TV Diary
a) "Nocturne"
Apple TV's "Nocturne" is based on a Swedish novel called The Sandman, and at different points had the working titles "Lazarus" and "Parallax." So in four tries they never once had a good, distinctive title for this story. And the TV version moves the story to small town Pennsylvania, which has been kind of a trendy setting for crime dramas the last few years, although Bill Camp seems to be the only one putting any effort (perhaps too much) into speaking in a Pennsylvania accent. It's good -- Stephen Graham really compelling as an imprisoned serial killer, Liev Schreiber as the former cop figuring out how Graham seems to be effecting things outside prison -- but after three episodes I'm kind of on the fence about whether it's more than merely good.
This British A24 sitcom created by and starring comedian Leo Reich is about twentysomething friends with aimless post-college lives but it doesn't have that earnest quasi-"Friends" (or, worse, quasi-"Entourage") thing that afflicts most modern American shows about young adults. Part of what sets it apart is the narration, which is actually by Zadie Smith, she gets a lot of the best lines in the show, but the whole cast is good.
c) "Phony"
My wife got excited when she saw an ad for Hulu's "Phony" a few weeks ago but she'd already kind of lost interest by the time the first episode premiered, which is a shame because it's very quickly becoming one of my favorite shows right now, I am totally locked in after that fifth episode's ending. The premise is that a teenager (Sam Nivola) wakes up after a car accident and suddenly believes that his mother (Connie Britton) has been replaced with an identical imposter, and you don't know if he's lost touch with reality or something is actually going on. But what really makes the show is the cast, Nivola and Grace Brennan and Mahaela Park and Maliq Johnson and Colter Lee are all on an almost "Freaks & Geeks" level of just feeling like real kids you went to high school with, the chemistry of these characters is what's really gotten me invested in this odd story.
I've never really watched the Ali biopic, I guess I should rectify that at some point. I think doing an 8-hour version of his story is a good idea, though, there's certainly enough story there to fill it out, and Jaalen Best is pretty convincing in the role.
e) "Newlyweds"
Jamie Lee Curtis co-created and has a recurring role in this mediocre old-fashioned NBC sitcom with a "Dharma & Greg" like premise about a free-spirited woman (Tea Leoni) and a buttoned-down guy (Tim Daly) who marry soon after meeting. I watched all the middling sitcoms these people had in the '90s and it's kind of nostalgic and fun to watch them in a show like this, but it's really just not very good.
This sitcom about a family of vampires living incognito as normal Americans feels like someone at CBS decided they needed a version of "What We Do In the Shadows" in the style of "Ghosts" -- but apparently it was the other way around, the showrunners of the American version of "Ghosts" had a pitch about a vampire sitcom 10 years ago before they'd heard of the original What We Do In the Shadows. In any case, it's a reasonably charming show with a couple of decent gags and people I liked in other shows (Rose Abdoo from "Hacks" is great in this), but it's nothing special.
I subscribed to one of the weakest streaming services, MGM+, earlier this year for one of their few excellent shows, "American Classic," so now I feel obligated to watch any other shows they put on. Do I care about seeing a midbudget Treasure Island adaptation? Not particularly, but it's got Hayley Atwell dressed like a pirate kicking ass, so I'm there.
"The Lowdown" was one of my favorite new shows of 2025 and it may be even better now with Betty Gilpin and Tommy Lee Jones in the cast for the second season. I love the way Sterlin Harjo's shows have made me suddenly fascinated with Oklahoma, TV is such a great medium for letting you see a place through the eyes of someone from there.
One thing about bingeing shows is that it weirdly makes shows less memorable for me than if I watched it once a week over a few months. I think I watched the first season of "Black Doves" pretty quickly two years ago and then forgot it existed right until the new season popped up. Good show, though, if you're into stylish violence and spy shit, and this is actually one of the first times that I went wow, Keira Knightley is a pretty good actor sometimes.
Another Netflix show I watched pretty quickly when it debuted and then forgot about, but it's cute and well above the after for Netflix sitcoms, glad it's back.
The Druski episode was pretty good, I don't think he knocked it out of the park relative to his best online sketches, but it's still cool to see him acclimating himself to mainstream comedy smoothly, he really has the goods. I rolled my eyes about Shane Gillis hosting again on twitter and had thousands of fanboys tweeting slurs about me for several days, but I still watched his episode and man he just sucks, the fact that he apologized on two different occasions for messing up in one sketch was just pathetic, if you're gonna fuck up just move on.
A steampunk anime with Brian Tyree Henry as the voice of Bass Reeves, pretty awesome show.
I like how wacky Korean romcoms are, this is literally about a woman who conducts a lot of static electricity and meets a man with an artificial heart that she can help charge up.
n) "Delusion"
A K-drama about a village where an old man with dementia is a murder suspect, which is an interesting premise.
This Japanese show just kind of feels like somebody got the idea to rip off "Nip/Tuck" 20 years later.
p) "The Doll"
This Polish historical drama is one of Netflix's biggest international hits of the last couple months and I think it's deserved, good show, Sandra Drzymalska is a star.
A Thai drama about a couple who are both black sheep in their respective families and there's tension about inheritances and family secrets, kind of more of a soap opera than what I'm usually into so I didn't watch much of it.
r) "The Fixers"
A Taiwanese action-comedy, pretty fun show.
A Brazilian legal drama, pretty good, reminds me of the kind of thing Shonda Rhimes would have a big hit with here.
A docuseries about a Mexican cartel kingpin, interesting to get into the facts of a story like this since I've seen a lot more fictionalized stories about this kind of thing.
A lot of people seem to really dislike Awkwafina and get performatively annoyed whenever she's cast in something, which is often. I'm more neutral on her but this Apple TV series really feels like streaming platform filler, a cooking show about a celebrity who admittedly doesn't cook that often.
I still love Bill Murray movies, but at this point there are enough stories about him that I don't buy into the manic pixie dream comedy icon image that a lot of people still have of him, so I didn't really care too much about this reality show about him playing golf.
I have pretty mixed feelings about "Friends," but I watched it every week in the '90s like many others did, and I always thought Matthew Perry was the funniest cast member, so his addiction struggles and early death were pretty heartbreaking. This docuseries has interviews with family, friends, girlfriends, occasional showbiz buddies like Kevin Pollak, pretty much everybody but "Friends" co-stars, and it felt like a pretty empathetic warts-and-all portrait of his complicated life, left me feeling pretty sad.
I never really followed the Natalee Holloway story when it was happening, so I kinda caught up with this Netflix doc, didn't realize how many twists and turns there were in the saga.
As much as we kind of know what happened to Nicole Brown Simpson, there are still a lot of unknowns, including whether OJ acted alone, so it was interesting to revisit the various theories and evidence about that idea.
It feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of what was bad about the Stanford Prison Experiment that someone thought "let's do it right this time, and make a Netflix show about it," I'm surprised MrBeast wasn't involved.
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