TV Diary
a) "Lanterns"
I know even less about the Green Lantern than I do about other comic book heroes, but I like the HBO series so far, easily the best performance of Kyle Chandler's career and also a great use of Aaron Pierre, Kelly Macdonald, Garrett Dillahunt, and Poorna Jagannathan. I definitely enjoy the snappy scenes with those core characters more than the flashbacks and the comic book lore stuff, but it all hangs together really well, excited to see where the story's going.
I haven't read the 1901 Australian novel My Brilliant Career or seen the 1979 film adaptation, but I really enjoyed the Netflix miniseries, Philippa Northeast is so charming and Sybylla is such an entertaining character. It's one of those shows that looks fairly historically accurate but the dialogue sounds fairly modern, every time they dance to music the band is covering pop songs that were written a hundred years later, color-blind casting, etc. So I have no idea how faithful the show is to the spirit of the source material beyond the obvious changes, but I liked it.
Another classic novel I haven't read, although I feel like I at least started this one at some point in grade school. MGM+ really seems like the dregs of the streaming services, I'm only signed up for it right now because they have one of my favorite shows of 2026 so far, "American Classic." But I'm trying to check out more of their other stuff and the first episode of these seems reasonably promising, Mirren Mack is beautiful but the more I see Kit Harington in stuff the less convinced I am that he can act at all.
Hugo Weaving is great in this Australian series that recently hit Netflix in the U.S. about the staff of an airport who deal with the daily crises and issues of people getting on and off the planes. It feels pretty true to life and gradually gives you these moments where you learn more about the lives of the characters, kind of like "The Pitt," which is funny because one of the stars is Shabana Azeez, who plays Dr. Javadi on "The Pitt," and I guess I'd probably read at some point that she's Australian but it was kind of jarring to hear her real accent in this.
e) "Adults"
When "Adults" debuted on FX a year ago, the most I could say for sure was that it was at least slightly better than "Overcompensated," the Amazon comedy that it was frequently compared to and shared one cast member with. But by the time I finished watching that first season over the summer, it had really grown on me. I think the writing is slightly better than the cast or the direction lets on, but the cast is at least likeable enough to pull it off, and Amita Rao has killer comic timing, she's stolen a lot of scenes this season.
f) "The Paper"
"The Paper" is another one that grew on me over the course of its first season to the point that I was anticipating the new one. I don't think anybody really wanted a tenuously connected spinoff of "The Office," least of all me, but the cast is really good, Sabrina Impacciatore and Alex Edelman steal a lot of scenes. And I actually find the Ned/Mare romance plot to be reasonably charming and compelling, as tired as I am of will-they-or-won't-they office romance storylines, they just have good chemistry and I like the way they bond over both being workaholics.
I really dislike the Chad Powers parts of "Chad Powers," where Glen Powell puts on some hideous facial prosthetics and looks and sounds like a live action version of Mr. Van Driessen from "Beavis & Butt-Head." As the show has gone into the second season, it's subjected me to Chad a little less, and I've enjoyed the parts with a normal-faced Powell doing scenes with Steve Zahn and Perry Mattfeld. But the title and premise are what they are and a certain amount of the show is always going to irritate the shit out of me as long as I watch it.
h) "Reacher"
I don't know if it's just perception of the show or an actual change in production values but "Reacher" feels a little more "Walker, Texas Ranger" now than the first couple seasons did. And I know there are a whole lot of books in the series, but the longer you watch this guy hop from one place to another getting into trouble and killing a shitload of bad guys, the more absurd it all feels -- in this season he ends up on the news and is basically famous, which feels like a genie you can't really put back in the bottle, but they'll just ignore it in the future anyway. And anyway it's still fun to watch Alan Ritchson beat the crap out of everybody and eventually spend a night in a hotel room with a hottie in peril who throws themselves at him -- in this case played by Agnez Mo, apparently an international pop star who's the Rihanna or Indonesia or something, who turns out to be the villain of the story.
Glad this is back, episodic TV is a good fit for Guy Ritchie and he has a great cast.
j) "SCTV"
"SCTV" is canon for comedy buffs who were born in the '60s and/or in Canada, but for the rest of us it's been this elusive thing you see in occasional late night reruns or YouTube rips of old sketches of these hilarious early career highlights of Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, John Candy, Martin Short, and so on. So it was pretty exciting to see a good chunk of episodes of "SCTV" hit Netflix for the first time last week, especially just a few months after O'Hara's death. I think sketch comedy is on its best day a hit-or-miss medium and not everything is going to hold up well, in terms of references or taste, after 4 or 5 decades, but there's some really funny stuff in there, one of my favorite sketches is the Half Wits game show, just some good hardcore silliness.
k) "Dang!"
As sick as I am of the whole 'adult animated sitcom' genre, I will concede that this new one on Netflix starring Stephanie Hsu and Poppy Liu has pretty sharp writing, I enjoyed the first episode. Not as good as "Strip Law," which Netflix already canceled, but hopefully they won't cancel this one too.
I'm not sure but I think it's pretty likely that both of my kids have watched all 283 episodes of "Adventure Time" at least once. And one of them just devoured this decent little collection of prequel episodes and started watching the series all over again. "Adventure Time" took quite a while to grow on me but I appreciate its endless well of surreal, kid-friendly absurdity a bit now.
There's a line on the 1995 Geraldine Fibbers song "Dusted" about "reading Banana Fish" that I always kind of assumed was referencing an obscure west coast zine or something, but apparently it was a seminal manga of the '80s and '90s that was adapted into an anime in 2018. And I like it, it's kind of a gritty crime drama with some surreal sci-fi-ish elements, good dialogue and storytelling.
This Mexican series on Netflix has a good premise that grabs you right away -- a young woman needs a kidney transplant, and her dad is willing to be her donor, but that's how she finds out that he's not her biological father and her mother's been hiding a secret for decades. I haven't kept up with it, but the first episode was pretty good.
o) "Happiness"
Lately my wife has been in the habit of binge watching anime and K-dramas on her tablet, and sometimes I gently remind her that we have a TV and I like a lot of the same stuff so we could just watch some of these shows together on the big screen. I've watched a lot of Korean shows on Netflix but someone I missed this one from a few years ago, it's about a zombie breakout but it's fairly character driven with sharp dialogue, I'm enjoying it so far.
"Take A Hike!" is a reality show where four South Korean celebrities go hiking in the mountains. I'm not really familiar with any of the people in the cast (although one of them is a singer named, I shit you not, 'Car, the Garden'), but obviously we've had lots of shows like this in America, it's moderately entertaining whether or not you know who the people are.
In this Brazilian reality show, mothers compete for who knows their children best by attempting to predict their choices in different situations. Cute idea, nothing I need to see more than once but I feel like this is a format you could do in America and other countries successfully.
This is one of the new America's Test Kitchen shows on Netflix, Bryan Roof just goes around the country and checks out different restaurants and talks to chefs, kind of boilerplate Food Network-type stuff but I love seeing, like, Louisiana barbecue places where the food looks incredible.
Netflix has gone all-in on "video podcasts," which kind of irritates me as a concept. But there's not that much difference between a cooking show and a cooking video podcast in practice, and Meredith Hayden is a good host.
Alix Earle is a blonde influencer lady who apparently has beef with another famous blonde influencer lady, Alex Cooper, who is a completely different person who had a different but similarly dull, earnest reality show a few months ago.
u) "Lion"
A nice 4-part National Geographic doc chronicling one lion's life from a cub to the head of a pride. It's kind of funny that Jon Favreau exec produced this just because he directed that one Lion King movie, though, like does his name make any difference to whether someone would watch this?
I don't follow women's basketball closely, or basketball in general really, but it's certainly been interesting to watch women's college hoops and the WNBA make these great strides over the years. And I didn't really know until I watched this Apple TV miniseries just how important UConn and Rebecca Lobo in the mid-'90s were to that trajectory, really interesting and engaging doc.
College football is even less in my range of interests and this show just wound up being background noise.
I have vague memories of reports that O.J. Simpson was making a TV prank show 20 years ago and being appalled by the concept like most people. But I probably forgot about it for the last 19 years, until this docuseries featuring footage and interviews with people who worked on it or were ambushed with unexpectedly meeting O.J. Simpson on the show, which was apparently supposed to be funny. Just a snapshot of a completely insane time in pop culture that we lived through.
A really horrifying Netflix doc about a pastor who people think killed his wife, just every single detail of the story makes the whole thing worse and worse, I tapped out after one episode, I'm just not a big true crime person.
I think it's good that Conan only does 3 or 4 episodes of these a year, you don't really need a lot of them, but each one is pretty fun, I feel like he's evolved his comic persona a little by improvising out in the real world with regular people instead of just with celebrities on a talk show set. I particularly enjoyed the episode in the Netherlands.
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