Netflix's Black Summer: The disjointed vignetteness and interstitial title cards (and, if I'm being honest, the inclusion of a lone Korean character, who only speaks Korean) kind of gave the vibe of this being, like, an american adaptation of a webtoon, but no it turns out this is a prequel to Z Nation, a show I had never heard of but every image of it on google makes it look like a sitcom.
Anyway, it's very standard zombie outbreak survival story, but somehow the characters are even more thinly drawn than you usually see in this sort of thing. There's no reason to be invested in anyone's survival (or deaths) because they barely exist in the first place. In season 1, there's this random homeless (?) guy who shows up to help two of the characters. I'm not sure he ever actually speaks, but he's around for like an episode or two, and then just walks off. Nothing happens to make him walk off, he's not integral to pulling off their gun heist, he was just... a guy, who was in some scenes. I guess "he was just a guy, who was in some scenes" sort of describes most characters, but most of the other characters at least introduce some sort of conflict or personal goals or something before they get killed.
Other standard zombie outbreak survival stuff: The characters are very stupid ("of course we should leave this massive, empty ski lodge that's fully powered and has enough food to keep us fed for months if not years, it's an actual irl ski lodge instead of a set so we can't do big action scenes here"), the strength, intelligence, and durability of the zombies varies wildly depending on what the scene needs.
There tend to be a lot of long takes, which is kind of impressive I guess!
Netflix's The Unsettling: Pretty sure I put this on my list a long time ago when I was adding random spook 'em up content to Get Around To. It's not good! A teen girl moves into a new foster home, is plagued by visions of a Ghost and creeped out by her foster parent's "miracle" bio son. A cult is involved. (The foster home is one of those "ranches" you see on tv that are out in the Texas desert that leave you wondering what it is they actually do here). Kind of has the vibe of an ABC Original/Freeform show, or more accurately an overly long movie, since it seems to wrap everything up in the finale.
Extremely funny to see the main character being like "we'll always have each other and we'll always be family" even though she's only known her foster siblings for about three days.
Zero surprises or scares, zero creativity.
Amazon's A Private Affair: Went in from the description thinking it'd be a Miss Fisher's Murder Mystery kind of moment, you know, episodic, high budget period piece whodunnits starring a rich lady, but it turned out to be a season long mystery that leaned much for heavily into action adventure pulp than I expected. It looks amazing, the filming locations are gorgeous, but I do think the desire to film pulp in beautiful locations ends up dragging the the series out. Particularly egregious was the trip to the Cies Islands to speak to a man in witness protection, which culminated in our heroine jumping out of a crashing plane, and it's just like, this was a whole episode, nothing about the information they obtained felt like this needed to be a whole episode, and worst of all it happened well past the point that the viewer had enough information to solve the mystery so it just felt like a waste of time. The footage of the Cies Islands is really pretty though!
I enjoyed it, but it would have been better if this had been maybe an episode shorter? The mystery won't keep you guessing. Worth it for the scenery alone.
