TV Diary
Thursday, January 22, 2026
a) "Ponies"
This delightful Peacock show is an "erotic buddy comedy-drama spy thriller" with Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson as the wives of two CIA agents in 1977 Moscow. As with any period piece that's not 100% serious, it helps to not worry about realism or historical accuracy, although the one thing that actually bothered me was the season finale that shoehorned Elton John into the plot, with an actor who looks nothing like Elton John. Richardson has been good in a lot of things but only seemed to get recognized for it after "The White Lotus," but this is easily her best performance to date. Highly recommended if you like "Poker Face" and aren't too mad at Peacock canceling it to give one of their new shows a try.
b) "Steal"
Another new show starring another strikingly beautiful "Game of Thrones" actress, in this case Sophie Turner. I'm not a big fan of the "this season on..." teasers that are often at the end of a show's first episode these days, but the one for "Steal" at least made me curious to keep watching to see how the story escalates, the first episode felt like a generic heist mystery.
c) "His & Hers"
Jon Bernthal did a respectable Baltimore accent in "We Own This City," so it's disappointing that he derails every scene of "His & Hers" that he's in with an atrocious southern accent. This is one of those situations where they should've cast a real southerner or told him not to worry about the accent. I know at some point Bernthal became 'the thinking man's tough guy' or something but I still suspect he's just an actual bonehead of no particular talent. The story, with Bernthal as a cop and Tessa Thompson as his ex, a journalist investigating the same murder case, had an interesting premise, and while I didn't hate the ending as much as many people did, I did kinda roll my eyes at the twist.
People dislike Simu Liu for some valid reasons but he's a decent leading man, this spy show has a fun premise and he has decent chemistry with the wonderful Melissa Barrera.
e) "Girl Taken"
As exhaustingly self-aware as most American TV is now, I find the somber melodrama of a lot of British TV kind of jarring and hard to watch. I mean, this is a psychological thriller about an abduction, there's no 'light' way of doing that, but there's just not much personality or style or originality here.
It's funny to think that before Taylor Sheridan became one of the most successful producers in television, he was a bit player in a Kurt Sutter show. And now Sutter's latest show is a western that feels like a failed attempt to attract the target audience of Sheridan's shows (Netflix canceled "The Abandons" yesterday, 6 weeks after its released). It's fun to see Gillian Anderson in a show like this and the first episode was pretty good, but I dunno, hasn't held my attention, I'm not surprised it didn't take off.
British miniseries always wrap things up too quickly, with only three episodes you might as well have just made a feature. After Mia McKenna-Bruce's rightfully award-winning performance in How To Have Sex, I'd love for her to have a leading role in something great, but this is just okay.
h) "Ripple"
This Netflix show has this touchy feely concept about strangers' intersecting lives and fate or something, kind of reminds of something that would've been on CBS in the '90s or something. I don't dislike it, though, the cast is charming. There's a whole music industry subplot and at one point in the second episode, Sydney Agudong (Nani in the Lilo & Stitch remake) goes onstage and sings a pretty acoustic cover of "Seasons" by Future Islands. Very surreal for me as someone who watched Future Islands rehearse that song a couple days before they went on Letterman back in the day.
A mystery thriller about a baby with a head injury, maybe a little dark and stressful for me to watch more than one episode of.
I don't care for these Harlan Coben miniseries that pop up on Netflix every few months or weeks, but I keep putting them on as little time wasters. And this one pissed me off because Minnie Driver is there in a generic thankless role when she deserves so much better (honestly "Speechless" should be wrapping up a 10-year Emmy-winning run right now, in a better world). There's one really committed, memorable supporting performance by Maeve Courtier-Lilley in "Run Away" but it's otherwise pretty mediocre.
This Netflix series where Rowan Atkinson feuds with a baby for four episodes is pretty bad, but I just learned it's a sequel to a show called "Man vs. Bee," and I have to assume that NINE episodes of Rowan Atkinson feuding with an insect was even worse.
l) "Fallout"
I think my favorite thing about the second season of "Fallout" is that both the advertising and the show itself seem a lot more confident about Ella Purnell being the star of the show, Lucy is a great character. There are also some worthy additions to the whole cast of characters, including Justin Theroux and Macauley Culkin.
Stephen Graham and Erin Doherty both won Emmys for their work in "Adolescence" (my #1 show of 2025) but I hope people don't sleep on the other completely different show they're both in that just returned for a second season. The Forty Elephants are such a fascinating chapter of history and Doherty is fantastic in this show, I adore her.
"The Night Manager" was a miniseries that I watched and enjoyed and then more or less forgot about almost exactly ten years ago, I'm surprised they brought it back for another season but I'm happy to watch Tom Hiddleston (Gaga voice) MANAGE THE NIGHT again. It seems like they've done a decent job of picking up the story where it left off in a way that makes sense.
This is just a 23-minute one-off special, but it's one of the most ambitious things Adult Swim has done in recent memory, with a few creators of Adult Swim shows ("Steven Universe," "Over the Garden Wall," "OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes") working separately on different pieces of a story that are assembled into one piece with totally different animation and storytelling styles woven together. The making-of doc is as interesting as the special itself, I hope they try more experiments along these lines, maybe a sequel installment or a whole feature-length film.
I know it's not a fair expectation, but I always go into these things hoping they'll be at least half as funny and entertaining as The Lego Batman Movie and they never are.
Apparently in Germany there's this 1963 comedy sketch called "Dinner For One" that's become a beloved annual tradition, always airing on new year's eve. And "Miss Sophie - Same Procedure As Every Year" is three episodess filling in the backstory. I feel like if someone made a miniseries prequel to a famous sketch that I knew -- the dead parrot "Monty Python" sketch or something -- I'd roll my eyes pretty hard, but watching this without much context, I liked it, it was a funny little farce.
Another Netflix miniseries based on another country's cultural touchstone -- in this case Jorge Ibarguengoitia's 1977 novel Las Muertas -- that I wasn't familiar with, but I still found the series pretty enjoyable.
I haven't watched most of the previous Taylor Swift documentary projects, but I really had a good time with this one. Of course it's a self-serving little PR puff piece of what she chooses to show you of the backstage work on The Eras Tour, but it was still fascinating to see a bit of the work that goes into such a colossal undertaking, to get these fun little portraits of some of the dancers and backup singers and band members. I also really loved Swift's speech to them before the last show that opens the first episode, I thought it was kind of profound and revealed a bit of how she approaches her work and how she got here.
I didn't really care or know much about the Beatles, or at least as little as a 13-year-old classic rock fan could, back when "The Beatles Anthology" originally aired in 1995. So I'm kinda glad that I didn't even try to digest any of that stuff in 1995, so that I could devour all four Anthology albums and all the old and new episodes of the series as an adult in the last few weeks of 2025. I don't know how different this new Disney+ version is from what aired on ABC back in the day, but I was really pretty impressed with the quality of the doc, it didn't feel 'dated' at all outside of some of the '90s fashions in the interviews. They did a good job of getting the story from people that were there at the time, including Neil Aspinall, an old friend of Paul and George who worked for Apple Corp and pulled together all the archival footage for the first attempt at a career-spanning Beatles doc in the '70s. I particularly liked how much of George Martin's perspective you get through it all. And how sometimes Paul would be like "we're doing interviews on my boat today!"
A self-congratulatory documentary where Simon Cowell celebrates his career and tries to engineer the return of non-Korean boy bands, pretty boring stuff from someone whose face is increasingly difficult to look at.
My 10-year-old has been starting to watch more of the non-animated content on Netflix, including documentaries about animals and this recent series hosted by a former NASA engineer that kind of aims to teach STEM concepts to kids. I'm glad something like this exists, when I was growing up we had "Bill Nye the Science Guy" and "Beakman's World" and the generation before that had "Mr. Wizard."
I find Will Smith's whole inspirational Instagram influencer persona these days a little wearying, but he's an ideal host for an upbeat docuseries like this about traveling the globe.
This Apple TV series is about orphaned endangered species that need help from human specialists to get reintroduced into living in the wild. So it's interesting to learn about that side of the conservation process, but it's almost mostly about cute baby animals, and the episodes about cheetahs and lynxes were especially cute.
One of the more interesting true crime shows I've seen in recent years, murder-for-hire plots are always such nasty stories and it's sometimes hard to believe that people every attempt them, they always seem to go off the rails in predictable ways.
It's funny how modern game shows all have the same staging and lighting setups, this one looks like so many other shows with a slightly sillier title and slightly dumber concept that it almost feels like a parody, especially with Neil Patrick Harris as the host. It's pretty much just a boilerplate trivia show, though. What I find irritating is that when all the contestants have to answer the same question, you usually only hear the answer from the people that got it right or the closest to right, and a big part of the fun of trivia shows, in my opinion, is hearing the wrong answers people come up with.
