TV Diary
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Lena Dunham is more talented as a writer than as a performer, but making someone else the lead actor in her projects isn't an instant upgrade -- Sharp Stick for instance was terrible. "Too Much" really benefits from Megan Stalter from "Hacks" playing the lead in Dunham's very autobiographical new series, though (Dunham is also in there as the main character's sister). As far as Netflix shows that trace the messy yet charming arc of the beginning of a relationship, "Too Much" ranks somewhere below "Love" and "Nobody Wants This," Dunham's signature pathological self-obsessed oversharing eventually kinds of overwhelms the show and makes it exhausting, but Stalter's great.
b) "Smoke"
Both the times I've seen Taron Egerton play American characters were on Apple TV+ dramas, "Black Bird" and now "Smoke," and both times I feel like I can't tell if his American accent's bad or if he was just miscast as a character that he's not very believable at playing. It's actually gotten worse with each progressive episode, because the rest of the cast is spot on. Jurnee Smollett playing a total badass is great, I think she's ready to be the lead in a big action movie.
I feel like Carrie Coon is the latest great actor who's been underserved by "The White Lotus," she never gives a bad performance but it felt like she just got a couple good scenes out of a character that ultimately felt like filler in an overstuffed ensemble. So I'm glad HBO still has her doing great work as the politely manipulative and scheming Bertha Russell on "The Gilded Age" as well, and she gets to wear big crazy hats too.
"The Buccaneers" is set only maybe a decade earlier than "The Gilded Age," but it's more deliberately soapy with a modern soundtrack, not nearly as good a show but I enjoy it too. Adding Leighton Meester to the cast almost isn't fair, as if the show wasn't already full of devastatingly pretty faces. What's interesting, though, is that right now I think the show's most interesting romantic subplot is the one between two of the oldest members of the cast, Amelia Bullmore and Greg Wise have great chemistry.
I forgot how much I liked this show, glad it came back for a second season since you never know with British shows. Kat Sadler is brilliant and Carla Woodcock and Freddie Meredith are probably the most consistently funny members of the cast.
f) "Aniela"
This Polish series does the 'rich person's life and marriage fall apart' thing that we've seen in a million shows, but the first episode is pretty memorable and gripping, great unhinged performance from Malgorzata Kozuchowska.
A pretty promising French mystery thriller on Netflix starring Isabelle Adjani, I'm not far enough in it to make much of a judgment but I'm intrigued by the premise of a woman finding out the man she's accused of killing was her father.
A good old-fashioned heist show from Spain on Hulu, lots of beautiful scenery and good uses of music and Silvia Alonso is gorgeous.
i) "Olympo"
Teen dramas from other countries feel a little less self-consciously silly than the ones in America, this Spanish show about elite athletes at a training facility is pretty good.
Another show from Spain! A pretty good workplace comedy about a teacher at a cutthroat prestigious school, Cecilia Suarez is beautiful and they put her in these big goofy glasses to unconvincingly deglamorize her on some She's All That shit.
This Danish series on Netflix does a good job of just presenting the human-level consequences of sea levels rising without being overtly about 'climate change.'
A Japanese show about a charming, charismatic murderer, doesn't really put an interesting spin on the concept like "You" so I got bored with it quickly.
A charming Taiwanese show about a woman who turns her life into a standup comedy routine.
I love a good "former spy gets pulled into a mystery" plot, and this is about a retired Italian intelligence officer who investigates her son's death.
Another good trope is "former gangster goes back to his old life for revenge," and this Korean show about a guy avenging his brother has some pretty great action scenes.
There are a ton of new shows and features about sharks on Netflix and Nat Geo this month, I thought maybe they were just trying to steal Shark Week from Discovery, but I guess it's mainly because of the 50th anniversary of Jaws. This Netflix reality competition is probably the silliest of all the new shark shows, where teams go under water and compete to find and photograph different types of sharks. My wife and kids used to play Pokemon Snap a lot, so this kind of reminds me of a real world version of that.
Based on the name I figured this was just a "Making The Band" knockoff or rebranding that wanted to avoid the stigma of being associated with Diddy. But I actually really like this because the whole concept is that singers choose each other to start groups with, so the whole thing is built on mutual appreciation more than competition from the jump. It's still a little derivative (it's sort of like "Love Is Blind" crossed with "The Voice"), but it works, and AJ McLean was always my favorite Backstreet Boy, he's a good host. I haven't gotten to the episodes featuring Liam Payne yet but I like that they did a nice message remembering him at the top of the first episode.
r) "Virgins"
This TLC docuseries about people in their 20s, 30s, or 40s who haven't had sex is oddly kind of heartwarming and empathetic, just telling these stories about their lives and why they're still virgins, showing their attempts to go on dates and find love. Despite the title and the concept, it feels like the show really treats everyone with dignity and doesn't reduce them to their virginity.
A sort of NBC news magazine series profiling people who survived storms and natural disasters. The first episode is about the 2011 Joplin tornado and tornado stories are always interesting to me, those things are terrifying.
t) "The Snake"
I kinda miss Jim Jeffries having his own shows, but it feels a little like a waste of his talent to have him host a Fox reality show that's a blatant knockoff of "The Traitors.
I feel like police finding a bunch of cocaine on a private jet can't be such an unusual occurrence for it to be a whole Netflix docuseries, like doesn't this kind of thing happen all the time?
A wealthy Argentinian woman was found strangled to death in her home in 2006, and the murder is still unsolved. Again, it feels like Netflix barely had enough story here for a film but managed to milk it for a whole miniseries.
Now, a crooked mortician accused of fraud and desecrating bodies, that's a docuseries, it's clear HBO Max still really knows how to do this kind of thing a lot better than the docs that Netflix craps out.
The Philippines is such a unique and interesting nation and it's been on the world stage for some pretty bleak reasons in recent years, so it's nice to see a Netflix series just celebrating its arts and music and cuisine and culture.
I haven't seen Jane Seymour in anything in a long time, it's nice to see her doing well and hosting this show where people go through their ancestry and kind of openly confront some of the more complicated and sordid stories they find.
I have a vague memory of the original "Walking With Dinosaurs" from 1999, I guess this is the same basic idea, I guess it's pretty scientifically accurate but I hate the visual style of the CGI dinosaurs.
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