Shrinking

I saw mixed reviews of this AppleTV+ comedy by Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein starring Jason Segal, Harrison Ford, Jessica Williams, Christa Miller, and Michael Urie. Jason Segal is a father of a teenage daughter whose wife died in a car accident a year ago. He is also a psychologist who has started to provide some pretty unorthodox and probably unethical treatments due to his grief. Harrison Ford is his mentor and colleague. Jessica Williams works with them and was his wife’s best friend. Christa Miller is the next door neighbor who has pretty much been raising his teenage daughter while he’s been MIA as a father, and Michael Urie plays his best friend. It starts off very much focusing on the therapy stuff and then settles into more of the hang out comedy show that Bill Lawrence is so good at. Something happens at the end of the first season that I wish they hadn’t done because it means they are not going to just lean into the hangout comedy stuff in season two like they should. I saw people complain that they didn’t like how delved back into the grief stuff after it felt like you were past it in the show, but I feel like that’s how grief is. You think you’re okay, and then something happens and you’re not. So I didn’t feel like there was the whiplash that others referred to. I just thought it was a great character driven show with a lot of heart. This is all I want from a tv show. Bill Lawrence is married to Christa Miller and keeps casting her in this same sort of role where she is constantly putting down her husband while saying she loves him. Makes me wonder about their marriage a little bit. Also fun fact, Michael Urie graduated from the same high school as me, but 2 years later and since the dumb schools in Plano, Texas are split 9 and 10th and 11 and 12th for football reasons we were never in the same high school at the same time and I didn’t live there when I was younger and we might have crossed paths in a school that you went to for longer than 2 years.

Daisy Jones & the Six

I very much liked the book by Taylor Jenkins Reid that this show was based on. It’s actually the only book of hers that I’ve found to be more than just mediocre despite their popularity. So I was very excited about this tv show. I thought a show about music, which you know I love, based on a book that I really liked. This has a lot of potential. Sadly the show did not live up to my expectations in the least. I thought Riley Keough was very well cast as Daisy, and that’s about it. There are a couple of songs from the show that I liked, but most of them I didn’t think were that great. The show just felt kind of flat and boring most of the time like it was just going through the motions and hit the high plot point so the book without trying to convey why any of the characters would be motivated to do anything they were doing. Somehow I feel like I simultaneously liked it more and less because I read the book because it gave me more insight into the characters, but then made me mad about what they changed or didn’t convey properly. I didn’t really care that they combined two of the minor band characters into one in the show other than the fact that it then made no sense for the band to be called the Six, which made me unreasonably angry. Also, the number of times these people walked into a studio to record without having rehearsed the songs or sometimes even heard them when that studio time would have been astronomical drove me bonkers. Mostly I just hated what they did to Camilla. Her love for Billy was at the heart of that book, and that did not come through in the show. Granted, I think she probably acted in the show more like someone would have actually acted in real life than some of the more martyr like things she did in the book. However, the changes they made really turn her into a different character that changes the heart of the story. I have no idea how this show would play to someone who hadn’t read the book before watching it.

The Last of Us

I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about this show going in. I’m not super big into zombies or post-apocalyptic survival worlds, so it didn’t seem super up my alley. It was getting a lot of good buzz leading into it though, and I knew my husband would want to watch so I figured I would at least try it out and I could bail whenever I got tired of it. So far at least that hasn’t happened. We’ll see what happens in season 2. They’ve done a good job of making it almost episodic where there is an overarching plot and goal, but then each episode to some degree has been it’s own self-contained little story. They all interconnect to a degree, but at least so far many of the characters from each episode are gone within an episode sometimes two as they either die or Joel and Bella move on. Each story is well told though like a little short story so that they don’t feel like throwaway characters. You actually get a sense of who they are and their motivations.

Bad Sisters

Bad Sisters on AppleTV+ is about 5 sisters in Ireland who are very close after the eldest sister raised the younger ones when their parents died. One of the sisters is married to a real bastard who is extremely emotionally abusive to everyone, but especially her. The other sisters eventually decide that he has to go, and set out to kill him. You find out that he did in fact die at the beginning of the show, but you don’t know how he was actually finally killed until the final episode. There are also two brothers who run the insurance agency left to them by their father who hold his life insurance policy that they don’t actually have the money to pay out. So they are investigating the death trying to prove that foul play was involved so that they don’t have to pay. I very much enjoyed the show. I feel like maybe it was a couple of episodes longer than it needed to be as I felt like it was spinning its wheels a bit at the end, but I would still definitely recommend watching it. Plus it has some really great house porn. Like I want to live in all of these sisters houses in the Irish countryside.

Extraordinary

Extraordinary is a British tv show available on Hulu, though a lot of the actors are actually Irish including Siobhan McSweeney who you will know as Sister Michael from Derry Girls. Here she plays the mother of the main character Jen. They live in a world where everyone has a single super power that they develop at the age of 18. They are not necessarily your typical super powers. Some are quite bizarre. Thus, it’s not always clear what they are right away. Jen is now 25 and either never developed a power or still hasn’t figured out what it is and is very much struggling to deal with that. It’s a fun little comedy with a lot of irreverent humor.

South Side

South Side was an HBO show that was set on the South Side of Chicago. It just ended recently after three seasons. It mostly centers around characters who work in a rent to own furniture store and two Black police officers working in the South Side. I loved the first season of the show. The second season got a little less realistic and a little weirder, and I didn’t like it quite as much. The third season was just off the rails and felt like it had a completely different style than the first two seasons. I didn’t care for it that much. The first two seasons are still worth watching though even if you don’t follow through the entire series. And if you can resist chiming in to sing South Side the way they do at the end of the theme song, then you are not me.

Cunk on Earth

Cunk on Earth available on Netflix is an absurdist mockumentary tv show where Diane Morgan plays Philomena Cunk, a clueless interviewer, interviewing real historians about various historical events. They do know what the bit is, but they are meant to answer the questions she asking in a totally serious manner. It’s very ridiculous, but also a lot of fun. There is a recurring bit with a particular song that is the highlight of every episode. There are apparently other Cunk On… series that exist, but this is the only one on Netflix at this point. I hear that some the others are available on YouTube, though I haven’t gone looking for them yet.

Slow Horses

Slow Horses is another AppleTV+ show that is a British spy series. I heard a lot of great things about it, but I just couldn’t really get into it. I mostly paid attention through the first season, but I was only half paying attention at the beginning of the second season probably because I was playing on my computer while trying to watch and I very quickly got lost and had no idea what was happening with the plot. Consequently I mostly paid zero attention to the second season while my husband watched it. So I don’t think this show was for me, though your mileage may vary given how much other people seem to like this show.

High School

I watched this show eons ago but apparently somehow forgot to write about it. It’s available to watch for free with commercials on Amazon Freevee. The show is based on a memoir by Tegan and Sara Quin of the indie band Tegan and Sara. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t say how faithful it is or not. It follows them in high school as they move to a new school, start getting interested in music, and start to recognize their sexuality. Each episode is told through the perspective of two different characters, not always Tegan and Sara. I really liked it, though I don’t feel like the plot advanced very far in the course of the season, so I hope we get more seasons of it.

This Is Going to Hurt

This is Going to Hurt is based on yet another memoir. This time by Adam Kay. It’s a British show co-produced by the BBC and AMC. It’s available in the US to stream on AMC+. I kept hearing how great it was, but there was nothing else I was interested in on AMC+ and I didn’t really want to pay for just this show. We finally subscribed for a month when Amazon was having a $2 sale for AMC+ as one of their channels. It was an excellent show and worth paying even the full price of AMC+ for a month. It stars Ben Whishaw as a doctor working on an obstetrics and gynecology doctor in an NHS hospital in 2006. It shows the good and the bad of Britain’s nationalized healthcare. Adam is a pretty terrible person a lot of the time, but your’e always sort of rooting for him. I presume this is a one season and done show, but I would watch more episodes if they ever made them.

The Detectorists

The Detectorists is another BBC show that is available to watch on Amazon Freevee and a number of the other free streaming services with commercials. It originally aired it’s three seasons from 2014-2016 but then came back for a 75 minute Christmas episode this past December for some reason. (Right now that is only available to stream through AcornTV). That’s how I wound up hearing about the show. I saw some article written about it because of the new episode. It sounded like some nice gentle humor, and I can always use that. It centers around Andy and Lance, who are metal detectorists hoping to find long buried treasures on local farms. There is also the other members of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club and their rivals the AntiquiSearchers. Season 1 was definitely the highlight, but I also enjoyed the rest of the seasons. If you’re looking for some gentle British humor watching some relaxing scenes of people walking around fields swinging metal detectors, this show is for you. It sounds kind of boring, but it is not.

Smiley

Smiley is a Spanish series available on Netflix. It’s a rom-com centered around Alex and Bruno, two gay guys who are very much opposites but who are both longing for a serious relationship while being surrounded by people only interested in hooking up. They meet when Alex accidentally leaves a voicemail meant for an ex on Bruno’s phone. The show also builds out the supporting characters really well too, which is impressive given that it’s only 8 half hour episodes. I do enjoy opposites attract/hate-to-late romances, but I do wish they done a little more with building up what would actually make them want to be together. There’s only really one scene in the whole series that I feel like actually tries to do that, and it’s not enough in my opinion to overcome everything presented that would not make them a good match. Despite that quibble, it was a show I very much enjoyed watching and would definitely watch more of if they ever made more seasons.

Crash Landing on You

Crash Landing on You is a Korean drama also available on Netflix. I know people love Korean dramas, but this is the first one I’ve ever watched. Linda Holmes from NPR was raving about it, so I decided to give it a try. I don’t know if this is typical of all K dramas, but the episodes were way too long for my taste. They’re all between 75 and 90 minutes long with the final episode being over 2 hours. That’s just too long for a tv episode in my opinion. The story centers around a rich woman from South Korea who goes paragliding as part of a publicity stunt and improbably gets swept away by a tornado that comes out of nowhere and accidentally winds up in North Korea where she is found by a captain in the North Korean army. For reasons he winds up having to hide her in his small village while they try and figure out how to get her back to South Korea. I had a hard time following some of the political stuff going on that was putting people’s lives in danger, but I got enough of it to get the gist of what was going on. I loved the supporting characters, particularly the members of the captain’s troop. It’s definitely a little melodramatic at times, but overall I liked it even though I wish the episodes had been shorter.

Mood

Mood is another BBC show. We watched in on some actual tv channel when it aired, so I’m not sure if it’s streaming anywhere at this point. It follows Sasha, who is a 25 year old woman who is sort of a disaster. She’s trying to make it as a professional singer, but her actions and lifestyle are alienating everyone around her. After getting dumped by her boyfriend and kicked out of her parents’ house she winds up getting connected with some social media influencers and then delving into the world of sex work while trying to keep her dream of a singing career alive. There are lots of sort of dream sequences in which she breaks out into song. I had mixed feelings on the show. Ultimately, I liked how things ended and how you get some more of Sasha’s back story that explains a lot of things.

Getting in one final TV Diary post before the end of the year, so that I’ve written about everything I’ve watched or started watching this year before I write my most memorable pop-culture post next week, not that (spoiler alert) any of these shows are showing up on it.

The Recruit

The Recruit is a new show on Netflix. We’re only a few episodes into it so far, but I’m very much enjoying it. I saw a lot of tv critics comparing it to the show USA used to produce like White Collar, Covert Affairs, and Burn Notice. I loved those shows and miss that sort of episodic tv that also had a good season long story arc you were following as well. I get the comparison, though this show is less episodic than those were. From what I’ve seen so far it’s got good action and some decent humor. I do find it a little ridiculous how his co-workers are out to get him from the second he starts the job, but overall it’s a light, fun show.

I Hate Christmas

I am also only halfway through the Netflix show I Hate Christmas, but I already know exactly what is going to happen because this Italian show is a remake of the Norwegian show Home For Christmas, which we watched the previous two Christmas seasons. I think this is the first time I have ever watched a foreign show that is a remake of another foreign show that I’ve previously watched. This version is set in Venice and pretty much has the same plot lines of a woman who makes up a boyfriend because she is tired of her family giving her a hard time about being single and now she has 25 days to find someone to bring home to Christmas. I really liked the original series, and I’m enjoying this one as well. The Norwegian show had two seasons, so I’ll be curious to see if this has another season next year.

So Help Me Todd

Skylar Astin plays a sort of screw-up who lost his PI license and now is trying to get it back while working for his mother played by Marcia Gay Harden at her law firm. He’s always trying to push the boundaries. It’s mostly a procedural. There’s a case of the week and not really any overarching plot aside from his relationship with his family and his ex who also works at the law firm. It’s unfortunate that he has better chemistry with the actress playing his sister than he does with the actress playing his ex who we are obviously supposed to be rooting to get back together. I have literally fallen asleep watching every single episode until the last one of 2022. I have enjoyed it well enough to go back and rewatch it the next day, but it’s also not something I’m going to be crying in cereal about if it doesn’t get another season.

Bluey

It’s me. Hi. I’m the middle aged woman with no children watching a TV show designed for pre-schoolers. I have heard any number of adults talk about how good this show is. Most of them had kids. Some tv critics who have extolled it have kids but none of the age who would have ever watched this show, so it obviously does appeal to adults. I can’t even exactly put my finger on why. It’s very simple animation. It does have heart to it. I think if I did actually have kids I would want to ban them from watching it for the simple fact that it has to create unrealistic expectations for kids about how their parents should just drop whatever they are doing to play with them at all times. The episodes are only 7 minutes long, so it’s a nice quick hit of sweetness.

Fresh Off the Boat

I’ve been watching Fresh Off the Boat on and off for much of this year. I’m just starting the final season. I’ve definitely slowed down in my watching the last couple of seasons. It’s not that it’s gotten bad as much as it’s just gotten rote. It feels like all the jokes and stories are just super repetitive at this point. I’ll finish it, but the early seasons are much better. I also liked the kids better when they were younger. It’s a pretty decent sit-com though.

Wednesday

I gather that Wednesday was a gigantic hit for Netflix and that lots of people really love it. I thought it was fine. I think Julia Ortega is very good in the role. I just didn’t get super into the show overall. I’m sure there will be additional seasons because it was so popular. I’ll probably keep watching it if there are.

Gadget Man

We previously watched and really liked the show Travel Man in which Richard Ayoade traveled to various countries accompanied by another comedian. I don’t think that show is available streaming in the United States anymore, and I’m not sure that we were even able to watch all of Richard Ayoade’s seasons of it. I gather it’s still being filmed with a new host, but again not available here so I don’t know how it is with the new host. Anyway, we recently discovered that some, but not all (and not even consecutively numbered seasons) of Ayoade’s show previous to Travel Man called Gadget Man are available on Amazon Prime. So we’ve been watching them. It’s definitely not as good as Travel Man, but it has some of the same-ish structure and sense of humor so it’s a quick sort of trifle of a show to watch when we want something less than a half hour.

Fleishman is in Trouble

I should probably wait to write about this show until I’ve seen the rest of the season or I guess even the episode that dropped today given how many critics put in on their favorite episode list before it even aired. Maybe it will completely the turn the show around for me to, and I’ll understand why everyone seems to be in love with it. That is except for the one critic who called it boring. That’s pretty much my assessment of it. I’m bored. I read the book. I really liked the book. I am completely and utterly bored with this adaptation of it. Even my annoyance at the characters doesn’t rise to enough of a level to overcome the boredom.

Quantum Leap

I never watched the original Quantum Leap. I was at the completely wrong age for it when it aired. We have been watching the reboot, but I’m mostly just sitting in the room while my husband watches it. I don’t really care about it at all as evidenced by the fact that I have never gone back and rewatched any of the episodes that I’ve fallen asleep during. I’ve never been super into procedurals. This does have some sort of overarching plotline, but it feels completely inconsequential because the show is over if Sam dies or they figure out how to make him quit leaping, so it has no stakes and I don’t care about it. I will probably eventually quit even bothering to be in the room if my husband wants to keep watching it.

It’s been way too long since I’ve written one of these posts as evidenced by some of the shows I’m going to be writing about. It feels like I watched She-Hulk ages ago. Better late than never I guess.

The Big Brunch

For some reason I wasn’t sold on this show after the first episode, but luckily I kept watching because after that I fell in love with it. It’s a delightful baking show with Dan Levy hosting and judging along with two other people. All the challenges surround having something to do with brunch in some themed way. The contestants are all competing to win $300,000 to further their business plans related to cooking, which are vastly different. You want them all to get the money, but it was especially hard to see the people who had visions for things that are really helping their communities lose. It has such good vibes all the way around.

Welcome to Wrexham

I feel like this documentary about Rob Mcelhenney and Ryan Reynolds buying the Wrexham football club is riding the coattails of people’s love for Ted Lasso, but I still found it enjoyable. I am not a sportsy person. I pretty much never watch actual sports, but I am a huge sucker for sports documentaries or scripted shows where I get to know a lot about the people and all that story is only briefly interrupted by only the most exciting or relevant parts of the actual sporsting matches. This show is perfect for that. Rob and Ryan are fun together and you’ll be cheering for the team and the people of Wrexham.

Mo

Mo is a Netflix show about a Palestinian refugee who has been living in Houston with his family as an undocumented immigrant for most of his life. His father died years ago, his adult brother is on the autism spectrum, his mother is still very religious and trying to keep Mo connected to his Muslim heritage, and he’s dating a Mexican Catholic woman against his mother’s wishes. It’s both a funny and heartbreaking show. It’s probably something that has flown under your radar, but I highly recommend watching it.

The Patient

I can’t really say that The Patient was an enjoyable watch because the subject matter is pretty bleak. It’s a well made show starring Steve Carell as a psychiatrist who is kidnapped by one of his patients who it turns out is a serial killer trying to cure himself. There are some interesting twists and turns, and I think it ended the only way it really could. So really good prestige television, yes. A delightful romp, no.

She-Hulk

For the most part I have been uninterested in the Marvel TV shows on Disney+ and have watched very few of them. My husband insisted that I at least try this one out. I found it to be a pretty fun show. It’s more sit-com than the other Marvel shows. I enjoy when Marvel stuff is more humorous than serious hence why the Thor movies are my favorite. I’m not mad I watched it, but overall it felt like a trifle, and I didn’t understand their use of Jameela Jamil’s character, who seemed set up to be a sort of big bad nemesis but then wasn’t really. Also, I had a very hard time with the CGI. The She-Hulk version of Jen was atrocious and it bugged me every time she was hulked out.

Reboot

Reboot is about the cast and writers of a popular 90s sitcom (think ABC TGIF type sitcoms) that is being rebooted. The original writer who is returning, but his daughter who has pitched the reboot as an edgier show is also there and they butt heads over the direction of the show and what’s funny. The original cast is back bringing their own baggage and past relationships with them. It was a pretty good show with an excellent cast. It wasn’t perfect, but I would definitely be happy to see another season.

Partner Track

This was a pretty terrible rom-com type show on Netflix about twentysomething lawyers who are trying to make partner at their terrible law firm while also getting involved romantically with one another. I could not tell any of the white bro male characters apart. I kind of hated all the characters and found it really dumb that the female lead was obsessed with the guy who she slept with once ages ago drunkenly at a wedding while the amazingly awesome boyfriend she has is supposed to be somehow the worst because he’s moving a little fast in their relationship when the other guy is the actual worst. I also did not care about nor could I really follow what was happening with all the law cases that were supposed to be part of the plot. There was a big bombshell at the end of the final episode, but Netflix has saved me from myself in wanting to see what happens next by canceling this show after one season.

Blockbuster

I was excited when they announced this sitcom about people working in the last Blockbuster. It’s unfortunate that it is 100% terrible, and I cannot recommend that you watch a single second of it. I cannot in any way defend the fact that we watched all 10 episodes. It is not funny in any way. The characters are all ridiculous caricatures of people, but not in any way that is good. I’m somehow supposed to believe that Melissa Fumero, Randall Park, and J.B. Smoove all went to high school together despite the fact that none of them are remotely close in age to each other and it clearly shows. There’s no chemistry between Randall Park and Melissa Fumero, so I did not care a whit about their forced will they or won’t they relationship. Don’t be dumb like me. Don’t watch this show.

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.

Still catching up on some TV shows I watched awhile ago.

With Love

With Love is a show on Amazon Prime that revolves around an extended Latinx family and various love stories within it. Each episode takes place on a different holiday so you’re moving quite a bit through time from episode to episode. It made it a little hard to invest in some the characters and relationships, but I thought it was cute. It’s apparently been renewed for a second season. I’m not sure where they will take it from here as it felt pretty self contained, but I guess I’ll find out eventually.

Julia

For the most part I enjoyed Julia on HBOMax. Sarah Lancaster did a great job of playing Julia. I also really enjoyed BeBe Neuwirth as her best friend. It was interesting to see how the show was created, though I have no idea how much of this is fact versus fiction. I did feel at times like Julia was too whiny, and I really could not with her husband. I feel like I always heard that they had this great relationship and that he was so supportive of her. And eventually by the end of this season he had come around and seemed to be more on her side, but good lord what a man baby whose little feelings are hurt because he got forced into retirement and now his wife is having success. Hopefully there will be less of that in the next season.

Heartstoppers

This was a cute adaptation of a series of graphic novels about two teenage boys exploring their sexuality and falling in love. I never read the books, but from what I gather from people online it was an extremely faithful adaptation with literal shot for shot recreations of some of the illustrations. I gather people were really happy with it, which as you know when people have strong feelings about a book is really hard to do. I also heard a lot of queer adults saying that they wish that they had had something like this when they were growing up, so it’s good that kids these days do especially given all the efforts to legally and otherwise try and stuff LGBTQ+ people back in the closet. I don’t think I connected with it as strongly as other people, which is fine. It was not made for me, but I’m really happy that it seems to mean a lot to the people it was meant for.

Ghosts (British Version)

The hit CBS sitcom Ghosts was actually adapted from a British sitcom that is available on HBOMax. They’re pretty fairly equivalent. I think I like the lead actress in this version better than the CBS one, but I also like the actor who plays the husband better in the British version so I guess it balances out. Same with some of the ghosts. There was a joke about not eating rice krispies until they’re dead (i.e. no longer making noise) that I still cannot stop laughing at, and that I mention every time my husband eats rice krispies. Solid bit that.

We Own This City

We Own This City is a show created by David Simon based on a true story and book written by former Baltimore Sun and now Baltimore Banner reporter, Justin Fenton. A lot of critics and people of course compared this to The Wire, which it’s not and isn’t meant to be because it’s not The Wire. They seemed to be mad about that. I thought the show was fine, but I wasn’t upset that it wasn’t The Wire. As someone who read the book and lived through all the news coverage while it was happening the show didn’t have much to offer me other than the way it portrayed the story that I already knew really well. The show was way too convoluted presenting the story jumping around in time with sometimes only very subtle clues as to what year you were in. I could sometimes barely figure it out and I have to think that anyone coming to this story cold would have to be confused a lot.

Under the Banner of Heaven

Speaking of shows based on books, Under the Banner of Heaven is an adaptation of the book by John Krakauer about a murder and a crazy Mormon sect. Again the show was fine, but it in no way did the book justice. I remember loving this book when I read it and finding it super compelling. I didn’t want to put it down. I did not feel anything like that for this show. I could very easily have stopped watching it at any time and not felt like I was missing anything.

First Kill

First Kill is a new teen vampire show where the vampire and vampire hunter fall in love. It’s of course reminiscent of things like Buffy and Vampire Diaries, but it’s also very heavily based on Romeo and Juliet with the families of the two girls warring and telling them they need to stay away from each other. It was in no way actually good. It does have Elizabeth Mitchell in it though, so that’s a bonus. However most of the acting is pretty terrible or the writing is or maybe both.I still binge watche the stupid thing in two days.

I am way behind on posting about the tv I’ve been watching. Looking at the list of new shows I keep for these posts I’m realizing I finished some of them months ago.

From Cradle to Stage

This show is 100% made for me. It’s based on a book by Dave Grohl’s mom, Virginia, in which she interviewed the moms of musical artists about their childhoods and how they got into music. In the show Dave Grohl and his mom go around and make these conversations into little documentary episodes. Each episode is interspersed with Dave and his mom talking about his own experiences with music growing up and his career. I love it so much. It’s literally the only thing worth watching on Paramount+, which I only have because we got a free subscription. This was pretty much the only thing I found to watch. I don’t care that much for the Foo Fighters, but from everything I can tell Dave Grohl is the biggest mensch. If that ever changes literally no one tell me because I don’t want to know. He also has made several music documentary films and tv shows that I love so much. The final episode showed Virginia Grohl having a lunch with all the moms featured in her book and there were more people there than were featured in the show, so I really hope that they make another season featuring some of these other moms. I will pay for Paramount+ just to watch it.

The Guilded Age

This show is barely about anything other than looking at people in pretty dresses living in pretty houses and being scandalized by anyone who dares not have been born into their money trying to get into their circles. It’s utterly ridiculous, but yet I enjoyed it. I could use less of the downstairs people in this show. I know they were a big part of Julian Fellows previous show, Downton Abbey, but here they’re not as well integrated into a show so much so that I don’t even know which of them work in which house. This show doesn’t need to be about them. Also, I have to hand it to this show for having a season finale in which literally nothing happened despite the fact that it was an hour long. It really is an impressive feat.

You’re the Worst

I avoided watching You’re the Worst for a long time because I don’t like shows where everyone is terrible and that was my impression of what this show was. I wasn’t really wrong about that, but I also really wound up like this show. It’s the first show I’ve truly binge watched in quite awhile. In a lot of ways it’s over the top ridiculous, but there are also some really real moments about living with mental illness and being in a relationship with someone with mental illness that make it really lovely. Even though the characters were awful I liked them. The only thing I will say is that it worked better for me when they only interacted with each other because then it was a whole circle of awfulness that really only affected them. I didn’t care for the episodes where there were outside people who were affected by it. Luckily those didn’t happen very often.

Single Drunk Female

Single Drunk Female is about a twenty-something alcoholic woman trying to get her life together after she hits rock bottom and gets sober. Her mom, who she is living with but who has had enough of her drama is played by Ally Sheedy. It’s an enjoyable little half hour show that airs on Freeform and is available on Hulu, which is where I watched it. I’m happy that it got renewed for another season.

The Newsreader

The Newsreader is an Australian show that is available to watch on the Roku Channel. It takes place in the 80s and stars Anna Torv, who should really have more roles on tv, as a news anchor with a mental illness, who has a nervous breakdown and who is helped out by a coworker who she decides to help work his way into being a news anchor as well. They start dating, but he is also secretly gay and lying to both her and himself about it. Each episode surrounds a big news story. Most of them were things that were also big enough stories that they were things I knew about. There was one episode featuring a bombing in Melbourne that I know nothing about, but which I assume was also real since the other stories were. It was a good show, and I recommend watching it. I have no idea if you have to have a Roku to watch the Roku Channel, but if you do have one watch it and see if you can anyway if you don’t have one.

The Dropout

I waited to long to review this show because I know I had some very specific thoughts about it, but now I can’t really remember what they were. I know there were various uses of music that felt way too on the nose to me and several pop cultural references that felt very heavy handed in trying to let you know what year you were in at a particular time. I think Amanda Seyfriend did a good job in the role. It was maddening that her house of cards was able to go on for so long.

There are a number of new sit-coms that debuted midseason that I’m really enjoying. Some of these shows stretch the definition of sit-com, but they’re all 30 minute comedy-ish shows so that’s how I’m classifying them for the purposes of writing about these shows.

Grand Crew

Grand Crew is my favorite of the new sit-coms. It’s a great hang out comedy about a group of friends. It reminds me of some of the things I loved about Friends. Instead of hanging out a coffee shop they hang out at a wine bar called Grand Cru. Nicole Byer is probably the biggest name in the cast along with Echo Kellum who plays her brother in the show, but it’s a real ensemble comedy. It’s funny. I like the characters, and I just really enjoy hanging out with them every week.

Abbott Elementary

Abbott Elementary is the show that has gotten the most press out of all the new sit-coms. It’s about an underfunded school in Philadelphia. It’s a workplace ensemble comedy. Janine is sort of the main focus of the show, played by Quinta Brunson, who created it. She’s a new teacher who is still full of energy and wanting to do the best for her students despite a system designed to beat you down. There are also another new teacher, a long-term sub, and the older teachers who are still trying to get things done but are also more resigned to the system they’re stuck in plus the laughably ineffective principal. It’s both funny but all too real. It’s in a mockumentary format, which is not my favorite, but there have been some really hilarious looks towards the supposed cameraman that have almost made it worth it.

Pivoting

I would have said Pivoting was my least favorite of the new network sitcoms, but I feel like a handful of episodes in it’s starting to find its footing a little bit more. The last couple of episodes have had at least one thing that made me really laugh out loud. The premise is a group of three friends who are reevaluating their own lives after the death of the other woman who was a close part of their friend group. Eliza Coupe is a reluctant mother who loves her kids but doesn’t know what to do with them and decides to scale back on work to spend half days with them. Maggie Q plays a successful doctor who decides to quit her job to work in a grocery store. Jennifer Goodwin plays a dissatisfied wife and mother who decides to try and have an affair with her personal trainer. There’s some good comedy here and think once the show gets to develop the characters a little more beyond the summary note they used to sell the show it will get even better.

American Auto

American Auto is another workplace comedy. It stars Ana Gasteyer as the new CEO of a car company who has no experience with cars and came from work at a pharmaceutical company. It’s created by the same people who did Superstore and is sort of the opposite of that show in that instead of focusing on the people out on floor it’s focused on the people in executive suite. It has its moments, but at this point it’s probably my least favorite of the shows. It’s still a solid comedy though and I think again it has the potential to get even better as the writers figure out what makes each of the characters really tick, which an take a little bit for sit-coms.

Sort-Of

I’m really happy that the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast alerted to me this as they were correct that I never would have found it otherwise. It’s a Canadian show available on HBOMax. It’s not something HBOMax is ever going to recommend to you. It’s my least favorite thing about every streaming service is that they basically only allow you to see like whatever 10 shows they are promoting and their algorithm decides you would like. There is really no way to easily browse their full library of content and find the more obscure stuff unless you already know about it and do a search for the title. Sort-Of is centered around trans woman, Sabi, who is a Pakistani-Canadian trying to come out to her mother. She is also the nanny to two kids. She makes the decision to move to Berlin with her best friend, but stays back to help out after the mother of the kids she nannies for gets in an accident and winds up in a coma. It’s a really great show with lots of interesting relationships. I’m not sure if it will get more than these short 8 episodes, but I do hope so.

Somebody Somewhere

Somebody Somewhere is an actual HBO show that is currently airing is about halfway through its first season. It’s about a woman who has returned home to her small town in Kansas to help take care of her dying sister, and who is now staying there after her sister’s death dealing with the rest of her family and figuring out her life there. She reconnects with an old friend from high school who runs sort of an underground gay choir in his church and he convinces her to join. It too has some really good characters and relationships, and I’m happy HBO has already announced there will be another season.

The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window

This Netflix show is a sort of parody of the movies like Gone Girl and the Woman in the Window starring Kristen Bell. I gather from some friends that perhaps it gets better or at least people were happy enough with where it went by the end, but I really just did not like the first episode at all. I saw some headline to the effect of that it’s a mysterious comedy that is neither mysterious nor comedic and that felt true to what I saw. I don’t think I am going to spend my time watching any more of it, but you can at least know that some people I know liked it better than I did.

I have a lot of new tv I’ve been watching to talk about. This is what happens when you’re one of the last people living still mostly locked down during the pandemic and it’s cold outside so you can’t even have an outdoor social life. You watch lots and lots of tv. This is just part of it. I’ll back later this week with a post specifically about sit-coms.

The Sex Lives of College Girls

Mindy Kaling has found her real sweet spot in creating teenage rom-com tv shows first with Never Have I Ever and now Sex Lives of College Girls on HBOMax. The Mindy Project had its moments, but I quit watching it even before NBC canceled it and then it moved to Hulu. I never even bothered watching her series version of Four Weddings and a Funeral because the reviews were so bad. Now though she is creating some of my favorite tv shows. I loved The Sex Lives of College Girls so much. I’m so sad that I’m out of episodes to watch. It centers around four freshman roommates at the fictional Essex College in Vermont. Leighton is a legacy whose parents went to Essex and her older brother already attends. She is also a closeted lesbian. Bela is an Indian girl whose parents want her to become a doctor while she wants to pursue comedy and is determined to make it as a writer for the school’s renowned comedy magazine while also making up for what she feels is lost time in her lack of a social and sex life in high school. Whitney is on the soccer team and her mother is a Senator. She is also having an affair with the team’s assistant coach. Kimberly is a somewhat naive girl from the mid-West who doesn’t have much money unlike most of the people at Essex who is trying to navigate her way in this new world. She is the character who is the most cartoonish. Either I got used to it or they dialed it back some over the course of the show. I loved this show. I loved the characters. I loved the friendships and the relationships. It’s a perfect teen dramedy, and I cannot wait until there are more episodes.

Elite

The Netflix algorithm knows I love a good teen drama so at some point it recommended this Spanish show to me. I added it to my queue and after it sitting there for years I finally decided to watch it. I’m really glad I did because Netflix was right and I did love it. There are four seasons so far and Netflix assures me a fifth season is coming. It centers on an elite private school in Madrid where lots of rich and important people send their kids to school. No one should ever send their kids there though because every season is framed with some sort of murder or attempted murder. Basically if your kid goes there they’re either going to be murdered or become a murderer. I thought maybe after the sort of throughline of the first three seasons was done that in season four they would drop the framing where you start with whatever that season’s crime was with everyone being interviewed by the cops and the show filling in what happened up to that point over the season, but they did not. I wish they had because they never really needed it. I’m much more interested in the relationships between the characters than I ever was about who committed whatever crime we were focused on that season. The first three seasons are great. The fourth season I don’t think was as good. Half of the original characters left after season three including most of my favorites. I did not like any of the new characters they brought into replace them, the stories seemed even more ridiculous than normal, and the personalities of the characters that came back did not seem consistent with previous season. Made me feel like they got a bunch of new writers in season four. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed watching it and will definitely be watching season five whenever it comes out. If you like a good teen drama and aren’t opposed to subtitles I recommend it.

Maid

Maid is a Netflix show loosely based on Stephanie Land’s memoir of the same name. It stars Margaret Qualley as Alex a young mother who flees her abusive husband and winds up working as a maid to support herself and her pre-school age daughter. She is equally caught in trying to get help from her mother who has undiagnosed bipolar disorder and having to take care of her. Her mother is played by Andie McDowell, Qualley’s real life mother. This show is excellent, but it is also one of the hardest shows I think I have ever watched. I definitely could not watch more than one episode of this in a sitting. I felt the stress that this character was going through. It made me really sad because I know there are so many people who are actually living this life where they are just caught in impossible situation after impossible situation and all the systems that are supposedly there to help them are built such that it’s actually impossible to get help from them and even make things worse. It really highlights how broken the systems in the country are because we’re so worried about someone who we don’t think deserves something getting it. Because the show does not want to be complete misery porn it winds up ending on a positive note for the character, but there are far too many people who will never manage to navigate their way out of lives that are stacked against them at every turn.

As We See It

As We See It is the new Jason Katims show on Amazon Prime. You may know Katims from his previous shows Friday Night Lights and Parenthood. He featured some of his experiences as a parent of an autistic son in the character of Max Braverman on Parenthood. Now he extends that into his experiences parenting a child with autism who is now an adult themselves. It centers around three autistic adults in their 20s sharing an apartment and being cared for by an aide named Mandy. Jack is really smart but struggling to keep a job because of his lack of social skills and inflexibility. He is also faced with finding out that his father has what will probably be terminal cancer. This story also focuses on his father worrying about how to make sure Jack is going to be all right after he’s gone. Violet is a sex obsessed woman who just wants people to perceive her as normal and doesn’t realize that her overattachment to people even strangers is inappropriate and potentially dangerous. She is being cared for by her older brother Van since their parents died. Harrison is the least functioning of the three. He is practically agoraphobic and Mandy is working with him to get him to leave the apartment and gain skills so that he too might be able to support himself in some fashion one day. In true Jason Katims fashion it mixes complete heartbreak with small triumphs that warm the heart. It does not however gloss over the difficulties of all of the characters with the autistic characters just wanting to be understood for who they are and not always understanding why people view them as they do and their families struggling with the weight of helping their loved ones navigate an unforgiving world and the stresses that they themselves have to deal with.

Station Eleven

I read the book Station Eleven back in 2015 and did not re-read it prior to watching the series on HBO, so I didn’t remember enough about it to know how faithful it was or not to the source material. I gather from the things I’ve heard about it that there was quite a bit changed, but that everyone seemed to agree that the changes worked. So let’s go with that. I do know that I felt differently about the book than I did the tv show. I remember feeling like there was a lot of hope in the book that I did not necessarily feel in the tv show. Perhaps some of that is that I read the book prior to having ever lived through a pandemic myself, so I’m pretty sure my feelings about the tv show were colored by my own experiences. The pandemic in this show is way worse than COVID, killing something like 99% of the population. It was sort of interesting watching the end of this as the supply chain shortages caused by so many people getting sick from Omicron were starting to ramp up given this series shows how much worse it could have been with these characters living in a post-apocalyptic world in which pretty much all of the things we have come to rely on as a modern society like all kinds of technology cease to function because there aren’t enough people to keep them running. Weirdly my favorite parts of the series were the parts with Jeevan and young Kiersten struggling to survive right after the pandemic happened, which is something I usually hate and why I don’t tend to care for post-apocalyptic shows or books, and which I said in my review of the book that I was happy it didn’t spend a lot of time on. Ultimately I really did like this show, but based on how i remember feeling after reading the book I liked it better which is generally the case when it comes to book adaptations.

Good Sam

Good Sam stars Sophia Bush and Jason Isaacs. He’s a world renowned cardiologist who is very difficult to work with. Sam is his daughter who has been working under him but is planning on leaving the hospital for another job until he is shot and they ask her to fill in as the Chief of Cardiology. Now he’s back at his job and having to be supervised by her until the medical board signs off on his recovery and is very unhappy about being subordinate to anyone, especially his daughter. It’s sort of a mix between House and Grey’s Anatomy with a curmudgeonly but brilliant doctor at the center, a case of the week, and some soapy elements mixed together. It’s a decent network drama that’s more than just a straight procedural if you enjoy these kinds of shows.

Around the World in 80 Days

Masterpiece on PBS is currently airing this new adaptation of the Around the World in 80 Days starring David Tennant. It’s fine. I don’t love it. I’m usually doing something else like reading or messing around on the internet when my husband puts it on.