Patricia Arquette is a standout on one of Apple TV's best shows, "Severance," so it feels fitting that Apple's given her a Ben Stiller-produced vehicle while "Severance" is still early in its run. In "High Desert," Arquette plays a woman, Peggy, whose life is in disarray: she's a recovering addict, her husband is in prison, her mother died, her home was foreclosed on, her siblings have stopped helping her, she's working a saloon in a wild west theme park and trying to become a private detective. While Peggy could be a tragic or sympathetic character, Arquette plays her as a kind of comically confident fool, but then it's a show where almost everyone is ridiculous in some way or another.
Seth Rogen has produced a lot of TV series, some of them pretty great, but "Platonic" is the first series he's starred in since "Freaks & Geeks" and "Undeclared" two decades ago. And it kind of feels like Rogen, Rose Byrne, and Nicholas Stoller couldn't get a third Neighbors movie made so they just threw together this series where Rogen and Byrne play old friends who reconnect. I really hope "Platonic" stays true to its title, because there kind of is a relative absence of depictions of straight male/female platonic friendships that don't eventually turn into romantic relationships, and Byrne's marriage seems nice. But as with most Rogen/Stoller projects, the friendships at the heart of the show is kind of toxic and dysfunctional and every episode has a big messy argument that's more stressful to watch than funny, I kind of wish they'd work hard at the comedy aspect than trying to be so 'real.'
It made sense to me when Drake exec produced "Euphoria" and "Top Boy," but it doesn't feel very Drake to adapt a novel into one of those shows about solving the murder of a beautiful young woman who disappeared during a Caribbean vacation. Maybe on some level it resembles the "Find Your Love" video? The first episode was pretty compelling but I've lost interest in the mystery as it's gone on.
"City On Fire" is also based on a novel about a beautiful young woman who was shot, although so far she's survived and is in a coma. The book took place in 1977 New York City and the Apple TV+ series moves the story to 2003, which seems like an absurdly huge difference that significantly changes the context of the crime drama parts and makes the underground rock scene backdrop seem a lot cornier. The victim is playse by Chase Sui Wonders, who continues her string of charming roles in "Generation" and "Bupkis," but there's a lot of 'manic pixie dream girl' cliches here, she even does a full-on "The Shins will change your life" move putting headphones on a guy and telling her to listen to this great band (not The Shins, but later you see a Shins poster in her room). There's a lot I like about "City On Fire," including most of tve cast and the score by Jason Hill (who also scored "Mindhunter"). But it's one of those frustrating stories with a dozen central characters who all know each other in unlikely coincidental ways, unbeknownst to each other, and several are suspects in the shooting in some way or another, I'm ready to be really annoyed with however this whole thing gets tied together.
In my little generational cohort of people who write about pop culture on websites, Shea Serrano is one of the biggest success stories, a guy whose book was praised by Barack Obama and got to co-create an autobiographical sitcom with Mike Schur of "Parks and Rec" and "The Good Place" fame. I don't know the guy at all but I'm rooting for him a little, and his show on Freevee (Amazon's free tier streaming service) is good, all the obnoxious uncles are pretty entertaining.
Sarah Goldberg is best known from "Barry," in which she played Sally, an ambitious actress whose dreams briefly come true when she creates and stars in an acclaimed dramedy series called "Joplin" for a streaming obscure service called BanShe. So it felt a little close to home to see that Goldberg had created and stars in an acclaimed dramedy series called "SisterS" for an obscure Canadian streaming service called Crave (it's on IFC/Sundance in America). That being said, Goldberg is really talented and the first episode of "SisterS" is promising, the tale of an American woman finding out her real father was Irish, and going to Ireland and meeting a half sister she never knew about, and it being this really awkward warts-and-all situation.
I've been pretty impressed by Bel Powley in a string of supporting roles, and she's excellent in a very heavy leading role in "A Small Light" as Miep Gies, one of the people who helped hide Anne Frank's family. I like seeing this story from a slightly different vantage point but it's also a little hard to watch just knowing how it all ends.
Of all the movie stars who I never thought I'd see workin series television who've starred in recent shows, Arnold Schwarzenegger would probably be near the top of the list alongside Harrison Ford. But here Arnold is, in a Netflix action comedy show that will probably be forgotten in a month, god bless him. I always thought Schwarzenegger was hilarious in his lighter movies like Twins and True Lies, so I don't mind this being sort of a True Lies knockoff where he plays a spy who finds out his daughter is also a spy. Doesn't really feel like they hit the mark based on the first episode, though, probably needed better writers and/or supporting players.
"Citadel" is another action series that doesn't seem to live up to big expectations -- they don't have Schwarzenegger or anything, but each episode cost $50 million, making it possibly the second most expensive TV series of all time behind another Amazon Prime series, "The Rings of Power." It definitely doesn't feel like you're seeing all that money on the screen and you have to wonder what the hell is going on with these Amazon shows. But removed from that context, "Citadel" is decent, I watched three seasons of "Quantico" so I'm up for another somewhat boilerplate spy show with Priyanka Chopra.
I have a soft spot for Grease, but a Grease prequel series definitely seems like a good example of streaming services just desperately trying to wring new content out of old IP. I like musical TV shows, though, even when they're not particularly great, there's a higher baseline craft involved in doing a bunch of original songs and choreography with a young cast that can perform it. And this cast makes a pretty good go of it, I think Cheyenne Isabel Wells has a real star quality.
A perennially popular Twitter topic is movies you would hypothetically remake with every cast member but one played by Muppets, inspired by Michael Caine's brilliantly straight-faced performance in A Muppet Christmas Carol as well as Melissa McCarthy in 2018's The Happytime Murders. I thought about that often when watching "The Muppets Mayhem" on Disney+, where the humans that interact with Muppets the most are YouTuber Lilly Singh and former child star Tahj Mowry, who just approach the whole thing with no edge of reality so it's just kind of cheesy. I grew up on the Muppets and always particularly loved Dr. Teeth & The Electric Mayhem, so I was excited to see this Disney+ series about them, and it's just okay. And it seemed like a bad idea to set the story in the contemporary music industry if most of the cameos are D-list artists like Zedd and Desiigner.
I know I always say this, but every time a show turns out to be a docudrama mixing scripted storytelling and talking head nonfiction, I feel disappointed that they didn't just commit fully to one format or the other. An that was definitely the case with Netflix's "Queen Cleopatra."
Season 3 just came out this morning, but each season of this show runs under 100 minutes, so I've already watched it all, still one of tve funniest shows on TV. Some of the sketches that made me laugh out loud the first time around were Richard Brecky, Club Haunted House, summer loving, the driving crooner, and the ponytail guy. The "shirt brothers" sketch features a good return performance from Biff Wiff, who was kind of the breakout star of the second season for the Santa Claus sketch.
What I've seen so far of season 2 is good, Nicholas Hoult is really so much better in this show than any other role I've seen him in.
Veteran supporting player/character actor Mike Hagerty died last year just a couple months after the first season of "Somebody Somewhere" aired, one of the most substantial roles of his long career. The show is still pretty good without him, although I could've done without the scene of two of the main characters having violent diarrhea.
I often bemoan the state of animated sitcoms and 'adult cartoons,' but a show created by two "30 Rock" writers has, in my view, a pretty ideal pedigree. That said, Netflix's "Mulligan" is just okay so far, although I should keep watching to see if they really gain steam. The premise is decent (dumb random saves the world in an Independence Day-style alien invasion and is then completely unprepared to become the new leader of the free world), and there are some funny jokes, but I counted at least one nicked from "The Simpsons" in the first few minutes of the first episode.
It's almost hard to believe Mike Judge isn't involved in the (deep sigh) Max original animated series "Fired On Mars," which has a lot in common with his animation style and tone of humor (the premise is practically 'Office Space in outer space') and stars several voice actors who've been in Judge projects (Luke Wilson, Pamela Adlon, Stephen Root). It's a bit better on the animated sitcom scale than "Mulligan," though, the story is kind of bleak but there's some good dark humor here and there.
The (another deep sigh) Max original "VGLY" is about an aspiring Mexican rapper, played by real life music star Natanael Catano. The first episode was decent but I'm just very weary of these show business/entrepeneur "hero's journey" type shows HBO has been constantly peddling ever since "Entourage" and "How To Make It In America."
This Polish series on Netflix is kind of an Interstellar thing where an astronaut is in suspended animation in space for 30 years and then comes back to Earth, without having aged, and found that his girlfriend married his best friend. Not an interesting premise to me, to be honest, and as sci-fi it feels like they didn't make much effort into making it scientifically plausible.
It's probably for the best that VH1 no longer makes things like "I Love The '80s" and "I Love The '90s," leaving the field open for CNN to do a similar miniseries that's slightly more serious about the last decade. Tom Hanks exec produced it, and it's kind of a trip to see someone that famous do little talking head segments on a show like this. There are two ways to define a decade's starting and ending points, and these series tries to have it both ways by extensively covering the events of 2010 and 2020, which I find a little annoying (especially when it comes to referencing COVID-19, surely the definitive turning point of the 2020s). But otherwise, I think it's fairly well done, interesting to see some conventional wisdom about an era I loved through start to get set in stone. I particularly liked the music episode, covered a lot of ground quickly but accurately, was fun to see several of my music writer contemporaries on TV (Chris Molanphy, Jayson Greene, Hanif Abdurraqib, Amanda Petrusich, Puja Patel).
The gender imbalance on country radio is still pretty entrenched and hasn't improved in the past decade that it's been a constant point of debate. But I'm glad CMT has something like this series, profiling a different woman in country music for an hour, slightly more low key than, I don't know, a "Behind The Music" type show. I've only seen the first episode with Carly Pearce but 29: Written In Stone is one of my favorite albums of the last few years and it was great to get an in-depth look at that record.
I feel like there are a glut of docuseries lately, often about subjects that aren't interesting enough to sustain a few hours of television. But Hillsong Church, a megachurch that had a huge rise and fall in the last decade with celebrity affiliations and then a series of scandals, is definitely worthy of a miniseries, and this Hulu show is pretty well done, including interviews with key people in the story like Carl Lentz, the disgraced pastor who was Justin Bieber's spiritual advisor or whatever.
This nature doc series on Apple TV+ is pretty enjoyable, Tom Hiddleston narrating episodes about elephants, bears, giant sloths, etc. This kind of thing never gets old for me if executed well.
This Netflix series feels like a pretty clear attempt to make "The Last Dance" for professional golf, but not about any one particular athlete or moment, a wider look at the entire sport. It makes golf about as interesting as it's ever going to get for someone who doesn't follow it already, which is nice, but I wasn't on the edge of my seat itching to watch every episode or anything.
I always hated how MTV turned all the randos from "The Real World" and "Road Rules" into a growing repertory of faux celebrities teaming up in other shows, and it appears that's what Netflix is doing now with "Perfect Match," a dating show featuring people from other Netflix dating shows. It's moderately refreshing that people can curse and talk about sex in these shows without the unconvincing polite veneer of network shows like "The Bachelor," but still, not really for me.
This Disney+ cartoon about a squirrel and a rabbit is pretty cute and funny, kind of disappointed my kid didn't take much interest in returning to it after we watched it once.
