Greek
I was vaguely aware that Greek was a show when it was airing on ABC Family/Freeform back in 2007-2011, but it was never something I watched. I added it to my Hulu watch list as soon as I subscribed to Hulu, but had never prioritized watching it for whatever reason. A couple months ago I got to the point where I wasn’t watching anything on Hulu and decided I needed to either watch something or cancel it, so I started watching Greek. With it also being a decade since the show had ended I had seen a couple of pieces people had written about the anniversary which made it stick out as something I should watch.
At its core Greek is a show about Casey Cartwright and her younger brother Rusty who attend the fictional Cyprus Rhodes University in Ohio. Casey is a sorority girl and Rusty who is a science nerd decides to rush a fraternity in hopes of fitting in better than he did in high school. He is originally courted by the fraternity of Casey’s current boyfriend Evan, but winds up in the fraternity of her ex-boyfriend Cappie. There’s lots of stuff about rival fraternities and sororities that is sometimes over the top, but it also has all my favorite things in a show. There are great relationships, both friendships and romantic relationships. I love Casey and Rusty’s relationship. Characters also get to grow over time. They really don’t make shows like this anymore and I feel like with having now watched this one I’ve watched all the ones that have ever existed and it makes me sad. If you’ve never watched Greek I recommend it.
Somebody Feed Phil
Somebody Feed Phil is a Netflix show based off of the one season of a show called I’ll Have What Phil’s Having on PBS. We’ve watched both and it is essentially the same exact show with a different title and a different theme song. The Netflix show theme song is sung by Lake Street Dive, a band I really like. My husband joked that he will only let me take him to see them in concert again if they play the theme song. I told him he should just be one of those obnoxious people in the crowd and yell it out as a request. They probably won’t play it, but they’ll probably be amused anyway.
The show is a travel and food show in which Phil Rosenthal travels around the world and eats local cuisine with locals and various chefs. He’s this kind of goofy Jewish guy, who was the head writer for Everybody Loves Raymond. He obviously loves to travel, eat, and talk to people. It’s a lot of fun watching him do it. It really made me want to be able to travel and eat in restaurants again. I also don’t know how he doesn’t weigh 500 pounds based on everything he eats. There’s also a cute segment towards the end of every episode where he Skype’s with his parents and tells them about his latest adventures. I don’t know who decided that should be a segment of the show, but it’s endearing.
Kim’s Convenience
Kim’s Convenience is a Canadian show available on Netflix. It follows the Kim family who are Korean immigrants to Canada that run a convenience store. There is somewhat of an estranged relationship with their son Jung who got into trouble as a teenager and spent some time in prison. Now he’s out and getting his life back on track working at a car rental company. They also have a daughter Janet, who is in art school, which is not something either of them really understand. It’s really funny and sweet. The characters are great. I’m sad that the CBC has cancelled it and that the season 5 episodes released on Netflix today will be the end of the series.
Ginny and Georgia
Ginny and Georgia is a Netflix show that got a lot of comparisons to Gilmore Girls because it has a young mother and her teenage daughter at the center of it. It’s really not anything like Gilmore Girls other than that. Georgia was a teenage mother, but she also has a much darker backstory that has essentially turned her into a con woman and kept them on the run as a family for most of Ginny’s life. Ginny also has a younger brother named Austin. Their most recent move after the death of Georgia’s most recent husband, is to Wellbury, Massachusetts where Austin struggles to fit in a lot, but Ginny for the first time feels like she belongs somewhere. She finds a group of friends and a boyfriend and is trying to make sure her mother doesn’t do anything to screw it up.
Almost all of the reviews of this show indicate that it is trying to do too much and be too many things and they are not wrong. It’s a little bit all over the place. In addition to the con woman stuff and the life of a teenager stuff you also have it trying to address racial issues because Ginny is biracial. There are parts of the show that are really good. I actually really liked the stories surrounding Ginny and her friends and some of them felt very authentic about teenage life, but then you always had to swerve back into the more cartoonish Georgia stories. Unfortunately the show finally seemed like it was going to pick a lane in the season finale and it isn’t the one I wanted.
Philly DA
Philly DA is part of the PBS Independent Lens series. It’s an eight episode documentary about Philadelphia’s progressive DA, Larry Krausner. It’s a really compelling look at him and the work he is doing. He meets with lots of resistance for the changes he’s trying to make and it’s hard to know whether they will have an effect long term because people understandably worried about the crime that is happening now and want to see immediate action even if it ultimately is detrimental down the line. We happened to watch the final episode on the night that Larry Krausner won the Democratic primary in the current election, which based on what you see in the show did not seem like it would be assured.
Made for Love
Made for Love is an HBOMax show starring Cristin Milioti as the wife of a tech entrepreneur who has essentially been keeping her captive in the tech bubble that he has created. When announces his newest invention is a chip that will be implanted her brain she decides to escape, but it turns out he already implanted the chip and is able to track her. It’s a kind of absurdist comedy. There was a lot about it that was weird, but I liked it.
Small Axe
I’m cheating a little including Small Axe in this in that it’s really an anthology series of five movies on Amazon Prime directed by Steve McQueen about West Indian immigrants in Britain from the 1960s to the 1980s rather than actual tv series, though most of them are not much longer than an hour. Some of them are based on true stories and others are entirely fictional. Lovers Rock is the one that everyone was talking about when it came out, so I saved it for last. Turns out it was my least favorite of the movies, although I get why people loved it at the time. It essentially is just watching people go to a party. You don’t really know much about any of the characters and it really is just experiencing this party. There is one glorious scene in the middle with people singing and dancing that I know is what really got people and I get that, but I also think that people who watched this much earlier in the pandemic and lockdown probably experienced it very differently than I did when I watched it as vaccinations were rolling out and things were starting to ease up. I think Education, which is one of the ones based on real life events in which black children in the 1970s were being taken out of mainstream schools and sent to schools for the “educationally subnormal”, was my favorite.
The Friends Reunion
I adored Friends when it was on. I’ve seen every episode multiple times and especially the first five seasons I could probably quote from memory. I however was never excited by the prospect of this reunion that was announced as part of the HBOMax release. It didn’t actually even work out in their favor since COVID delayed taping it. I just didn’t see the point in it and it largely proved me right. The best parts were the cast just on the rebuilt set reminiscing. The rest of the show was trying to do too much or just seemed pointless. Like do I really care who David Beckham’s favorite Friends character is? I do not. There were a few tidbits that came out that I hadn’t heard before, but most of it was rehashing old territory while looking at a bunch of people who looked worse for the wear and just reminded us all how we’re 17 years older for better or worse.
Madame Secretary
I started watching Madame Secretary on Netflix several months ago and made it through about two and half of the six seasons. I might watch some more here and there, but it just didn’t hold my interest. I really do like Tea Leone and Tim Daly and I really like their relationship and even the family stuff with their teenage kids that is usually super annoying on a lot of these types of shows. Those pieces were essentially what was keeping me watching. The rest of the show is mostly just super procedural about her job as the Secretary of State and I found I just didn’t care about any of those plots. I like shows with more character stuff than this one has. They tried a little bit of super awkward romance stuff with a couple of the characters in the first season which they rightly dropped because they certainly didn’t know how to write it. Aside from an episode here or there that the plot makes touch on something in one of their personal lives you mostly just see them at work and don’t know much about their lives. I’ve never been a fan of procedurals for this reason and I thought this show was less like that than it actually is so I was never really able to get into it.
More Than Meh 