Finished the final season of The Crown last night. All in all, it’s been a pretty good series as long as one doesn’t take it too seriously fact-wise. I think we’re going on a series hiatus until our Christmas movie marathon is done.
I noticed that when I did my post! I looked it up on IMDb to make sure I had the correct title when I saw the word “Lawmen”. I thought is that a typo? But then thought - there will be more!
Anime!
Still watching I’m Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness which remains silly. I think the first season might be over, or maybe just the current story arc. Still enjoying the hell capybara.
Likewise: A Playthrough of a Certain Dude’s VRMMO Life - Still moderately entertaining, and I think I’m at the end of S1. The show features a shadowy cabal of game designers watching the protagonist’s progress; they are clearly shadowy because they are always standing in a darkened room around a table that projects the game events upwards for sinister underlighting effect. Must be terrible for their eyes and backs to work like that.
Finished all of The Saint’s Magic Power is Omnipotent - It’s not really a spoiler to say that it ends with the monsters all dead and the two romantic leads finally admitting to each other what everyone else in the entire kingdom already knew.
Finished S1 of So I’m A Spider. So What?. Much of the series is told as two timelines in parallel, one 15 years after the other, done rather cleverly to make you wonder how things changed from one to the other, how good characters became evil and vice versa, and what the hell is going on. A decent twist ensues. Looking forward to the next season.
Finished: Parallel World Pharmacy, a perv-free story about a cutting-edge pharmacologist who dies of overwork and wakes up in the body of a small boy in a world where there is a god of medicine. He cures a lot of people, defeats conspiracies, solves social inequality, and reveals how squirrels are fundamentally evil.
Started and gave up on: The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You. I mean, I knew this was going to be high-perv content but wanted to see the set-up, which didn’t disappoint. Episode 1 is a cavalcade of lampshading and fourth-wall breaking, including a friend of the protagonist who is only there for initial exposition and is literally just named “Friend A” (and announces that he will never be seen again). There is also a god who complains that most of the lines he had in the manga were cut. Really quite funny. That said, Episode 2 was all boobs, panties and pratfalls. I will not be watching episode 3.
Not anime:
Finished the last season of The Crown. It was fine. I really want it to be true that the Queen went jitterbugging at the Ritz.
Still working on: Mr Queen. Man, the episodes seem long and there are a lot of characters to remember and political factions to keep straight, but the lead actress is absolutely carrying it all with ease.
I’m enjoying this new show on Amazon Deadloch, it’s a spoof murder mystery set in small town Deadloch, Tasmania. After the first murder, a detective is sent in from Darwin to lead the investigation, and the race is on. I suppose it’s the usual wacky townies, the creatively swearing detective from Darwin and the senior officer from Deadloch who is trying to just run a normal investigation. I’m very much liking the mystery, I don’t have a clue where it’s leading.
“Alright, let’s forensic the fuck out of this!”
So, the 'A Murder at the End of the World’ killer turns out to be…
The AI bot, Ray (with an IRL assist from the kid Zoomer as an innocent dupe).
I have to say, that was a surprise and not a surprise at the same time. I didn’t predict it, but mostly because I gave up most interest in the show and was just kind of trance-watching toward the end.
Clear echoes of Hal 9000, from an over 50 year old movie. Right down to destroying the evil bot’s memory banks-- though a lithium battery fire is more dramatic than pulling out memory chips one by one.
And it was kind of an ‘of course’ moment since we’ll clearly be inundated with ‘AI is evil’ plot points in shows and movies going forward.
I loved Deadloch, but I have to admit I needed to turn on the subtitles - I simply couldn’t understand a good 40% of what the one detective was saying !
Very crude, and a bit gory. But a guilty pleasure none the less.
The majority of viewers disagree. While it’s not a dramatic ratings jump, seasons 3 and 4 scored notably better than the first two. It’s typical for a sitcom to find its stride after the first one or two seasons, but in this case there were major cast changes which I think were for the better. The show then plateaued for the next few seasons and took a dip in the final Season 8 when they started running out of good ideas, though the series finale was widely regarded as one of the best in the history of sitcoms!
Sister Boniface is just getting stupider and stupider. I don’t know if I can take it much longer.
True, because no sitcom went wrong pandering to the great masses.
I just watched the last episode of the second season of Julia, the Max series about Julia Child. I really liked the show and hope it gets renewed for a third season and more. It helps that Julia Child is portrayed as such a nice person, and the food porn helps too. (About the only sour note was the jealousy of Simone Beck, Julia’s co-author.)
The amazing thing about that show is how so many of the characters have their own storylines. And it’s not hard to follow them all. And I dig any show set on the cusp of conformist America and the 1960’s counterculture. The last episode nicely expressed the liberation from the former.
We finished Season 2 of Dark Winds, and we really enjoyed it. It’s a police procedural set on a Nacajo reservation in the 1970’s. Really well done.
We are now into episode 5 of “Evil”, and we are really liking it. If you like shows such as Lucifer or Supernatural, you’ll like this show. The cast is like a who’s who of actors from good television shows.
The premise of the show: A female forensic psychologist is hired by the Catholic church to investigate miracles, possessions, etc. The Psychologist is an athiest and a skeptic, and one of the other team members is a tech guy who is also a skeptic. The third member is a guy who is becoming a datholic priest, and he believes.
The writing is excellent, and the religious/supernatural/atheism debates are very well done. It seems like the theme of the show is a case-of-the-week of a supposed supernatural event, and the team investigates. The catholic church actually hopes for a debunking of these cases becausebthey don’t want to deal with a real case of Supernatural religious happenings. The show often (in the first four epidoes we watched) leaves you to decide if anything supernatural actually happened.
Mike Colter (Amenadiel from Lucifer), Asef Mandvi and Katie Herbers are the team. Supporting players include Michael Emerson (“Person of Interest”), Christine Lahti, Peter Scolari, Andrea Martin, Tim Matheson, and a whole lot of other familiar faces.
I assume you mean episode 5 of the first season? I don’t think I posted anything about Evil here, but it really is an excellent series. There are three seasons out, all of them equally good, with season 4 having been delayed by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. It will be out sometime next year. The lead writers, Robert and Michelle King, are very good at what they do and have been successful at basically winging it with no long-term plan. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it but IIRC the first season starts out with phenomena that turn out to have natural explanations, or at least plausibly so with perhaps an element of uncertainty. But as the episodes progress, and definitely in later seasons, the undeniably supernatural takes center stage. Really looking forward to Season 4. If you’re only on Season 1 you have a lot to look forward to!
Anime! Continuing the “medical science in a superstitious world” theme, we got “The Apothecary Diaries”. Description:
Basically Quincy M.E. if Quincy was a 17-year-old girl in Ming-era China sold into captivity. Also, the main male foil is a eunuch.
Non-anime:
The Golden Hour. I dunno - my wife likes these miserable police/detective shows (along with endless reruns of the various Law & Order shows) and I watch along. It was fine, but not really my thing. Good if you want to be depressed.
Thanks for the review. We’re looking forwasrd to it.
And I screwed up the reference for one of the actors, Mike Colter. I could have sworn he was Amenadiel on Lucifer, but actually the actor was Luke Cage. The actor who plays Amenadiel looks somewhat similar.
I started the new season of Futurama today. Full disclosure: this has historically been one of my favorite if not my all-time favorite shows.
First episode kept me entertained. I enjoyed the writers room gags. I shall continue.
I did find myself wondering what actually goes on in robot hell. Perhaps I’ve forgotten.
Just binged Deadloch on Amazon Prime. It was……extreme, I think. I nearly stopped watching 15 minutes in, everything was just too over the top.
But I continued all the way through and am happy I did.
Yeah, the first episode does not give you a good feel for the show in total. The second episode is half as ‘zany?’ and the third episode is barely at all and the rest of the season goes from there. No idea why the show is so uneven, especially being The Pilot.
Forgot to mention Isekai Cheat Magician. But it was pretty forgettable.
Also watching What If…? as it drops.
We streamed Midnight Mass on Netflix. From Mike Flanagan, who did The Haunting of Hill House. Like Hill House, it was great…right up to the end, then kinda fell off the rails.