TV Diary
Wednesday, January 25, 2023
This has very quickly become the first big event series of 2023 and it feels glib to say, well, "The Walking Dead" just finally ended and now this is going to occupy the same pop culture space for the 5-10 years. But honestly, as much as I love a good zombie movie or apocalyptic thriller, it's hard not to feel a little exhausted with this stuff, no matter how well done it is, and Pedro Pascal is definitely a great lead. And the first episode was gripping stuff but I wouldn't say it had me on the edge of my seat as much as, say, the beginning of A Quiet Place Part II. And the mushroom head zombies just look dumb to me, I'm glad that the actual moments of the characters facing them are a relatively small part of the show.
I was pretty excited when I first heard the news that Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain would star in a miniseries about George Jones and Tammy Wynette -- in fact it was the moment I decided I would give in and subscribe to Paramount+, which I did, although the series was moved over to Showtime by the time it aired. But I started to lower my expectations when they didn't get the hair right in the promotional stills, and the series ultimately turned out pretty good but underwhelming in some key ways. Michael Shannon was a particular disappointment -- he played perhaps the greatest country singer ever and a legendary larger-than-life character, but he sang the songs himself pretty poorly ("The Door" sounded good, but he really butchered some classics). And just in general Shannon never felt convincingly like Jones to me, and some of the most famous incidents in his life kind of fell surprisingly flat as scenes in the series. With Walton Goggins right there, playing sideman and songwriter Earl "Peanutt" Montgomery, I couldn't help but wonder if Goggins would've done a better job as Jones. Chastain was much better in her part, both acting and singing, I'm glad she got some awards show love. And I did like how they traced the story through the years, all the ups and downs and reunions -- in the last episode there's even a scene of Tammy filming the video for The KLF's "Justified & Ancient."
"Kaleidoscope" is about a group of criminals attempting a multi-billion dollar heist, but big hook of the show is that Netflix shows the 8 episodes in a different order to everyone who watches it. I haven't watched it all yet so I'm not sure if there's gonna be any puzzle pieces that fit together brilliantly by the time you finish it or if it's just kind of a gimmick that limits their storytelling capacity. But at least it's got a strong cast, Giancarlo Esposito and Rufus Sewell always have a lot of screen presence.
d) "Willow"
Willow is one of those '80s fantasy movies I associate with childhood, and I have a lot of lingering affection for it and Warwick Davis, and was happy to hear that he'd headline a sequel series for Disney+. I have mixed feelings about the execution of the show -- there's a lot of needledrops of famous pop and rock songs and snarky MCU-ish dialogue that kind of clashes with the tone of the original movie. But overall the first season was a fun little adventure, and Ellie Bamber, Ruby Cruz, and Erin Kellyman are all just incredibly cute and charming.
"The Witcher" and this recent prequel miniseries kind of pull off the whole fantasy with contemporary dialogue and music thing better than "Willow," in part because the content is a little more adult and sense of humor is a little darker and more baked into the franchise. My wife particularly enjoyed this, we wound up watching all 4 episodes in one night.
f) "Kindred"
I think it's generally been a good thing that adaptations of novels have moved towards television rather than movies in recent years, there's just more space to get the whole story and not have to drop a lot of nuance or subplots. But I have to say, without having read Octavia Butler's Kindred, I came away from FX's series feeling like this might have been better as a 2-hour feature than as 8 episodes. That being said, I liked it, excellent cast, I was impressed by Mallori Johnson and Micah Stock without having seen much of them before, and Ryan Kwanten was good in a role very different from he's known for from "True Blood."
It's hard to say that anyone's a 'Netflix star' rather than just generally a famous actor who's had a hit on Netflix. But if there is a Netflix star, it's Noah Centineo, who's starred in like half a dozen Netflix coming-of-age romcoms. And "The Recruit" is Netflix's attempt to build a series around Centineo, and it seems that they just went to the creator of the ABC cop drama hit "The Rookie" and asked him to do a CIA version of that show. "The Recruit" is pretty fun light viewing, as a spy adventure show it's pretty light on suspenseful intrigue or thrilling action, but it's got lots of cute and likable people bantering at each other.
Back in October, I was part of a video crew that filmed a little 'scavenger hunt' promo for the Disney+ series "National Treasure: Edge of History," running around the Library of Congress and Mount Vernon and other historical sites in the D.C. area with a few members of the show's cast (you can see some of what was shot that day on YouTube). I always enjoyed the Nic Cage movies and the actors we worked with seemed like nice kids, so I was rooting for this show to be good, and it's pretty enjoyable. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Harvey Keitel feel a little overqualified for this kind of thing but they're good in it, I particularly liked the Graceland episode.
I think casting is the most important priority in a TV series, and "That '70s Show" is a perfect example of why. Even as a teenager I thought the writing was hacky and its weird ahistorical way of having the show take place in the entire decade of the 1970s at once was irritating, but I still watched every episode for years because everybody in the cast had great comic timing and embodied their character perfectly, and Laura Prepon was a dream girl. And every subsequent attempt to copy the chemistry of the original cast has been a total failure, from "That '80s Show" to Seth Meyers's brother replacing Topher Grace in the last season of the original show. "That '90s Show" is aware that all the goodwill for the show is down to the original cast, so Kurtwood Smith and Debra Jo Rupp are there, and the rest of the original cast (minus the disgraced Danny Masterson) pops up in 1-3 episodes. But most of the show is about a new set of teen characters, and it becomes painfully obvious that they don't have the It factor of the old cast. Also, they do a terrible pop-punk version of Big Star's "In The Street" for the theme song.
j) "Irreverent"
In 2015, I watched and wrote about "Impastor," a short-lived TV Land series about a criminal on the run who hides out in a small town posing as a priest, and the wacky hijinks that ensue when a guy who's not even religious pretends to be a reverend. And I got serious deja vu recently when Peacock premiered "Irreverent," a show with more or less the exact same premise -- the circumstances of the convoluted plot are slightly different (the real priest isn't dead in this one, and the guy goes in hiding in Australia), and it's done as a 60-minute dramedy instead of a 30-minute comedy, which is a bad idea, but otherwise it's the same show, down to the cheesy wordplay of the title. If anybody but me even remembered "Impastor" there'd be grounds for a lawsuit.
k) "Family Law"
I haven't seen Jewel Staite in much else in the 20 years since "Firefly," but she's still a total babe. And in this Canadian legal drama, which recently got picked up to air on The CW in the U.S., she plays a recovering alcoholic who hits rock bottom and has to work at her father's law firm. Kind of a familiar formulaic show about a bickering dysfunctional family, but it's not bad.
l) "South Side"
I already put this on my year-end 2023 TV list, but I will say that season 3 was fantastic, they're still setting a high bar. The Steph Curry punch episode and the filmmaking contest episode really let them stretch out and experiment with the storytelling of the show, and Officer Goodnight and Sergeant Turner are probably the funniest duo on TV right now.
m) "Velma"
People really, really hate this show. And I'm not going to defend it, because it isn't good at all, but most 'adult' cartoons are pretty often awful and this is just average by that metric, to say nothing of how every other "Scooby-Doo" update or spinoff for 45 years has been unwatchable garbage. Now and again there's a line that's up to the standard of Mindy Kaling's several other better shows, but mostly it's a lot of tired meta humor and tonedeaf attempts to capture the zeitgeist.
n) "Koala Man"
Speaking of bad adult cartoons, it's probably for the best that I have nothing good to say about this new Hulu series that Justin Roiland exec produces and occasionally guests on. This Australian show has a complicated backstory about America no longer existing and Australia becoming a global superpower, but mostly it's about a delusional middle-aged father putting on a koala mask and trying to be a superhero, and it very rarely delivers any laughs.
The first season of "Random Acts of Flyness" that HBO aired way back in 2018 felt like something really fresh and unique, a sort of uncategorizeable mix of satirical sketch comedy and surreal experimental cinema. It finally came back for a second season in December, four years later, and there were some great moments, but it kinda lacked that element of surprise and Terence Nance had a bit more of a recurring storyline in this season with him playing a version of himself. And I didn't really like the "pirate and the king" piece at the end of episode 5, it felt like a corny YouTube video essay. So at this point I think I'm more interested to see Nance's next feature than another season of the show, it feels like he wants to do something more narrative-driven.
p) "1899"
"1899" is a German sci-fi series from the same creators as "Dark," which was one of the most popular foreign language series on Netflix. I never really got into "Dark," but I liked "1899" more, strong cast, interesting premise, I like seeing sci-fi set that far in the past. I was a little surprised at how shocked and angry people were that it got canceled after one season, though.
q) "Glitter"
The Polish series "Glitter" debuted on Netflix a few days after the conclusion of the 2nd season of "The White Lotus," so I immediately noticed the common ground between them -- both are about sex workers in a European coastal resort town and occasionally have some similar storylines. But "Glitter" kind of feels like its own thing by the end of the season, excellent cast.
I enjoyed this Norwegian miniseries on Netflix about people stuck in an airport before Christmas, it was a bit Planes, Trains & Automobiles and a bit Love, Actually.
This Peacock series is an unusual little experiment from Jason Woliner, a director who has worked with both Sacha Baron Cohen and Nathan Fielder and clearly delights in blurring fact and fiction. Paul T. Goldman is a man who wrote a book about how a woman he married turned out to be lying to him and hiding a criminal past. And Woliner decided to let Goldman play himself in a retelling of the story, but the show is constantly breaking the fourth wall and showing Goldman interacting with the real actors portraying people from his life, and sometimes asking for their autograph. The whole thing is very reliant on you wanting to watch this hammy, awkward middle-aged guy who constantly bugs his eyes out at the camera and says things like "beam me up, Scotty, I'm in the twilight zone." And it feels like Woliner is trying to have his cake and eat it too as far as being skeptical and critical of this guy and enabling him, I don't know, in the end I felt very exasperated and unmoved by the show's self-impressed attempts to do something different.
t) "Spector"
This 4-part docuseries about Phil Spector is sort of half and half explaining his groundbreaking career and explaining how it enabled him to behave like a gun-wielding maniac for decades and ultimately kill somebody. And I suppose you can't tell one story without the other, but it is hard to get that balance right. I did appreciate that they tried to give a sense of who Lana Clarkson was beyond being the woman Spector shot, and give her some dignity and respect.
I liked that Netflix premiered this doc about all of FIFA's dirty laundry just before the World Cup in November, man there's some awful stories.
It's still very surreal for me, as someone who watched Meghan Markle on "Suits" for 7 seasons, to see her as this globally famous figure now for reasons that have nothing to do with her acting career. That being said, I don't even care about the British royal family enough to follow the saga of Harry and Meghan distancing themselves from and speaking out against his family, I guess it's kind of cool that he's shaking things up and they came off somewhat sympathetic in this Netflix thing, but it's all kind of boring to me.
w) "MILF Manor"
As many people have pointed out, TLC's "MILF Manor" is reminiscent of "MILF Island," one of the horrible fictional reality shows referenced in an episode of "30 Rock." But it's actually even worse than that, because the producers surprise the MILFs who are looking to hook up with younger men by setting them up with...each other's sons. It's all pretty uncomfortable, although on some level I have to respect the diabolical shamelessness of the people who thought up this show and managed to get all these people unwittingly into this situation.
Maybe Rebecca Romijn is happy being married to Jerry O'Connell, but I can't help but feel bad for her that she's co-hosting a reality dating show version of "The Love Boat" with her has-been husband. It just seems like she should be up to something better than a Nick & Vanessa Lachey husband-and-wife reality show gig.
y) "Zootopia+"
Zootopia was imperfect but a pretty enjoyable little movie, I'm not surprised Disney+ did a spinoff series, but I am surprised they were so lazy that they simply slapped a plus sign on the movie's title for the series. "Zootopia+" is six self-contained shorts about little unseen subplots to the events in the movie (sort of as "Jack-Jack Attack" was to The Incredibles). For instance, the first episode is a really entertaining little adventure where Judy's parents have to chase after one of their kids who stows away on her train when she leaves home at the beginning of the movie.
Years and years ago, friends of mine gifted a Japanese toy to one of our kids that was this odd little plushie of an egg yolk with a face and limbs laying on the egg white. Apparently that is the popular Sanrio character Gudetama, an "anthropomorphized egg yolk whose main traits are laziness and sadness." And there's now a Netflix animated series, and this whole thing feels even weirder now that I've seen the origin story of this stuffed animal egg that's been sitting in my house for almost a decade.
