TV Diary
a) "Manhunt"
Steven Spielberg's Lincoln did not depict the president's assassination, as Spielberg figured, probably correctly, that that would become the focal point of the entire film if it was included. And that leaves the lane wide open for something like "Manhunt," an Apple TV+ miniseries which focuses on the 12 days from John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln to Booth being caught and killed (with frequent flashbacks to the last year of Lincoln's presidency). I have spent probably over 100 hours in Ford's Theatre for work over the past decade -- I have run teleprompter for events in a little room directly beneath the balcony where Lincoln was shot, and the night we did an event on the 150th anniversary of the assassination, I left the building through the same back alley exit where Booth escaped, which was really spooky. So watching the assassination dramatized where it really happened at Ford's in "Manhunt" was fascinating to watch, they did an amazing job with that scene, although obviously that's just a brief moment at the beginning of the series. The protagonist of "Manhunt" is really Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies), Lincoln's Secretary of War who organized the hunt for Booth, and the guy who famously said "Now he belongs to the ages" or "Now he belongs to the angels" (in "Manhunt," they go with "angels"). Hamish Linklater is an inspired choice to play Lincoln, he has the perfect height and physicality for it but I never would've thought to cast him. Patton Oswalt and Matt Walsh play supporting roles, and while they're perfectly good dramatic actors, I think it's kind of to their detriment that they're so successful in comedy, I feel like I'm watching "Drunk History" when they show up onscreen.
My wife read the novel Apples Never Fall, which takes place in Australia. And as we started to watch the Peacock series based on the book, we realized that the show takes place in Florida, but was still filmed in Florida, and half the cast is Australian. And just to make it even weirder, one character is still Australian, and he's played by Sam Neill, who's from New Zealand. I just want to know how they wound up with that. But it's a good show, I'm more interested in the characters than the mystery, just because I feel like I'm always let down by the plot in shows like this.
This Max series is loosely based on female reporters who covered Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, but it takes place in a fictional primary full of fictional candidates, which is probably smart, opens them up to tell different stories with obvious real world parallels. It's a little frothy and tonally reminds me of "The Sex Lives of College Girls" more than "The West Wing," but the cast is really good, I'll watch anything with Carla Gugino in it.
"Palm Royale" features a great cast of funny women (Kristen Wiig, Laura Dern, Allison Janney, Carol Burnett) in a show about a faded beauty queen trying to fake her way into high society in 1969 Palm Beach. I feel like it's kind of slow going so far, but I like it. I was trying to figure out how to describe the tone of this show and I saw that the creator, Abe Sylvia, was an exec producer on "Dead To Me," I think that's a good comparison point, if you liked "Dead To Me" you might like this.
e) "Boarders"
Tubi has a reputation as the lowest tier of streaming services, a free ad-supported streamer that gets old castoffs from other networks and makes such low quality original films that "Tubi movie" has replaced "straight-to-video" as the most crushing euphemism for a shitty movie. So it's a pleasant surprise that Tubi is the American distributor of "Boarders," a pretty charming BBC Three show about boarding school teenagers that could probably be a hit with the same people that love "Sex Education" or "Derry Girls."
As someone who still likes network sitcoms, I'll admit that there's pretty slim pickings these days outside of "Abbott Elementary," so I'm glad "Animal Control" got a second season, please just keep Vella Lovell on TV as much as possible.
g) "Girls5eva"
Nowadays, every show that gets canceled too soon mounts a campaign to get picked up by another network, and they're almost always unsuccessful and I get bummed out by the false hope and multiple letdowns. So it was gratifying to hear that "Girls5eva" made a jump to Netflix when Peacock didn't pick it up for a third season, and I hope Netflix just keeps it going for years as a successor to "Kimmy Schmidt." The whole cast is fantastic but I feel like Renee Elise Goldsberry and Paula Pell are competing for the biggest laughs this season, I loved the episode that takes place in Maryland that reveleas that Wickie is from Howard County but tells everybody she's from some other hardscrabble part of the state.
h) "Invincible"
As someone who doesn't "binge watch" and always has different stuff to watch, I personally like when shows split seasons into 2 parts with a break of a few months in between. But I know that's generally an unpopular move, especially with a show like "Invincible," where people had to wait two and a half years for season 2, and then didn't get it all at once. It doesn't help that so far "Invincible" is way less gripping in the new episodes without Omni-Man in the action. It's still a good show, but pulling away from the character that made it a great show in the first place was probably a bad idea for sesason 2, even if they're playing the long game on the overall story arc. Also, it's starting to really bug me how quiet the show is, lots of scenes with no score or music mixed very low, which can be effective when the dramatic tension is high, but lately it hasn't been.
i) "Furies"
This French series about Paris crime families is one of the most promising Netflix imports I've seen in a while, I like how the action's choreographed and the look of the show, the colors really pop.
j) "Supersex"
When you make a film or series about the pornography industry, from Boogie Nights to "The Deuce," there's usually a conscious effort to really prove you're seriously making art and telling a story, that even if the nudity and sex is inevitable, it's not gratuitous. "Supersex," a Netflix series based on the life of Rocco "The Italian Stallion" Siffredi, is unburdened by those kinds of ambitions, it's practically soft porn, with more sex scenes per episode than perhaps any TV show I've ever seen.
k) "Feedback"
A Polish show on Netflix about a washed up rock star with memory issues who's trying to find his missing son.
I like this Taiwanese anthology series on Netflix, each episode is a different love story set early in the COVID-19 lockdowns. "Modern Love" was a good show, too, I kinda wish there were more anthologies like this.
Unlike the other recent live action versions of "One Piece" and "Cowboy Bebop," I haven't seen the original animated version of "Yu Yu Hakusho," so I don't have as much of a context for it. But I kind of like this trend, the bright colors and stylized action of a live action anime are really visually exciting to watch.
n) "Onimusha"
"Onimusha" is a recent Netflix anime series based on a video game, and once again I have no frame of reference to compare it to the source material, but I find it entertaining anyway. It's cool to watch an animated fantasy that takes place in roughly the same time period as "Shogun."
Five years ago, Netflix aired one season of "Rhythm + Flow," a sort of hip hop "American Idol" with T.I., Cardi B, and Chance The Rapper as the judges. It was a decent show and the winner, D Smoke, has gone on to have a moderately successful career, but it definitely felt like a hard sell for rap fans and the viewing public, and I'm not surprised that Netflix never did a second season. They have, however, taken the format international, and the French version was a hit and is already on its second season, while an Italian version was recently launched. Knowing very little about European hip hop, this is kind of a strange, fascinating watch for me, but it's cool how each judge represents a different city and is trying to find a new star to represent their scene.
This Netflix docuseries is about Brazilian singer Luisa Sonza, and again it's kind of interesting as an American music fan to just watch things about pop music in other countries and see the familiar parallels and the cultural differences, although I didn't really get much of a sense of Sonza's music, just her typical creative struggles and public controversies.
q) "Queens"
NatGeo's new nature doc series focuses on the female members of various species, from lionesses to mother foxes, with narration by Angela Bassett and lots of needledrops of triumphant female empowerment pop songs. A pretty simple concept, delivered in a fun and satisfying way.
Another excellent new NatGeo series that focuses on the lives of professional nature photographers. It's cool because you get their personal journeys of how they got started in their careers but also get to see a lot of them in action, taking amazing pictures in the middle of nowhere.
Someone rightly figured that there'd be an audience for a Netflix docuseries about the history of atomic and nuclear bombs after the success of Oppenheimer, and "Turning Point" is really good. Christopher Nolan's movie was very deliberately about Oppenheimer's life and didn't show the bombs drop in Japan or the perspective of anyone outside America, which is a decision some people thought was fine and other people really hated. So I appreciate "Turning Point" showing that perspective very significantly, interviewing several Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors.
This Peacock reality series is about as ridiculous as you'd expect from the title, but I must say I cackled when they threw out the word "threelationship."
"Ghost train fire" sounds like a cool post-punk band but apparently there was a real tragedy in 1979 where a "ghost train" amusement park attraction in Sydney, Australia caught on fire and several people died, and this Netflix docuseries gets into what happened and theories about it being an accidental electric fire or perhaps premeditated arson.
In the late '70s, a single mother and her two young daughters lived in a London house with one of the most extensively documented poltergeist cases of all time, objects being thrown and furniture moved, all sorts of crazy stuff. I need to finish this Apple TV+ series at some point, it's a fascinating story.
I literally grew up on "Late Night with David Letterman" in the '80s, when my parents would tape the show and watch it in the daytime. And of course when I was a little kid, my favorite part of the show was the "stupid pet tricks" segment, and I'm surprised it took this long for it to get spun off into its own series. Sarah Silverman hosts it, and there's lots of silly cameos from Letterman and other comedy luminaries, it's moderately amusing and there are some genuinely impressive pet tricks. I get anxious seeing them herd animals onstage with a live band, though, like that has to make some of the animals nervous.
This CBS game show is based on traditional Mexican bingo, kind of fun to watch but I guess it didn't catch on, they pulled it from the schedule after a few weeks and have yet to schedule the rest of the episods they produced. Sheila E. is the bandleader/co-host, that's kind of cool.
Apparently C-list movie star Josh Duhamel directed a comedy called Buddy Games a few years ago, based on some kind of informal drunken Olympic games he and his friends grew up playing. And then it was turned into a CBS reality show hosted by Duhamel, pretty goofy stuff but I feel like it's more fun to watch than the average overly serious reality competition show.
z) "Snake Oil"
"Snake Oil" is a decent concept on paper, a parody of "Shark Tank" that's also a functioning game show where contestants have to figure out which pitched businesses/products are real and which are jokes. David Spade's too boringly snarky and deadpan to host a show like this, though, should've been someone else.
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