TV Diary
a) "Lucky"
"Lucky" stars Anya Taylor-Joy as a woman named Luciana who goes by Lucky, who catches some very bad breaks and some good ones after pulling off a heist in Vegas. It's based on novel. Does nobody have any shame about cutesy name stuff like that? Anyway, it's pretty good. It's not as consistently enjoyable as Jonathan Tropper's other current Apple TV series that has you rooting for a thief, "Your Friends & Neighbors," and I don't like the Fiona Apple theme song as much as the one she did for "The Affair," but the first two episodes are reasonably gripping.
b) "The Hawk"
"The Hawk" stars Will Ferrell as a typical Will Ferrell character, a delusionally confident athlete (in this case a pro golfer). Playing that kind of character for 10 episodes instead of a movie or a sketch, though, I don't know, it feels harder to stretch a deliberately one-dimensional character like that over so much more screentime without getting repetitive (this is also why I never loved Danny McBride's wannabe Ferrell schtick in "Eastbound and Down"). "The Hawk" has some occasional good moments that kept me watching, though, and a nice supporting cast including Jimmy Tatro, Chris Parnell, and Patty Guggenheim, who was so funny on "She-Hulk." Luke Wilson is in this too, but that mostly just reminds me that Owen Wilson's recent golf show "Stick" is better than this.
Amazon Prime seems to gravitate towards certain genres way more than other streamers, and their focus on YA has worked out well for them, but I don't know if they've gotten any kind of return on their investment in shows and movies about sexy spies. But Hannah Waddingham is the spy who fucks in "Ride Or Die" and what can I say, they have my attention. It's light and silly, but her friendship with Octavia Spencer drives the show and it's charming.
If J.K. Simmons is the lead of your show, I'm definitely going to watch it, but I'm disappointed with "The Westies" so far, it made me annoyed all over again that the much better "Counterpart" was canceled after only two seasons. "The Westies" is based on real '80s Irish-American mobsters, but it feels like they tried as hard as possible to copy The Departed, including a Dropkick Murphys theme song and a cop-playing-both-sides character. I'm still trying to give it a chance for Simmons and the dreamy Sarah Bolger and her Irish accent, but the first episode ended with a scene that felt pretty contrived, and then the final line of the scene was so corny I gave my TV a middle finger. And the two episodes since then have only slightly redeemed it.
"The Five-Star Weekend" stars Jennifer Garner as a famous food blogger taking her friends on a Nantucket getaway while mourning her husband. Jennifer Garner being friends with Chloe Sevigny is just weird casting, I don't buy it for a second, but this is a decent little soapy show with a great cast including Regina Hall, D'Arcy Carden, and Timothy Olyphant. The main plotline they're really focusing on with Garner and Gemma Chan is not interesting to me at all, but there's lots of good little character moments with the whole ensemble, it's well written.
f) "Riot Women"
Since we signed up for BritBox for "The Other Bennet Sister," I've been checking out other shows and really enjoy this one that came out a few months ago. Not quite as good as the other show about a British all-female band, "We Are Lady Parts," but charming with a very good cast.
g) "Vanished"
"The Flight Attendant" was a great project to transition Kaley Cuoco out of sitcoms while still utilizing her comedy chops in a thriller context. "Vanished" has a similar premise, with Cuoco as an American woman abroad suddenly getting pulled into a tense, deadly conspiracy, but it's closer to a straight up drama and, while occasionally exciting, not really very interesting.
h) "Elle"
The full title used in some of the advertising is "Elle: From the World of Legally Blonde," which is just awful, even worse than "The Continental: From the World of John Wick." In the Jaafar Jackson era of casting, I guess it's nice that Reese Witherspoon's daughter who looks like her didn't get this role, the actress they did get, Lexi Minetree, is pretty good. But it's pretty corny, it's all about Elle Woods going to high school in Seattle in the '90s, so she's a fish-out-of-water in a public school full of grunge kids instead of a fish-out-of-water at Harvard Law School, all the humor is so lazy and on-the-nose.
Another reboot I don't think anybody needed, but it's okay, I guess. I just have so many memories of the old series being on TV constantly in the '80s and '90s and it feeling like the very essence of channel surfing boredom.
j) "Silo"
The end of the second season of "Silo" sort of pulled me back into the show. The entire series up to that point had taken place underground in an undetermined point at least 150 years in the future, and suddenly they flashed back to present day Washington, D.C. to start to fill in the backstory of what happened. I think that was the exact right time to do it at the midway point of a show that's going to end after the fourth season, and it added Jessica Henwick and Jessica Brown Findlay to the cast, which is also a plus. I had started to tune out a bit but now I'm reinvested in the show.
k) "Trying"
With "Trying" in its fifth season it feels like they've kind of gone through the entire story arc they probably had in mind when creating the show and are now just in a comfortable groove and idly introducing different subplots to keep it going, which I don't mind because it's a sweet little show with a likeable cast. I also like that each season of "Trying" has a different soundtrack artist that writes a new song for every episode, more shows should do something like that, and it was a pleasant surprise to hear Orla Gartland's voice and realize she did the soundtrack for season 5.
Still a pretty good show in its third and final season, I don't know if it found an audience of people who loved, say, "Insecure," but I feel like it should.
This anime on Netflix has an interesting sort of alternate history steampunk vibe, it takes place in an early 20th century Japan where electricity hasn't been discovered/'invented'(?) yet.
n) "Summer '36"
This takes place in France in 1936 but feels like one of those modern murder mysteries involving upper class people at a hotel or resort that are so trendy now. Pretty good, one of the better Netflix imports I've seen lately.
A Korean psychological drama about a literature professor that's based on a play, kind of enjoy seeing something this stagey with mostly one setting.
One of those Chinese historical dramas with really beautiful costuming, there are so many episodes in a season so I don't think I'll stick with it but it was fun to watch a little of.
This South African show seems to be really globally popular, it's about somebody who's internet famous who gets dragged into a family scandal, people love that kind of thing I guess but it doesn't interest me much.
r) "Reboot"
Erika Toda has starred in probably the 2 best Japanese shows I've seen this year, "Straight To Hell" and "Reboot." The latter is about a guy trying to find his wife's murderer, wish it didn't have such a generic title.
s) "Proud"
This Polish show on HBO Max is about a male model who has to care for his nice after his sister dies, and just suddenly has to make this huge change from a party animal lifestyle to parenthood, great performance from Ignacy Liss.
I'm not generally much into game shows and reality competition shows that B-list and C-list celebrities do just to stay on television, but I kind of love this show. A dozen contestants answer fairly basic general knowledge questions or do little goofy problem-solving challenges, and whoever does best each week gets to go home, until the last remaining person is crowned the dumbest of them all. There's a nice range of people who have an airhead reputation they might want to refute (Steve-O, Carmen Electra, Hilaria Baldwin), some well educated people who it's fun to point and laugh at when they don't do well (Dr. Drew, Andrew Yang), and some random likeable people to root for (Anthony Michael Hall, Ice-T, Jon Heder). It's pretty entertaining, I don't think I've been this invested in seeing who's still standing at the end of a season of a reality show since the heyday of "American Idol."
As someone who will watch almost any TV show but will almost never listen to any podcast, I'm slightly vexed by Netflix's new move toward just putting established podcasts in their library next to all their TV shows. But "Switched On Pop" is just the kind of podcast I'd listen to if I did regularly listen to podcasts, and it was fun to watch I guess their first episode in a visual format, I like the way they embrace really looking at modern pop songs from a compositional standpoint and digging into production methods and song structure.
The main "Hot Ones" series I guess still lives on YouTube, but the first episode on Netflix with the "Extra Heat" subtitle seems to be more or less the same show, but with Will Ferrell and a couple of his co-stars from "The Hawk" promoting their golf show in a baseball park (?). Maybe this is just going to be one-off Netflix episodes of "Hot Ones" that are ads for other Netflix shows, but it's fine, "Hot Ones" is all good with me.
It's always interesting to find out where a movie based on a true story took creative liberties. But this 3-part docuseries seems to be just a bunch of people who knew Jordan Belfort griping and nitpicking about Belfort's book and Scorsese's movie or saying 'I wasn't as fat as the guy that played me' or whatever.
x) "Murder 101"
A Tennessee high school teacher has students in his sociology class investigating cold cases and uncovering new info about an '80s serial killer, wild fascinating stuff.
I've gotten this far in life knowing as little as possible about Burning Man and not having much curiosity about it, but this HBO Max docuseries is moderately interesting I guess.
I watched this when it first came out on Netflix, before Norway's World Cup run really became this huge deal, and it helped me get invested in that whole story. Highly recommended if you've become a fan of Erling Haaland in the last few weeks.
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