TV Diary
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a) "Stick"
I will always love Owen Wilson for Dignan from Bottle Rocket, so "Stick" won me over immediately with his character who's a little bit of a middle-aged Dignan, but with a backstory that's more like Luke Wilson's character from The Royal Tenenbaums. In terms of the pretty high bar a lot of Apple TV+ shows have set, it feels like a very simple, unambitious show, but it's grown on me a lot. Pretty much the whole show is 5 characters driving around in an RV, and I enjoy the interactions between pretty much amy pair of those characters, it's a great little ensemble cast. But the golf prodigy Santi (Peter Dager) is the reason all of those people have been brought together, and he's by far the least likeable character and least likeable actor in the show, especially after being a seriously irredeemable little shit in the last episode.
b) "Ironheart"
Disney+'s MCU series have been really hit or miss, and given that Ryan Coogler is an exec producer on "Ironheart," which centers on a character that was in Wakanda Forever, and has a bunch of actors I usually enjoy, I hoped this would be one of the good ones. But my feelings are pretty mixed after the first three episodes. The main character has an AI assistant who looks and acts like her dead best friend, which is certainly a timely premise, but I don't care for the way that
c) "Revival"
Melanie Scrofano battled reincarnated dead people for four seasons on "Wynonna Earp," one of my favorite SyFy of the past ten years. So I'm happy that she's back in another SyFy show about people rising from the dead, nothing wrong with having a niche. And this show has a different tone and premise, apparently it's based on an Image Comics series, I'm enjoying the creepy small town Wisconsin atmosphere and the ensemble cast.
Kevin Williamson has created some very popular properties including the Scream movies and "Dawson's Creek" and I've seen very very little of his work. Maybe a couple episodes of a show he did with Kevin Bacon a decade ago? I don't know about "The Waterfront," Jake Weary and Humberly Gonzalez have a lot of chemistry so I end up paying attention to their scenes and then tuning out a lot of the rest of the time, which means they're really not utilizing Holt McCallany well.
e) "Patience"
I like seeing shows like 2022's "As We See It" where characters on the autism spectrum are played by actors on the spectrum, and Ella Maisy Purvis plays the title character on "Patience," a British show about an autistic archivist in a criminal records department who starts to help a police detective solve crimes. It's so easy to imagine an American version of this show where it's a totally formulaic procedural that depicts Patience's talent as a gimmicky superpower, so I appreciate the subtle and sensitive way this show approaches the story.
This is a downbeat Australian drama about the family of a teenager who died in a storm in Tasmania. My wife and I had our honeymoon in Australia and I have particularly fond memories of the day or two we spent in Tasmania, so I like seeing it onscreen even if that's not really at all the point here.
"We Were Liars" is based on a YA novel and reminds me a lot of stuff I've seen before about people leading scandalous lives in beautiful idyllic places, especially the way they keep teasing some big catalyzing event without telling you right away what happened. And I have to say I'm probably not sufficiently curious enough to keep watching to learn more.
h) "Countdown"
My wife loves Jensen Ackles from "Supernatural" so I was like hey let's watch his new Amazon show, but she tuned out well before the end of the first episode and I didn't last much longer, really rote crime drama stuff.
i) "The Bear"
Like a lot of people, I've been a little less interested with "The Bear" with each passing season, but I haven't bailed on season 4 or started to actively dislike it like some have. I do think it'd be good if it stopped winning comedy categories at award shows and/or got moved to drama categories, though. Out of the first six episodes of the season that I've watched, I didn't laugh at all until the third episode, although I did laugh pretty hard at that one on multiple occasions. And I haven't seen any self-indulgent episodes that made me despair like S2E7 or S3E1, although Syd's more serious storylines are a lot more compelling than Carmy's at this point. I liked when Carmy finally set a repeating menu, though, that was a nice moment of rare actual character development. Generally, I still like the cast and their characters and the atmosphere and really effective use of music, the episode with Talk Talk and Pretenders songs was especially good.
j) "Iyanu"
This Cartoon Network series about an orphan who discovers she has mystic powers has a pretty cool visual style. I feel like my kids might dig this one but I haven't gotten them to watch it yet. It's already a hit, though, and recently got renewed for a second season, and some Baltimore guys from a production company called Blakwater Music do a lot of the music for the series, happy to see them doing well.
k) "Moonrise"
This Netflix anime series is about a lunar rebellion, which is just an awesome premise, although I'm not that into the animation style.
l) "Go!"
A South African show on Netflix about a sprinter going to an elite school on a scholarship, didn't really take much of an interest in it after sampling an episode.
m) "Caught"
New Jersey novelist Harlan Coben's books have sold 90 million copies, and since 2018 he's had a huge production deal with Netflix that has adapted at least a dozen of his books into series, all limited series that run 5 to 8 episodes, some American productions and some made in France or Poland or Argentina, which is where "Caught" was made. And I have no idea if any of these shows are particularly popular even by Netflix standards, I've never heard anybody talk about any of them, my only knowledge of any of this stuff is seeing it pop up on my Netflix menu. "Caught" is pretty dour, I didn't get too far with it.
"Just One Look" is another Harlen Coben adaptation, I think the third or fourth Polish production, so maybe they really love this stuff in Poland. This one is about a woman whose husband has disappeared, I found it a little more interesting than most of the Coben shows I've seen.
"Until You Burn" is a Colombian show about a guy avenging his dead brother, it's based on a very old novel but my frame of reference is that it mostly reminds me of that ABC show "Revenge."
A charming Turkish show about a guy who can see a ghost and helps them try to solve their murder, I like it and the actress Elsa Bilgic is so beautiful.
r) "Weak Hero"
This is an example of the kind of great title and premise -- an action series about a teenager who outsmarts his bigger and stronger bullies at school -- that you can get from Korea that you would never get from American TV. I've been complaining a lot lately about the trend of game shows and reality shows being hosted by actors, not totally washed-up actors but reasonably good and respected who should be doing a scripted show instead. In this case, NBC's "Destination X" is hosted by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who stars in a current hit show, "The Boys," and I don't know if that makes it better or worse. I kind of like the concept of "Destination X" even if it's still pretty stupid, and some of the women on the show are really beautiful, as is often the case with these shows.
"Call Her Alex" is a two-part Hulu documentary about Alexandra Cooper, host of the "Call Her Daddy" podcast. I don't know much about all this stuff but it's one of those situations where someone is a lot more earnest about what they do than you might expect, the whole thing takes itself very seriously. One of the episode descriptions is "what starts as a sex podcast evolves into the foundation of an empire."
u) "Harlem Ice"
A nice Disney+ docuseries about a competitive figure skating team from Harlem, it's such an interesting sort of combination of athleticism and choreography.
v) "Underdogs"
I have a higher tolerance for Ryan Reynolds than a lot of people, but this Disney+ show where he does wacky voiceovers to nature footage is pretty annoying.
This show continues to feature Ryan Reynolds in agreeable small doses alongside more interesting figures like Welsh football hooligans. I like how it's a sports doc that deals with the actual games but also gives you such a wide view of the business side and the fans in the team's city, there's some really great storytelling in this show.
I don't know much about sports or sneakers but I remember how Reebok and Nike were the two big brands when I was growing up, and then at some point I realized that Nike was still huge and Reebok had fallen way behind. So it's interesting to see this show about Shaq and Allen Iverson leading Reebok's effort to be competitive again and land some big athlete endorsements, it's all about the behind-the-scenes process like that movie Air.
There are so many docuseries about cults now, and every episode of this Freeform series is about a different cult, which really shows you what an epidemic it is in America.
z) "Trainwreck"
Netflix frames each "Trainwreck" installment as a feature film but they're really not that much longer than an hour and they release a new one every week, it's really a series. Of the new season, I've watched the Rob Ford one and the Astroworld festival tragedy, and that one really made me angry. I love that some people risked their careers or their business relationships with Live Nation to talk about what happened.
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