Nicole Kidman has done a lot of television since "Big Little Lies," but she's really taken on an insane workload lately. She will have starred in at least 3 seasons of television in 2024 ("Expats," "The Perfect Couple," and "Special Ops: Lioness"), possibly 4 or 5 depending on when "The Last Anniversary" and the second season of "Nine Perfect Strangers" come out. "The Perfect Couple" is about a destination wedding where the maid of honor is murdered, pretty good ensemble but I haven't gotten too far with the show yet, dunno if it's just "White Lotus" lite or something more (naturally, the murder victim is played by an actor from "The White Lotus," Meghann Fahy).
I really liked "WandaVision" and the whole reveal with Kathryn Hahn's character, but that was 3 and a half years ago, kinda feels like forever. I like that they took another big swing for the first episode of "Agatha All Along" and kept with the theme of "WandaVision," though, it was really entertaining.
This period piece about a robbery the night of a Muhammed Ali fight in 1970 is really entertaining, insanely stacked cast that includes Don Cheadle, Samuel L. Jackson and Taraji P. Henson. And listen, I have no problem with Kevin Hart, I happily watch him in a lot of stuff, but he wasn't the right lead for this, he doesn't have the right screen presence for something that isn't a full-on comedy, it reminds me of Will Ferrell not understanding why "Winning Time" could star John C. Reilly but not him.
My favorite memory of watching The Batman was when my wife walked in the room, and I pointed to the Penguin and explained that he was being played by Colin Farrell and she just got the most puzzled look on her face and said "why?" There have been some great performances from people in heavy makeup or prosthetics -- including the definitive Penguin, Danny DeVito! -- but Farrell as the Penguin just seems like such a needlessly gaudy gimmick, having a fit handsome sex symbol wear a fatsuit and a weird latex face. And it seems even more ridiculous when you make him the main character of a series, and the more I look at Farrell's weird Penguin face the more of a strange uncanny valley effect it has, like it's a real person's eyes behind a bunch of other shit that looks slightly off. I liked the first episode, especially because Craig Zobel (Compliance, The Hunt) is a much better director than Matt Reeves, and Cristin Milioti is good enough in this show to keep me watching, but I'm irritated by the prestige TV sheen on comic book characters here.
It feels like every time Ryan Murphy does a series based on a true story, he strays further and further from the truth, and this Menendez brothers series has gotten a lot of criticism for taking liberties with the story. I haven't gotten too far into it to see everything they supposedly got wrong, but it's well produced and compelling, which is part of the problem, these people who make true crime shows can make absolutely bullshit and harmful lies fun to watch.
It's funny that Ryan Murphy's OJ Simpson show was "American Crime Story" but the Aaron Hernandez one is "American Sports Story." Is the difference that one guy was still in the NFL when he killed people and the other wasn't? I don't know if this has as many factual issues as the Menendez show, but this is much weaker as television, partly because Jose Andres Rivera is hopelessly miscast, you can never watch this show for a second thinking that you're watching Aaron Hernandez, there's no resemblance whatsoever.
A Netflix series called "Billionaire Island" sounds like potentially the worst reality show on television, but it's a pretty good drama from Norway about power struggles in the salmon farming industry. It feels like we're just getting inundated with "Succession"-ish shows these days, but if you have to watch only one, I think you might as well watch one about Norwegian fish tycoons.
A pleasant little South Korean show on Netflix about a woman going back to her hometown and gets romantically involved with one of her childhood friends, if this show was produced in America it'd definitely be on the CW.
A South Korean show about a psychiatrist (duh), which starts out with a whole dramatic origin story where the guy is an acupuncturist for the royal family and is expelled from his job when the king dies after he performs acupuncture on him.
This Netflix docuseries is about a Japanese pop group that rebrands and changes its lineup after a sexual abuse scandal involving the agency that formed the group. It's a pretty somber, serious show, but sometimes they mention Timelesz's old name, Sexy Zone, and I have to stifle a laugh.
Don't know much about soccer but I found this docuseries about an Argentine football star pretty enjoyable.
A true crime docuseries about a 13-year-old Italian girl who went missing in 2010 and her body was found a few months later. Don't know if I'll finish it, just a really awful, sad story.
Another tough watch, about women who became escorts in Mexico City and were trafficked and murdered.
An A&E miniseries about how the Houston PD formed a bilingual Latino homicide unit when the rate of Latin murder cases skyrocketed in the late '70s, interesting story but also depressing in how it took such an extreme situation for those people to get those jobs.
A couple years ago there was a whole viral thing about Mormon wives talking about swinging and partner swapping on TikTok, and unsurprisingly they were all game to star in a Hulu reality show. I understand the fascination with Mormon culture but mostly these are just normal suburban moms and it feels like they're all trying to be the Kardashians here.
There are so many mafia movies and TV shows that it kind of gets hard to separate the real history from the pop culture depictions, so I enjoyed this docuseries, which, naturally, was narrated by someone from "The Sopranos," Michael Imperioli.
"The Sopranos" has been a cultural blind spot for me for a long time, I only just started watching the series this year. So I enjoyed this 2-part HBO doc that delves into David Chase and the show's other writers' lives and personal experiences that inspired the show, and some pretty great stories about getting the show off the ground and anecdotes about how hard James Gandolfini worked on the show, how kind he was to the people he worked with, and the toll playing Tony Soprano took on him.
This 3-part Paramount+ documentary is light on starpower -- just about only frontmen of major bands who did interviews were Poison's Bret Michaels (who, of course, sang the song the show is named after) and Great White's Jack Russell, who just died last month. But there's still a wealth of really good stories from industry guys like Tom Zutaut and Alan Niven and sidemen like GNR's Steven Adler and Kix's Brian Forsythe (who I myself
interviewed last year). Still, a pretty entertaining overview of the era with some very memorable stories. Quiet Riot's Rudy Sarzo was on tour with Ozzy Osbourne when Randy Rhoades died, and his stories about Ozzy's grief and remorse are really touching.
In 1989, a scientist discovered tons of gold on a shipwreck in the Atlantic Ocean. I'm really a nature doc geek because I was a lot less interested in this than National Geographic's other recent docs that were just about ocean life.
It feels like the days of every "Daily Show" correspondent getting their own "Daily Show"-style series are long gone, so I'm glad that Roy Wood Jr. got a show on CNN but they've adapted a UK panel show instead of doing another evening news satire. These shows that rely a little more on improv than writing are inherently less consistently funny, but I enjoyed the first episode, Wood is a great host.
This show tells a pretty wild story but I feel like it only got made because people want to have "the next 'Tiger King'" and after a while it's just depressing to hear about this woman's antics.
This is British comedian Jack Whitehall's second reality show with his dad after "Travels With My Father," now about him having a kid. And so much of it just feels contrived to put them into "funny" situations that I just don't find it charming at all, it's just another heavily staged reality show except it's trying to make you laugh.
A reality show that tries to be clever with a thing where contestants interact in real and then also interact on the internet via anonymous screennames, but I don't know, the whole thing just feels stupid. It's also confusing how they sprinkle in some minor celebrities and people from other shows (including Andy King from the Fyre Festival doc) into a group of otherwise unknown people.
A reality show about four African American families who decide to live in Africa. I don't really have an opinion about what they're doing, but the way the Americans talked about living in Africa in this show made me cringe a lot.
