The All-New TT: Television Time Mini Reviews

[Pajaro Pete]

Netflix's The Midnight Club: Ol' Mike Flanagan (Hill House, Bly Manor, Midnight Mass) is back, this time with a teen drama. It's, um, easily the worst of his Netflix shows, and I think that's partially because it was intended to be an ongoing series rather than a one and done. There's a lot of awkward CGI spook 'um ups that happen front and center that feel really out of place in a Flanman project but I get why for this particular narrative they couldn't rely on "spooky guy hanging out in the background" like in the Hauntings.

It's set in a hospice for teens (you should be able to discern from that if this is the kind of show you'd enjoy), where every night they gather in the library to tell spooky stories. The stories themselves use the show's actors (and occasionally other Flanagan regulars) in wig of varying qualities, which I think is always really fun.

Spoiler: Some vague stuff from later on in the series

Something really cool happens later on that made me go "Holy shit" but then they backed off it hard, which I guess makes sense because I don't even know where they'd go from there but man talk about your pulled punches. Also one of the least interesting stories gets revisited twice.

 

[Pajaro Pete]

Netflix's The Watcher: Another project Ryan Murphy barfed out, this Based On A True Story is about a family moving from the mean streets of their NYC brownstone to their dream home in an affluent New Jersey suburb, but start receiving creepy letters from someone who calls themselves The Watcher. The soundtrack makes it feel like they're aiming for the conspiracy thrillers of the 60s, but it feels more like a Lifetime Original. Everyone acts like a cartoon character, and while that's fine in most cases, it kind of ruins one of the more genuinely creepy things that happens.

 

[FelixSH]

Watched Umbrella Academy, and just stopped, in the middle of S2. I enjoyed the first season quite a lot, and it's not like I actively disliked what I saw of the second. I just didn't feel any connection to the characters anymore. Like, I wondered what we are doing.

This is probably partly on me, because I never gave the show all my attention, but that wasn't a problem with season 1, so, *shrug*. Dunno, not saying it was bad, but it clearly stopped working for me.

BTW, Wisteria, I saw, read and enjoyed your reaction to my post about Foundation, and I do intend to write something, but I need to actually take out time for that, and also forgot for some time. But I, at least, appreciate you writing reacting.

 

[Purple]

To be fair, a big theme of season 2 is all of the characters trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives.

 

[YangusKhan]

The newest season of American Horror Story started this week, and the first 2 episodes were pretty good? I mean it's almost always the case that a new season falls off the rails by the end, but usually I can see the cracks of that trajectory start appearing right from the beginning. This time though I don't see it (yet) and so the first 2 episodes have really just been a played straight horror-mystery story.

Anyway it's about a serial killer targeting gay men in New York City in 1981, and also seems to be teasing a background plot about the very start of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. So uh, content warning about all that.

 

[Vaeran]

I've been watching FX/Hulu's The Patient, which stars Steve Carrell and Domhnall Gleeson (Hux from The Star Wars) in a psychological thriller where (episode 1 spoilers) Gleeson, a serial killer who wants to be able to stop killing, abducts his therapist (Carrell) and chains him up in his basement to force him to help. Somewhat strangely for a drama series the episodes are only 22 minutes long, but so far it's super tense and the performances are great. Check it out, maybe!

Hey! I finished this! It was really fucking good! Bye!

 

[Violentvixen]

I finally got around to checking out Halo and it's resoundingly meh, but wanted to watch it before my Paramount + trial runs out tomorrow. Just moves way too slow and was pretty muddled. I never understood the point of the side story in the desert area and ended up skipping over all those scenes pretty quickly. I did really like Kai-125 and also think their interpretation of Miranda Keyes is great so I could see some interesting stuff happening with those characters. But dunno if I'll actually bother to watch a second season, I doubt I actually watched even half of the first season since I was skipping around so much. The props, sound design and sets are phenomenal though.

 

[Neo Skimbleshanks]

I finally started season 2 of Chucky because I watched Body Snatchers and was so excited to hear Meg Tilly was going to be in season 2. The show is sometimes very funny but also has such a nasty streak that I'm sometimes taken aback. Like, what's the tone here? The most recent episode really bummed me out! Jennifer Tilly has been in a cage for like 17 years, just saw her sister for the first time in all that time only to have her murdered, and then gets obliterated by a truck?? I know it's fake, but that's just a lil depressing... like when Chucky stabbed that 12 year old last season.

 

[FelixSH]

Anyone watched Wednesday? Or watching it right now, it hasn't been on Netflix that long.

It's a take on the Addams Family, focusing on Wednesday who is sent away to the old bording school her parents went to. Its main focus is on outcasts, on "weird" people and especially kids, and humanising them. I enjoy it a lot for that reason.

Not sure if it works as an Addams Family interpretation. Putting Wednesday in a setting in something like the real world, taking the Addams away from their home turf, feels like it is breaking the concept.

It still feels Addams Family enough, and I enjoy the show in general. The actors are great, especially Wednesday and Morticia (coming from someone who can't really judge acting, so take that however you want), and Gomez is fun too.

 

[jpfriction]

I’m liking it. Seeing Wednesday do the occasional teen girl thing like desperately go through her closet to pick out a dress because a boy she likes just showed up at her door is never going to feel right, nor do the gory bits, but overall quite solid.

 

[Kirin]

Here’s the thread where I meant to post this:

My wife and I just finished watching the entire run of Bojack Horseman. Dang. That was a thing.

I'd avoided it for a long time because it looked like a depressing show about horrible people being jerks to each other. Turns out it's a really good depressing show about horribly flawed people trying their best but often failing and being jerks, but still trying. Also it lets its animators and writers just run with some really wild stuff. Good show.

 

[Adrenaline]

This season's Christmas episode of Bob's Burgers was the best episode period of the show in years.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Looking forward to it, then. It usually takes Disney + a week or two to catch up.

 

[FelixSH]

Started watching Gotham, and enjoying it very much. I never was much into Batman, despite enjoying the franchise in some interpretations, but I do recognise enough names to get joy out of hearing them. Still in the first season (they are long, 22 episodes, like in the old days), but that one is pretty fun. Penguin is excellent (like here, I have no idea how he has been portrayed in general, I just enjoy his storyline, and how he finds ways to defeat more and more difficult foes, always being underestimated), but I have fun with the rest of the show too.

Makes me want to actually watch the whole of the Animated Series. I mean, it's always on the back of my mind (I only saw a handful of episodes as a kid, and loved what I saw), but this might be the push I need.

 

[Sprite]

Here’s the thread where I meant to post this:

My wife and I just finished watching the entire run of Bojack Horseman. Dang. That was a thing.

I'd avoided it for a long time because it looked like a depressing show about horrible people being jerks to each other. Turns out it's a really good depressing show about horribly flawed people trying their best but often failing and being jerks, but still trying. Also it lets its animators and writers just run with some really wild stuff. Good show.

I’ve never seen a show thread the needle quite like that show when it comes to sympathizing with a terrible person while never, ever letting them off the hook.

 

[Pajaro Pete]

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.

 

[FelixSH]

I started rewatching Golden Girls, the first time watching the show since, dunno, I guess the early 00s. I really like it, even three episodes in.

Did you know that there was a gay dude in the first episode? Who never appears again? Apparently, the first episode was too long, and they had to cut a lot of scenes, which seem to be mainly the ones with him. I'm not complaining, I enjoy the show a lot as it is, and I do appreciate that they even tried, at this point in time. Also, it might be better, because Sophia does use two bad words (at least in the German version), when talking about him - not even meant as insults, she likes him, but the way you use insults casually. You know what I mean.

Anyway, it's fun, I enjoy my time with the show. And I learned, that Bea Arthur, Betty White and Rue McClanahan were already very well known actresses, playing in popular sitcoms in the 70s, which I'm now curious about. I immediately looked for what Bea Arthur had done earlier, and found the sitcom Maude. There aren't any good sources for that show, but I found a few episodes on Youtube. What I watched was a scene from an episode, that shows a gay bar. In a sitcom, in the 70s. Which blew my mind. And Maude, played by Bea, is on the right side here. I learned, that Bea was an activist for different causes, one of them homeless, queer youth.

So, yeah, great person. I hope to be able to watch more of Maude (there are a few episodes on Youtube, so that's a start).

 

[Violentvixen]

Season 3 of the new All Creatures Great and Small started and I'm please that I like this show even though they're diverging from the books in a lot of ways. These books are so important to me but I'm surprised by how much I've like just about all the changes. Especially as the majority of them have been adding more than just white male characters but in ways that show they really put some research into it like with Cleo Sylvestre/Anne Chapman. What a cool but heartbreaking story.

Because—though it’s changed slightly, recently in Britain—but the only time you see people of color, they’re either portrayed as West Indian, or as I say, post-Windrush. It’s great to have that representation there in the story. And obviously, it was very emotional for me as well, particularly in the second series, because on the way to filming, we actually passed the village where my mother was brought up. I was in the car, and I suddenly saw this sign, and it completely just destroyed me, in a way. Because I just thought about what she must have gone through as a young girl, not knowing anybody who looked like her, just surrounded with sometimes hostile people. They weren’t always—I mean, the so-called granny, the foster mother, was lovely. But I know that my mother used to say, for example, that on Empire Day at school, when they celebrated the Empire and waved Union Jacks, people would talk to her about being a heathen, and…So all that suddenly regurgitated itself. Yeah.

 

[Kirin]

Finished up the Netflix version of Bee and Puppycat. That sure was a lot of chill surrealism.

 

[FelixSH]

Gotham probably isn't good TV for any measure, but pure entertaining nonsense. But it surely is a ride. It was goofy from the start (an old guy showed that he is actually super strong, by picking up his moving help and bends its metal legs), but nearly at the end, we see one woman move another in a wheelchair. They are running from armed people. The one in the wheelchair is in labour, but channels her pain by pulling out two guns, screaming angrily, and just shooting whoever is in their way. With the camera being directly in front of her, and her angry face.

There is more nonsense. By all its bleakness, season 5, the last one, really enjoys leaning into being very, very dumb at times. Considering how it started, it really has become a bizarre show.

 

[Rascally Badger]

So Hunters on Amazon Prime is a show.

Season 2 seemed to realize that they lost their biggest draw, Al Pacino, in season 1 and struggles to find a way to keep him involved, so you get season long flashbacks (mostly) featuring only him. The show doesn't seem quite to know what to do with itself otherwise. It spends 6 of its 8 episodes with the team hunting down Hitler. They catch him in episode 6.

Episode 7 is a self contained story about an old German couple hiding some Jewish families in their house. Its like a horror version of Home Alone as directed by Wes Anderson. I don't know if its good, but it is orders of magnitude more interesting than the rest of the show.

The finale turns into a courtroom drama, also featuring none of the main characters. It is like the people behind the show realized they were out of juice and just did some thing else.

 

[SpoonyBard]

Pretty late to the Wednesday party but I recently finished it and enjoyed the series overall, though it makes a few inexplicable decisions.

Gotta agree with the general sentiment that the Addams Family works best when the characters are thrust among normal folks and the entertainment comes from the clash that ensues, so setting the series at Diet Hogwarts was a strange decision. Not to mention it raises other questions that the series won't address (not only are the Addams's NOT uniquely weird in the world, it implies they're even part of definable 'types' of outcasts. But if so, what is Gomez? We know Morticia has visions, passed to Wednesday, and even though Fester couldn't make the cut academically he clearly has electric abilities, but Gomez? He's just kind of a weird gremlin I guess? Does that count for Nevermore? Why was he there exactly?)

The greater mystery in the season was interesting, though it very quickly became obvious who the monster was around the time the gang went to the spooky house, when Love Interest A got 'attacked' by the monster but we never see it, that was basically giving the game away.

The big confrontation with the ultimate big bad was a bit dumb, but I do love a 'reluctant friends coming together' trope so I can forgive it. Not Wednesday delivering cheesy one-lines though, "Howdy Pilgrim." no more of that please she's better than that.

It occasionally got a bit too cheeky with its callbacks (the 'snap twice' password, Wednesday straight up being called 'kooky' and saying she preferred 'spooky', Christina Ricci's character saying she thought she and Wednesday were a lot alike and getting immediately shot down), but at worst these were eye-rolling.

The real heart of the show, though, was... well, the hand. Probably the best version of Thing yet. Helped that it was neither animatronic nor CGI (aside from digitally removing the rest of the actor's arm) so the other actors were interacting with a real, well, Thing.

Not a huge fan of Wednesday being put in a love triangle being part of the story, probably the biggest misstep besides the setting. Let Wednesday be Wednesday, don't try to shoehorn in tired old teen drama cliches.

Still, looking forward to where it goes for season 2. Hopefully they learn the right lessons from this first outing.

 

[Paul le Fou]

So I've binged through two seasons of The Boys, and it was good! Then I started season 3 and the first episode was just wall-to-wall red flags of total creative bankruptcy, trying to milk a success with no idea how to follow up a concluded storyline. Did anyone watch season 3? Is it actually any good?

 

[karzac]

Poker Face, created by Rian Johnson and starring Natasha Lyonne as a modern-day Columbo, is extremely good. Each episode introduces you to a sad cast of characters and shows one of them murdering another and then covering it up. Then the episode does a small flashback, showing how Lyonne's drifter-detective Charlie fits into this group of people, and then finally has her uncovering the murder and pinning it on the villain. It's very formulaic, but very satisfying and Lyonne's bedraggled charm really sells it.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

So I've binged through two seasons of The Boys, and it was good! Then I started season 3 and the first episode was just wall-to-wall red flags of total creative bankruptcy, trying to milk a success with no idea how to follow up a concluded storyline. Did anyone watch season 3? Is it actually any good?

Season 3 is odd. It definitely has issues of "how do we even do this anymore" when the status quo should have been completely shattered and yet they still find a way to reset back to it. The show is a ticking time bomb at this point with how untenable the scenario is. It's still fun and bombastic, but the pretzels the show twists itself into, in order to keep a semblance of a status quo is increasingly strained.

 

[lincolnic]

Poker Face, created by Rian Johnson and starring Natasha Lyonne as a modern-day Columbo, is extremely good. Each episode introduces you to a sad cast of characters and shows one of them murdering another and then covering it up. Then the episode does a small flashback, showing how Lyonne's drifter-detective Charlie fits into this group of people, and then finally has her uncovering the murder and pinning it on the villain. It's very formulaic, but very satisfying and Lyonne's bedraggled charm really sells it.

It's great so far (we're three episodes deep in my house), but you do have to ignore the little bit of cognitive dissonance that says "so...someone just happens to get murdered every place she rolls up?" No complaints beyond that, though!

 

[Purple]

I mean, that's also the implausible premise of Columbo, Murder She Wrote, Monk...

 

[karzac]

Yeah I also assume she's going to lots of places where there aren't murders, and they just didn't m we ke episodes about those ones.

 

[Pajaro Pete]

Pretty late to the Wednesday party but I recently finished it and enjoyed the series overall, though it makes a few inexplicable decisions.

Gotta agree with the general sentiment that the Addams Family works best when the characters are thrust among normal folks and the entertainment comes from the clash that ensues, so setting the series at Diet Hogwarts was a strange decision. Not to mention it raises other questions that the series won't address (not only are the Addams's NOT uniquely weird in the world, it implies they're even part of definable 'types' of outcasts. But if so, what is Gomez? We know Morticia has visions, passed to Wednesday, and even though Fester couldn't make the cut academically he clearly has electric abilities, but Gomez? He's just kind of a weird gremlin I guess? Does that count for Nevermore? Why was he there exactly?)

The greater mystery in the season was interesting, though it very quickly became obvious who the monster was around the time the gang went to the spooky house, when Love Interest A got 'attacked' by the monster but we never see it, that was basically giving the game away.

The big confrontation with the ultimate big bad was a bit dumb, but I do love a 'reluctant friends coming together' trope so I can forgive it. Not Wednesday delivering cheesy one-lines though, "Howdy Pilgrim." no more of that please she's better than that.

It occasionally got a bit too cheeky with its callbacks (the 'snap twice' password, Wednesday straight up being called 'kooky' and saying she preferred 'spooky', Christina Ricci's character saying she thought she and Wednesday were a lot alike and getting immediately shot down), but at worst these were eye-rolling.

The real heart of the show, though, was... well, the hand. Probably the best version of Thing yet. Helped that it was neither animatronic nor CGI (aside from digitally removing the rest of the actor's arm) so the other actors were interacting with a real, well, Thing.

Not a huge fan of Wednesday being put in a love triangle being part of the story, probably the biggest misstep besides the setting. Let Wednesday be Wednesday, don't try to shoehorn in tired old teen drama cliches.

Still, looking forward to where it goes for season 2. Hopefully they learn the right lessons from this first outing.

i have many of the same thoughts as you but overall i did not enjoy the series. for me the biggest stumbling block was them trying to create Lore and Grounding The Addams. in the 90s movies, everything exists for the sake of a joke, you're not supposed to think too hard about the logistics, you're just supposed to roll with it. but Wednesday is like, "oh no, gomez might have committed a murder and that's bad, and he might go to jail for that and that's also bad" and "Wednesday goes to an Edgar Allen Poe Ghoul School For Babby Monsters, but everyone thinks she's weird for being a goth, and so the Addams are still considered weirdos even amongst the Weirdos," and you have Wednesday herself acting like the 90s movie character where she talks about serial killings and being macabre and whatnot, all while she's trying to stop a serial killer (and like, one of the worst of her actual actions is sending mouse traps to an editor who didn't like her book), so it sort of deflates the character from being a fun part of an ensemble to a really dorky edgelord teen who we're supposed to think is the coolest badass around.

jenna ortega did a good job, but oof the material.

 

[Paul le Fou]

So I've binged through two seasons of The Boys, and it was good! Then I started season 3 and the first episode was just wall-to-wall red flags of total creative bankruptcy, trying to milk a success with no idea how to follow up a concluded storyline. Did anyone watch season 3? Is it actually any good?

Season 3 is odd. It definitely has issues of "how do we even do this anymore" when the status quo should have been completely shattered and yet they still find a way to reset back to it. The show is a ticking time bomb at this point with how untenable the scenario is. It's still fun and bombastic, but the pretzels the show twists itself into, in order to keep a semblance of a status quo is increasingly strained.

So the second half of episode 2 started picking up and I ended up thinking that season 3 was about as good as the previous, albeit with underlying arcs that stretched believability more, a bit more contrivance. I'm assuming season 4 is in the works and hoping that will be the last one because I highly doubt they can stretch the concept any further, however much fun it is to watch Karl Urban call superheroes c**ts.