totally get why this wouldn't be to people's taste (especially if they were expecting a lighter, fun, spandex-clad nostalgic throwback-to-the-80s comedy with a dash of female-entrepreneur-get-it-done-grit-and-perseverance uplift) but this for me is the most underrated show of 2021. 1st episode didn't blow me away (I left underwhelmed but there was enough there for me to return to at a later point in time) but eventually I came back to the show and grew to like it more with each episode
this is dark. very dark. the emphasis is on the first word in dark comedy which will turn a lot of people off (especially since Apple TV+'s signature comedy being the feelgood uplifting Ted Lasso might lead some to expect the streamer's comedies to hew more towards that tone). not only that, but it often deals with its dark themes and material with a flippant comedic tone which might only exacerbate how offputting some people find the show and it absolutely does not shy away from keeping the edges rough, not making the main character's ED any more palatable for a general viewing audience (though not graphic) nor making her very sympathetic, it's not easy to watch a character suffering from a disease and still outright dislike that character (most portrayals of characters with physical/mental diseases are often shown as root for-able or having some kind of character growth towards likeability). likeable characters are few and far in between here, but characters don't need to be likeable, they need to be interesting and every one here is watchable (even the husband who can be a bit one note at times so it's probably my residual liking for comedian Rory Scovel to make his dbag character as tolerable as he is)
who doesn't love Rose Byrne, been a fan since Damages and in addition to the expectedly good acting from her, her voiceovers are also killer, imbuing a lot of snark/derision/judgment/etc etc in her line readings (she can out act some people with just her voice). Bunny & Tyler are also great and totally watchable and while there's not enough Paul Sparks (esp in the first half) when he shows up he's also expectedly solid
not gonna be everyone's cup of tea and i get the aversion from some but glad it got renewed for a second season as the darkness of the material and the tone in which it handles the material is very much my cuppa and i'm here for Rose Byrne in lead roles
this season very much feels like the Kings were told mid-way through shooting that the show was cancelled and they scrambled to shove in season 7 ideas along with all the season 6 character storylines they started
and another season of Diane zonked out on drugs? :|
what a come down from season 1, which wasn't perfect but overall a joy and delight; season 1 felt like a well-oiled machine, smoothly delivering jokes and hijinks in an effortlessly likeable manner. in a show whose premise is that it goes wrong, you're on the look-out for things going wrong and even if you saw it from a mile away (which you didn't always), when it came it was still usually hilarious. season 2's humor feels more forced with the set-ups and payoffs forcing the characters to become increasingly annoyingly dumb or unawares and saw-it-from-a-mile-away gags feeling a bit too obvious and landing less well
one of the best and most consistently laugh-inducing parts of season 1 was Dennis's butchering of his lines, they took that trait and cranked it up to 20, turning him into a borderline imbecile.
British Beanie Feldstein Annie is still solid and always delivers, if she has a bigger role in an episode the episode is the better for it.
Improvements from season 1 include Sandra's self-satisfied pomposity (especially her smirk); definitely not a clone of Hugh Skinner Max's sheer gleefulness (pointing to the wood to make it chop in episode 1; his giddiness at forcing Chris to imitate him in episode 2); and Jonathan's lines constantly being cut/muted (a joke that should've been kept to the end). The last 2 episodes function a bit better as they try something different and cycle through different things more quickly.
If there's a season 3 here's to hoping review season 2 to fix recurring weaknesses so a potential season 3 more consistently hits the highs of season 1
not so much a step down from season 1 as tripping and falling down a flight of stairs from season 1
as good of actors as they are Suranne and Rose had no intimate chemistry which made their whole storyline such a time suck, a contrived piece of lOoK At ThEsE oFfIcErS bAlAnCiNg PeRsOnAl IsSuEs WiTh ThEiR dEmAnDiNg AlL-cOnSuMiNg JoBs. i buy them as colleagues but not lovers
could've done with each episode being 15 minutes shorter and the season with 2 episodes less
well-shot but after the first episode spends most of its time meandering, circling the point but not getting to it
whoever thought it was a good idea to sideline portia/elliot/drew and give their screentime to a gaggle of largely interchangeable, horrifically annoying, influencer characters — even if acknowledged as such by other characters on the show — ought to have acid thrown in their face
Brendan Gleeson is a downgrade from Chris O'Dowd. Patricia Clarkson is a downgrade from Rosamund Pike. Jay is a downgrade from having no regularly-appearing cast member secondary character. Amazing to see the same team behind season 1 produce this absolutely lesser in every way second season. Stuck with it only because the reviews said it gets better after a shaky start and it does sort of get slightly less bad in later episodes while still remaining totally underwhelming and widely missing the mark from the effortlessly charming first season
First season was an 8.5/9. This was so bad, 3.5-4, and that's being generous. Poor writing. Poor directing (Jeri's awkward dance in her apartment early on). Poor editing (was it necessary to play the entirety of 'I Want Your Cray Cray'? Would playing 1 minute as opposed to 3 minutes not have the same effect but cut out some filler? Very indicative of the editing of the season as whole, scenes play for way too damn long, scenes that already smack you over the head with very superficial dialogue)
Didn't care for scenes with Malcolm. Didn't care for scenes with Trish (who becomes increasingly annoying and one-note). Didn't care for scenes with Jeri. Really ruined Jeri's character (outside of a classic Jeri move in episode 12). Really disrespected Simpson's character. I would've hated the character of Alisa a lot more if it weren't in the hands of Janet McTeer. Likewise, Krysten Ritter is the only thing keeping me from completely feeling like season 2's Jessica is a mere shadow of the complexity and snark of season 1. It's hard to tell whether I hated s2 of Daredevil or s2 of Jessica Jones more, but they've had the same effect: I feel nothing, maybe relief even, that Netflix has cancelled a lot of the Marvel shows over the past two weeks and the remaining shows might not be long for this world when their committed upcoming seasons are finished.
One of the biggest season 1-to-season 2 drops I've experienced. It was torture forcing myself through the season.
first season started off fine with many spooky happenings/monster-of-the-week type episodes with a bit of an overarching plot before it went totally haywire at the end
if the first season finale jumped the shark hoo boy, season 2 jumps lakes, LAKES, of numerous demonic sharks multiple times per episode. it just got so damn stupid and nonsensical and just lurched from one dumb thing to another dumb thing with little connective tissue. demonic/religious horror can be fun (it's the whole selling point/basis of the show when it started out!) but it just got so zany (and not in a fun way) and stupid. Paul Giammatti showing up was a surprise but really adds little, hope he had fun though. Only Macarena Gomez really gets out of s2 with any dignity in tact 'cause she knows how to flip a switch and play that semi-campy antagonistic villainess role
First season was nothing to write home about but Angeline Ball carried that season on her back along with some decent/okay/serviceable supporting performances. The overall international-financial intrigue and the quite decent back-and-forth/reluctant-partnership between Ball's DS Berry and Wouter Hendrickx's Christian De Jong made the show bearable enough as a background noise show.
Remove Ball from the equation and ramp up the dumb dialogue and 3.5x the characters' stupidity and and plot contrivances and you get this season. Absolutely skippable. Hard Pass
this season went nowhere and they still took their sweetass time getting there
these episodes absolutely did not need to run well over an hour each
the show went exactly where I thought it would and took its sweet ass time dragging its feet there, hitting the most obvious beats and then hammering home the point over and over and over again with the most on-the-nose dialogue, packed to the gills with cliches, dialogue i've heard a million times over in other sci-fi/fantasy media, and characters largely reduced to fan-service spouting fan-service dialogue
started off with some level of promise but fell off a cliff right quick
absolutely did not have the conviction to follow through on the time jump and everything it meant, that a high school not-couple who had an unplanned baby together would naturally drift apart, Oly giving uni a real go while balancing it with motherhood, Santi having a stable job and the life of someone doing physical labor all day, each of them pursuing their own romantic relationships while co-parenting. all of these were set up and just absolutely never developed and just forgotten about maybe 2-3 episodes in
instead, we got more extremely obnoxious young characters who were extremely annoying (who is writing the young characters?? fifty-year-olds with no perception of young people?!). Vince being part of a not-throuple and being a surrogate could've been interesting but the premise was far funnier on paper than the execution as the couple having his surrogate were some of the most annoying characters committed to paper played by actresses without an ounce of ability to survive the atrocious writing (again, who's writing these characters? someone who read a listicle of 'top 10 annoying gen z stereotypes' and decided to make characters based solely on that??). it would've been interesting to see what new friends oly makes in school but they end up bringing back a lot of old characters who allegedly have changed and matured after ~5 years but are all annoying as all get out when they come back.
it was extremely evident early on that they were gonna push oly and santi back together and their respective relationships had absolutely no meaning and nowhere to develop or deepen once that was obvious. oly's TA b/f was sort of interesting at first but the show immediately nerfed him into being some weird socially awkward dweeb. santi actually had a pretty nice g/f (Keeks) who was played by a far better and more interesting young actress than pretty much any other young actor on the show but she was thrown aside in service of the show contriving oly and santi back together. honestly if you're gonna break them up have the conviction to follow through on it for more than 5 episodes before attempting to push them back together.
their respective families have absolutely nothing to do and are given empty nothing stupid storylines throughout the season (i still love the energy Bowie brings to the show even if he was reduced to hey wanna bang no okay through season 3). the actor for Matias is just totally absent in s3 while they unfortunately kept Don around who continues to grate so much. his acting always felt out of step with the show over-playing the baffoon-y dad and he continues to just suck up oxygen in any scene he's in.
lord please cancel this show because i do not have the willpower to prevent myself from further hatewatching
S5: The opposite of cogent
:pray::pray::pray:PRAYER CIRCLES FOR KIM WEXLER:pray::pray::pray:
there's a contingent who believes everything post Dreamland episodes has been gold return-to-former-Archer-glory whereas it definitely fell into an overly-familiar hitting-the-same-beats-over-and-over again pattern for me and I was very very ready to bid adieu to Archer but I ended up liking this season a lot more than I expected
a change in dynamics—Lana grappling with taking Mallory's job and all the moral landmines that entails, Archer grappling with aging and a new younger (/better?) agent to bounce off of and trade barbs with really rejuvenated the show for me while Amber Nash's voice acting for Pam remains top-notch and elevates any dialogue she gets no matter how run-of-the-mill—so much so I actually wish there was another season to see this new dynamic further take hold and grow. not perfect (it was very obvious in the bribe episode where that would go and I wish it got to the ending much sooner in the episode and have Lana play moral mental gymnastics with herself in the remainder of the episode to justify continuing Mallory's bribes) but much fresher than it had been for seasons. the ending felt a bit abrupt (I assume they got word of cancellation late in production because it was very much not setting up for that) but man, this is a show that's been on for nearly half my life and it's a little weird that it's just over and done with now
3000% believe Aisling Bea & Sharon Horgan could be sisters irl, hell i'm still not convinced they aren't
decent-if-not-spectacular noir-esque show with mostly strong acting across the board that was really let down in the back half by introducing those super-annoying college kids and having them take up so much screen time
started strongly and initially exceeded my expectations for turning what was firmly a guest character to the main character but by the end of the season each episode felt rote, like a broadcast version of Poker Face and i mean that derogatorily
they really shoulda stuck to the plan of this being their last season and replaced the filler/side-quests with s6 material
too much of s5 felt like slow-walking to the big Diana thing, discursions felt more discursionary than ever
Ladhood season 3 dropped September 5. Brassic season 4 dropped September 7. Queen Elizabeth II died September 8.
I am firmly convinced QEII hung on just long enough to binge the latest seasons of each before going well that's me then
What a mixed bag of a season. This started out strong like the show knew it had something to prove after the past few seasons of GoT, the first two episodes were much stronger than the lukewarm reviews gave it credit for.
And then came multiple episodes that were generally still quite good but with a significantly dumb moment at the end (Daemon running through a hail of arrows not getting hit till the very end with only a superficial shoulder wound; everything at the royal wedding (figuring out Criston's banging the princess because he's staring at her too much? at her wedding? when he's her bodyguard? instead of holding onto that information immediately going up to Criston to confront him with it. Criston just losing it and beating a dude to a pulp and nobody stopping him. Alicent finding him RIGHT when he's about to seppuku himself); Lady Laena going from being in the throes of a painful childbirth then disappearing the moment 2 out of 5 people in a room turn their back on her and managing to walk all the damn way to her dragon and putting several hundred yards between her and Daemon when she had just spent hours trying to push a bowling ball through her vagina).
And then the last couple of episodes were just an all-around disappointment (having now watched the season finale, that one was aces and up there with the first two episodes). Episode 9, generally the most explosive episode of the season in GoT, was a bit of a mess. Criston Cole put his hand on an old man's shoulder to push him down into his seat and the next scene is the dude slamming his head on the table so hard he dies and bleeds out? He went from standing up with his head perpendicular to the table in one scene to his head flat on the table the next. The way the scene was cut with Cole's hand on his shoulder one second to him slamming his head on the table the next, there was no indication Cole pushed hard enough nor that he did so at an awkward angle for the old man to end up that way. The worst-directed and edited scene of the series. An episode that should've felt like there was a ticking clock in the race to find Aegon and quickly crown him as the various schemers try to put their plans in action in the immediate wake of the king's death felt more like just going through the motions and checking items off a list. And then toss in every dumb thing about Rhaenys bursting through the ground with her dragon (just one of many: the doors were shown as nearly being closed on the people one moment then 20 seconds later Rhaenys flies through wide open doors??).
The wigs are also not great. Some look more natural than others (Caucasian females got the better end of the stick) but were generally risible (Matt Smith's got much better when it was shorter but his initial wig looked like shit Legolas cosplay). The one on young Laena's head can charitably be described as Great Value Elsa from Frozen knockoff.
The time jumps were also jarring. Realizing that there's a lot more meat in the story to get to, I still wish they had spent the first season on the youngest generation of actors because they deserved it, Milly Alcock knocked it out of the damn park as Rhaenyra and deserved a whole season. Throw in some actors aging up a decade while others looking like they aged up 3 years and then there's Ser Criston Cole, blessed by the gods with beautiful hair and apparently eternal youth.
HBO had made no secret about wanting GoT to run longer and had ~5 pilots in production after the series ended, they should've milked this for all it's worth and let it progress slowly even if that meant delaying some of the juiciest most dramatic parts of the story to later seasons, instead the pacing felt off and really didn't let the complicated, tumultuous relationships between characters breath and ebb and flow a bit more. It's hard enough keeping track whose child is whom in the circle that is the Targaryen family tree, it's harder still when they're played by a different actor every other episode.
if the intergalactic wolves don't win i'm taking out every person on the continent
James Purefoy & Dominic West is quite the downgrade from Matthews Goode & Rhys
Matthew Rhys could be giving a tour of a back alley in a city and I would want to attend. James Purefoy could get exclusive access to some newly unearthed remains of one of the 7 Wonders of the World and I'd be like eh, pass
This show has suffered significantly from the reduced screen time of Rhys (presumably due to his busy TV schedule & residence in the US) and his fleeting—albeit regular—appearances in season 3 make this a step down from season 2 which itself was a step down from season 1
There was such an easy breezy unforced watchability to season 1 that made it an appealing watch even to someone like me who doesn't drink wine and finds a lot of foodie-winey shows a bit of wankery. Rhys's playfulness took the pretentiousness down a notch and was quick to inject a bit of rapscallion humor and had a great rapport with Matthew Goode, who, without Rhys as a partner-in-crime is a lot more dull and less-effortlessly-charismatic than he had been in season 1.
Dominic West is alright, he gets a few funny lines in here and there but it really feels like everyone involved tried too hard to have funny one-liners and they just aren't as effortlessly funny as Rhys (their delivery actually often feels very effortful & scripted) and makes it all the more annoying to see them trying so hard.
Fattorini also, even if he doesn't mean to, is very much the model of a pretentious wine snob which played well with Rhys, coming off as a wise teacher to Rhys's unruly student, but without Rhys he comes across very wooden. Fattorini should stick to selecting wines and not pursue a television career, lacks an interesting screen presence. His and Amelia's bantering voiceovers feel very very forced and scripted. In most season 3 episodes, Fattorini gets 1-2 (usually 2) extended segments where he explores various wines from different countries, the information is generally interesting and the segments competently produced, but I kept finding my mind wandering, Fattorini just doesn't have a compelling screen presence. I don't question his bone fides as a wine expert but a TV career is not something he should set his sights on, at least not as a primary figure, only as a secondary supporting player
Watched this season on 1.25x and at times 1.5x or 2x
the world building in Scavengers Reign is insane
took bigger swings, didn't all connect but I'm generally down w/ comedies just going for weird
only realized this season the credits show "Cre8ted by Meredith Scardino"
also boo netflix auto-playing the next ep and skipping the songs that play over the credits
absolutely clumsy handling of western-middle eastern relations (fertile ground for a good drama exploring the complex intertwining of the two and many many competing & shifting interests in the region), nothing good or new there
Not a huge romcom fan and this isn't gonna convert me but it was a breezy watch whenever I wanted to pop on something simple and the will they-won't they opposites-attract age difference of it all kinda hit at the right time.
A lot of the characters felt like fluff and were no where as interesting or watchable as the main couple although Bruno's friend/co-worker Albert was a welcome presence (after also enjoying Tom in Please Like Me I guess I'm a sucker for the straight-man straight best friend character)
What really drags it down is way too much time apart for the main couple, the chemistry is great between them: both the sexual/romantic tension and the believable chasm of differences between them and misinterpretations and miscommunications driving them apart. The lack of shared screen time between them in the middle chunk of episodes is filled with too many side character plotlines I just don't care about who don't have an iota of the chemistry between Alex and Bruno
