I really like FX's new single camera sitcom "English Teacher," tonally, it reminds me a lot of some of my favorite FX comedies like "You're The Worst" or "Legit," maybe a bit of "'Community' if it took place in a high school.' A lot of the storylines in the first two episodes are the kind of "teens are so woke these days and adults don't understand them" situations that are often done in hacky and tonedeaf ways on other shows. But "English Teacher" does a good job of finding something actually funny in those situations without leaning too far into shock value or sanctimonious liberalism. Great dialogue, great performances, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Stephanie Koenig and/or Sean Patton make me laugh in almost every scene. 

"Bad Monkey" is the second time a show with Bill Lawrence as its showrunner has taken place in Florida and has paid tribute to Tom Petty in every episode. "Cougartown"'s episode titles were all Petty songs, and the first season of "Bad Monkey" features 21 Petty covers by people like Eddie Vedder, Jason Isbell and Weezer. That ingratiated me to "Bad Monkey" from the jump, but it's also just a perfect vehicle for Vince Vaughn, he plays a down-on-his-luck cop who's been suspended from the force, and gets to be that charming jerky antihero while he solves a weird mystery involving a severed arm and carries on with beautiful women. And I'm a sucker for shows that are kind of noir in a sunny locale, like "Terriers" or "Veronica Mars."

The ABC sitcom "Happy Endings" is one of those cult classics that endears me to everyone who worked on it, so I was excited to see that "Happy Endings" creator David Caspe and co-star Adam Pally created "Mr. Throwback." It's a mockumentary with Steph Curry as himself and Pally as Curry's childhood friend who grew up to be a broke dirtbag and comes back into his life. Curry is a decent comedic actor who doesn't have to do too much heavy lifting to make the show work. The whole thing was clearly filmed very quickly when Steph Curry had a little time between the end of the NBA season and the beginning of the Olympics (there's a joke about 'Hawk Tuah,' something that went viral roughly a month before the series was released), but that kind of goes along with the whole mockumentary concept of the show. 

This new Netflix series from "The End of the F***ing World" creator Charlie Covell is a high concept thing about gods and goddesses starring Jeff Goldblum as Zeus. I don't think the first episode was particularly funny, but the cast is good and I like some of the big swings they're taking with the premise. 

My main impression of the first season of "The Rings of Power" is that it didn't look or feel like the most expensive TV series ever made, and two years later it might as well not have existed. But Amazon is still committed to spending a billion dollars on at least five seasons of this thing, so it's back for a second season, and it feels a little more suitably epic and high stakes now. The beautiful Nazanin Boniadi left the show, which disappointed me, but it didn't really feel like her character's storyline was important to anything going on anyway.  

An increasingly popular trope in TV that I usually dislike is when a character dies but the actor remains on the show as a ghost or hallucination that's only visible to one other character. "Only Murders" is doing that this season with Jane Lynch's character, but so far I like it, I mean this is a comedy, they're just having fun with it. Richard Kind with an eye patch and Desmin Borges are also in the cast this season, which is promising. 

I remember seeing City of God long long ago and liking it, but not enough that I really can muster a lot of interest in this sequel series, which is well made but has such an awful title. 

A South Korean show on Netflix where a guy starts running a rental villa in a secluded forest area and this strange woman who might be a ghost shows up. I don't know what's really going on entirely here but it's cool and creepy.  

This Chinese show is a comedy about cops so I kind of expect it to be like, I dunno, "Brooklyn Nine-Nine," but its tone is often a little darker and more dramatic. Also, it's apparently a spinoff of a show I've never seen called "Marry My Dead Body." 

A few weeks ago here in Maryland, a child died when a bounce house was picked up by a strong wind and I guess hadn't been properly tied down. And I'd never thought about it before, but apparently that is something that happens, a study found 28 deaths and over 400 injuries when wind picked up moon bounces and bouncy castles. "The Accident" is a Mexican series on Netflix which begins with a fatal bounce house accident, and it becomes the catalyst for a whole community to turn on each other with violent consequences. It's the darkest thing I've ever seen where the phrase "bouncy house" is uttered hundreds of times. I'm not going to say it's campy or unintentionally funny like "The Slap," especially since it's about the kind of tragedy that has happened many times in real life, but at some point the show does feel a little over-the-top and soapy. 

A Netflix show from the Philippines that's kind of an old-fashioned star-crossed romance about two people from different socioeconomic strata that fall in love and are pulled apart by their families. 

This Netflix reality show is about a South Korean movie star, Cho Jung-seok, who dabbles in singing and playing guitar and decides he wants to go all-in on music and write and record an album in 100 days between film projects. I feel like if an American movie star did this I'd find it kind of charmless and indulgent, but not knowing this guy, I like how enthusiastic and earnest he is about it, and how he's really determined to become a songwriter and do his best, not just work with hitmakers or whatever. 

I am on the record as not particularly loving the docudrama format of combining a talking head doc with some dramatic scenes with actors. But it's done pretty well here, especially with Ed Harris as the narrator. 

I was in college when the Laci Peterson murder happened, and to be honest I tend to tune out those kinds of cases when they just become a national obsession and blanket the news. So I didn't really know that much about it until I watched this Netflix docuseries and well, shit, I know this goes without saying, but what a bleak story, what a monster Scott Peterson is. 

David Attenborough is 98 years old and still regularly coming out with new nature docuseries, I guess what he's doing isn't that strenuous so it's fine that he's still working, but his shows are always great and I'm gonna miss him when he's gone. The conceptual hook of "Secret World of Sound" is that they use powerful microphones to show you the sounds animals can hear and make to each other that usually go undetected by human ears, which is pretty cool. I also really like that Attenborough isn't just the narrator like usual, he does fun little segments speaking to the camera and interacting with animals. 

James Cameron is a partner in the deep sea exploration initiative OceanX and narrates and co-stars in this docuseries about their expeditions in the Atlantic. Cameron is kind of dry as a narrator, given his gifts as a filmmaker, but it's interesting stuff, I'm always happy to watch watch a doc about obscure ocean life. 

Nebraska has always one of Springsteen's more revered albums, relatively to its relatively muted commercial impact, and it feels like its prominence is only growing lately. Jeremy Allen White is playing Bruce in an upcoming biopic about the making of the album, and PBS ran this special hosted by Warren Zanes, who wrote a book about the album. Emmylou Harris and Lyle Lovett and Eric Church all sound fantastic covering Springsteen's songs, the Lumineers and Noah Kahan are okay too. They kinda cheat by doing the slower demo versions of some of the Born in the U.S.A. songs written during the Nebraska sessions, but that's cool too. 

MTV Live is my go-to music video channel lately, some of its concert specials and performances but it's mostly music videos. And I was surprised to see on a recent Saturday night that they were playing metal and hard rock videos. As someone who watched "Headbanger's Ball" back in the day, it put a smile on my face. I don't know why they didn't just have a host intro the videos and call it "Headbanger's Ball," but this is cool too. They're playing pretty fast and loose with their definition of 'metal,' though, I saw a Turnstile video on there. 

 

Late last year, Disney+ started running "BTS Monuments: Beyond The Star," a moderately interesting docuseries about the biggest K-pop group. Now they've followed it up with a laid back travel show about two of the group's members, Jimin and Jungkook, going on vacation. There's a few funny moments, even through the language barrier and the cultural differences, you can see that these are some good guys that have become good friends, but I also don't really care about their band so this isn't interesting at all to me. 

I guess every streaming service is going all-in on having K-pop docs these days, this one is Apple TV+'s. It's pretty good, you kind of get to see the entire South Korean music industry through the prism of three acts that are at different points in their careers. 

And Netflix has this show that's kind of a "Making The Band"-style show where young women from all over the world compete to be in a girl group that's being assembled by one of the big K-pop companies. It's interesting to see how the sausage is made, and how they kind of methodically place a lot of emphasis on dancing and choreography and don't mind if someone can barely sing if they can dance. It's also a lot more frank and empathetic than "Making The Band" ever was about how brutal this process can be and one of my favorite parts of the show was when one girl got fed up and left.