TV Tuesdays Free Talk

I just finished the 2^nd season of Bored To Death - an oblique take on a private detective case of the week show. More theatrically camp than noir but such a refreshing angle to take. Witty, fresh and entertaining with a light hearted study of relationships and their ups and downs - life's vicissitudes as my English teacher was fond of saying.

Created by Jonathan Ames. It was only after I finished that I saw that he created Blunt Talk too - which I also thoroughly enjoyed - for its similarly sidelong approach aimed at Network News.

Looking forward to catching up on the 3^rd and final season next week.

I have a month left on my Apple TV trial. So far I've found some pretty good shows on there, but the discoverability of their Sony TV app is really bad. Anything I shouldn’t miss? I’ve watched Ted Lasso, Prehistoric Planet, Shantaram, and Shrinking so far and enjoyed all of them.

If you're in the UK or you steal your telvision, The Gold is worth a watch. I think its slowly releasing in North America, but I have no idea where.

The series isn't anything special, but its enjoyable

Drama series inspired by true events surrounding the 1983 Brink's-Mat robbery, and the remarkable story that followed

Decent actors (including the blond stud from Slow Horses), good pace.. worth a watch if you've got a space to fill.

Wu Tang: An American Saga is back and... still good. There are a lot of issues with this show, but for its final season, its nice to see things come together. The actors have done a good enough job covering the tracks, too. its nice that they let them do that instead of just using the original.

Here are some other shows on my radarsonar...r:

• Hello Tomorrow (Comedy, Drama, tonight) - In a retro-futuristic world, charismatic salesman Jack Billings leads a team of fellow sales associates determined to revitalize their customers' lives by hawking timeshares on the moon. Pretty show, but also pretty predictable.
• The Consultant (Comedy, 02/23) - After an unspeakable tragedy at CompWare, a games studio based in downtown Los Angeles, a mysterious consultant, Regus Patoff, blows into town and takes charge.
• Mandalorian (Action, Adventure, Fantasy, 03/01) - After the stories of Jango and Boba Fett, another warrior emerges in the Star Wars universe. The Mandalorian is set after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order. We follow the travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy far from the authority of the New Republic.
• Perry Mason (Crime, Drama, History, 03/06) - Set in 1932 Los Angeles, the series focuses on the origin story of famed defense lawyer Perry Mason, based on characters from Erle Stanley Gardner's novels. Living check-to-check as a low-rent private investigator, Mason is haunted by his wartime experiences in France and suffering the effects of a broken marriage. L.A. is booming while the rest of the country recovers from the Great Depression -- but a kidnapping gone very wrong leads to Mason exposing a fractured city as he uncovers the truth of the crime.
• Top Chef (Game-Show, Reality-TV, 03/09) - An American reality competition show in which chefs compete against each other in culinary challenges and are judged by a panel of professional chefs and other notables from the food and wine industry with one or more contestants eliminated in each episode.
• Extrapolations (Comedy, Drama, Mystery, 03/16) - Unanticipated stories of how the upcoming changes to our planet will affect love, faith, work and family on a personal and human scale.
• Lucky Hank (Comedy, Drama, 03/19) - Follows William Henry Devereaux, Jr. A born anarchist and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans. (Bob Odenkirk!)
• Succession (Drama, 03/26) - The Roy family is known for controlling the biggest media and entertainment company in the world. However, their world changes when their father steps down from the company.
• Beef (Comedy, Drama, 04/06) - Two people who let a road rage incident burrow into their minds and slowly consume their every thought and action.

I've given in and gotten a subscription to Dropout.tv, mostly to watch people in their mid 30s okay daily games with each other because I saw one too many clips of Brennan Lee Mulligan on Gamechanger.

I've now binge watched many episodes of Gamechanger, and recently finished the episode guest starring Giancarlo Esposito, which was amazing.

After Trevor Noah's snoozefest I didn't think The Daily Show could be saved, but then they got Sarah Silverman as a guest host! The woman is delightfully cheeky, a comedy genius, and sharp as a tack. She breathed new life into the show. There will be a number of guest hosts, Jeopardy style. Hopefully, they'll keep her!

My husband and I got COVID and have been quarantining, so we've had a lot more TV time than we normally do:

The Traitors (US), Season 1 and The Traitors (UK), Season 1

A new reality elimination series that's essentially the Werewolf/Mafia party elimination game in TV form, with Agatha Christie vibes. The premise is that there are two teams: The Faithfuls, and The Traitors. They all work together, but only the Traitors know each others' identities. Each night the Traitors "murder" (eliminate) a player, and each evening, the whole group has a roundtable discussion and votes one player out. That player then reveals if they were a Faithful or a Traitor.

At the end of the series, the Faithfuls can choose to end the game if they believe they have eliminated all the Traitors, or they can continue voting rounds. If only Faithfuls remain, they all split the prize money. If even one Traitor remains among them, the Traitor takes all the money.

The UK and US versions are almost carbon copies of one another, with the same setting and almost all the same challenges used for each. The US version is hosted by Alan Cumming (in consistently fantastic outfits) and the UK version is hosted by Claudia Winkleman (I know this is heresy, but I liked her better as a host than Cumming).

The UK series is the better version though, because for the US they made half the cast minor celebrities from other reality shows. They get way more screentime than the everyday participants, which undersells half the cast of characters. Plus, many of the celebrities don't really need the money and are just there to make TV, which takes some of the drama out of it.

Both are still enjoyable watches, though my husband and I have some strong feelings on the formatting of the show (i.e. it is WAY too imbalanced, and the challenges should be related to the show itself, not just spectacle). If they do some tweaks to the format, it could be one of our favorites in upcoming seasons. There's a lot of promise, but it's definitely not there yet.

The Bridge (2020), Season 1

This is another reality game show where 12 strangers live in the wilderness next to a lake. There's an island in the middle of the lake, and if they're able to build a bridge to it in 20 days, they get to keep it.

My husband and I ended up not liking this at all.

It might be my own fault for not looking into the premise of the series enough, but I really thought this was going to be a cooperative show. In many ways it almost is, which would have been nice, but it's completely ruined by unnecessary gimmicks that exist just for "drama" (e.g. chances to sabotage the group, only one person gets to take the money at the end, forced eliminations, etc.).

The premise already has enough built-in drama: the people literally have to cook all their own meals, chop all the wood, build each section of the bridge, even empty out their own outhouses, etc. It would have been way more interesting to watch a show that focused on those elements and had genuinely inspiring cooperation and interesting logistics, as well as the natural interpersonal conflicts that come from the stress and fatigue of such an exhausting undertaking with strangers.

The tone of the show was all wrong. Also, it's only a short 6 episodes, and the editing for the different participants is wildly imbalanced. For example, there's one contestant that's very clearly made out to be a "heel" and gets way more confessional time than they should because they talk almost exclusively about manipulating others and jockeying for position. By the end of it, I still didn't feel like I really got to know or connect with, like, half of the cast. Some of the actions people took made no sense because the show didn't give us the groundwork for why they made those decisions. I think this was done to create "drama" or "surprise", but it ended up feeling cheap -- just like the show's forced "plot twists".

It would be a way better show without the unnecessary conflict, but I know that's not how television works, unfortunately.