She was on Colbert last week, and she was really annoying there as well. It was enough for me to pass on the show entirely.
Speaking of actors who usually play obnoxious characters, is anybody watching Entitled on Netflix? For whatever reason they chose Brett Gelman to play the sympathetic protagonist; a widower discovering his dead wife’s secret past on her family’s English estate. We’re two episodes in and have kind of stalled on it. I’d pick it up again if someone could assure me there is a payoff for all the cringy humor.
I’m about done with the second episode of Ballard, with mixed feelings.
- the pace of the crimes/solving is very good, it rarely stops moving.
- Maggie Q is terrific, she really is
- I like the rest of the team, including that dude from the Drew Carey show. Even the annoying guy.
…but…
- I am so tired of the “angry, demeaning bosses” trope, it’s a cheap way to ratchet up the show’s blood pressure
- also, almost every other non-team character is angry and demeaning too. Just stop.
Fortunately some of the bad tropes get reversed…I’ll stick with it.
My memory is a bit fuzzy 18 years later, but as I recall it was quite strange, and didn’t really seem to be about anything. I also recall being bummed that it got the ax after only 10 episodes, so I must have enjoyed watching it at least a little.
It doesn’t get any better with the tropes. The real eye-roller is when they actually have a large digital clock on a desk that is counting down the “72 hours to show progress or else”. 
Hahaha that’s perfect.
While more than a bit cheesy, that at least let the viewer know of the time left for the team to figure it out.
My wife and I watched a couple of eps last week and I was initially amused by it but I just couldn’t stick with it either. Once I started hearing Lena Dunham’s voice in Jessica’s actions, the show started to “not work” for me. I don’t consider myself a Dunham hater but there’s a certain entitlement to her writing that to me works in small doses.
finished “waking the dead” Waking the Dead (TV Series 2000–2011) - IMDb
good heavens, boyd is a really toxic character. i don’t know how he didn’t end up in prison or killed.
the good ship murder is back with new episodes, as is star trek.
My wife and I are still plowing our way through “Vera”. I’m starting to notice a pattern: each episode is about 90 minutes; after about an hour, I start nodding off, wake up, nod off again, to the point that by the end of the show I’m completely lost, but don’t care enough to go back later and watch it again to make sense of it. I should probably just quit but my wife enjoys it and it’s our “couples tv”. (Maybe I should get her to watch Andor with me… then she’ll be the one falling asleep!)
Me, too. She’s off-putting to me, as well.
Kleo (Netflix, 2se.) almost done with season on. It’s good. It’s German but the dubbing is fantastic and the characters and plot move along. It takes place shortly after the Berlin Wall fell and the characters are sort of archetypes of the citizens living in Germany on both sides at the time and the plot and dialogue play off that tension.
Recommended for fans of The Gentleman series, Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, dark and violent with a dash of humor.
This happens to me a lot with British cop/detective shows. They have so many characters and red herrings that I can’t keep the story on track. This is typical Agatha Christie technique and why I could never get into her novels. There would be all this confusion and then at the end she’d introduce a character that was either never part of the story or so insignificant you didn’t pay attention to it. We saw the play “Mousetrap” some time ago and I was lost.
I watch so many of these I can usually spot all the tricks. I’m rarely fooled too much. But that’s not because I’m so smart; I’m just over-exposed to all their gambits.
Many of these British mystery series, while nicely produced, often follow a well-worn pattern. We would probably watch more of them if not for the length of the episodes (90 minutes) and the plethora of characters (and red herrings) introduced. The perp usually ends up as some character with a two-minute walk-on in the first 20 minutes who we invariably forgot about as soon as they walked off.
I hear ya. We have grown to like Chelsea Detective but they too follow a similar pattern.
Just recently watched Ludwig. I like mystery series, and this one is entertaining and funny (though the murders are the least important part). Does lean into some tropes (one that I do find rather tired), but is executed so well that I don’t care. I like the arc, and hope it plays out well. The main characters seem three-dimensional enough to me, and I like the interpersonal dynamics thus far.
I was just recommending this to my sister, and wishing the next season was here already!
The best thing about murder mystery tropes is that if you use them cleverly you can manipulate the audience into believing anything you want.
The dubbing is quite good but if you don’t watch it in German you miss Kleo’s brilliant delivery of “[long pause] Gut.” It’s just not the same in English.