TV Diary
a) "Cape Fear"
Javier Bardem very easily could've been typecast as a certain kind of menacing character after No Country For Old Men, but he managed to do the expected Bond villain and then take on a decent variety of roles from there. So playing Max Cady in the latest version of Cape Fear feels like such an obvious slam dunk casting for him that it's almost boring. And while I roll my eyes when old stuff is given a newfangled prestige TV sheen, it almost feels like they should've done more to modernize the tone of the story, it feels like they mimicked the feel of the two Cape Fear films so closely (and Scorsese and Spielberg are exec producers) that it's even more redundant and unnecessary, at least after two episodes.
My wife's a big fan of the horror comedy musical Anna and the Apocalypse, which I recently put on my list of the best movies of 2017. Ella Hunt was the lead in that, and for years it puzzled me that someone that talented and beautiful hadn't done a whole lot since that movie. So it was nice to see that Hunt's debut album and a sitcom starring Hunt both came out last week. I'll watch anything Mindy Kaling creates, she just has a good ear for old-fashioned snappy sitcom dialogue, but "Not Suitable For Work" has a pretty generic premise to overcome with a group of 20-somethings living in the same apartment building in New York City. Will Angus is probably the funniest person in the cast, there's definite potential there, but it's gotta get over that hump of feeling like a "Friends" knockoff and find its own comic rhythm.
"The Boroughs" isn't created by the Duffer brothers but they are executive producers, and it feels a bit like "if 'Stranger Things' was about senior citizens instead of tweens," which automatically makes it more palatable to me, especially because there's another actress I love from Beetlejuice, Geena Davis in this instance. I'm not totally hooked on the story, but the occasional monster fx are good and the cast is engaging enough that I enjoyed the whole adventure and the repeated emotional use of "Thunder Road."
Nic Cage's turn as Spider-Noir in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was one of those fun little unexpected bits that helped make that movie a delight. But making it into a series almost 8 years later just feels overcooked and dumb, Cage's Edward G. Robinson voice sounds worse the more I hear it and they couldn't commit to making the whole thing black-and-white so it's got a hideous color palette like the '90s Dick Tracy movie. I got a lot of blowback for talking shit about this show on Twitter, but I've continued to watch it and my opinion hasn't improved much.
Britbox has been around for a while as a way to stream a lot of British TV in America. We resisted signing up for a while, but my wife wanted to see this series focusing on one of Elizabeth Bennet's sisters from Pride & Prejudice. And it's pretty enjoyable, it takes slightly more liberties with the original story than it needs to, but tonally is pretty spot on. Tanya Reynolds in particularly has a lot of fun with Caroline Bingley's politely rude dialogue and Richard E. Grant makes a great Mr. Bennet.
f) "Star City"
I have a lot of gripes about "For All Mankind" but I still enjoy it (the recent episode with an early 2010s mass casualty event on Mars during a flash mob set to Nicki Minaj's "Starships"? Wonderfully ridiculous!). But it feels like maybe a little too much for Apple TV to launch a spinoff for one of its longest running shows. they should've just had more Soviet Union storylines after the first couple seasons instead of making it into a whole separate series. Solid cast, though, it's not bad.
g) "Deli Boys"
There were a couple episodes of the first season of "Deli Boys" that really lived up to the show's potential, enough to keep me tuning in for the second season, which has started off pretty well. Poorna Jagannathan is so much fun to watch in this, she usually plays doctors and moms but she gets to be a total badass in a crime syndicate.
I liked the first season of this but I'm kind of surprised by how happy I was for it to return, just a nice easygoing dramedy that occasionally hits you with a belly laugh or something really emotionally resonant. Kind of refreshing to see Tina Fey and Will Forte play grownups with a little bit of gravity in their performances, and Colman Domingo just elevates everything he's in.
Another good Netflix show back for a second season, so far it just kind of feels like they're decompressing from the events of the first season and setting up a new story, but Emma Myers is a great lead.
I was never much of a fan of "Big Mouth," and this is a talking animal show with the same creators and voice actors. Kind of feels like everyone is smarter than the puerile sex jokes here and knows it, maybe they're having fun but I'm not.
I find the episode lengths of a lot of Asian TV off-putting, there's really no reason every episode of HBO Max's "Song of the Samurai" should be a 95-minute feature film, especially because it's kind of funny and charmingly character-driven. But I really like it, I'm glad it's something unique and not just doing something like "Shogun" with a smaller budget.
Every story of Brittney Griner or someone else getting jailed for drug possession in Russia is totally terrifying, so this Apple TV series dramatizing a fictionalized version of that situation is pretty gripping just for tapping into the fear of fucking up in a place like that.
This Chilean series is one of the best Netflix imports I've seen this year. It's a missing teen mystery, and there's always a lot of those, but the dialogue and direction is sharp and they use music really well.
Another missing person story, this one from China, interesting but moves a little slow for my taste.
o) "Santita"
A decent Mexican drama on Netflix, Sofia Vergara's cousin Paulina Davila is gorgeous.
A Taiwanese series based on fantasy novels, pretty good visual effects.
A South Korean romcom with one of those hoary Hallmark Channel premises where a big city working girl ends up in the country and falls for a farmer.
This South Korean show about a lawyer who can see ghosts, and tries to resolve cases that are tormenting those ghosts, is kind of charming, I could totally see it getting adapted into a network hit in America.
A more serious Japanese show about a lawyer who lives in a tent on the roof of a building and takes all sorts of cases involving gangs and drunk drivers and stuff, it's really fascinating to me what kind of stuff gets adapted from Manga series.
This Indian show is a dramatization of the life of a guy who teaches people about physics on YouTube. I guess it's like the Indian equivalent of if there was a Neil deGrasse Tyson biopic or something? Weird.
This variety show that's been on Japanese TV since 2012 just debuted on Netflix in America, it's fascinating to see what their late night TV is like, this show is very heavy on man-on-the-street interviews about current events.
v) "Rafa"
I know next to nothing about Tennis so it's interesting to see a Netflix docuseries dig in to the career of one specific superstar, Rafael Nadal. I'm sure there's something you lose in access-driven docs where the celebrity gets to control their own narrative, but I guess Rafa has never opened up this much before so it's still worth seeing.
In light of all the MJ stan propaganda making the rounds after Michael, it's good to see something like this Netflix docuseries shining a light on exactly what Michael Jackson has been accused of, I don't think anybody needs to draw any conclusions about what did or didn't happen, but we shouldn't sweep it under the rug.
x) "Kylie"
Kylie Minogue's longevity as a pop star should really be studied, so I'm loving this Netflix docuseries, just learning about how she got into show business, what that show "Neighbours" was actually like, how she transitioned from Stock Aitken and Waterman hits to doing different music, how Michael Hutchence influenced that, etc.
I didn't think this story of a guy with a suspiciously convenient form of amnesia was going to be interesting, but with every episode of the HBO doc it just got stranger and more fascinating, totally bizarre situation.
Pretty much what you'd expect from a reality show about rich young adults in the Hidden Hills.
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on Monday, June 08, 2026 at 6:44 AM.
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