I’m back with another roundup of what I’ve been watching since the last time I wrote one of these posts.

The Summer I Turned Pretty

The Summer I Turned Pretty is an Amazon show based on a YA book by Jenny Han, who also wrote To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, which was a smash Netflix movie. I have never read any of the books, but I preferred this over To All the Boys. Probably partly because it was a series instead of a movie which gave more time for the story to breathe. The things that annoyed me the most all had to do with the debutante ball, but I’m sure all that stuff is straight from the book and not some plot pulled out of thin air. So I don’t hold it against the show itself. I too would like to live a life where my rich friends invite me to live at their beach house with them all summer, but alas I think this is only something that happens in book, tv, and movies. This show has excellent YA romance love triangles/squares plus rich people beach house porn. What’s not to love?

Our Flag Means Death

Our Flag Means Death is definitely for a particular taste and sense of humor, but luckily it was to my taste. It’s a Taika Waititi show, which should give you some general idea if it’s for you or not. Stede Bonnet is a rich, married man who abandons his wife and children to become a pirate despite not actually liking anything that pirates have to do. He pulls together a rag tag bunch of sailors for his crew and they set out to prove themselves as pirates despite Stede’s aversion to actually torturing or murdering anyone. They get into battle and then join forces with Captain Blackbeard (played by Waititi) and his crew. It’s got a dry, sort of twisted sense of humor and some nice slow burning love stories.

Ms. Marvel

Ms. Marvel is the only one of the Disney Marvel tv shows I have watched (though my husband is making me watch She-Hulk now). Overall I enjoyed it though sometimes found it to be a clunky mix between a coming of age story and a superhero show. I vastly preferred the coming of age parts of the story and really wish that it had been about a Kamala’s life as a teenage girl trying to figure out her life without all the superhero stuff tacked on.

Uncoupled

I’ve seen a lot of shade thrown at this show, but all the things that seemed to bother a lot of other people didn’t bother me as such. I don’t care that I’m watching a show about rich people problems with a bunch of unrealistic characters. I also love/hate Emily in Paris by the same creator, though he also created Sex in the City, which I did eventually watch all of but never liked. This I more straight up like, but I also don’t think it’s the best show in the world. It’s for sure living in a different reality than most people. Neil Patrick Harris’s character is for sure annoying and self-centered, but the reason that it works is because his friends call him on it. He doesn’t get to just wander around being self-absorbed without anyone pointing out what an ass he’s being. I found it an enjoyable way to escape from regular life for 5 hours.

Yellowjackets

Thanks to an Amazon Prime Day deal we subscribed to Showtime for a month for 99 cents to finally watch Yellowjackets, which everyone else had been going on about months and months ago. They did a phenomenal job casting the adult and teenage versions of the characters. I’m interested in it enough to watch another season, but I’m not in love with it as much as everyone else seems to be. I just don’t care enough about whatever evil mysterious thing is wherever the plane crash landed that’s leading the girls to do whatever it is that they did. I know they’re adding adult versions of some of the other girls, so I guess it will be interesting to see how they expand out the present day world as I did sort of wonder what happened to everyone else and why we were only focused on these four women.

God’s Favorite Idiot

God’s Favorite Idiot is a Netflix show starring Melissa McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone. He is apparently chosen by God for something that is unclear to him. While he’s trying to figure that out Lucifer comes after him. It’s a comedy and all a little bit non-sensical, but I enjoyed it well enough.

Severence

Based on everything I heard about Severence on AppleTV+ before I started watching it, I had kind of assumed it was a comedy. It’s not really. It’s more of a drama, though I guess it has some twisted comedic undertones. It’s certainly not a straightforward, laugh out loud comedy. That’s for sure. People seemed to love this show, but I did not. I mostly found it boring. It definitely lost my attention and I either slept through parts of it or was playing on my phone enough to not really know what exactly happened. I for sure could not tell you what happened at the end of the season. If there is another season of this show, I shan’t be watching it.

The Bear

In keeping with the trend of shows that everyone seemed to love that didn’t do much for me, we have The Bear. I centers on a renowned high end chef who moves back to Chicago to take over his brother’s sandwich shop after his brother commits suicide. He tries to make lots of changes to how the business is run and everything sort of falls apart. People talked a lot about how stressful the show was to watch. I can see that. Literally every episode I don’t know how these people managed to serve food to anyone. However, I personally didn’t feel stressed watching it. Perhaps because I never worked in the food industry so it didn’t bring up any personal experiences for me. I thought the show was okay, but not the masterpiece other people seem to think it is.