I'm a big fan of most of Taylor Sheridan's TV shows (Mayor of Kingstown is good, but a bit too brutal for me). I knew he had another 2 in the pipeline for Paramount+ (6666 and Land Man) but now he's announced another batch of shows with stars like Sylvester Stallone, Nicole Kidman, David Oyelowo, Zoe Saldana, and Billy Bob Thornton. I'm particularly interest in the Bass Reeves show, starring David Oyelowo, because Reeves is the African American marshall from the 1800s that the Lone Ranger was based on.
Just finished PeaceMaker and it's one of the best superhero shows that's been made. John Cena feels like the living embodiment of James Gunn's comedy and the series has way more hear than it should. Nearly got me to cry a couple of times during the finale.
Agreed! Though I will say that I thought the first four episodes were much better than the last four. Not that I think the second half of the season was bad. It's more about how good those first four episodes were. But James Gunn is very good at having these ensemble films where he manages to do justice to most of the characters. Like, in most other series, those cops would be non-entities just there to drive the plot forward, but Gunn makes us care even about them.
Watched the first two episodes of Severance on Apple+, and it's fascinating. The colors, the sound, the completely muted approach to the world that's being built is unlike anything I can think of and I honestly don't know what the big reveal is going to be.
Samuel L. Jackson is incredibly good in the The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey. In fact, the performances are excellent throughout.* Dominique Fishback (Robyn) switches between the kinds of emotions you'd expect a young woman to have and the harder edged stuff her life has forced her to develop in the blink of an eye. It's really wonderful to watch. They both do it simultaneously in the scene (first episode) depicting Ptolemy Grey realizing who's in the coffin. My wife and I read the book and we both think it's doing a good job of capturing the essentials, without being limited by them. *Except for Walton Goggins, who's saddled with the job of being vaguely sinister. I'm sorry to say that I don't think he's ever hit the heights he reached in Justified in anything he's done since.
I'm really enjoying the show so far, and it's exhilarating to see the job Jackson is doing. Goggins does a lot of fun stuff, but I think I've most enjoyed him recently in his ridiculous hitman role in Fatman. The other thing I really like on Apple TV+ is Severance, even though we're 6 episodes into the 9 episode season (episode 7 comes out Friday) and I still have no idea what's really going on or how they're going to resolve it. Honestly, with Ptolemy Gray (I haven't read the book yet), Severance, Bel-Air, Halo starting tomorrow, and Moon Knight starting next week, I think this is the most interested I've been in weekly episodic television for at least a decade.
I haven't seen Fatman, but I'll look for it. My wife and I make a point of watching things together, and she's pretty squeamish, which rules out Severance. Your recommendation of Bel-Air makes me reconsider my initial, thoughtless, dismissal of it. I've been looking forward to Moon Knight since I saw the teaser. Oscar Isaac is always fun. I think Ptolemy Grey is right up there with the best I've seen in the last couple of years. It's so fun to see Jackson stretch out. His portrayal of the (self-inflicted) shame and vulnerability that comes with memory loss is jaw-droppingly good, I think (based on the time my mother-in-law stayed with us).
Severance isn't particularly violent. It's almost entirely in the psychological thriller realm, at least so far (there is one attempted suicide). Bel-Air surprised me. Since it started on Super Bowl Sunday, I just watched the two episodes they released that day instead of the 93 hours of pregrame nonsense, and enjoyed it. I think either episode 3 or 4 was the one that convinced me it might end up being an upgrade over the original. Peacock/NBC liked it enough to order 2 seasons right away instead of just a pilot and first season, so they definitely are behind it. My grandmother was that way as her memory was going as well. I've had to pause the show a couple of times and gather myself due to just how on point Jackson has been.
While we're at it, Paramount+ is doing a lot of interesting stuff these days (besides their great soccer coverage) and the 10 part limited series, The Offer, based on the making of The Godfather is one of my most anticipated shows of the year. The first 3 episodes release on 4/28, then it's weekly for the next 7 weeks.
I'm watching Coyote on Paramount+. It's solid. Nothing spectacular but nothing egregious either. It's always nice to see Michael Chiklis in a role that isn't a bad superhero movie. He plays a retired Border Patrol agent who gets roped into helping illegals cross the border. The show interested me for a few reasons, most of which aren't the actual content. The original intent was a 10 episode season on Paramount Network in 2020 with the expectation it would run for a few seasons. Then Covid hit and it got reduced to 6 episodes and released in January of 2021. As far as I can tell it was the last show released under the CBS All Access banner before the relaunch as Paramount+, and it didn't get a second season. The season gets a 6.8 rating on IMDB, but the episodes all individually rate between 7.1-7.6. It gets 58% from critics and 81% from fans on RT. It's a good use of 6 hours if you're in between other shows and are wanting something quick that's pretty good.
Moon Knight had the best debut episode of any of the Marvel Disney+ shows, and maybe the single best episode overall, but it's more than that. This particular episode is one of the most mind bending episodes of any show I've ever watched. I don't know how the next 5 episodes will go, but this knocked it out of the park. This is already my favorite Oscar Isaac role since Inside Llewyn Davis.
I just started watching Halo. I tend to be a bit allergic to movies/series based on games but I guess The Witcher softened me up a bit. So far, it's not bad. I like the lead (he was excellent in Loralei) and the basic theme of rebellion against the system is a good starting point. Bokeem Woodbine has always been good at portraying the guy who's been pushed to the edge of society and so decides to own that and make it a strength. Side note: the theme and background music seems designed to evoke both The Expanse and Blade Runner.
Bel-Air > Fresh Prince. I know it's blasphemy, but if you're going to re-imagine a show then this is how you do it. It occasionally got overly melodramatic, but it's a really good show and nearly every character change works for a modern setting.
It's really not. It takes an episode or two to accept how different it is, but then it's a solid B+ show for me. Having it be 10 episodes, mostly about 45 minutes long, helped it for sure. It's a tight story with no real fluff.
Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel Maybe this should be in the movies thread, since it's basically a feature length standup "concert" film. But anyway. It's on HBO and I looked for it after watching him on SNL. I'd seen one of his earlier standup films and been interested, since he focuses on interacting with the audience and welcomes their involvement. This was a whole other thing, though, despite the fact that the format was basically the same. I told my wife it was almost shamanic. I found myself leaning forward about 20 minutes in. There are a lot of genuinely funny moments, but this guy took so many emotional risks it was almost frightening at times. He never seemed to waver, although I wondered what was going on inside. And to be fair, the audience was every bit as good as he was. They hung in through some very (!) long pauses (that he always landed well) and their comments were frequently questions that needed to be asked. I'd hate to think the people doing the asking were plants, but it sure didn't seem that way. Anyway, this actually felt new to me, in part because he was just sort of dancing out there, beyond my experiences. Kind of a gift, I thought.
I can't speak to the quality of a show about superheros because I'm an adult. But I always find it remarkable that virtually no Americans can do British accents for shit but Brits do Americans convincingly all the time. I chalk it up to the fact that there's far less regional difference in the USA whereas one can reasonably guess where someone is from and how much money they have within 100 miles in the UK, based on how they speak. Notable exceptions are Sasha Baron Cohen's merciless butchering of the Boston accent in The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Michael C. Hall completely nailing the posh British elocution in Netflix's Safe.
Severance is the best thing I've watched on Apple TV+, and I say that as someone who is a huge fan of Ted Lasso (I haven't checked out The Morning Show yet). It's so trippy the whole way along, and even the reveal in episode 6 was so well done that I didn't fully trust it. The season finale (season 2 was ordered on Wednesday) is probably my favorite season finale of a show since the end of The Good Place season 1.
Ptolemy Grey had a fantastic ending as well. I'm actually a bit disappointed that both of these Apple TV+ shows ended the same day.
My expectations for the Killing Eve finale were not great. For that, the show had already lost far too much of its luster. But somehow the actual episode still fell short of that! Truly only season one is great (not coincidentally written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge). The three seasons that followed were an exercise in increasingly diminished returns. Saved only by the good work of a great cast (saved in so far that it was almost always still watchable). But even within that context, the final episode was almost laughably bad. A shame, because certainly Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer would have deserved a better sending off.