I feel like Netflix has pinned their hopes on The Revenant screenwriter Mark L. Smith being their Taylor Sheridan who will bring them some big popular red state dramas. I like "Untamed," a murder mystery set in Yosemite National Park, a bit more than Smith's other Netflix series from a few months ago, "American Primeval," Eric Bana and Sam Neill are good leads and the story has some decent twists and big emotional moments. I'm glad it got renewed because it feels like a potentially good longterm vehicle for Bana and Lily Santiago than a one-off or miniseries.
Sterling K. Brown is one of the best actors in television right now so this show really comes alive when he's onscreen, but it's really just a small supporting role. Pretty good show, though, based on an award-winning novel about a guy who flees a Barbados sugar plantation in the early 1800s, and Iola Evans is really beautiful.
This Netflix show reminds me of a lot of other shows where a young housewife moves to a new town and gets mixed up with an affluent community full of dark secrets, this one takes place in Texas and is specifically about gun-toting Christian conservatives but otherwise fits right into a familiar formula. It's reasonably entertaining, though.
d) "Leanne"
Apparently Leanne Morgan had a Netflix standup special that was pretty popular (though I don't think I'd seen her before other than a small roll in the recent Will Ferrell movie You're Cordially Invited), so they gave her a sitcom created by Chuck Lorre. As a longtime Lorre apologist, I found it moderately enjoyable but it's the same old same old, basically "Two And A Half Men" with female leads.
This show is based on a Stephen King novel, it's about teenagers with telekinesis and other powers who get taken to some mysterious school, kind of a more sinister X-Men premise I guess. The theme song is a slow, ominous cover of a Tears For Fears hit besides "Mad World," I rolled my eyes pretty hard at that, but otherwise it seems like it might get good. Jason Diaz really has a powerful screen presence in this, I was surprised to look him up and see that he's mostly known for CW shows.
A Disney Channel sitcom about three high school girls who start a garage band and then become hugely successful. Some of the jokes are pretty cheesy but it's reasonably charming, some of the songs are catchy, and judging from Disney Channel history, at least one of these girls is going to be a huge A-list celebrity in ten years.
"The Amazing World of Gumball" is a classic in my household, my third favorite animated series of the 2010s, and Cartoon Network stopped making new episodes in 2019. Hulu's 'new' "The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball" is fully just the exact same show with a slightly different title. And that's not a complaint at all, it's still delightfully absurd with a great distinctive visual style.
h) "Karma"
This Korean series is one of those crime thrillers where a bunch of strangers become connected through a series of coincidences, secrets, and tragedies, this kind of thing has been done better before but it's pretty good.
This Spanish series on Netflix takes place in the 1880s and is kind of a more playful irreverent kind of romantic period drama that breaks the fourth wall, I like it.
A Mexican show about a family who forges a will when the husband and father dies, kind of a soapy dark comedy, not really to my taste.
Netflix already did a documentary about the famous 2003 Beligum diamond heist that I didn't watch, but I enjoyed
l) "Hitmakers"
It's well known that labels will often put together 'songwriting camps' where writers and producers try to put together material for a big star's next album, sometimes collaborating but also competing with each other to come up with the songs that the artist will actually end up releasing. That's a fascinating part of the music industry and I love that Netflix made a reality show about it. "Hitmakers" is made by the same people that created the Netflix real estate reality show "Selling Sunset" and it has that annoyingly glossy, overly glamorous sheen, but it's still pretty interesting to me. Almost all the people on here have written huge hits although they're mostly not too well known in their own right (aside from Sevyn Streeter, who had some success as a solo artist), so it's interesting to see them onscreen, teaming up in different combinations to pitch songs to John Legend or Usher or Lainey Wilson. I was disappointed that NBC's "Songland" only lasted two seasons but this show feels slightly more true to how the music industry works.
This, like HBO's other recent doc miniseries about Paul Reubens, is annoyingly split into two movie-length installments instead of being broken into normal TV episode lengths, which is a trend I do not care for. But this is great stuff, I'm a Billy Joel fan but his story turned out to be more compelling than I expected, I love that they were able to take the space to dig into his craft and his writing inspirations, even for some songs that weren't hits, and were able to pull in guys like Springsteen and McCartney in there to show their respect for Joel as a songwriter. One thing I really appreciated was that Joel's first wife and former manager Elizabeth sat for substantial interviews, she's such a big part of the story and I'm glad she was game to talk about it all and give her perspective.
There have been so many retrospectives about Live Aid and the big charity singles of the '80s in the last few years that it feels like this 3-part CNN doc doesn't really have much new in there, but it's pretty engrossing and gives a good nuanced perspective and has some really interesting little anecdotes about how the day came together.
This Netflix docuseries about London trauma centres is really intense and graphic, but it's also filmed in a really slick way to make it look almost like a scripted series, which I find a little jarring sometimes.
Each episode of this Apple TV+ docuseries is focused on a different endangered species, some wonderful footage and stories but man I've spent my whole life being angry about how the dwindling numbers of endangered species, it's such a stain on humanity.
One of the 'Magnolia Network' shows on HBO Max, where modern families cosplay as 1880s homesteaders, kinda tedious.
I don't have any memory of hearing about these murders when they happened in 2022 but caught up on what happened when the killer was sentenced recently. Horrifying story, this Freeform docuseries interviews some people who knew the victims but it kinda seems like they're just filling out as much screentime as possible with what little information they have.
I'm surprised I haven't already seen a bunch of true crime stuff before about this TV anchor who disappeared in 1995, crazy story.
This recent docuseries on Hulu kinda feels like it's playing both sides, they interview families who put their kids on social media and show the criticism they get, but they also put them on TV and make them even more famous.
This is another docuseries on the same topic (with the same 'kidfluencer' portmanteau that makes me feel queasy) that was on Netflix in April feels a little more sensationalistic, the Hulu one has its problems but is probably better overall.
Apparently Showtime used to have a show about male escorts called "Gigolos," and after one of the gigolos caught a murder charge Paramount+ made a docuseries about it. The pipeline from reality TV gruel to true crime gruel is very real.
The real story of a guy who hid a chest of gold in the Rockies and left clues hinting at its location, which seems just too ridiculous to be true, I feel like sometimes people just do obnoxious stuff because they want a documentary made about them.
I feel like just when social media was finally no longer obsessed with YesJulz, Netflix put her on a "Basketball Wives" knockoff and made her more famous.
y) "Polo"
I think polo is an interesting sport that I don't know much about, but this Netflix show is much more interested in the upper class social politics of it all.
I feel like sometimes these sports docs that spend a year with a particular team get lucky and end up documenting a historic season, but sometimes there's stuff like this where it's just another year and they try their best to make it seem interesting or dramatic.
No comments:
Post a Comment