Baltimore Sun journalist Laura Lippman's 2019 novel Lady In The Lake was inspired by the true stories of two murder victims in 1960s Baltimore, a white girl who was heavily covered in the media and a black woman who wasn't. There was lots of excitement in Baltimore when Apple TV+ developed a series based on the book, and even more a couple summers ago when Natalie Portman arrived in town to film the series. I haven't read the book so I'm just taking the story one episode at a time, Alma Har'el (Honey Boy) directed every episode and I love the visual texture, it's a little more of an intense dreamlike vision of '60s Baltimore than, say, Barry Levinson's period films, and music is woven into the episodes really vividly. 

Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits was released a year before I was born and I feel like it was the first movies I remember seeing probably a little earlier than I should have when I was 6 or 7, I have fond memories of it but that ending traumatized me a little but I also now remember how ridiculous and hilarious it was. Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement are a pretty good team to make a "Time Bandits" series, they have their own ear for dialogue but it's altogether in a similar spirit to Gilliam and Palin's sense of humor, and the cast is fantastic. When there's one child actor in an adult cast for a project with a sort of adult sense of humor, I often take it as a given that the kid will be the weak link, but Kal-El Tuck is fantastic as Kevin, just makes the dialogue come alive and makes you really see the story through his character's eyes. 

My favorite short-lived one season series of the last few years was "Teenage Bounty Hunters," and I'm happy that creator Kathleen Jordan got to make a new limited series for Netflix, although it's a completely different period piece sort of thing. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron in 14th century Italy during the bubonic plague, and Jordan adapts it into a pretty broad comedy, although they thankfully steer clear of playing COVID parallels for laughs, which I think a lot of other people would've done. Tony Hale and Zosia Mamet are the only pretty recognizable actors but the entire cast is great, Douggie McMeekin and Karan Gill are really funny. 

d) "A Good Girl's Guide To Murder"
I love English names, I'm watching a British show and suddenly I'm very invested in the life of someone named Pippa who goes by "Pip." "A Good Girl's Guide To Murder" is based on a YA novel that's kind of a murder mystery, and I've only watched one episode but I'm already all the way in, likeable characters and intriguing premise. 

Roland Emmerich's movies are a little tacky even when they end up being entertaining megabudget affairs with huge stars. And Emmerich's gladiator series for Peacock cost $140 million to make, but once you spread that out over 10 episodes, it looks a little cheap, even with a very overqualified Anthony Hopkins doing his best to give the whole thing some gravitas. 

Apple TV+ has been pretty strong in the sci-fi genre. And this family-friendly show about a 12-year-old boy who discovers that he has superpowers is decent, I definitely don't feel like the audience for it but I think it's a lot better than similarly styled shows you might see on, say, Freeform. 

I kind of wish this was on network television instead of Hulu because it's so good at putting some pretty thorny and complex issues of parent-child relationships and the prison industrial complex into this kind of bright, whimsical sitcom with an incredible performance from Delroy Lindo, like it'd be interesting if this reached an audience as broad as "Black-ish" or "Abbott Elementary" or something. 

"Unstable" is definitely not on the level of previous Victor Fresco cult classics like "Better Off Ted" and "Santa Clarita Diet" but it's a solid workplace comedy, and Lamorne Morris and one of the Apatow kids are good additions to the cast for the second season. 

"Women In Blue" is a Spanish language Apple TV+ series based on the true story of Mexico's first female police force, formed while a serial killer was targeting women in Mexico City in the '70s. I'm only one episode in but it's pretty promising, even if the idea of a show about female cops being empowering itself feels like a dated concept. 

This Indian show on Netflix is about a guy with a lot of debt who decides to fix his financial problems by becoming a gigolo, which feels like kind of a cheesy lowbrow premise (although HBO's "Hung" was really a pretty good and underrated show). Fortunately, "Trihbuvan Mishra CA Topper" feels more absurdist than lurid, with a really funky, unpredictable comic rhythm, pretty unique show. 

"Master of the House" from Thailand is another foreign language Netflix series where it feels like there's some cultural gap that makes it feel very odd and unfamiliar to me, but in an opposite direction where it just feels off-puttingly serious and melodramatic with extremely over-the-top sex scenes. 

This Korean show is about a woman infiltrating a wealthy family responsible for her father's death, and I'm always a fan of a good hard-boiled revenge story. 

There are so many movies and shows about children magically becoming adults or vice versa, but the Korean show "Miss Night And Day" has a truly odd premise about a woman who switches between being a 20-something and a 50-something. I don't know, maybe this could be done in a really funny way with the right execution, but as a sincere high-concept fantasy dramedy, I don't know, it's a little doofy. 

This is an Italian show about a trans woman who learns that she has a 15-year-old son, who she fathered when she was still a man. I'm sure things like this have happened and it's possible to tell a story about it with sensitivity, but this just feels like a sensationalized '80s soap opera storyline in execution. 

This Japanese Netflix show is about real estate scammers and I don't know, they try to make it seem cool and exciting like a bank heist and it doesn't really work. 

I don't know anything about Spanish football, but this Netflix docuseries is pretty entertaining and dramatic, soccer is such a great high energy sport that seems to really breed big personalities. 

Netflix made the very smart call to start filming a Simone Biles docuseries in the run up to the 2024 Olympics, and put out the first two episodes before the games started, with more episodes filmed in Paris to follow later this year. It's good so far, a great primer on her career thus far that gave me a better appreciation for her incredible accomplishments in Paris. 

This Netflix docuseries follows the whole Lou Pearlman more like a true crime series than a music doc, which I thought might irritate me but it feels appropriate, it would be weird to try to talk about '90s boy bands without focusing on how the two biggest groups were formed by an evil bastard who eventually died in prison. I don't like that they took footage of Pearlman and deepfaked it so it seemed like he was speaking words he wrote in a book he published, but at least they put disclaimers up that made it clear that's what they did, which is sadly on the more responsible end of A.I. fucker these days. It's a little more interesting in the early episodes when they have interviews with some of the members of the big groups (AJ and Howie from Backstreet Boys, Chris from NSYNC), I got a little bored when they started covering the O-Town era. 

This Hulu series is a good update of the "Project Runway" formula with fashion designers making clothes for recording artists to perform in (Toni Braxton, Coi Leray, Jojo Siwa, etc.). It's fun to see the designers unconstrained by some of the more practical constraints of making clothes for regular people to wear and embrace that they can make something a little more outlandish for a concert. 

I just looked up David Attenborough's age and man, I didn't realize he's 98. I'm glad he's still narrating all these awesome nature documentaries, I'm just gonna appreciate him as long as he's doing it. 

A pretty good slick prestige TV docuseries about food and cooking on Apple TV+ where each episode is really thoroughly dedicated to a particular ingredient or concept, kind of like "Salt Fat Acid Heat" with more episodes and more topics. 

Ann Burgess was involved in the FBI's program to create a psychological profile for serial killers in the '70s, and the "Mindhunter" character Wendy Carr was loosely based on her. The new Hulu docuseries about Burgess is really interesting, ends up feeling like a nice fact-based companion to "Mindhunter," which is welcome since we're sadly never gonna get a 3rd season of that great show.  

Another true crime docuseries that's kind of about women studying killers, in an attempt to solve cold cases. I had no idea a project like this was going on, pretty fascinating how they're doing it. 

An Apple TV+ docuseries about a Mexican drug cartel's horse racing money laundering scheme, pretty crazy story, I wouldn't mind seeing this adapted into a scripted series or movie. 

The 2016 movie Sausage Party feels like an artifact of a very specific time when Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were at their peak as hitmakers and could make a big gutsy concept like an R-rated computer animated film about food that fucks and says curse words, and actually have box office success. 8 years later, they've continued the movie with an Amazon Prime series with most of the voice cast, but it just feels like a weird reminder of this ugly-ass movie's sort of dated "edgy" sense of humor that nobody was waiting for. 

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