TV Diary
Thursday, April 16, 2026 
Dan Levy's first feature Good Grief was a decent little dramedy, but I'm glad he's back with a new Netflix series he co-created with Rachel Sennott that feels a little more like his proper follow-up to "Schitt's Creek." Levy and Taylor Ortega, who I've adored since "Welcome To Flatch," play a pastor and his sister who piss off some mobsters and cartels and get mixed up in a bunch of dangerous shit. The story just keeps jumping through all these tangents that don't always make sense, I think "Search Party" did this kind of thing with a little more energy and gleeful absurdity, but overall I really like it. Every scene with Ortega and Jack Innanen is hilarious, they have this great dynamic as a very specific kind of dysfunctional couple. And Levy just plays a bit more of an earnest protagonist here, he's more the anchor of the story than he was on "Schitt's Creek" but not as funny as he was on "Schitt's Creek."
This reminds me of Alexander Payne's Downsizing in that it's got some impressive writing and acting that feels at odds with the wacky Honey, I Shrunk The Kids-style premise and visual effects. Certainly that's a deliberate choice to some extent, but it still results in a weird mix of tones and some inevitably corny physical comedy revolving around one character being shrunk down to a few inches tall. The meat of the show, though, Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen trapped in a bitter, loveless marriage, is pretty well done.
c) "Rooster"
As someone who has always enjoyed Bill Lawrence's sitcoms, I'm happy to say that 2026 feels like peak Bill Lawrence -- "Shrinking" has hit its stride and is I think one of his best shows to date, the "Scrubs" revival was better than I thought it'd be, his biggest hit "Ted Lasso" is returning soon, and "Rooster" had HBO's biggest ratings for a new comedy in over a decade. "Rooster" has a completely different HBO-y look from Lawrence's other shows (even the episodes directed by Zach Braff!), but the tone is familiar, Steve Carell and John C. McGinley are hilarious as always, and it's cool to see Charly Clive in something like this after her star-making role in "Pure," she's great. Michael Stipe did the theme song, which is a pretty cool get, but I wouldn't have even guessed it was him if I didn't know.
I love horror movies, but the trope of repeated fakeouts where you're led to anticipate a scary or violent turn of events long before they start happening, is not my favorite thing about horror movies, although it can be done well to comedic effect. Netflix's "Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen," true to its title, has a whole lot of that, I find it a little exasperating, but otherwise it's pretty good. I thought "The Magicians" had one of the best casts on television in the 2010s and I'm annoyed that those actors aren't all over the place now, so it's nice that at least Adam DiMarco is staying booked.
Scott Speedman always seemed to me like a super generic early 2000s actor that never left a strong impression in his various roles in the Underworld franchise in other stuff. But now he's in the title role in a hit ABC show based on Carl Hiaasen novel and I feel like it's the first time I've found his performance charming and memorable, he's good as a hardscrabble private investigator down on his luck. And he has good chemistry with Jaina Lee Ortiz, who I previously loyally watched in another crime drama set in Miami, "Rosewood."
Last month I complained about the style of murder mystery that's in vogue on TV when I wrote about "DTF St. Louis," but "Imperfect Women" is really a better example of how boring these kind of flashback-heavy mystery shows can be. One of the weakest Apple TV shows I've seen to date, big waste of Kerry Washington and Elizabeth Moss.
I've heard people complain that The Count of Monte Cristo isn't actually very well written for a classic book, so I'm going to selfishly take that as an excuse to watch an adaptation without having read the source material. But I know the gist of the story, of course, and this miniseries with Sam Claflin and Jeremy Irons, which aired on Swiss television in 2024 but just recently came to PBS in America, has some pretty good atmosphere and production values.
I adore Minnie Driver and always thought she deserved a few Emmys and a career resurgence for "Speechless." So it's depressing that she's been in three TV series already in 2026 and two of them are among the worst shows I've seen this year, "Run Away" and this Fox miniseries of Bible stories (the third is a Canadian show that I think is coming to America on some obscure streamer I don't use). We as a society are failing Minnie Driver! At least this one had one hilarious scene where she yells at God about her womb.
"Malcolm in the Middle" was a reasonably entertaining show for its time, although even as a teenager I thought it was clear that Bryan Cranston and Jane Kaczmarek were carrying the show. This revival was initially going to be a 2-hour TV movie and then they decided to make it a 4-episode miniseries, and either way I think a bite-sized trip down memory lane is all that's really warranted here. Unfortunately, it feels like a lot of other revivals of old shows where they put a lot of focus on new cast members playing the old characters' kids, in this case Malcolm's daughter who's now the narrator. It's fun enough, though, Cranston steals a few scenes.
This spinoff of some forgettable 2010s movies that started in 2023 has just now returned for a second season, it's not terrible but it really just feels like a big lumbering waste of Apple TV money.
This has gotten rave reviews from people who are fine with the visual style of animated Star Wars shows, but I am not one of them, just hate the way this stuff looks.
l) "Invincible"
I'm a few weeks behind on the fourth season of "Invincible" and it seems like the latest episode was one of those really action-packed ones that gets everybody talking and makes the show worth following. But it kind of feels like most seasons of this show are like that, not every episode leading up to the climax is very entertaining. I like that there's been maybe a return to a bit more humor this season, though.
A new Netflix anime series, a very introspective and sensitive sort of teen soap opera.
My 10-year-old very rarely takes an interest in watching anything that's not animated, but lately he's been binging this Australian live action sitcom that was made about a decade ago about kids roughly his age, it's pretty charming, reminds me of some of those Nickelodeon sitcoms from the '90s.
"Crap Happens," or "Kacken an der Havel," is a Netflix sitcom about the career struggles of a white rapper from Berlin. It's like a German version Lil Dicky's "Dave," but not even as good as that comparison implies.
I'm used to a lot of the international fare on Netflix being crap like, well, "Crap Happens," so I was pleasantly surprised by this moving series based on Orhan Pamuk's 2008 novel.
q) "Portobello"
This is an HBO miniseries about an Italian TV host who was accused of being part of a crime syndicate in 1983, I'm only a couple episodes in but it has a great lead performance by Fabrizio Gifuni.
She hasn't posted on Twitter in a year or two, but it still matters a lot to me that Padma Lakshmi is probably the most famous person that follows me on social media. Her new show on CBS is really good, kind of a corrective to the formula of "Top Chef" and a lot of cooking competition shows where people have to do what they can with a limited set of ingredients and/or resources, instead a bunch of award-winning chefs are given everything they need to do their very best work. And some of the dishes they come up with look so delicious and unique, but there still plenty that old school reality show tension and suspense, because of course there's time limits and some people kind of scramble to finish their dishes.
A riff on the title of "That '70s Show" in 2026? Timely! But this is a cute show.
A kind of depressing but good and necessary nature series about how various animals and communities have adjusted to life in the time of extreme climate change.
I love bees and this new National Geographic docuseries is fascinating, some of the footage they got of inside beehives or bees protecting themselves from a hornet are just amazing.
Oh man, this true crime doc about a polygamist sect in Utah is just so unsettling and gross, I did not want to watch more than one episode of it.
Another really stomach-turning true crime series, this one about a Spanish tour guide who assaulted countless tourists.
I'd never heard of the famous and controversial rock climber Dean Potter, the first episode of this HBO docuseries was pretty gripping, but then I was like well now I have to look up how he died and stuff, why live in suspense about the other episodes.
This dating reality show produced by the "Call Her Daddy" podcast lady is just kind of cartoonishly absurd, with some contestants living it up on a yacht while other contestants work hard below deck. I don't know if some degree of class consciousness or social critique is going to seep into this thing, deliberately or by accident, but the execution seems largely shamelessly stupid.
Apparently Byron Allen has been hosting this show for hundreds of episodes over the last 20 years, but I've only started to see it pretty recently, kind of by accident if I still have CBS on after Colbert ends. It's just absolute dogshit, feels almost more like an infomercial than a comedy show, and of course it was recently announced that this is what CBS is putting in Colbert's timeslot after his show ends next month.
