
The CW canceled "In The Dark" before the 4th season started and I'm fine with this show running its course, I'm kind of over all the exhausting twists and turns of the story, but I'm still gonna watch it and hope things turn out alright for Murphy and her friends.
A comedy on Showtime in its second season, kind of pleasant and relatable but I just never get that into it, fades into the background when I put it on.
This show will also be the kind of inferior little brother to "Rick & Morty," but it's grown on me. I think they've realized at this point that the 'people in the wall' storylines are often more interesting than the main characters and have leaned into it a little.
For a while there, it felt like "The Daily Show" had completely changed the late night landscape and its alumni all had their own topical shows on every channel. That's still kind of the case -- John Oliver is the clear reigning host on HBO, and Michael Che is still on "SNL" and Trevor Noah is holding down the original show, and Jon Stewart has his little Apple TV+ show that nobody watched, and Stephen Colbert is on CBS, although at this point what he does has more to do with what David Letterman did in that timeslot than "The Daily Show" or "The Colbert Report." But it definitely feels like "The Daily Show" format has peaked and is on the decline to some extent, and this week Samantha Bee's 6 years unceremonious came to an end as pretty much all of TBS's original programming gets slashed after the Discover-Warner merger. It appears they won't get to do a finale episode, since the last episode aired over a month ago (which Sam Bee taped while she had Covid, which kinda adds insult to injury I guess). And it's a shame, because this show had some great moments and had remained in my weekly rotation alongside John Oliver.
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on Friday, July 29, 2022 at 2:39 PM.
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