The spouse has been binging Turn on Netflix, about spies during the American Revolutionary War. I’ve been dipping in and out because I occasionally actually have things to do with my life but the bits I’ve seen have been pretty good. Solid cast (including Kevin McNally, Jamie Bell and Burn Gorman), a suitably frustrating antagonist, and enough of a nod to actual history to make it interesting.
We’ve also finished the new series of Rick and Morty which continues much as previously. One of the episodes is spectacularly sacrilegious (to Christians) but if you’re still watching this show at this point you already know what you’re in for.
Which one? I saw the new season, but can’t remember. I will say that the new voice actors for Rick and Morty are so good, I would not have noticed the switch had I not been made aware.
N0S4A2 - This one’s a few years old (2019) but it recently showed up on Netflix. A few episodes in, it’s a pretty fun watch. Despite the title (which is the Big Bad Guy’s vanity license plate) the vampirism is of the psychic soul-sucking kind, not the bloodletting kind. I read the book, written by Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son, but so long ago that I remember little of it. So the series, other than very vague main plot beats, is new to me. The son definitely has learned from the father-- many of the typical King elements are there: a mix of fable / fairy tale and horror; psychic abilities; characters who are mostly good but flawed, with messy personal lives.
Playing Gracie Darling - This one’s a new (2025) Aussie series that also recently showed up on Netflix. An episode in, it’s intruiging, but the jury’s still out. Basic plot: A group of teenage girls (and one guy) have a seance using a Ouija board, resulting in the seeming possession and disappearance of one of the girls (the titular Gracie). Many years later, the now-grown survivors find out that a new generation of teenagers are ‘playing Gracie Darling’, doing the Ouija board seance, and another girl has gone missing. So, shades of the show ‘Yellowjackets’-- young people unleash some evil that follows them into adulthood. Minor note: damn, for a board game that can be purchased in any toy store, Ouija boards have unleashed evil spirits and demons a lot in movies and TV shows! They should probably be regulated or something. At least make them age-restricted.
Ah, damn. We’re enough episodes in that I’m kinda committed. Well, thanks for the heads up, but I’ll just have to read the book again afterward for a resolution, I guess. Not that there’s any guarantee that the series follows the book very closely, of course.
My husband and I watched the limited series The Beast in Me with Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys. We really liked it. There were some unsettling and tense scenes.
We watched the pilot of Best Medicine (Fox). An Americanized version of the BBC series Doc Marten….curmudgeonly big city doctor moves to small town. Starring Josh Charles (SportsNight, The Good Wife)
Pilots are always a bit weird, so we’ll watch another episode before final judgment. It’s not bad…very much a Northern Exposure vibe.
We finished what was left of Resident Alien on Netflix, but our watch of S3 has been so sporadic that we haven’t really kept track of what’s going on and we agreed we should probably go back and watch the whole season again (it’s only 8 episodes).
Season 10 of Shetland is available on Britbox now. We watched the first episode the other night.
And we started The Pitt last night, which looks very interesting.
I’m watching the French mystery series Perfect Murders (Crimes parfaits) on Hoopla. It’s made of the Columbo mode: we see the murder being committed, then the cops come in to figure it all out. Another interesting element is that there are multiple teams of detectives, each doing two episodes, then moving on. I’m not sure if they’re in the same location, and there doesn’t seem to be any interaction between the teams.
The characters of the detectives are vividly drawn, starting with Agnes, who has two husbands, and hates any technology and refuses to use it. The others are also memorable and the killers often are very sympathetic. In one case, there was no murder but the person involved frames her neighbor for it.
We started watching Hunters on Netflix. Three episodes in and we don’t think we can go on. It’s about Nazis, and Nazi hunters, but My God is it sadistic. Just over the top. Perhaps it has to be. And there’s not a likeable character in the bunch. Plus, I accidently read a major spoiler about one of the characters and knowing that puts the kibosh on it for me.
We are watching The Night Manager, a show we managed to not see for, get this, 10 years. It has a second season happening now and we thought we’d check it out.
Tom Hiddleston - check
Hugh Laurie - check
Olivia Coleman - check
Tobias Menzies - check
And yet, we are two episodes in and the show is only OK for us. We love the cast, the production is obviously tremendous and expensive looking, but we only find the show to be OK so far.
It left me feeling very meh. A little bit of that Elizabeth Debicki, who for whatever reason I’ve just never warmed up to as an actor. But mostly it just seems to be lacking some necessary spark. I didn’t hate it at all…but…meh.
Finally got around to the most recent season of Dark Winds. As usual I really like the regular characters, their interactions, the beautiful locations, and the 1970s setting but the storylines, villains, and supernatural stuff were often kinda tiresome. Jenna Elfman’s character wasn’t too bad though.
Rewatched Fallout and started the new season. This is a good show, I know absolutely nothing about the games, but the show is intriguing, the backstory compelling, the characters are a great mix of hero/antihero/villain. It hits the right mix of action/despair/humor/humanity to keep me wanting to see more of this place, see how they all turn out.
They did the right thing, at least in season 1. They simply set it in the same setting, had the same comedic-morbid tone, and started with the bombs going off.
The story? Completely new. I call it Fallout 5 with no gameplay. This was an incredibly wise decision. The stories of the Fallout games are fine, but we don’t need an adaptation of any of them.
One fun thing we learn in the games is that every Vault was running a social(or medical) experiment on the people of that Vault. Having a triangle-organized vault system is new to the show. 31-33 are all together and something must have been up.
As far as I can tell, it was some kind of obedience, worker, and manager type experiment.
Some of the other vaults are hilarious. The experiments can be wild.
I finally got around to watching “Mad Men” last week. Finished it over the weekend. I have to say, I think that final show was the best series ending I have ever seen. A journey of several episodes is wrapped up and tied with a bow in a single jingle that we all remember and/or recognize. I generally hate and despise series finales, in fact, I can’t think of a single other one that I have liked. I really thought this one was brilliant.
Mostly drama, but there is some hilarious highlighting of just how weird normal behavior was in the 1960s. I personally think it is probably the best TV show of the last 20 years.
