TV Diary
In my last TV Diary I wrote about "A Thousand Blows," a pretty good new show starring Stephen Graham and Erin Doherty, and both of them are also in this really remarkable Netflix miniseries. Graham plays the father of a 13-year-old boy accused of murder, and Doherty is in one episode as a psychologist assigned to work with the kid. That may be the single best episode of television I've seen so far this year, just incredible writing and acting. Director Philip Barantini made a film starring Graham called Boing Point that was all one 92-minute continuous shot, and a whole lot of the scenes in "Adolescence" last several minutes, maybe longer, I never kept count, but it's really technical impressive stuff on top of the very sobering subject matter and subtle storytelling.
b) "Dope Thief"
So far in the first two episodes, "Dope Thief" seems to conform to a familiar style of prestige TV, the crime drama where the protagonists are violent criminals who are given enough sympathetic qualities for you to root for them, or at least want to watch what happens to them. And Bryan Tyree Henry is, in my opinion, one of the best actors working today, so I love the idea of him having a Tony Soprano-type antihero to play. But then, in "Dope Thief," Henry and Wagner Moura play two friends who pose as as DEA agents to rob drug dealers, which seems like such an absurdly dangerous hustle that there's really no suspense when a job goes bad in the first episode and they get into some deep shit. Again, though, Henry's performance is just so beautifully nuanced and emotive that I'm enjoying it. And the first episode was directed by Ridley Scott, who's produced a lot of television over the years but hadn't actually directed a TV episode since 1969.
Amanda Seyfried has a pretty good career by any standard, including an Oscar nomination and an Emmy win, but I feel like we should be seeing her in more and better things, she's so talented. "Long Bright River" is a good complex role in a dark story that can really show what she can do as a dramatic actress, she plays a beat cop who's trying to investigate the death of a homeless girl. But it's a very dour and depressing show, I don't find myself in a rush to watch more after I finish an episode.
"Grosse Pointe Garden Society" is a new show from the creator of "Good Girls" and has a bit of that same vibe of normal suburbanites getting mixed up in some serious criminal situations, but it's a little more soapy in a playful, self-aware way. Melissa Fumero, who was on "One Life To Live" before she starred in "Brooklyn Nine-Nine," probably has the exact perfect background to star in a show like this.
e) "Deli Boys"
A pretty good new sitcom on Hulu about two Pakinstani-American brothers who inherit their father's business and learn that it was a front for a criminal empire. Saagar Shaikh is really funny on here, and I always liked Poorna Jagannathan in "Never Have I Ever," happy to see her in another series regular role.
The CW has felt like a zombie network that barely exists anymore, the few new shows they have are imported from Canada or co-produced with networks from other countries. "Good Cop/Bad Cop," for instance, takes place in America but is fully filmed in Queensland and airs in Australia on a network called Stan (which just cracks me up...Stan). But it does star an MVP of The CW's glory days, Leighton Meester, and it's an enjoyably cheesy comedy about two sibling police detectives who become partners despite having very different working methods.
The NBC drama "The Hunting Party" is about a bunch of prisoners escaping after a mysterious prison explosion, and the FBI agent who then has to track down all the escaped killers and psychopaths, one in each episode, a very hacky and old-fashioned kind of network show. Colleen Foy is really good in the episode where they're tracking down a female serial killer, but it's pretty formulaic stuff.
h) "Watson"
Morris Chestnut plays Dr. Watson, sidekick of Sherlock Holmes, returning to his medical practice after Holmes's death, but he's a very sexy Dr. Watson who sometimes needs to take his shirt off for half a scene just to change into another shirt. It's a weird mix of generic medical procedural and Sherlock lore, but I dunno, this is exactly the kind of thing CBS should be airing, I think.
This is about David and Goliath, mostly from David's perspective in the run up to their battle, feels like Amazon Prime is leaning into making more shows that will appeal to "The Wheel of Time" and "The Rings of Power" viewers, and this one feels a little more normal scale and not a megabudget waste of money.
j) "Suits LA"
I watched every episode of "Suits" when it originally aired on USA and it was just this underrated, highly watchable basic cable drama, and I was amused when it belatedly became a huge hit on Netflix. By that point the producers had already attempted one pretty good short-lived spinoff centered on Gina Torres' character, but now that people really think there's money to be made, NBC has a west coast-based spinoff. What really made the original "Suits" work was the cast chemistry, and it doesn't really feel like the "Suits LA" captures that dynamic at all, even if creator Aaron Korsh made the tone consistent with the old show, and a couple of familiar faces from the original "Suits" do show up now and then. I'm happy to see the gorgeous Baltimore native Lex Scott Davis in a lead role, though, wishing all the best for her.
I've never been someone who considers "The White Lotus" one of the best shows on TV, it feels like Mike White is kind of cynically pressing the buttons to make a titillating, zeitgeisty HBO watercooler show. That said, he gets great actors and often gives them really entertaining dialogue, so all he has to do is cast Carrie Coon and Walton Goggins and Parkey Posey and I'm happy on board for another season. I never find the big death scene reveal at the end of the season to be particularly interesting, but I like watching the characters careen towards some kind of climactic catastrophe.
l) "Reacher"
Still a pretty fun show, not tired at all of the big man getting into scrapes and beating people up, and Alan Ritchson is a good enough actor to make that character not a total caricature. I like that British actress Sonya Cassidy from "Lodge 49" joined the cast this season, but the American accent she does in this show is a lot more over-the-top and fake-sounding than the one she did on that show.
Most of my teleprompting work is for events, in-house videos for companies, etc., so I only very occasionally work on anything that gets aired on national television. But I spent several days in December and January working on the second season of this CNN docuseries, and I did the prompter for pretty much every host segment where Jake Tapper speaks directly to camera, and some of the ads and a little of the voiceover stuff too. It was an exhausting but fun shoot (great craft services tables too, lots of avocado toast). So far two episodes of the season have aired and it's been cool to see stuff I worked on in the full context of the episode, the Enron episode in particular did a really good job of explaining a story that I never really took the time to understand back when it was all over the news.
I have a lot of lingering affection for Meghan Markle because, again, I watched every episode of "Suits," and I don't remotely care about the British royal family enough to understand half the reasons people now love or hate her. But doing a Martha Stewart-style lifestyle show on Netflix definitely seems like a listless experiment in her trying to find some way to stay in show business even if she's no longer acting, I dunno, the vibe is weird.
o) "Extracted"
A Fox reality show where amateur survivalists are dropped into the Canadian wilderness. Not really my thing but I like that they took normal people who have never been on TV and let them pick friends or family members to be on their teams, I feel like this would become a completely obnoxious show if it involved celebrities or 'reality TV all-stars.'
The latest ambitious nature doc miniseries from the producers of "Planet Earth" is narrated by Tom Hanks, which was a really great choice. I'm still amazed how they can do so many of these docs around the world and I still feel like I'm seeing some locations and species of animals for the first time, this is stupid to say but wow, Earth is so immense and beautiful.
This Spanish series on Apple TV+ is about two people who meet at a funeral, a good funny character-driven show with really engaging leads, Veronica Echegui and Joan Armagos.
r) "Berlin ER"
One of my favorite things about watching foreign shows on streaming services is that they usually still have the title card with the show's name in the country where it was produced. So when I put on "Berlin ER" on Apple TV+, the title card flashed onscreen as "KRANK BERLIN" (translation: "Sick Berlin"), which I liked a lot more. A pretty good show, if you're enjoying the medical drama adrenaline of "The Pitt" right now and could use more of that, I would recommend this show.
A charming Polish show on Netflix about an MMA fighter's trials and tribulations as a mother.
This Taiwanese show is one of the few Asian imports on Netflix that feels like an HBO-grade prestige drama, about the friendships and tensions between several actresses at different levels of success.
u) "Adoration"
Another Netflix import that feels a little higher quality than usual, based on an Italian novel about the disappearance of a teenage girl, very textured and emotional storytelling, doesn't feel like the kind of formulaic "missing or dead teenager" show I've seen on American TV a dozen times.
I haven't watched all of this Netflix drama about a famous 1981 bank heist in Barcelona, but the first episode is really well done, I love how they drop you into the action and let you watch it all unfold.
This telenovela starts out with a good premise but I feel like it went off the rails and lost my attention pretty quickly, it's just not a style of storytelling or pacing that I'm used to.
This has a similar premise to the movie Return To Me (a person falls in love with a heart transplant recipent who got their dead spouse's heart), but with a supernatural twist where the guy has the memories of the person whose heart is now in house body. Sweet but kinda cheesy.
This feels a bit like Thailand's answer to "Black Mirror," an anthology series about near future dystopian scenarios involving technology's effect on society. Some of the satire is really heavy-handed, though, even in comparison to "Black Mirror."
I started watching this Netflix series and it was [retty compelling but I dunno, I feel like I should read the novel one of these days before I get through an adaptation.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, March 19, 2025 at 12:45 PM.
You can skip to the end and leave a response.
No comment
Post a Comment