TV Diary
This Apple TV+ miniseries is about a New Orleans hospital where 45 people died in the days following Hurricane Katrina. And while I think that telling true stories, including tragic ones, can be done well, and this series is very well made, I have found myself pretty uncomfortable with this one. It's well acted, with Julie Ann Emery a standout in an impressive cast that includes Vera Farmiga and Cherry Jones. And it takes an unflinching look at the micro and macro decisions at the local, national, and corporate levels that made things so much more awful than they should have been in that situation. But at some point, seeing the CGI floodwaters roll over New Orleans like a Roland Emmerich disaster movie, watching a soundstage replica of Memorial Medical Center lose power and become filthy, chaotic, and flooded...the artifice of it all, and the strangeness of watching an expensive reenactment a such a horrific chapter of history, it just feels unsettling to me in ways not intended by the people who made this. A lot of people flinched at the idea of watching something like "Station Eleven" during a real pandemic, but that series had a lot of warmth and humanity to offset the dark stuff, here it's just all bad, getting harder to watch with every episode, and I know I'm not doing anything noble or necessary by watching it.
b) "The Resort"
This Peacock show is a mystery comedy where Cristin Milioti and William Jackson Harper (or, as my wife calls them, 'The Mother and Chidi') play a troubled married couple who go on vacation in Mexico, and bond over trying to solve a mystery involving a couple college kids who disappeared at the resort 15 years earlier. And what really makes the show work is that the flashbacks make you really care about the missing tourists (played by Skyler Gisondo from "Santa Clarita Diet" and adorable newcomer Nina Bloomgarden), although so far it's still such a rambling, unpredictable shaggy dog story that I have no idea if this thing is going to have a satisfying conclusion. I'm enjoying the ride, though, especially the most recent episode where Luis Guzman shows up as a reclusive eccentric author.
I really love A League of Their Own, just a thoroughly enjoyable movie. So I'm a little wary of turning it into a series, but I have to admit it fits perfectly into the TV landscape right now. As I wrote here last month, "there have been so many period pieces about woman trailblazers in male-dominated industries, sometimes in parallel to real life figures but not really closely based on them," including "GLOW" (which I compared to A League of Their Own when it first aired), "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," "Physical," and "Minx." But Abbi Jacobson is leading a great cast and there's a lot of potential here. D'Arcy Carden on "The Good Place" was one of the best TV performances in recent memory and I'm really happy to see her in a leading role where she doesn't play a computer.
I remember The Sandman being a big deal in the '90s, and I know there'd been attempts to adapt it forever, but I never read it. In fact, the only Neil Gaiman thing I ever read was Good Omens, which was already turned into a pretty good series. People seem to be pretty happy with this adaptation, but for me, without having the frame of reference, it feels like it's off to a pretty slow start after an episode or two. The visual effects are a mixed bag, some scenes look amazing, some scenes kinda look like crap.
e) "This Fool"
In "This Fool," comedian Chris Estrada plays a kind of goofily square guy from South Central L.A. who works with a program called 'Hugs Not Thugs' that helps rehabilitate former gang bangers including his cousin, played by comedian Frankie Quinones. It all feels a little broad and maybe stereotype-driven, but there's some funny dialogue and sharp scenes, including Michael Imperioli and Michelle Ortiz in good supporting roles, so there's potential there.
f) "Bump"
This Australian dramedy about a pregnant teenager started airing in America on The CW, and it's pretty charming with good cast, although the production values look kind of shoddy compared to U.S. shows.
This British import on Peacock is a thriller about government cybercrime analysts, and it kind of feels like a serious version of Peacock's last British show about government cybercrime analysts, the broad comedy "Intelligence."
h) "Echoes"
Michelle Monaghan was great enough in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and a couple of other things that I'm forever rooting for her to get bigger, more interesting roles than she usually gets. And "Echoes" has a big, juicy role for her -- two actually, as twin sisters who secretly switch lives (and jobs, and husbands) every now and again, until one of them disappears. Leni leaves clues for Gina that she has decided to simply pick up and leave, and Gina poses as both of them while trying to get to the bottom of what her sister was doing. It's an intriguing story after a couple episodes, but so far the execution is a little soapier than I'd like, I'm hoping it lives up to its potential since Monaghan's projects so rarely have.
i) "Surface"
"Surface" is another sort of psychological mystery miniseries, starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who was in another psychological mystery miniseries, "The Girl Before," earlier this year that wound up being pretty underwhelming. I don't love stories where everything kind of hinges on one character having a conveniently specific kind of memory loss, which Mbatha-Raw has after an apparent suicide attempt that, she starts to find out, may have actually been a murder attempt. So I don't feel especially compelled to see this one through to the end, although I may because Mbatha-Raw is so strikingly beautiful.
j) "Uncoupled"
Neil Patrick Harris is probably one of the most prominent openly gay actors who has played straight characters in practically all of the roles he's known for. So "Uncoupled" feels overdue as an NPH vehicle where he plays a gay protagonist, a middle-aged guy who's just been abruptly dumped by his boyfriend of 17 years. But it's created by Darren Starr, who's made a long line of shows I find completely dull and off-putting ("90210," "Sex And The City," "Emily In Paris"), and the first episode felt pretty unpromising to me.
k) "I Am Groot"
Disney+ recently premiered this little series of 5 shorts, you can watch all of them in a half hour, I don't know why they didn't just make it a whole proper series given the popularity of Baby Groot. I feel like the character loses something with a lower CGI budget than the "Guardians" movies had, to say nothing of not having all the other characters to bounce off of, but they're cute little cartoons.
This French series on Netflix is kind of Nightmare on Elm Street deal, with a monster that hunts teenagers in their dreams, with the twist that it happened after they took a weird experimental drug. I've only watched one episode so far but pretty creepy stuff.
This Korean show on Netflix is about a professor who becomes a drug courier in order to provide for his family, so obviously it's going to garner a lot of comparisons to "Breaking Bad," although tonally it doesn't seem to be headed in the same kind of tortured antihero direction at least.
n) "High Heat"
This Netflix telanovela about sexy firefighters is pretty ridiculous, although I'm not sure if it's any more ridiculous than American sexy firefighter shows like "Chicago Fire" and "9-1-1."
I was recently sent screeners for this Epix miniseries, which has 4 episodes, each one a profile of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and Charlie Watts. And I was eager to watch the final episode about Watts, which airs next week, hoping that they completed some interviews with him before he passed away last year. Unfortunately, they did not, but the episode is a lovely tribute full of great revealing moments. Watts collected the drum sets of legendary jazz and rock drummers, and there's a cool scene where two of his oldest friends go through his collection after he passed away. They also talk to his tailor and show all his suits and some suits he was having made before he died that he never got to wear, and Keith's interviews for the episode are as emotional as I've ever seen him. It's a pretty cool series, the Mick and Keith episodes are obviously interesting but even the Ronnie episode is a revealing look at a guy that you don't necessarily know as much about. One subtle thing I liked about the show is that the visuals of the show are driven by on-camera interviews with the Stones, and footage of their concerts and old TV appearances, but all the other musicians offering commentary (Tina Turner, Slash, Rod Stewart, etc.) appear via voiceover.
It really feels like overkill that there have been two recent documentary projects about Woodstock '99, although I didn't see the HBO one so it didn't feel too redundant for me personally to check out this one. It feels like it kind of falls between making too much of things, acting as if this was a singular awful concert situation when we see things like the Astroworld tragedy happen all too often, and also somehow not taking it seriously enough -- like some of the people responsible for this shitshow get to sit in comfortable chairs and talk on camera about the mistakes they made but they're probably never going to experience any consequences. Also, it annoys me that the show is full of '90s rock including bands that didn't play the festival -- like, Blur wasn't there, don't drag them into this.
This whole Faye Yager story is really engrossing and strange, I haven't finished the series so I don't know all the details yet but I'm surprised I didn't hear more about this back when it was happening.
Another chilling true crime docuseries, this one about a 17-year-old who shot his father, I try not to watch a lot of this stuff but I understand why some people get addicted to it, going down the rabbit hole of a case and wanting to know every detail and feel some certainty about the truth of what happened.
Lately the Warner-Discovery merger has gotten a lot of attention because of the fallout of HBO Max pulling a ton of shows and movies, but there have been effects in a lot of other places, including TBS and TruTV becoming complete content deserts with no new programming. So it's a little surprising that one new show got on the air on TruTV recently, this goofy travel show that, I'm guessing, will not survive long enough to make 101 episodes. Adam Pally was very funny on "Happy Endings" but he can be a little obnoxious in other contexts, and it feels like he made this show as an excuse to hang out with his most obnoxious friend, a comedian named Jon Gabrus who is apparently also on MTV's awful "Guy Code." The show is fun sometimes, though, especially when they go around finding fun things to do in places you don't really think of as a party town like Richmond, Virginia.
It's a sign of how instant a hit "Abbott Elementary" was that within 6 months of it debuting, ABC already had one of its stars, Janelle James, hosting a game show too. "The Final Straw" is a pretty silly show, basically a super-sized version of Jenga where people try to remove objects from these big goofy towers without them falling over. Watching it actually made me crave playing Jenga, and we had a good round of Jenga with my wife's family on vacation a couple weeks ago.
I like the idea of Netflix's twist on the old home renovation show formula, where they do these lightning round renovations in 12 hours. Feels kind of stressful just to think about how they execute it, but it makes for good TV.
The first season of the British comedy "The Outlaws" was filming way back in spring 2020 when Covid hit. But it got renewed for a second season while production was suspended, and then they went back and shot both seasons back-to-back, which Amazon released in America just 4 months apart. I like it, but I can't shake the feeling that the cast is better than the show, particularly Darren Boyd, who's better on "Trying," and Christopher Walken, who's better in a hundred other things.
w) "Trying"
Although I realize that there are lots of people who want kids but have trouble having them the old-fashioned way, and there are stories to tell about that, it so often feels like TV shows introduce those kinds of storylines as some kind of elaborate form of stalling or keeping the characters in stasis -- we want these characters to want kids, but we don't actually want the show to be about parents of small children, so let's prolong the process as much as possible. So on paper, the British series "Trying" initially felt like that trope expanded out to an entire series. But by the end of the second season, the show had found its comedic voice, and the characters got to adopt two children, and by that point I was really rooting for them and foud it all very emotionally affecting. Now in the third season, they've got to actually deal with being parents and getting a lot of reality checks, but it's still a very warm, funny show, I'm glad they didn't keep stringing the characters along without becoming parents for more than a couple seasons. Also, Robyn Cara's character Jen has been in the show sporadically since the beginning, but I feel like they've really found her voice over time and she's one of the funniest parts of the show now.
"Locke & Key" came back for its third and final season Netflix, and this is one of those situations where three is a good number. I never quite got into all its lore enough to really want to see this story go on forever, and Emilia Jones is probably ready to do a lot of movies after the success of CODA.
"Never Have I Ever" has been renewed for a 4th and final season, and I can't remember the last time a Netflix show that wasn't a huge popular phenomenon got that many seasons, so honestly, good for them. It's really grown on me, I think it's one of the best high school sitcoms in years, really smart writing and likable characters.
As a show like this gets into its 4th season, it's fun to see how much more bizarre they can make a show that was pretty ridiculous to begin with. And at this point, Colin Robinson has died, but the infant son that burst out of his chest, a child with the face of middle-aged Mark Proksh, is aging rapidly, and is now a Roblox-obsessed tween. The "who'll come first on the wedding night" bit a couple weeks ago was amazing, the funniest song from a TV show since "Misbehavin'" from "The Righteous Gemstones."
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, August 23, 2022 at 8:53 AM.
You can skip to the end and leave a response.
Post a Comment