It feels like every other show on TV these days is a season-long murder mystery, which I'm starting to get really sick of. Obviously that's a very old genre of story and a lot of shows are very "Twin Peaks" about it, but "The White Lotus" feels like a more common template, where you should start with a death and then get all the backstory with lots of misdirection and stalling to keep the suspense up until the last episode, it all feels very hacky and cynical. Maybe that's unfair to bring up when talking about "DTF St. Louis" because so far it's a pretty engrossing story with great performances. But it's all painstakingly assembled so that each episode makes you believe a different explanation for the death of Floyd (David Harbour), which is kind of exhausting, like okay, fine you've got me guessing and second-guessing, let's get on with it. It's about a TV weather man (Jason Bateman) being accused of the murder and the theme song is "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In," like it's just some obnoxious HBO dark comedy crap. Also, funny thing, I watched this week's entire episode on HBO Max with an ASL interpreter in the corner of the screen because I thought it was some deliberate thing that had to do with one of the main Floyd being an ASL interpreter. 

John Galworthy's novels about the Forsyte family were published over a century ago, won a Pulitzer prize, and have been adapted several other times as popular television and film projects. I don't really know anything about any of that, though, so I'm going into Channel 5/PBS series cold. And I liked the first episode, some moderately intriguing class conscious drama, tons of extremely beautiful British women. 

"Best Medicine" is a Fox series about a doctor with the last name Best, so right off the bat, you know it's going to be a little corny. But Josh Charles, a Baltimore-born actor who's been consistently great in everything he's been in since Dead Poets Society and "Sports Night," is well suited for this light playful dramedy, with a slightly "Northern Exposure"-ish premise about an accomplished surgeon who becomes the town doctor for a Maine fishing village. Cree Cicchino is a particularly good foil for Charles as his assistant. The show's already been renewed for a second season, which I was happy to see. 

Now that Dick Wolf has three shows about the FBI that take up an entire night of CBS primetime, he's expanding to another federal agency, and just sampling the first episode confirmed that this shit is really not for me. 

I don't watch a lot of Taylor Sheridan's shows regularly, but I don't really dislike his stuff, and often at least the first episode is a strong pilot that establishes the story and the characters well. The first episode of "The Madison" is just incredibly bland, though, and seems to promise an even duller story to follow. Michelle Pfeiffer is married to David E. Kelley and they've vowed not to work together for the sake of their marriage, which I respect, but Kelley has made some great shows in recent years and she really deserves a TV vehicle better than this. 

"Jury Duty" was my #1 show of 2023, but it felt like one of those lightning-in-a-bottle ideas that easily could've not worked at all, and I didn't even think about whether they'd try to repeat it. But by simply tweaking the premise and having a different setting, a corporate company retreat instead of a jury trial, they found a way to do it again. The way the first season ended was what really impressed me, how they turned a social experiment that could have been mean into something kind of heartwarming, and so with only three episodes out now, I don't know if "Company Retreat" will end the same way. But the unwitting star of the show, Anthony, is rolling with everything pretty well, and the cast is really funny and only a couple of the characters feel like they're pushing the plausibility of the ruse with their performances. 

Being a day one fan doesn't really mean anything with TV, but it has been a little surreal watching "The Pitt" going from a promising little show to a cultural phenomenon. And while it's still a procedural where the interpersonal relationships of the characters are subtly teased out in little fleeting moments and just a couple of offscreen hookups have been acknowledged in the storyline, the shippers have turned every episode into a referendum on their weird romantic endgame theories for every possible pairing of characters. Great show, though, lot of really compelling moments in the second season and the Roxie storyline was especially heartbreaking. I can handle the gore, but a job where the computer system can go down and instead of going home you just have to figure out how to keep doing your job without it, now that's scary. 

Julia Roberts was originally attached to star in "The Last Thing He Told Me" before she pulled out and was replaced by Jennifer Garner, and it's really hard to watch this show without thinking about how much better it'd be with Roberts. Garner is good in comedy and lighter stuff, but I don't think she really has the range for a dark drama, she's just blandly frowning all the time. Angourie Rice, who plays her stepdaughter, is great, though, I think she could have a serious career ahead of her. 

I only finished the first season of "Paradise" recently and that 7th episode was crazy, really upped the ante and made the entire thing more interesting. So it was fun to go straight from that into the second season, where the story expands with that great standalone episode introducing a new character played by Shailene Woodley. 

This Korean show, a live action adaptation of a cartoon, is about a guy whose superpowers are tied to how much cash is on him, which is a hilarious premise, kind of like a more literal Bruce Wayne. 

I rolled my eyes when this Netflix docuseries immediately opened talking about "Succession." But it quickly becomes a hilarious of the Murdoch family watching the show, and not realizing until they saw the chaos after Logan Roy died that they actually did need to put a succession plan in place before Rupert died. It also has some details about that fascinating story of James Murdoch financially backing the creation of Rawkus Records, and Newscorp buying it so that Rupert could keep James in the family business. 

"Neighbors" is an A24-produced docuseries on HBO, each episode details two disputes between neighbors property boundaries or pets or sanitary conditions or noise or whatever. They really lean into the kind of anthropological aspect of it all, and also kind of cleverly dole out bits of character detail, so you start to take sides in the argument before you know which side of the dispute is MAGA or has a weird hobby. It ends up being a pretty fascinating snapshot of what Americans are like right now. Many of the disputes escalate to physical fights or lawsuits, but they're mostly ongoing current conflicts, so you just kind of jump into the story and then leave without getting much of any resolution, which can be a little frustrating but I guess that's beside the point. 

Chef competition shows are always fun and Guy Fieri takes a lot of shit for being an over-the-top character but I generally like his shows, he seems like good people.