Wife picked up a 3 month hitch of Starz in order to watch the latest season of Outlander.
What else is good? I casually scrolled through the menu the other day and didn’t see much that really jumped out at me.
We’re watching “Shining Vale” a new Starz original with Courtney Cox, Greg Kinnear and Mira Sorvino. It’s a “horror-comedy”, which is a difficult genre mashup to get right, and it’s not bad (basic plot: dysfunctional family moves into haunted house). The comedy aspects are balanced pretty well with the scary, creepy elements, which is not easy to do.
I know “Black Sails” has its following. I tried watching it years ago with a previous subscription to Starz and didn’t really get into it for whatever reason. Maybe I’ll give it another chance.
Anything else good? To my wife, getting to see her precious Jamie again is worth the price of admission, so anything more we can get out of Starz is all gravy.
If you like murder/detective shows, I thought Dublin Murders was a really great adaptation of the Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series and has a kind of other world feel sometimes. Also second Counterpart, I really enjoyed it- JK Simmons and Harry Lloyd were excellent in it.
The only thing wrong with Counterpart was that it ended early, after only two seasons.
Starz also had a series about Spartacus, which you might like, though it featured lots of blood and sex. They also had American Gods, based on the Neil Gaiman novel, and Party Down, though I think that’s now available elsewhere.
Counterpart was fantastic. It managed to star both J.K. Simmons from Whiplash and the J.K. Simmons from the Farmers Insurance commercials!
High Town is pretty good. It about a gay National Marine Fisheries Service agent living in Provincetown, MA who is mostly content to drinking, partying, and hooking up and basically doing fuck-all until she discovers a dead body and gets pulled into doing actual police work.
If you like historical dramas, there are the various “princess” series - The White Queen (starring Rebecca Ferguson), The White Princess, and The Spanish Princess
I’ve never watched them, but the crime series Power looks pretty good.
Vida…two sisters with VERY different personalities return to the Boyle Heights section of East Los Angeles to mourn the death of their mother and take over her failing neighborhood bar. They discover a changing community and struggle to adjust to their changed lives. Melissa Barrera, who recently appeared in the films In The Heights and Scream, was excellent as one of the sisters. One of the very few shows about the Mexican-American experience and very well done.
Hightown is really good. The second season is even better than the first, which is always good for a show. It was renewed for season 3.
So we watched the first episode of Counterpart. Odd thing though, we signed up with Starz through a Hulu deal and access it through Hulu, and could not find CP on the Hulu / Starz hub. So I did a wider search on the Firestick (which searches all the streaming channels we have) and it turned out to be on Prime. So maybe Starz dropped it from their rotation as a failed series, and it was picked up by Prime. Who knows.
Anyway, we enjoyed ep1. Interesting premise, that a man finds out he has a ‘counterpart’ to himself on a parallel Earth who was identical to himself until 30 years before, when the portal joining the Earths was open. Then changing circumstances on the separate Earths caused the the counterparts to make very different decisions in life, which led to them becoming very different people. How much of who we are, indeed, is formed by the choices we make?
Magic City is pretty good, starring Javier Bardem Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Olga Kurylenko and Holden from The Expanse. Late 50s, Miami Beach and Havana, the mob and other intrigues. The show seemed to make zero splash in the public consciousness, but it was much more entertaining than I expected. Worth a try.