TV Diary
This Apple TV+ thriller series is about a brilliant mathematician who finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy plot. It's alright, some moderately clever plotting. I thought Leo Woodall was good in "One Day" last year but he's not entirely convincing as a math genius here, just feels like a guy saying lines.
I love watching Ben Wishaw, voice of Paddington Bear, in dark live action stuff, he shoots someone in the head and I'm like "fuck, Paddington just shot someone in the head!" This British spy series is pretty good, inevitably it's gotten compared a lot to "Slow Horses" but I think it's both better and a little more exciting and tonally different. I wish there was a bit more Sarah Lancashire, who I now adore because of her performance in "Julia."
c) "The Agency"
Another espionage thriller! There was an article about how "The Agency" represented Showtime's effort to be "cool again," and how casting Richard Gere in a supporting role was a big power play they were really proud of. "The Agency" is pretty good and does have an impressive cast, including Michael Fassbender and Jeffrey Wright, but I feel like we're over a decade past movie stars being a cheat code to a popular series, and I barely have seen anybody acknowledge this show's existence since it premiered two months ago.
I had high hopes for "American Primeval," which covers a fascinating chapter of American history, the Utah War of 1857, and has a great cast including Betty Gilpin and Shea Whigham (Saura Lightfoot-Leon, who's in both "The Agency" and "American Primeval," is also really pretty). I real don't care much for Peter Berg as a director, though, I feel like he has a very dated early 2000s visual style that's heavy on Dutch angles and an orange and teal color scheme. There are some exciting action scenes, but overall I didn't feel like the actors got a lot to work with, and it kind of felt monotonous and miserable beyond the general dark, violent nature of the story.
This came out in December and was I think the last new show I added to my list of favorite shows of 2024. "No Good Deed" is a dark comedy full of tragedy and secrets, much like Liz Feldman's previous show "Dead To Me," but that show ultimately felt like a heartwarming story about friendship and "No Good Deed" is a little more bleak to the core. Pretty good, though, excellent cast. I remember I was watching the first episode, and there was this very tense scene of Denis Leary blackmailing and threatening Ray Romano, and my wife said "is that Manny and Diego?" and it took me several seconds to realize she was referring to the woolly mammoth and saber-toothed tiger from the Ice Age movies.
f) "Laid"
Stephanie Hsu was the one Oscar-nominated actor in Everything Everywhere All The Time who didn't win, and really probably should have. And she's really great in this very funny Peacock adaptation of an Australian sitcom that was developed by Nahnatchka Khan ("Don't Trust The B----," "Fresh Off The Boat"). The premise is pretty odd (a woman realizes that every person she's ever had sex with is dying, in the order she slept with them), but they just kinda go for it.
g) "On Call"
In a new twist in the ongoing war over "The Bear" and whether every 30-minute show is a comedy and every 60-minute show is a drama, Dick Wolf has created his first 30-minute series for Amazon Prime. And it's very much a drama, but it works in shorter episodes, especially since Wolf's network shows are usually really about 43 minutes with commercials anyway, so it's not a huge difference. It's also slightly grittier and more action-packed than the average Dick Wolf cop show, Troian Bellisario leads a pretty strong cast.
I've never really heard much about the Pan Am flight that was bombed in 1988, so the story is pretty much new to me in this series where Colin Firth plays the father of one of the victims. Pretty good so far, and the scene of the actual explosion and crash is really terrifying and impressive, although most of the series is slower and more character-driven, obviously that's the only big moment like that. I feel like the name of the show feels like a book title, though, just "Lockerbie" would suffice as a name for the series (it's not even the actual name of the book the series is based on, The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father's Search for Justice).
i) "The Sticky"
Apparently Canada has an enormous strategic reserve of maple syrup in Quebec, and millions of gallons of syrup were stolen in a 2011 heist, which provided the inspiration for this Amazon Prime series. I love the premise and that it stars Margo Martindale, but I don't feel like it really lived up to its potential, it was just okay.
In between Colman Domingo's back-to-back Oscar nominations, he starred in this Netflix miniseries that I really think should've gotten more attention. He's wrongfully accused of a murder and is trying to find out who really did it but it's more of a noir thing than a "The Fugitive" knockoff, Domingo is great as always and so is the beautiful Tamsin Topolski, never seen her in any significant roles before.
This Amazon Prime anthology series has a cool concept, each episode is basically a different filmmaker and cast doing some kind of take off on a video game (or board game/tabletop game). It really falls short of its potential, though, at least in the handful of episodes I've watched. I'm not much of a gamer so I've never played or even heard of a lot of the games that episodes are based on, but I will say that the Dungeons & Dragons episode was pretty underwhelming and the Pac-Man episode was ridiculously stupid.
l) "White Lies"
A pretty promising crime thriller with Natalie Dormer from "Game of Thrones" that takes place in South Africa, I need to watch more episodes at some point.
It's pretty funny that Olympus Has Fallen has spawned an entire Has Fallen cinematic universe with multiple sequels and now a TV spinoff, but hey, it's a good excuse for some big dumb thrilling action sequences, and this show seems to be up to the same standard as the movies.
In theory, a more family-friendly Star Wars series with a quartet of children as the main protagonists is not a bad idea, but I really found "Skeleton Crew" irritating and charmless, with Jude Law kind of saddled with the role of an amateur Jedi babysitter.
Netflix has a billion shows created by the mystery novelist Harlan Coben and this has been one of the more compelling ones I've seen, starts with a detective finding her fiance who'd disappeared a decade ago when he pops up on a dating app.
p) "Cross"
This Netflix series based on the Alex Cross novels stars Aldis Hodge and is definitely a big improvement on the movie where Tyler Perry played Cross.
I've never seen British actress Tamara Lawrance in anything before, apparently she's done a lot of theater, mostly Shakespeare, but she's great in this series about a UK detective who goes back to Jamaica, where she was born.
I'm a fan of James Gunn's more overtly comedic DC stuff like "Peacemaker" and The Suicide Squad, but this animated series is a little underwhelming, I just haven't clicked with it. Also it's so ridiculous and off-putting the way an animated Gunn appears in the opening credits, like, get over yourself, dude.
Pretty good recent animated series on Netflix, Bowen Yang is definitely a natural for cartoon voice acting.
I generally don't like this "Castlevania" spinoff as much as the original series, but it's alright.
u) "Asura"
This Japanese series is probably the best foreign language show I've seen on Netflix in a while, sharp dialogue and compelling, well rounded characters. It takes place in 1979, and apparently it's adapted from a show that originally aired in Japan in '79.
One of Apple TV+'s better imports, a German show about a family looking for their missing daughter that has an odd, quirky black comedy tone.
This docuseries is pretty enjoyable, instead of the usual "SNL" retrospective, they zero in on a very specific topic (cast member auditions, the writing staff, the "more cowbell sketch," the 1985-86 season) for each episode. If anything I honestly wish there were more than four episodes, because there are so many other stories from the past 50 years, they're only scratching the surface. But, like, even as someone who's never been a huge fan of "more cowbell" and rolls my eyes when people reference it (as a drummer I feel like it's taken away a fun instrument I'd use more if it wasn't such a running joke), it was interesting to see the whole thing broken down for an hour. They even talked to Blue Oyster Cult and their producers (nobody can agree whether the drummer or one of the producers played the cowbell on "Don't Fear The Reaper," or even if it was actually a woodblock). And the one person they didn't talk to is Christopher Walken, who apparently regards the sketch as an albatross.
"Human vs Hamster," hosted by Sarah Sherman, joins "Is It Cake?" in the pantheon of real game shows hosted by "Saturday Night Live" cast members that feel like they should be "SNL" game show sketches. It's really pretty entertaining to watch people try to do the same things hamsters do, and Sherman is a great choice to host something this absurd.
Another game show with a host from "SNL," Colin Jost. I'm much more well versed in pop culture trivia than the kind of general knowledge that regular "Jeopardy!" centers on, so I watch it like "Finally, a version of this show where I know almost every answer and can easily imagine myself winning!" I don't like that they have three teams of three competing instead of three individuals, though, that's a really unnecessary change.
A pretty stupid little quiz show based on the contestants' knowledge of the show "Friends." Another one where I can play along at home and get most of the questions right, at least when they pertain to the first few years, I didn't really watch the later seasons.
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on Monday, January 27, 2025 at 10:52 AM.
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