I saw season 2 and actually…I’d say not so much. Season 1 was fun. Season 2 was OK, but was becoming a bit of a slog.
I’m on episode 12 of Young Lions on Amazon Prime. It’s an Australia police drama with 21 episodes. Started off kinda slow, but I’m enjoying it now.
I binged The Gentlemen on Netflix yesterday. It’s an eight-episode series based on a 2019 Guy Ritchie movie of the same name. I enjoyed it, though it’s the sort of thing that involves twists, double twists and so forth.
We are watching Master of the Air, The New Look and Expats as the episodes come out . Enjoying all of them . Expats is tough watching.
I just listened to Marc Marons WTF podcast interview with Ben Mendelsohn who plays Dior in The New Look, I was initially taken aback with his very broad Australian accent in the interview , obviously I shouldn’t have been given he is a very talented actor but I was ‘holy crap how did he manage that French accent in the New Look’.
I don’t know how much they have made up out of whole cloth ( ha ha) for the history of the various characters , googling seems to indicate it’s close enough probably with some real life characters merged and Coco does not come over well. I also liked the portrayal of the critical state of people returning in near death from starvation, and not just happy happy joy joy reunions and everything is great !
I like the WTF interviews particularly as I lean about some of the slightly more offbeat movies I should queue up and watch .
I watched season one of Slow Horses and will certainly follow up with the rest of the seasons . Are the books worthwhile ?
Also binged For All Mankind season 3 on some
15 hour flights . Good popcorn viewing, yeah all a bit over the top now , but popcorn , so will have to get the last season in soon as we upped for Apple TV for just a couple of months to watch a few of these then will let it lapse for a while.
I’m on book two. The books are very British, so if you’re okay with that you’ll likely enjoy them. I don’t know if it’s just the Kindle version or if the books are similar, but the breaks between scenes in a chapter are not clearly marked, so I suddenly find myself reading about two different people than I was a few moments before. Takes some getting used to.
I loved the books, but I haven’t seen any of the series yet. It’s on a streaming servce I don’t get.
ETA: Yes, they are very British, but I find that more interesting than not. I love the evolution of various characters through the books and their various fates.
Master of the Air
Production is great , the story and pacing is very uneven , with characters in and out and different arcs. Clearly a rather high death toll is to account for some of that.
Maybe It’s my attention span and inability to remember names , for me it will do better on a rewatch all the way through (I thought the Pacific was better 2nd time through probably for that reason). Band of Brothers had large cast with people in and out but didn’t feel so disjointed , watched that 3 times through at least.
Thanks both of you.
I was very British but American now, but the quirky bits of the old home will be interesting so I’ll get one and see how it goes .
Carol and the End of the World on Netflix. Animated series about a woman who clings to routine as much as possible even as another planet hurtles toward Earth on a collision course. Pretty good stuff.
Loudermilk on Netflix. We’re near the end of the first of three seasons. Sam Loudermilk is a recovering alcoholic who leads a substance abuse support group. Oh, yeah, and he’s an asshole, but he really wants to help people. I like it pretty well, although there are moments here and there where the writers seem to stretch things a little to far to make him look asshole-ish.
The Addams Family on the Roku Channel. Update on this one. I previously posted that the formula was that a typical episode had a normie encounter the family on one pretense or another and get freaked out. I’m pleased to report that several episodes farther along, they’ve deviated from that formula a few times. So there’s more variety in the stories than just the one thing.
It’s slyly funny, rather than laugh-out-loud, which I appreciate. Sometimes I’ll read a line and then think “Wait a minute: what did he say?”
We’ve been cruising through pretty much every sitcom ever made. Sorted roughly from most to least favorite:
How I Met Your Mother - Somehow a bit more realistic than most sitcoms. It felt more like the real (remembered) tales of a group of friends who hung out a lot rather than the contrived-by-budgetary-necessity version that we get with most of the shows. Very satisfied.
Don’t Trust the B---- In Apartment 23 - And from here, we have all of the not-so-realistic sitcoms that feel like sitcoms. But, that said, I felt like this had more true laughs than most and more character development. More depth of character than almost everything else.
Fresh off the Boat - Very good and stays strong for quite a while but, at some point, the production crew seems to have changed, the family becomes Christian, they start introducing “special learning moments”, etc. We finished the whole thing but we were a bit disappointed about what had happened to it.
Deadbeat - First season was actually quite good, we were pleasantry surprised and would recommend it to almost anyone, despite all the drug jokes. And then the second season…Holy Moly it is ho-ree-bull. Very clearly, the whole production crew was replaced between the seasons. It’s hard to describe the absolute belly flop onto hard pavement that occurs.
Blockbuster - Very enjoyable and we were disappointed that there was only one season. I don’t know that it needed to have dozens of seasons but at least a second would have been nice.
2 Broke Girls - Not a lot of laughs but, in general, a very nice and solid sitcom. We were happy and satisfied with it throughout its entire run. I’d probably watch more if they released more.
Dollface - Starts out seeming a bit strange and dreamlike but morphs into a fairly straightforward show. Not bad but it didn’t feel like it had a lot of legs and probably ended at about the right length (short).
Modern Family - I’d probably put this down as the most “solid” show. If there was a fault with it, it was simply “too solid”. They had the characters, the sorts of scenarios, the sorts of jokes, etc. all down just a little too pat and, at some point, we just got tired of the consistent, reliable, saminess of it all. Probably, they should have ended it a couple of seasons earlier than they did.
Big Bang Theory - More famous than most of the others but I’d probably rank it in with 2 Broke Girls in terms of jokes and quality - once it gets going - if you don’t strongly associate with the whole nerd/geek culture thing. The first couple of seasons aren’t so good with very flat, one-joke characters and it takes a while to develop them, add some women and remake Howard, so that it’s a bit less creepy. After that, it’s pretty fine.
Mike & Molly - Less funny and more just “nice”. Ended at a fairly good time but also seemed like they never used a lot of the material that they had available to them. It’s almost never relevant that Mike is a police officer - likewise with Molly when she’s a teacher; Joyce barely ever does anything; Victoria is a one-joke shop for the entire first season; etc. The slow beginning and slow approach to developing characters seems like it might be a Chuck Lorre pattern, given that he did the same with Big Bang Theory.
Young & Hungry - Similar to 2 Broke Girls but a smaller budget. There’s no real reason to watch it unless you’ve watched all of the other sitcoms and need one - but likewise, there’s no real reason to avoid it.
Pretty Smart - Similar to Young & Hungry (and starring the same actress). Main character seemed interesting at first - an overly educated woman who put herself behind in exchange for her boyfriend, has to adapt to the everyday world. But they pretty much toss all of that immediately and it becomes “some sitcom”.
Ghosts - We liked it fairly well for the first several episodes but lost interest somewhere in the middle of the 1st season. It felt like they didn’t have much story to tell and they were going to steadily migrate to giving the writers’ pop views on the meaning of various historical moments. We’re not terribly interested.
Golden Girls - We watched a few episodes out of nostalgia. Didn’t land. Too many “special learning moments” for my modern, adult sensibilities.
Brooklyn 99 - Watched a few episodes. Didn’t laugh. Felt like an extended SNL skit and - like the average SNL skit - once the joke doesn’t land, they just keep grinding on it for far too long.
The Good Place - Tried watching it a couple of times but it seemed more like a lecture on what’s Good and Bad according to the PC Police than a fun and whimsical show about an interesting situation.
It was more of a lecture about ethical philosophies, but I guess that’s along the same lines. Still a great show, though, so it’s a shame you didn’t like it.
Gosh, I just hate this show. Every other joke is, “Tee hee, I’m a slut!” And though generally I’m pro-slut, this show just makes me feel the world’s an ugly place. 
Agreed, Good Place is one of the best shows ever.
Agreed, terrible show with one of the worst laugh tracks.
(Re: Dungeon Meshi/Delicious in Dungeon)
I’m caught up with the 10 episodes out so far. Pretty well done, except the animation could be better. So far it is following the manga very closely, and these 10 episodes cover up to only chapter 23 out of 97 for the manga. There is a lot of story left, not a chance of being able to cover it all in one 24-episode season if it continues to be a faithful copy of the manga.
I watched the first episode and it didn’t grab me. It seemed like a comedy that was only intermittently funny.
It’s been a while since I watched it. I faintly recall that, that might have been an element of one of the girl’s personalities but given that I barely remember it, I feel like they might have dropped it early in the run? Either that, or I just learned to ignore it.
I was just thinking about all the fat jokes at the start of Mike & Molly. I’m pretty sure that they persisted with some amount of fat jokes all of the way through the show but they’re barely noticeable towards the end. Mostly they stopped doing them but you also just get accustomed to them and appreciate that they’re never ill intended.
Picking on someone for something and keeping devoutly quiet about that same thing to not harm them, both can be just as hurtful. Comedy might be a tool to moving past all that and just accepting that we’re all our own people and we ain’t gotta be the same. Not giving a flip is the only true form of not giving a flip.
I get that. But the way I see it, it’s just its own little thing.
I Am Not Okay With This - Recommended.
Had this on my Netflix list for a really long, long time and just watched it. Only 7 episodes, the whole thing is under 3 hours, it ends pretty much right when it’s about to get really good, and it’s cancelled so you’re never ever going to get any more, but what there is is certainly worth watching.
On the face of it, it’s just a high school teen dramedy, but even if was only that, it’s well written and would still be entertaining. It’s a slow-walk superhero origin story when you really boil it all down. Disappointed that’s all we get, but still I enjoyed it.
Re: Carol at the End of the World: I agree. We watched it, not knowing what to expect, and enjoyed it. It’s not “funny” funny. In fact, one or two of the episodes were rather sad. I think the intention is wry, sometimes ridiculous humor interspersed with poignant moments, considering the situation all these people have found themselves in.