TV Diary
The middling 2021 Stephen King adaptation "Lisey's Story" was the first TV series Julianne Moore had starred in since the '80s. "Mary & George" feels like it's much more worthy of her talent and star power, though, it's a very entertainingly tawdry story of British countesses and dukes and earls in the early 1600s.
b) "Ripley"
I always say that a series is a better way to adapt a novel than a movie, but since The Talented Mr. Ripley was already a very good movie, "Ripley" has its work cut out for it. And it just feels like doing the story slower, in black and white, with a less flashy and charismatic cast, I dunno, I'm not gonna say it's boring but it's not terribly exciting either, although maybe Andrew Scott's performance will really make it worthwhile as the story escalates, I haven't gotten too far into yet.
This show is decent but I feel like it's one of those occasional projects that exposes Ewan McGregor's deficiencies as an actor. He's always an engaging, charismatic presence and can play a protagonist you sympathize with, but something like this that requires him to disappear into a character and play a guy born in Russia in the 1800s, it just feels like, no, you're just watching Ewan McGregor with a mustache.
A young woman becoming a highwayman in 18th century England after being framed for murder is a pretty good premise. Disney+'s "Renegade Nell" has the added twist of her having some kind of magical power that gives her super strength and speed. It's pretty light entertainment, but I like it, Louisa Harland and Frank Dillane are very charming.
The other day I asked my teenage son about what books he'd been reading for school, and he complained that most of them are about the Holocaust. On one hand, I'm glad schools are still teaching that stuff in these sketchy times we're living in, and I encouraged him to keep reading that stuff and taking it seriously. Still, I laughed and sympathized because I'm glad I read all the books I read about the Holocause when I was younger, but I don't think I finished the last couple series I started watching about the Holocaust, and I may not finish "We Were The Lucky Ones" either. The cast and the production values are good, but it's a little easier to take in a 2-hour movie on this subject matter than to stick with a 10-hour miniseries.
People seem to be pretty into this Netflix sci-fi series, I'm still trying to get hooked by the story, though, I'm not really sure if I care what's going on.
g) "Ghosts"
Still the best sitcom on CBS, which is still a pretty low bar to clear but I enjoy it. When I started watching season 3 my wife saw the loose-fitting clothing Rose McIver's wearing and correctly guessed that she's pregnant.
This pretty good Korean series on Netflix is, true to the title, about a girl named Nam-soon who has superhuman strength. I didn't realize when I watched it that it's a spinoff of a similarly themed show called "Strong Girl Bong-soon." America doesn't even have one TV show about a strong girl and they have two, it's not fair.
i) "X-Men '97"
I watched the "X-Men" animated series on Saturday mornings for a couple years, and I think it was part of my brother and I briefly buying comic books for a while in the '90s, which I never really kept up with. But I'd lost interest well before the end of its 76-episode run, so I have limited interest in this weird Disney+ series where they pick right up like it never stopped, and retain the animation style and most of the voice cast of the old series. Fun, I guess, but it's a bummer that Professor X is dead, and I can barely remember everything that happened in the old show, I don't really care.
This HBO series opens basically in the aftermath of comedian Jerrod Carmichael coming out of the closet with his 2022 special "Rothaniel." In fact, the first episode is partly about him winning an Emmy for "Rothaniel," and I think it would be a funny flex if he won an Emmy for that episode too. That episode delves into Carmichael's friendship with and unrequited feelings for Tyler, The Creator, which is pretty entertaining just because Tyler is a ridiculous person, but also kind of weirdly poignant since Carmichael had appeared on Tyler's album Igor, which is about unrequited love. But mostly "Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show" is a very uncomfortable but gripping television and it deals with him coming out relatively late in life in his 30s, and having a very tense relationship with his religious parents.
A really enjoyable Apple TV+ thing that is basically one 90-minute doc about Steve Martin's early life and his meteoric rise as a standup comic, complete with looks at his notebooks from the '70s and his whole methodical, intellectual approach to becoming an extremely silly, almost juvenile performer, and then another 90 minutes about his film career and later life. I wish the latter part had a little more about the movies since I grew up on so many Steve Martin movies, but I really liked how they threaded that stuff through his life story and showed how he very gradually found some personal peace beyond his professional success and excelled in so many different mediums. The behind-the-scenes stuff on his tours with Martin Short are great, they're as funny just bullshitting and critiquing each other's joke ideas as they are actually performing onstage.
I don't really like prank shows, but I like seeing talented magicians and illusionists do their thing, and I like how these are mostly good-natured deceptions where each episode has two elaborate deceptions where someone wants to get good-natured revenge on a friend or sibling.
A Netflix thing about the sort of cultural history of Christianity apart from the actual religious mythology, which I think is a very interesting angle to approach it from.
This is about the kind of thing you'd expect, alien abductions and Lake Lanier and so on, but it's fun, probably the best case scenario for disposable low budget Netflix filler.
This is closer to the worst case scenario for disposable low budget Netflix filler, just a really corny satirical thing full of hacky humor and stock footage, I feel bad for Peter Dinklage that he got roped into narrating this.
I had never heard of Synanon, but apparently from the '50s to the '90s it evolved from a support group for addicts into some kind of insane and dangerous cult, really fascinating stuff, I'm glad HBO made a docuseries about it.
A Netflix series with a somewhat similar topic about a disciplinary school becoming really corrupt and harmful, a sad story but not as gripping and sensational as "The Synanon Fix."
Another Netflix show about a cult, this time one I'd actually heard of! Raelians are funny, man, I try not to be judgmental but it's wild to me that stuff like this ever caught on, I guess it shows how predatory cults are to people who are really lost.
After making a bazillion hours of network crime procedurals, Dick Wolf has made a true crime series for Netflix that kind of works to format real stories about real people into a familiar "Law & Order"-type shape, which is really unappealing and distasteful to me.
More true crime newsmagazine gunk, this time on the CW.
I know nothing about rugby, but it's a sport I'm curious about and this Netflix docuseries is very interesting and watchable.
A Netflix docuseries about victims of a serial cyberstalker, I suppose it's interesting to see the details of a case like this but it's just kind of what I expected and a bummer to watch.
This is definitely one of the more interesting Netflix true crime things I've seen lately, just a completely horrifying story of a couple who were victims of a home invasion but the cops didn't believe their story and thought the guy had killed his girlfriend who was kidnapped.
A weird depressing Netflix reality show from Korea where influencers compete to see who's the most...influential, I guess.
A weird depressing Netflix reality show from Japan where only the women can propose to the men, but they have this looming deadline in which to make decisions, feels just lightly more cruel and dystopian than these shows often are.
A pretty crazy Netflix show from Spain about this guy who, as a teenager, was a very successful fraud who had millionaires and politicians fooled, fascinating story.
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on Monday, April 08, 2024 at 5:01 AM.
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