TV Diary
a) "Zero Day"
Robert De Niro is one of the few movie stars left where it actually feels like a big deal to see him do series television, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be good -- De Niro's been in some real garbage when he's not working with great directors. "Zero Day" on Netflix is a conspiracy thriller about a massive cyber attack bringing America to a standstill, with De Niro as a popular former president. The pedigree of the creators is promising and there's a good cast around him (Angela Bassett, Jesse Plemons, Lizzie Caplan) but the whole story just feels kind of vague and simplistic. There are a couple of episodes in the middle where things start to get very bleak and morally gray and it's a more compelling show, but then it kind of ends with a shrug, like they wanted to keep the story open-ended for a potential second season, but didn't actually leave anybody wanting more.
b) "The Pitt"
"The Pitt" is, by some distance, the best new show I've seen so far this year. It takes place in an emergency room and stars Noah Wyle, so the "ER" comparisons are inevitable, but I think the cast and crew have really done a remarkable job of putting their own stamp on the realistic medical drama genre. The "24"-style conceit is that each episode is one hour in real time of a 15-hour shift. 9 episodes in, I already feel so completely exhausted on behalf of the characters, especially after the last couple of amazing episodes. It's not over-the-top realism -- there's some comic relief, like Gerran Howell's character, who keeps having to change his scrubs because of one mishap with bodily fluids after another. But they also really keep hitting you with this grim situations that are day-to-day life for these doctors.
Mindy Kaling co-created this Netflix sitcom with Jeanie Buss, with Kate Hudson running a basketball team loosely based on the Lakers. And I really just enjoy the sitcoms Kaling makes, she's not quite on a Tina Fey level but there's a good snappy rhythm to the jokes. I kinda wish they could just make fun of Chet Hanks types without literally hiring Chet Hanks, but he's funny I guess.
d) "Toxic Town"
This Netflix miniseries is about a historic toxic waste case in Corby, England, where lots of kids were being born with birth defects. Most of the plot takes place in the mid-'90s, and there's lots of nostalgic Britpop-era needledrops, but obviously the story is pretty dark. I don't know, maybe it has the same effect as "Yellowjackets" for a British viewer, but I doubt it. .
I live in Prince Georges County, Maryland, one of the most affluent majority Black counties in America. And I guess that's a smart place to set a Black soap opera about feuding rich people in gated communities. CBS's new daytime soap opera takes place the fictitious PG County town Fairmont Crest (the real life inspiration Fairmount Heights is about 20 minutes away). And I've enjoyed watching the first couple episodes and learning about the characters and their vendettas, although I doubt I'll ever keep up with it regularly, that's just a big time commitment.
I've never watched "Peaky Blinders" and I may rectify that eventually, but I really like this new show from "Peaky Blinders" creator Steven Knight. Apparently there was an all-female crime syndicate called the Forty Elephants in 19th century London, and Erin Doherty plays the leader of the gang and I'm just smitten with her. Mostly the show is about her being involved in a bare knuckle boxing ring, so Malachi Kirby and Stephen Graham are really the leads, but the whole thing is pretty entertaining.
g) "Doc"
In the first episode of Fox's new medical drama "Doc," Molly Parker plays a doctor who gets a brain injury in a car crash and loses 8 and a half years of memories -- meaning in her mind it's 2016 and she thinks Barack Obama is still the POTUS. I feel like this could've been played for laughs well but they treat is as this serious storyline where she wakes up and sees her ex-husband and doesn't known they're divorced now. And then after a few episodes a lot of that stuff stops being the focal point and it's just a generic medical drama about her cases. I adore Molly Parker and am happy she's on a hit show that just got renewed for a second season, but it's not a very good show.
Kat Dennings is someone else I adore who was on a crappy network show, "2 Broke Girls," for six seasons. And I want better for her, but I don't think she wants better for herself, because now she's on an even worse show starring Tim Allen. I feel worse for Seann William Scott, though, because he just had a pretty good show, "Welcome to Flatch," canceled a year ago, and now he's third banana on this show and they don't even show him in the ads, I was completely surprised when he popped up in the first episode.
This Tubi sitcom is all about the generation gaps between Gen X and zoomers at an ad agency. As with any show pitting the young versus the old, some of the humor is really obvious, but it's a decent show, it's got potential, and I always like seeing Mark McKinney from "Kids in the Hall" pop up in anything.
j) "Severance"
When production delays and the union strikes caused a nearly 3-year gap between the first two seasons of "Severance," I worried that it would become one of those great shows that completely loses momentum and never regains its audience. Instead, it just seemed to bring anticipation to a fever pitch, and "Severance" is now the first Apple TV+ show to really enter the zeitgeist since "Ted Lasso." I love how they're slowly expanding the story while keeping a lot of stuff still unknown and mysterious, using each of the main characters to tease out weird emotional situations out of the experience of being severed, and the direction and camera work lately has just been insanely creative.
k) "Shoresy"
A message popped up at the conclusion of the third season of "Shoresy" saying it was "the end of part 1 of 'Shoresy,'" and the fourth season has a similar message about 'the beginning of part 2.'" That mostly just means that the title character is no longer an active hockey player and is navigating a new phase of his life, which at least for now involves him becoming a broadcaster. I'm sad that they've ditched some great supporting characters like Sanguinet, but I love the whole dynamic between Shoresy and Laura, it's such a charming departure from the tone of the rest of the show.
This new Adult Swim show is kind of a conspiracy thriller about a guy who's on the run from big pharma after discovering a mushroom with powerful medicinal properties. There's nothing about the story that really necessitates or lends itself to the show being animated, and I wonder if I'd like it more if it were live action, but it's really good as is.
Pixar's first series got a load of bad advance publicity when it got out that they'd removed a storyline about a transgender character before finalizing the series. Typical Disney cowardice, it sucks, the show is okay I guess. It's about a middle school softball team, it doesn't have as much of a conceptual hook as most Pixar movies but it's mostly up to their usual standard in terms of the visuals and storytelling.
Easily one of the funniest shows on TV, and I like that Harley and Ivy relocated to Metropolis for this season, it really just opens up the field for a whole difference set of jokes and DC Comics references.
This docuseries about last years U.S. Olympic basketball team is really great stuff. Just the behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with these athletes would be interesting by itself, but they do a good job of rolling out a compelling narrative about how the '90s 'dream team' inspired the rest of the world to take basketball more seriously so now the American team has more genuine competition than it used to.
This Apple TV+ docuseries is kind of an inversion of "Court of Gold" as you watch American soccer fight to be taken as seriously as the sport is taken in the rest of the world.
"Selling The City" is the latest NYC-based spinoff from Netflix's real estate reality franchise that started with "Selling Sunset." And everybody is really hot in a very Instagram way, I don't like a lot of reality TV but sometimes I put on this show and just stare slackjawed at everybody.
Each episode of this Hulu show profiles a differnet celebrity guest and their relationship with food and their family background. The first episode is with the lovely Florence Pugh, and I'm not going to say she's less attractive with her current haircut, because she's still Florence Pugh. But when I first saw her in an ad for this show in a fast montage, I genuinely thought she was Hillary Clinton.
I think the public fascination with "scammers" has really peaked at this point, and I kind of get it, it's true crime but usually doesn't involve anything really depressing or violence, it's all scandal and schadenfreude. This Freeform show profiles a different scammer in each episode, and while I don't think they're going to run out of people to make episodes about anytime soon, it's almost a waste because most of these stories could be its own series.
Netflix's recent "Apple Cider Vinegar" is one of the best scripted shows in recent memory about a scammer, and they followed it up a few weeks later with a docuseries about Belle Gibson. I'm glad they were released in that order, I liked being able to watch the fictionalized version and then see the real thing, I wouldn't have enjoyed vice versa as much.
Likewise, this CNN docuseries followed a few weeks after the scripted Peacock miniseries "Lockerbie: A Search for Truth," and I enjoyed being able to see the real footage after the thing I'd seen dramatized.
Like many people I followed the Gabby Petito saga before her body was discovered and before the boyfriend that killed her committed suicide, so there wasn't a lot in the Netflix docuseries that was totally new information. But just watching it and hearing from her friends and family was really emotional, I teared up a few times, it's just such a horribly sad story. Unfortunately, Petito's family gave Netflix permission to create an AI deepfake of Gabby's voice to use in the series, which I found really distasteful.
The channel I tend to leave the TV on is MTV Live (for some reason we don't have MTV Hits but we have that one), while my wife tends to leave it on the History Channel. Obviously there's good stuff on there, which she watches sometimes, but she also likes the the "Ancient Aliens" stuff that I can't stand. So sometimes it's nice to be reminded History Channel airs legitimate History Channel type stuff, and I liked this recent Thomas Jefferson docuseries they started airing on Presidents Day.
A pretty good doscuseries PBS aired during Black History Month, it's interesting to get the whole timeline of how Jim Crow and civil rights legislation and all these other cultural and economic forces sort of shaped the distribution of the African American population across the country.
y) "Asia"
It seems to depend on where you watch it if this is part of the ongoing "Planet Earth" franchise and called "Planet Earth: Asia" or is just a standalone David Attenborough nature doc called "Asia." Either way, I never get tired of watching this stuff, it rules, And Attenborough is 98, so I really appreciate that he's still doing anything at all.
The last few weeks of "SNL" 50th anniversary specials and documentaries have been really fun for me as a comedy nerd, most of it's just been great (one exception was the "SNL 50 Rewind: The Early Years" special, which felt like a cheapo thing an E! channel producer could've thrown together in one afternoon). Coming down from all that last weekend with a really mediocre Shane Gillis-hosted episode was a buzzkill, but I really like the cast right now, I'm glad the show still has some life in it from week to week in this milestone year.
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