wolfkin

Upload Season 1 was fun. Upload Season 2 was interesting. It was so interesting even with that awful missing episode jump it still mostly worked. Upload Season 3 doesn't know if it wants to be a sequel to Season 1 or to Season 2. It tries to be both at the same time. It's like they saw Severance and really didn't want to hit that "oh man it's kinda dull what's even happening here?" tone for even a single moment so it just yo-yo's back and forth between light and heavy, high and low stakes, fun and serious. It has an identity crisis. And yet again it ramps up the stakes at the end and I'm invested on a moment to moment level. But the world building is just so incohesive. Is Lucy bad or Lucy good. Will anyone tell? Is there a conspiracy? Does it matter? What about the plight of the poor is this a serious thing or just a joke that we'll think about later? Hey remember rebels? That was a fun detour. The show is about the dynamic of a worker and a customer so Nora keeps being a worker regardless of if it makes sense for her character. Honestly I gotta give it to Allegra Edwards her Ingrid is somehow one of the most realized characters in the show. I don't like her character but she brings life to every scene. She's putting her heart and soul into this for whatever reason every scene no pauses. I kinda hate Ingrid for most of the show's run but she's a full person and I get her. In part because of how shallow and stunted her character is they don't need to do anything to her and so they don't and they let her character flourish and don't ruin her. Which is a wierd thing to admit they're doing to EVERY other characters. Nathan, Nora, Aleesha, Luke. They're all over the map this season. Highs and lows and askews.

I want a Season 4 but after this I'm not convinced it'll be worth the wait.

Ummm.. okay? I mean there's a lot of superficial things i could talk about. Like how I don't like Priyanka Chopra as a person. How I don't like how they frame her in the show. Her attractiveness is being pretty not hot and the show really really tries to make her seem "hot". So it's kinda jarring. I'm not big on the flashback narrative device.

But you know what I do like. Spy stories. I love a good twist. I love a good double twist. But this show is making me DIZZY. It feels like 80% of the show is twists and reveals that double back on the twists and reveals from last episode. I've read a lot about the current strike and one of the interesting things i've seen actors and writers talk about is how much shorter TV series are on streaming. I mean objectively I'm sure it's true but this is the first time I've felt it. This show has enough quadruple crosses to fill out a season of Chuck (20+ episodes). But it's only six episodes long. It's incredibly jarring. I mean at first I thought it was just getting incestual which was fine because most shows have incestual casts. Everyone is related to everyone. But then the ties that bind just kept pulling them closer and closer.

This show needs more Stanley Tucci. Tucci grounds this entire show. He's fantastic. I would throw both my sisters at him just to be closer to him. I don't understand how he's so utterly delightful in a role that's even more secondary and less involved that Bruce Campbell in Burn Notice. Tucci is the most shining star of this show and I think Priyanka is fine and Richard Madd is just oddly fantastic as Mason/Kyle. But Tucci absolutely lights up every scene he's in.

I don't really see this as "Franchise" material. I don't really care about the wider world of Citadel. It's odd. But I am interested in where the story goes. I didn't get invested in who betrayed Citadel though. I think we're supposed to be spending every episode trying to find out who and how Citadel got taken down but I kinda just didn't care. I started to get invested and then there are like 7 twists and I just stopped worry about it.

A great season. It has a lot of things you'd love in any show. Honestly the weakest point is Chuck himself which is strange because he's also a great protagonist. But he's forever unable to stop himself from jumping in whether or not it makes sense for him to do so. He let's Sarah and go because he's tired of heartache and then he gets super jealous when someone shows attention. Literally five minutes later. It's very boyish. Still his earnestness is what we love and hate about him. Season 2 holds up fairly well all things considered. The sexy scenes aren't too gross. No one is too aggressively "sexist for that time period". Not even the pervert characters. The B-plot narrative of the Buy More was fun and the season's Jeffster track is in my top three. I think it peaks at Chuck vs the Best Friend. It felt like the production just amped up at that point. Great soundtrack. Introduced me to Chromeo's Mamma's Boy. Interesting filmwork. The final arc guest start was perfect. Seeing them again just reminded me of how awesome it was when it was airing.

It all comes together in a way that makes you thankful for Subway randomly having the pull to keep Chuck alive. I'd want two more seasons just based on what happened here. Easily.

It's finally over. I'll never have to go back to this again. "Reality TV" is awful. Uniformly. It's some of the worst content produced for home consumption. What that says about me watching it? Well I don't know. I'm not even addicted to the shows per se. But.. whatever I wanted to finish this. Now done I'll never have to watch more of it.

I remember a long time ago seeing Ridiculousness and how cringe and terrible it was and how much it made me appreciate Daniel Tosh and his show Tosh.0. His humor may not be everyone's cup of tea but it wasn't the ear scraping nonsense that was his competitor who if I understand correctly had three hosts and turned it into basically a shock jock radio show with videos. Tosh's humor of juvenile and puerile but it's done with effort and orientation. It's pointed and direct. Every scene I've seen of Ridiculousness was like watching drunk people laugh at inside jokes. It's dumb, it makes no sense and it lasts for way too long and they think they're WAY funnier than they actually are.

Similarly MILF Manor (MM) shows the value of a host. ANY host. I've heard buzz that people are starting to hate the hosts in Love is Blind but holy wow at least they're there to speak authoritatively and direct the action when needed. MM goes hostless. Presumably because they couldn't find anyone willing to stick it out for six weeks while mothers and sons fondled each other and then slept in the same room like they were a married couple on 50s Television. It made every event of the series more annoying. There's degrees of pretention in every aspect of reality TV. people pretending to be in love. People pretending to care what happens. People pretending to be venomously insulted. People pretending to be spontaneous. But watching moms and sons constantly pretend to be excited over text message instructions as they read them aloud sometimes handing off the second half of the message to someone else to read made a painful show even more painful.

I always say I miss 90s dating shows because the prize in those shows... was a date. They didn't pretend to have greater meaning. It was just a way to smush some bodies together and see if anything sparked and the spark was the goal. Now they spend week and weeks in dream vacations pretending they can meet someone in this hyper overstimulated environment and determine if they can go all the way. This show stops JUST shy of demanding they propose so no worries for those clenching in fear of that. But the halfway point when the "romantic triangle" came to a head nearly broke me. I watched three people pretend they're in a love triangle and each of them was lying to the other two. Ryan lies about not being possessive and angry. Gabriel lies about just wanting to be her friend and just "being a nice guy". He's clearly a NiceGuy:tm:. Stefany lies to both of them telling both of them she's super into them and not into the other one. She's clearly stoking the attention while she makes up her mind. On one hand I want to respect Ryan's anger because he's 100% correct. But being annoyed doesn't give you license to treat people the way he does. Especially in such a no stakes situation as he found himself. It's a shame because had she been honest about her ambiguity she'd be both sympathetic AND in the right. Instead she's just sympathetic because these dudes are really not being reasonable.

Some of the moms are more palatable than others. Kelle aka Disco Mama is too much. At one point I swear the dialog is suggesting she is requesting her consent be bypassed to put it politely. She's the type of woman who wants you to choke her, spank her and pull her hair as long as you tell her you love her while doing it. It's exhausting from episode one until the last episode we see her in. None of that even touches on her "moment of privilege" as I'll call it euphemistically. Because her white girl privilege shows up in every other scene she's in to be honest but there's a specific moment that was appalling but even if it hadn't happened, I would still have found her to be bottom tier. Other Moms like Shannan and Pola was more laid back and there's a fair spectrum of inbetween even if they don't all get the screen time to show it. The boys are... well they're boys. Some of them are very young and some of them are very immature and the overlap isn't as big as you'd imagine. None of them is particularly surprising or unexpected in anyway.

What is unexpected is how the relationship between the boys and their moms shift. At the start of the series no one knows what's going on. The moms are expecting young men and the men are expecting women their senior with a certain je ne said quois but neither expected the other to include a relative. This makes a lot of dynamics very awkward. Some like Kelle or Shannan maintain (in their way) anyway. Others like Pola become more reserved concerned more with the women who are after her son (Jose, her son, is the proverbial belle of the ball being older and more reserved he looks like the catnip 90% of the women are into). Either way there's a lot of tension. Sometimes they can ignore it while they play games that are quite frankly stupid. "Grope to identify your son" and "Tell your unnecessarily personal secret" and "Sex-Ed Test" and the occasional mostly random "date" seems to distract (sometimes) from the awkwardness though some of the families handle it better than others. But after that half way hump something different appears in the dynamics. The families start to become a more unified force. The boys rather than razzing each others and groaning at the thought of their mothers showing interest instead start to encourage interest in their mothers. They start to see the other boys as potential boyfriends for their mom. While there were certainly moments of potential interest in the show this is really the only one that developed.

The show would have benefited from a host to give direction. At one point they kick people off the show and everyone is confused because rather than a host speaking from a position of authority to dismiss them. It's just one of the moms reading a text message. She even has to state explicitly that it's not a joke because no one knows how to react. Whether to laugh or chuckle or ignore or put on the performative "tears". It's amusing on one of the dates a couple goes snorkeling and there's just 3 seconds of the instructor telling them what's going to happen and describing a whale shark and the show is so starved for direction it's like a moment of relief for someone to actually speak and know and orient the narrative. The show would also have been better with more interesting games. Most of them were so wishy-washy you don't care who has the best dance team and after the topless groping in episode 1 the blind massage later one feels like a letdown. The same way Truth or Dare is a let down after the wall of secret left one of the moms crying because her son found out she slept with his best friend. The sex ed test was so filled with potential but it so botched with discrete answers demanded from subjective questions. "What turns on a woman the most?" are you kidding me what kind of sex ed question is that? I mean why not "We asked the ladies what turns them on most can you identify the act with the woman?" or even something like "We have each woman's name here put their name where you think they agreed their most sensitive erogenous zone is". That would have ACTUALLY opened up dialog about the sexuality of 40+ women as well as been more interesting to watch than watching one of the dudes perform cunnilingus on a fruit in front of everyone. An act so disturbing one of the moms noped out of the rest of the session.

At the end I don't care about the couples because most of them are barely people. They're reality show actors. What are a y oung Boston man and a mom from Miami going to do? Go long distance? Some of the couples barely have chemistry especially after the mess of a surprise in the penultimate episode. I feel nothing when some of them announce their intent to stay together or to stay as friends.

I have a soft spot for some of the women in this show. Some of them I'd genuinely be interested in hanging out with both in the literal and euphemistic sense. And there are a few guys I'd gladly introduce to my sister though she told me all of them are no go for various reasons including how they acted on the show, that they were on the show, and who they picked to pursue on the show. But the people aside the show was a dumpster fire even on the reality show scale. It has a very salacious hook of MILFs and their sons being in the same dating pool but it's not an "experiment" and it's barely an "experience". It's a sloppy mess cobbled together with almost no redeeming qualities.

Well to this I can only say the following: tilt's head Huh?

I'll give you this, for a six episode series. WOW does it pack a bloody punch. It's got some amazing tension right from the git go almost leaning in to horror as no one bothers to turn on lights throughout the entire series. The score builds, you expect a shadow to pop out and every once in a while someone does. Little Benjamin does a perfectly solid job of being the stoic Isaac. For his profile Capaldi wasn't as big of a role as I expected but when he was used he was excellent. Jessica Raine was a wonderful leading lady.

Very quickly this transitions from a natural thriller into a supernatural one and then in your head you play the guessing game. Is it ghosts? Is it time travel? Is it Aliens because as The Doctor (or was it Sarah Jane) once implied the others are stupid choices. Something has to explain the things Isaac appears to see and talk to. Something has to explain the flashes of (stronger than) deja vu that Lucy has. Something has to link the schizo grandmother and her son.

Then there's the ending. Honestly as great as episodes 1-5 were. I'd let pretty much anything go with episode 6. I kinda wish there was a second series so we could get a more conclusive ending but what we have here in the terminal side is an ending you'll have to watch two or three times to really let it sink it.

I recommend it. Aside from the lighting where no lamps are on it's a very tight series. It fails to come together in the end. Well I wouldn't say that. We do get answers and those answers are satisfactory. It just fails to do anything with it. Having run out of episodes the series ends before we really can see where it's going next.

I'm not afraid of an open ending. I think The Matrix (1999) and Awake (2012) Season 1 both ended with fantastic open endings. They brought all the elements together. Did something and then showed us where they go next.

I haven't seen a show this openly jingoistic in years. Meet the new Jack Ryan. We've seen in a bunch of movies played by actors young and old. Here we have John "Is-is that a stick up his butt?" Krasinski, his sartorial style says I'm a casual worker but his extra smedium shirt and posture say "I'm perfectly capable and willing to go over and punch that guy in the face... no really I am.. give me a second I'm gonna go do it and prove it to you".

It's certainly watchable. Krasinski is a decent military action man. He's a little too stiff but Jack Ryan is supposed to be an analyst (to my recollection). The narrative is ... fine. There's a brown dude. He hates America. He's smart. He also has justifiable reasons to hate 'America'. It's fine. Once you accept that and stop trying to make it real and consider it like a heist film and just focus on all the cool heist things yeah there's some fun twists. Some parts of his plan don't really work when you look at it chronologically but you get to have your American comes save everyone moments. The action choreo is solid enough. I'll be back for season twp.

Well darn if that wasn't a lot of fun (10 episodes in). Omar Sy is as great as he always is. His character, Assane, has both tactical skills and strategic ones. There's a lot of world building that you have to be willing to let go and honestly for the absolutely fun time ahead I had no problem with that. Is it laughable that someone with Omar's build and complexion could fade into the background? Yes. He's huge, he's kinda built, and he's very dark. In so many scenes especially in the back half you have to ask if they know what he looks like both in terms of visage and body why aren't they inspecting people who look like him of which there are none. It's a weirdly racially neutral stance considering there are at least strong plot points that involve characters being extremely racist.

This isn't like Sherlock or Elementary where we have a literary character updated and injected into our present time. This is about a man who is obsessed with a literary character and fashions his life after said character. The difference is both minute and unimportant. He's a master thief which is always fun to watch especially since the master thief character is traditionally not one played by the black actor. He has a tiny crew of accomplices and works towards a singular honorable goal. There are ups and downs. Parts that are very believable and stretch what we've seen of modern technology in a TV show, and parts that are so laughably silly if you weren't so invested in wanting to know what happens next you take time to laugh at it. It's not perfect but it's takes itself seriously and visually it's looks gorgeous. I've seen films with worse cinematography lots of them. Paris is a great looking subject and it's filmed beautifully here.

As far as I'm concerned Astrid & Lilly Save the World is filling the void in our hearts left behind by Todd and the Book of Pure Evil. Personally I think I like Todd a smidge better but I think I can say that's a matter of my tastes rather than a reflection of Asrid and Lilly's quality. This is a show that fought hard to establish itself. While it lacks in the excessive teenage cursing for no real reason it kinda excels in the guts bit of blood and guts.

We have a solid premise here of Astrid & Lilly being outsiders who become the schools guardians. But their arc in just this first season isn't the typical hiding in the shadows doing thankless work. Yeah they do have teenage romantic angst but they also develop relationships with the people who have looked negatively at them. It's an interesting take... on top of course of the gore. I can't unstress the gore.

It's plain fun. You could harp on the way our dynamic duo different from the typical protagonist in gender and body type and attitude but to put it simply they're just kinda fun to watch and rather refreshing and mostly reasonable. I'm a big fan of Astrid and I can sympathize enough with Lilly. They have a companion to be their "Giles" which is a great throwback and just perfectly captures the humor of the show. He's overly enthusiastic and you kinda assume he's lying about something. He is but it wasn't what I anticipated so even that was amusing.

A season that lives up to it's title, not just with it's premise (girl gets note that would make any normal teen suicidal and then has an accident that looks like suicide), but with nearly every episode. The cast is colorful but interesting designed to maximize the amount of awkwardness in our protagonist Jenna Hamilton's life. From her mother Lacey, who had Jenna as a teen and waffles from advice on how she should tart it up more to get the sexy boys to insisting that she's still a sexy young thing herself, to her guidance counselor, who doesn't understand the concept of sensitivity and personal space, Jenna is surrounded by adults who try way too hard to be her friend.

Her actual friends while they love her bring their own levels of awkward to the story from Tamara the overly effusive friend with a motor mouth coming up with so much slang she could be E-40 Jr to the criminally underused Ming who pretty much always brings sense and reason but is a "bad Asian" and so her parents limit her screentime. The only thing more awkward than having one love interest in Matty "the arm pit sniffer but that's okay because she strangely likes it" as the boy who only sleeps with her where his reputation isn't at risk, is having a second love interest in Jake Rosati as another chill sport-y type who likes Jenna as much as he doesn't like his actual girlfriend.

The season works even 10 years later even though some aspects appear dated their concepts aren't. Yes the world has moved from diaries to blogs to microblogs but while in a facebook world a myspace inspired show sounds old. It doesn't lean too much on that for thematic or storytelling structure. The concept of friends online vs friends in person remain today just as much as bullying though no longer as acceptable openly still happens.

There's a lot of good central backbone mystery to this season. Who wrote the cruel "carefrontation" letter that should have driven our hero to suicide instead of an accident that just looks like suicide? Will Jenna get a boyfriend and which one will it be? Heck just what is it about Ricky Schwartz that Tamara can't let go.

There are some great highs here, not too many lows and I swear there is legit slang that has it's etymology from Tamara. A fun season that closes well with only a minor cliffhanger.

This season is a confused mess. That said there ARE highlights. Wyatt Russell's John Walker was better than anticipated. A lot of people hoped Sam would become the new Captain America but I've never liked Anthony Mackie for that role. Over the course of the season he does a good job of bulking up to someone I could see as Captain America as well as fleshing out as a person to the point where I wouldn't hate him being Captain America. Zemo is touted as a newer bigger badder villain but we barely see his iconic mask. The primary antagonists the "flash smashes" are a confusing muddled set of characters that it's hard to care about even as we watch them do heel-face turns and face-heel turns.

People have said a lot about WandaVision but it was a show that had a clear purpose and strong vision. From episode one it's both striking in tone and directly aimed at it's goal. Falcon and the Winter Soldier tries to mask that by looking REALLY good. Visually it does feel like a VERY long movie. The choreography is excellent and the fight scenes I did focus on while heavily edited were at least very well formed. They represent some of the best story telling in this season.

For all my relative distaste for F/WS I think it will hold up better than I think. I think that maybe when I watch it again it will fair very well. I may have to amend my score at that point.

There's a lot of expansion in this season. We get to see more of Young Bright, we get some of the Whitly family. The love interest angle is showing up out of nowhere.

Like many police related shows we have some post-BLM protest aspects. And like most things with this show it's done poorly. Absolutely horrifically. We have a black male cop reacting with shame when he should be reacting with anger or heck even an appropriate level of fear. More importantly it's a thread that means nothing to the show because no police procedural is interested in doing the work to tell that kind of story. There's talk for a few episodes about whether a court case will or will not happen until it all just fades away to the regularly scheduled programming. That said there are some slight improvements this season in story telling.

Bright makes some bad decisions regarding telling his sister about the murder last season which comes to a head in episode 7. The cases of the week come and go. Dr. Whitley is hammy enough to be enjoyable and Bellamy Young will forever be typecast as a southern woman who exudes forced class and a taste for whisky/moonshine and honestly she thrives in that role. I wish it was more interesting.

Season 3 is when I gave up on this show being subversive. It's laughably corporate. Ridiculously so. For a program that started out about a group of people who were all about the punk attitude and so anti-corporate they were working to take down the biggest corporation. The show has done nothing but suggest they were morally wrong for doing so. I expected the show might suggest how they did it was wrong. I expected the show might suggest things aren't better. I expected the show might push that they failed, but the last thing I expected is the show to constantly undermine the morality of taking down a literal evil corporation. To the point where this season is about restoring Evil Corp without a shred of irony. I realize 2017 wasn't 2020 but protests against racism and the government and corporations weren't uncommon. I don't understand how they can so frustratingly miss the point episode after episode, season after season. I kept expecting someone to realize the deeper layer. I figured there's no way this show is just going to ignore the bigger picture here. This is the season I realized I was waiting for it to happen and that it wouldn't ever happen.

I was absolutely floored for instance when they killed off all the minority characters from the f.society crew in such pointlessly racialized ways. Romero the black guy was killed in a literal drive-by off screen and the two brown characters were framed for terrorism. I believe even in the new f.society gang everyone I recall was white. It's so distractingly awkward it detracts from the general narrative because I keep expecting a deeper level at play. There isn't. It's a remarkably surface level show now that we're past the phase of unreliable narrator twists. Season 2 was a mess of the constant unreliable narrator and the backfill episodes and most of that is gone now so Season 3 is much easier to follow but that doesn't help the major themes and the issues with them.

For a prestige crime drama. it's such a shame that I liked the crime but hated the drama. The bookends are solid. It has a solid opening and I liked the ending. I like the things that happened. But the characterization and the tensions that carry the middle game and shift you from the ends to the middle and vice versa. They all depend on people caring far too much about incredibly stupid things.

The fact that Jacob's grandfather was a murderer had way too much bearing since it makes no sense for it to have any legal weight. The family is worried about it coming out. The prosecution wants to use it against the family but it's just inflammatory and irrelevant and in the end that's basically how it's treated.

The show does use some interesting framing devices whose contexts gets revealed later and they were interesting. The acting was mostly solid. Jaeden Martell looks like a creepy white kid who killed somebody and he acts like it. I don't understand why he can't even try to look less guilty. But I guess Pablo Schreiber's Neal Logiudice is equally cast as a dick of a prosecutor who looks like a giant tool and can't act like anything less.

I don't know how satisfying I find the show. Again the crime part is solid. it's interesting. It's not entirely realistic or believable but I can buy in. I'm very good at buying in. But the drama is 50% at least of the show and that part made me want to pull our hair.

Good lord almighty this is one of the most nouveau racist shows I've ever seen. This show is everything the alt-right wants in television. This is almost as bad as Heathers (2018). Now to be clear I don't mind a show having a racist character. I don't mind if that racist character is a main character or a lead character. My problem is that the show itself through it's writing and directing doesn't condemn the racism. Lloyd Lowery is an open racist. In literally every episode of the season he spouts something racist. It's often not helpful, it's often antagonizing and yet the show portrays him as a fairly reasonable if colorful. Thing is they don't do the same with Shea Daniels. Even when Shea shuts down Lowery like in my favorite scene where Lowery insists that black children doesn't understand the value proposition of a nickle today vs a dime tomorrow because they're genetically unable to wait and Shea points out that they're children who literally don't understand the value difference and as children pick for perceived value of the larger coin. That line was so brilliant I thought the show was actually condemning Lowery but no. It doesn't treat Shea's comeback with the same narrative seriousness as Lowery's insult.

Lowery constantly gets his crime contextualized. When Ray the disgraced cop dresses down the inmates by calling out their crimes only Lowery gets to contextualize what he did and show how it was an accident. that landed him in Maximum Security? but Shea and Erica just have to take their insults on the face. Ray as a character hates these cons to a point that doesn't make sense. While I don't like Charlie the black cop with a literal bad heart but a metaphorical good one, he's pretty consistent. He is what he is.

Plus you have to consider all the nonsense like a deal where they all get months off or they all get double time. It's wildly insane. That's not necessarily a problem in itself but it does make everyone act in crazy and weird ways. Like if someone gets in trouble the others start panicking about whether they should run because even though they did nothing wrong they're going to get punished. Honestly it's a reasonable reaction to that horrible setup. That's why there's no incentive to do that setup. All that does is incentivize all the criminals to work together to run away rather than stay good when someone else goes bad. There's a lot of ACAB nonsense like arresting people just to put pressure on their family or leaving cons in dangerous situations with no backup and they have to suck it up for the team. While at the same time the cops just deny the cons human decency. Any request is shut down like a toddler asking for the 20th time for a fry. All of that is just background radiation for Lloyds constant racism that no one talks about. He gets to insult every and anyone and they treat him like a talking parrot who said a bad word. "Oh that's just Lloyd" but the other two cons get constantly needled. It's so weird for 5 episodes I assumed it was just a matter of time before someone called Lloyd out. Instead he gets a romance storyline. Even an unrequited romance storyline puts him in a level of humanity that doesn't feel deserved for that character especially when no one else gets humanized like that.