Some Random Thoughts About Television... [R]

And The Recruit is among 4 Netflix shows canceled this week.

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/tv/netflix-cancels-four-shows-one-35188893

 

Bella Ramsey really can't pull off intimidating or much of anything else. I'll watch the last two episodes of the season, but they'll have to do something huge to get my attention for a 3rd season.

 

Honestly the most stupid moment of the episode for me was her randomly finding another guitar? Is that more stuff lifted straight from the video game? If so, they should know it makes no sense in a TV show.

 

Things continue to get very Canadian and weird at CW.

They've picked up a 2 season order of Law & Order Criminal Intent: Toronto. Season 1 already aired in Canada and season 2 is airing right now. At this point the C in CW should stand for Canadian.

 

Andor season two was solid overall for me. Perhaps a little less great than season one*, but I had expected that. Overall the quality was higher than I had dared to hope for.

Episode ten of season two was easily one of my favorites of the entire series. It is hard to imagine returning to Filoni's vision of Star Wars TV after this, saying this as someone who genuinely enjoyed season one of the Mandalorian. It's just that Tony Gilroy proved an entire different level of writing can be contained within this universe.

* I think season one kind of benefited from two things, both hard to replicate for season two: its quality being a huge surprise (which became an expectation for season two) and its word of mouth, organic growth where it almost felt like it found an increasingly bigger audience as it went along.

 

I only watched episode 10 yesterday, and it might be my second favorite of the whole series. Hoping to finish it up tonight.

 

episode 10 spoiler inside (open) episode 10 spoiler inside (close)

It's a testament to how deep the bench is in this show that one of its best episodes can be entirely devoid of its main character and that it can make the death of what is essentially a tertiary character like Jung feel so poignant. Perhaps the strongest asset of this show over all 24 episodes was the breadth and depth of its characterisation, where not even the tiniest minor character was wasted, but instead every bit of juice was squeezed from even the most modest of background figures.

 

Another missing element this season was the surprise appearances of actors the caliber of Andy Serkis. Season 1 just threw so much unexpected stuff at us and season 2, while still very good, didn't capitalize on the option to sneak a big name or two in there for one of the arcs.

 

Some interesting stuff for the fall. Somehow NBC kept both Brilliant Minds and The Hunting Party, with one executive claiming it was their consistent ratings, but both dropped off badly as their seasons continued. Brilliant Minds dropped from 3.92 million to 2.54 million viewers by the end of season 1. The Hunting Party dropped from 3.05 million to 2.02 million. It's baffling that those remained with such weak showings.

CBS is mostly expanding existing show universes, CIA is part of the FBI world and Sheriff Country is adjacent to Fire Country. Even Boston Blue is a spinoff of Blue Bloods. The only new scripted show in the fall that isn't part of something else is DMV, a single camera comedy about working at the DMV. During the winter they're getting into the Harlan Coben world with Final Twist. The spring schedule will add Y: Marshals, a show following Kayce from Yellowstone as that franchise delves into its first attempt at network TV appropriate content.

NBC is doing jack squat. They've got an unscripted show with Jimmy Fallon and then NBA games on Tuesday (October) and Sunday (after NFL season).

Fox is adding a game show and reality show in the fall, but they are adding two new scripted shows in mid-season, Best Medicine which is a reworking of the British comedy Doc Martin, and The Faithful which is a 6 part miniseries around the Easter and Passover season about the book of Genesis from the perspective of five of the main women in the story: Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel.

ABC has one new show listed for the 25-26 season and it's 9-1-1: Nashville, obviously expanding on the original 9-1-1 show.

CW hasn't said anything beyond adding the Law & Order Toronto show.

 

The first episode of Duster is one of the best things I've seen in a while. No idea if the whole show will be good, but it's got a unique vibe to it and the casting seems perfect at every point.

 

I watched through all of Grosse Point Garden Society.

It got moved from Sunday to Friday and instead of dying the ratings actually ticked upwards by a few hundred thousand.

My best description is someone combined the overly dramatic modern true crime genre with the trashy late night soap operas of the 80s and 90s, and it revolves around the members of an upper middle class gardening club.

Nothing groundbreaking, but everyone is stupidly gorgeous. The show time jumps often between the months leading up to a murder to the moments right after it. Everyone is sleeping with everyone and they all feel bad about it, kind of. Aja Naomi King and Melissa Fumero seemed to be having a cleavage contest every other episode. Dogs get killed, quilts get stolen from auctions, and we get left with an interesting cliffhanger that may never get solved since there's no word yet on if the show will return or not.

 

There are two episodes left in The Handmaid's Tale.

I thought this week was the finale, since it had a "finale voiceover," but it sure would have been disappointing if it had been.

The season has been incredibly uneven, but I hope the last couple of episodes tie up everything.

I really cannot stand June's husband, Luke. I have disliked the character since the first season, but really cannot stand him now.

I do not know what is going to happen, but I have a couple of theories. I will not share them, lest I am correct and spoil it.
Of course, I am NEVER correct about anything I predict, so I could throw them out there.

 

With YouTube being the single most watched thing on TV for a while now, I'll just throw in this great video of kids in high school in New York in 1989. Notice how happy and healthy everyone looks.

 

Wasn't an excerpt of this shared on Youtube a while ago to point out that like a lot of those kids looked 35 instead of 17?

 

Maybe?

 

I meant Twitter, not youtube.

 

Oh, then I have no idea.

 

Thanks to Nate Bargatze I now know this existed.

 

Bella Ramsey has moved into the territory of actress I never want to see in anything again. At her best she's nothing special, but this role in TLOU seems to have convinced her that she's some sort of savant and the last few episodes she's come across like a theater kid who never got had a teacher good enough to fix her bad habits.

 

Finished off season 2 of Kleo and thoroughly enjoyed it. German content on Netflix feels like it's the only thing that's consistently at the quality that the streamer had overall 8-10 years ago.

 

To be honest, after having seen all of season two of The Last of Us, I am more bothered by the video game logic in this season than Bella Ramsey's admittedly uneven performance (she is not helped by the writing a lot of the time).
For instance, it might make sense in a video game to have a character take a small boat out in a storm to travel towards a Ferris wheel at night, only to find two of the six people she is looking for in a city full of people for a convenient little confrontation. That is stuff that makes total sense in a video game, where the game construct with levels sort of lends itself to such narratives. In a TV show, it just feels a bit ridiculous. Adapting a story from one medium to another means you change that stuff, to where you still have the confrontation but construct the story to arrive at that point more organically. There have been multiple instances of this, translating the game too literally to a medium where those decision do not fit, though it never jarred to the degree it did in episode 207.

 

It was terrific.
It was so much fun to watch.
I will likely watch it again before the end of the year.

 

Murderbot has been pretty good so far. It's not exactly the tone of the novels, but a close approximation and probably necessary for the adaptation. They needed to expand the secondary characters since it can't all be in Murderbot's head, but they may have made them a little too cartoonish.