We finished The Bear, it was great.
We started on ‘starstruck’ , first season was fine, and worth watching. All ideas were exhausted by season 2 and the ‘ will they won’t they get together ‘ was all done, and the main character just became very unlikable as they tried to push a story along and get more laughs.
Seconding your recommendation. For a while there I hoped that France 2 was going to step up for a third season of Zone Blanche/Black Spot, but looks like non. (Watch out kayaker, some spoilers in that link.)
Recently stumbled upon Mike Tyson Mysteries. It’s absurd and preposterous. It’s ridiculous. It’s wacky. I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s the Best. Thing. Ever. Only four episodes in, so I’m hoping they maintained it at the same level, or close to it, over the entire run of the series.
I’ve seen a few episodes. I can’t believe Tyson agreed to do that.
Still watching Picard Season 3. Man is this good TV. The emotional through-lines are genuinely affecting. I teared up a little in more than one place.
Earlier in here, I said I had started SWAT, I liked it, and wondered when a guilty pleasure is just what I like? Well, now I’m here for the opposite. I think SWAT lost me.
One of the reasons I never watched SWAT was because as I have gotten older, the amount of guns we have in the US scares me. Being numb to violence worries me. The system of gun worship that is in the US still worries and scares me. I thought in SWAT, it would be more glorification of the gun and violence. Instead, I found a show that operated within the system it had and still used a gun but had individuals who didn’t reach for the gun as the first solution. They have a lot of non lethal take down options used. They do have non fatal shootings. They also dealt with societal issues in ways I hadn’t seen before and I appreciate how different it was.
Then we get the third season. Now it’s like all of the other shows, Bones popped into my head but most do it, where they had a specific mandate and reason SWAT was used and now they are using them almost as a typical procedural show. They are doing UC work. They are doing stings. They are solving homicides. I think it lost me due to this shift.
Glitch (2015, 3 se, Netflix) The blurb: A police officer in a small country town finds his life turned upside down when six former residents return from the dead in perfect health.
4 episodes in and my wife and I are enjoying it. Not hilarious, but pleasant. Set in a cute small Australian town featuring a wetter Outback when one night a few people from the local graveyard crawl out of their graves completely healthy and eventually remember who they were. Some of them have been buried for awhile, some have secrets. It’s essentially a new spin on the tired zombie trope and adds a refreshing Australian style. B+ effort so far, would recommend it in the Northern Exposure, Wentworth, Eureka area of entertainment.
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Halloween Month has started, so here are a couple of series about lightly creepy amusement parks.
Crazy Fun Park: a YA comedy from Australia about ghostish-zombieish teens “living” in an abandoned amusement park.
Dead End: Paranormal Park: I had watched season one of this when it first came out but didn’t notice that a second one came out last October. This one is an animated series about people working in a haunted amusement park.
As the series goes on, they stray a bit from the direct Scooby-Doo parody and I found it more weird and less funny.
The writers on Mike Tyson Mysteries (Hugh Davidson, Larry Dorf, Rachel Ramras) also created a live-action sitcom called Nobodies about their experiences trying to get a movie made. I thought it was pretty funny, although clearly less insane than Mike Tyson Mysteries.
I’ll consider myself forewarned. I do understand you can go on for only so long with the same kind of schtick, no matter how well you do it, before it gets tiresome. And it seems to me that when a show makes changes to keep things fresh, it usually veers to some extent toward “bland.” But I’m down with “more weird,” depending on how they do it.
Last night we finished the 2020 mini-series The Undoing with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. A whodunit story that really kept us interested and guessing.
I read the recent article in the Washington Post about the British show Naked Attraction; I’ll post a gift link below. I know it’s not really a series, but it’s already in its sixth season. It’s airing on HBO - oops, Max - so I took a look.
It’s a Dating Game type show, where a player chooses from one of six participants. The six are shown totally naked, with one area revealed at a time: below the waist, from the neck down, and finally with the face. The player eliminates one participant on each round, and in the end the player finally comes out naked as well. The winning couple then goes on a date, clothed, and there is a follow-up interview.
The title is only half-right: the people are naked, but attraction is certainly in the eye of the beholder. If you like shaved labia (their term), lots and lots of tattoos, the occasional breast implant, piercings, and flaccid uncircumcised penises (the norm in Britain), then you might find the participants attractive. I, however, did not, and did not need to see more than a couple episodes to make that decision. I do give them props for showing various body types with no body shaming, which was kind of nice.
Snake Oil with David Spade. He is working oddly low key, and a little snarky. It has moments.
Krapopolis - could be okay.
Naked Attraction is an abomination for all sorts of reasons. The nudity is actually less objectionable than the whole premise of deciding whether or not you’d like to date someone based entirely on the look of their genitals.
Finished S3 of Only Murders In The Building. It successfully misled me as to whodunnit (although I did know early on the victim was talking to a cookie), and there are some staggeringly funny lines. And of course there’s a setup to S4.
A blast from the (reasonably recent) past. I enjoyed The Closer when it originally aired, but because of some circumstances I don’t remember, I was only able to see a couple of episodes of Major Crimes. I have started watching that, very quickly fell back into familiarity with the characters, and binged the 10 episodes of the first season in one day.
Netflix has Band of Brothers available for streaming. We’ve never seen it, since we never had HBO.
Wow.
We’ve only watched three episodes. They are so intense, especially episode two, that we can only watch it once a week, needing some time to recover. This deserved all the acclaim it received.
It’s a winner all the way to the end.
Yep. Fantastic.The Pacific was nowhere as good, however.
The 3rd film-“Masters of the Air" should be out in Jan 2024.
Star Trek:Picard s1.
Late to the party in this one; I am a Trek fan but hadn’t heard good reports so left well alone, but decided to risk it after hearing very good things about s3 and thought I can’t just jump in at that point.
Hmm… ok plus points:
It looks great, very cinematic.
I like the theme music.
The first episode was actually rather good. It was intriguing, and set things up nicely, or so I thought.
Struggling here…
That’s about it so far. I am 6 episodes in and the thing moves so slowwwwwwly, it is only the promise of a vast improvement that is keeping me from giving up. Old Jean Luc should’ve stayed on his vineyard with his feet up and a nice glass of red.
Watched the first 2 and a half episodes of S2 of Our Flag Means Death (there’s some sort of playback issue in episode 3 that I hope HBO Max will correct soon.) What a totally unique and funny show! It’s about two historical pirate captains (Blackbeard and Stede Bonnett) and their crews. Every kind of non-normative romantic relationship is depicted (though no actual sex) in an historical environment that would seem naturally conducive to abandoning traditional mores. The emotional struggles of some of the characters can get rather dark but still have a comedic edge. There’s plenty of cartoonish violence, but it’s there to serve the humor. If there is a running theme, it seems to be that every choice that people make is ultimately governed by love (or passion or obsession or jealousy, etc)
Bit of a revisit. We’re in the middle of season two and it’s lost a bit of luster. I thought the season ender was a dud and some of the plot lines seem to go now where. My wife and I are really starting to despise the main protagonist also.
Not ready to give up, but wanted to warn those who would follow me. My wife is still on board but we are in C+ Grade territory, I feel. Though I admit I am hard to please.