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The performances here by Firth, Collette, and Binoche are nothing short of tremendous with excellent supporting performances by Stuhlbarg, Parker Posey, and Cullen Moss.
It's ever so slightly overlong and drags in the 5th and 6th episode, but the finale packs a great punch that lingered in my mind long after the credits rolled.
As someone who grew up 45 minutes away from where this real-life story took place, I was in awe of the accent work here. North Carolina is so dense with diverse accents and it is almost unheard of for TV and film to even approach success in this department, so I was utterly giddy to hear my home state represented as accurately as it was. This is not bound to be a show that enters our pantheon of most respected mini-series, but it would be a shame not to think of it as incredibly solid with some stellar character work. The slow burn is effective and this is a great show to take in over a few nights with a nice glass of whiskey.
This show represents something of a milestone in my life. It was the first time I ever paid any attention to the quality of writing in TV or film. Unfortunately, when that switch turned on I realized I do not care for How I Met Your Mother. It’s frequently preachy and sentimental, but legitimately never earns that status from its audience. Why should I be taking these lessons from these people? They’re not doing well. Most of them are annoying humans.
Ted’s search for a wife is the epitome of the “just a nice guy” stereotype. He presents himself as sweet and caring, but in reality comes off as borderline sociopathic with how conniving and twisted it all becomes. It’s all consuming: his only purpose is to find love. But rather than actually be some hopeless romantic, he ends up doing some awful things. But moreover: he’s not even that good of a person. It’s just like the type you meet in real life. Ted wants you to believe he’s the good guy, but how often does he play into Barney’s awful schemes?
Speaking of, Barney as a character is frighteningly close to aging like fine wine, but that would only be true if there were a closer examination of his misogynistic behavior that resulted in a deeper exploration of his trauma of childhood. This does not exist in any meaningful way. Hinted at, sure, but then we are also meant to be fully on board with his conquest of lust until the show decides he’s changed like the flick of a switch. There isn’t too much of a shift, it’s more like a three step stoop if that stoop started in China and ended in Mexico. Character development, as you might have gathered, is a struggle frequently as though these characters were never meant to have any sense of self. Most of the cast’s personality changes per episode to suit whatever best fits the platitude the writers are shoving down your throat.
Which brings me to the biggest elephant in the room: Robin. How I Met Your Mother hinges on one character and it’s her. Yeah, it’s extremely weird. There is an intense amount of heavy lifting placed on Smulders to be the romantic interest for two characters (although it genuinely never feels like a love triangle which is even weirder). But the unfortunate part is, Robin is a very weak character. She’s all business forward. She can’t settle down for no man. Except she can and will frequently, as she’s barely single throughout the entire show. Her choices are never “I’m choosing myself instead of Ted” it’s “I’m choosing literally any other man”. And I don’t say this from the standpoint of Ted being a nice guy and deserving Robin (see above). I say this in terms of this show having the gall to act like they’ve created an independent woman. They haven’t.
The only characters on the show I like are the ones I’ve not mentioned: Marshall and Lilly. They likable and the performances by Segal and Hannigan are top-notch sitcom performances. They actually deal with relatable struggles and seem to wrestle in a realistic way. This makes everything mentioned above all the more frustrating because it becomes clear that the onus isn’t on the inability of the writers, it’s on a shaky grasp or understanding of what counts for good character development.
Clearly the attempt by the writers is to create Friends for the next generation. It’s about a group of twenty-somethings living in New York learning how to be adults while figuring out love and friendship as they mature. Hell, there are even multiple plot points ripped directly from the original show, barely even altered. Now, I’m a bit biased because Friends is genuinely one of my favorite shows of all time, but in How I Met Your Mother it’s almost laughable how inorganic and simplified everything they ripped from the former show actually is. There’s very little sense that these characters should be friends. They just feel like drinking buddies. Their version of support for each other is showing up when things are at their worst. Mostly, they’re just extremely cruel to each other. There are attempts (sometimes even good ones) to create bits among them, but they all pale in comparison to the more grounded approach taken by Friends. How I Met Your Mother is very gimmicky. It’s told through a plot device that becomes increasingly more contrived the longer the show drags. The majority of the jokes are very broad and don’t exist to expand our sense of character. Compare this to the 90s mega-hit: the show is usually extremely dialogue based. There’s more of a sense of banter and camaraderie. The humor comes from clever dialogue rather than the heavy concept-driven set ups of the latter series. In other words, one of them feels like a sitcom striving for more while the other feels like a hangout movie that just so happens to be a sitcom. I’m mot going to tell you that Friends does not result in similar sitcom tropes, but the emphasis on character and subtle development greatly bolsters the show as a whole.
I could compare the two further. It would likely require more time and effort but people have already done that ad nauseam. I won’t do that any longer here. I’ll suffice it to say that I found this show frequently frustrating in terms of how it wants me to empathize with characters that do not feel real or likable. Ah well, maybe it’s just not for me.
To get it out of the way up front: I wouldn’t watch series 3. I didn’t find it nearly as good as the first two seasons. But overall this is a show of diminishing returns. The first debut series is one of the strongest investigative dramas I’ve ever seen sporting tremendous performances by Tennant and Coleman. The follow up series is a bit wobbly, but manages to retain enough of the emotional heft that I was satisfied throughout.
The third series would be better off in another show entirely.
But for that first season? I highly recommend Broadchurch.
This is perhaps one of the most difficult to review seasons I've seen because of the vast quality onscreen as well as the extremely varied content. The ways in which Lovecraft Country let me down were on an episode to episode basis. In a lot of ways it reminds me of monster of the week storytelling for the first half with a more conventional three episode arc at the end. All in all, yeah that sounds a lot like The X-Files. Which, if you know me, is a pretty high complement. However, like The X-Files that range in quality has some serious shortcomings. And in Lovecraft Country, those shortcomings become somewhat baffling at times considering this is a show about recontextualizing inequality in a new, fresh lens. It's simultaneously one of its biggest selling points while also being something of a let down because although its messages on blackness and racism in America are consistently excellent, the ways in which it shares that load with other forms of diversity and discrimination are muddled, by Misha Green's own admonition.
I'll start with the good. The aesthetic and acting firmly root the show within pulp science-fiction, nearly without a hitch. We have acting that feels at time intentionally over the top with intentionally cheesy VFX to bolster a general sense that this is not meant to be rooted in reality. It allows some of the more gnarly visuals to have a lessened punch to weaker stomached viewers while also letting the themes boil more to the forefront. Jonathon Majors and Jurnee Smollett are revelations onscreen. Michael Kenneth Williams is (predictably) fantastic. And the rest of the cast fills out the show with a varying degrees of success, but Aunjanue Ellis's arc onscreen is stellar. It feels like a rare form where the cast is actually aware of the subgenre they're in. They're not bringing too much to the seriousness that it roots itself in melodrama, but they also know when the drama needs its gravitas. Majors is clearly on a meteoric rise at the moment, and I am enamored. He rocks.
The writing here becomes a bit of a mixed bag, but Lovecraft Country still delivers two of the best episodes of television that aired in 2020: Sundown and Rewind 1921. Both so excellently weave the weird pulpy-ness of the source material with the thematic weight in a way that internalizes the black experience in America reminiscent of Get Out--which makes sense considering Peele's name being associated with the show. I'm not giving him all the credit though, Misha Green nailed those two episodes. There's a handful of other extremely solid episodes, from Whitey's on the Moon to A History of Violence and a couple that feel a little unsure of how to put forth an overall narrative with Lovecraftian influence when answers in those stories are intentionally hard to pin down.
Here's where I think Lovecraft Country starts to falter the most. It's also one of the oddest things to falter on, too. When you start looking at the show as a whole, the Lovecraft of it all is actually pretty minimal. There's definitely a root of that unknown dread (particularly in the first few episodes) but whereas Lovecraft never really explored specificity (thankfully, because then those stories would be even more xenophobic), Country is keen to show and tell us all about it. And so all these plot threads that feel weird become less weird. But there's less being thrown at you as you go on that matches the heights of the initial states of confusion in the show so we're missing some pretty confounding gaps of what someone might consider necessary from a Lovecraftian narrative.
Listen. Those types of stories are notoriously difficult to adapt properly because of how American storytelling begs answers when Lovecraft basically just answered questions with sentences that borderline made no sense. So we're left with the best instances of Lovecraftian adaptations spread far and wide. I'm probably not the first to say that the best for my money is Bloodborne, a game reluctant to give any concrete answers with a progression that never shies away from being absolutely disgusting and continually throws new stuff at you at every corner. And knowledge is virtually nonexistent because Miyazaki never makes games that give concrete answers. Hell, narratively speaking characters in Bloodborne who search for answers literally go insane. So, match made in heaven.
Lovecraft Country doesn't quite do this. Answers are there because answers are key to the theming and it's key to shine a light to racism. So what we're left with is a show that feels less like Lovecraft and a bit more like Harry Potter. I genuinely don't mean that as an insult, either. I love those books. But it does feel like Lovecraft Country was looking to a second season for things to get really bonkers and pool the wool out from under us. Maybe then we could've gotten a Cthulhu onscreen...but wait, why are there tentacles on the poster?
Ultimately, the dust has settled on the series. It's been canceled despite being one of the most nominated shows of the year. It's highly acclaimed, but also nonexistent (which is kind of ironic for a Lovecraftian show). This is all likely a rabbit hole of information stemming from an initial positive reaction to the series which led Green to seek other offers from other networks which then led to her inking a deal with Apple when some of the mid-season ratings started to dip and then when the deal went through, HBO canceled Lovecraft Country as capitalism's competitive spirit strikes again. I initially watched the show week to week and was enamored. Then I had a big move across the country and fell off the wagon and when I got back on it, I watched an episode that I found so extremely difficult to stomach that I stopped watching again for a very long time. I came back though and remembered why I liked the show so much initially. Because it's a series that was genuinely unafraid to throw the baby out with the bath water. Say what you will about it on an episode to episode basis (I sure have), but this is a series that was constantly able to reinvent itself--sometimes to its detriment--to keep us on our toes. What we're left with is a season that also hedged its bets on a second season to wrap up the narrative in such a big way that the news of its cancelation isn't just disappointing, it taints the (now) series finale with a sense of "uhhh...ok?"
But you know, as I think about it that's how tons of Lovecraft's stories also end. Call it divine intervention. I'll call it Cthulhu.
p.s. I know that this is based off a book. I unfortunately haven't read it, although I'd like to.
As the dust settles on Wandavision, I think we can see things a bit more clearly. I know I was regularly more of a dissenting opinion on this show each week, but it comes from a place of love for the genres the series pulled from and a desire for Wandavision to challenge itself more deeply. Although there a breaths of fresh air throughout the nine episode arc, Wandavision instead settles for sufficiently moving explorations of loss done in a method that feels shockingly unsure of itself considering the massive creative gamble presented by the first few episodes. Don't get me wrong, Wandavision is solid television. But when putting any irons to this fire, the facades it wanted to rest on reveal themselves to be as illusory as Westview itself.
The most interesting part of watching Wandavision week to week was seeing everyone who was not into the sitcom episodes be so lackluster on them only to retroactively become so much more into them after the fact, while many of us (myself included) who were on board for the weird fiction became more dissatisfied as the tone eventually became entirely scrapped by the finale. And listen, I'm not saying it was a bad way to plot it out like this, but the first few episodes stick out like a sore thumb. After watching the pilot, I really loved what I was seeing, but knew that what we watched was probably a failure of a pilot: it didn't present the show as we were going to get it, it functioned as a tease when the rug was pulled out from under us. And as the episodes wore on, that proved to be the case. The weird, nearly Lynchian tone of the opening was a gimmick. The metaphoric interpretation was shallow. Wandavision did very little with the profound potential of being trapped in a meta 50s set sitcom. For a point of comparison, look at the first episode of Twin Peaks: The Return. From the get go, Lynch showed us the surrealist tendencies of the season. He didn't waiver from that. It was consistent throughout and was frequently moving and always exceptional.
But in Wandavision, the surrealist flourishes of those sitcom episodes don't mean anything more than visualizing Wanda's escapism by using the flawed picturesque, idealistic sitcom of the 1950s. But that's it. There's little more to it than that. There could have been some explorations of women's rights and gender roles in the 50s as portrayed by sitcoms (hell, I Love Lucy even did that when it was on television); there could have been commentary on how Wanda had trapped herself in a reality she set up for herself. But it didn't. And so the figurative interpretation became so simple that the sitcom gimmick likely had to be dropped because they weren't pushing themselves any further. It still feels weird that the show leaned so hard into it in those early episodes, but considering the show's eventual conclusion I understand why it was dropped.
And I think that's likely the root of my opinion of Wandavision. I love surrealism and I love weird fiction. So, when I thought I was going to get those things in the MCU, I was pumped. Those early episodes teased the tip of the iceberg for something similar not only to Twin Peaks, but also things like Annihilation, Maniac, or even Legion. But it didn't. It eventually reverted back to something more similar to the rest of the MCU. And I really like the MCU, but the bait and switch didn't sit well with me. It might not really be entirely on me, but Wandavision led me on.
Lives a bit too comfortably in the shadow of other shows of its kind and takes awhile to ever boldly mine new territory. But although Ramy doesn't hold a candle to Fleabag or Master of None, it's still worth your time. More please!
Like most sitcoms New Girl has its ups and downs, but altogether has a good enough heart to it that I found myself binging all seven seasons in about six weeks. It definitely gets weaker as the show goes on, but there's still trademark quirkiness throughout so I found myself anchored by an extremely good cast of characters.
Falls dangerously short of being excellent through and through. As it stands Dark is still one of the best things Netflix has ever produced, but runs into some plotting issues along the way. The first season sets you up nicely and the second season is a banger through and through, but the third season (although planned from the get-go, it seems) jumps the shark ever so slightly that it feels like we lose a bit of what made the first two seasons ever so compelling in favor of complexity. If you are not okay with the idea of narrative confusion, I would avoid this series entirely. Because it is far more intricate than most things, and although I think it still handles everything well, be ready to watch all three seasons back to back because getting yourself reacquainted as the seasons dropped was a doozy.
One of the most peculiar television shows. There's nothing quite like it. It's absolutely sublime and yes, I think it surpasses Seinfeld.
Delightful. A slow start turns into one of the most charming sitcoms capable of the biggest warm fuzzies. It took three tries for me to get into Schitt's Creek and I am so sad that it did, because I missed out. It's just lovely.
The Outsider rests very much within the investigative/supernatural/suspense tropes we're used to. It rarely pushes too far outside the norm, but it does often recontextualize those tropes in a new lens that I found extremely engaging. I liked the exploration of culpability placed on institutions when it comes to relapsing criminals and child violence, I liked how progress is only made in this investigation by people not willing to be bound by those institutions. This is a series I'd recommend specifically when you feel like you've seen it all and you're tired. It's well made, extremely well acted, and runs pretty tightly for the ~ten hour experience. Sometimes we don't need something brand new, sometimes we just need to see that the old tropes still have a little bit of life in them and, to be honest, that's Stephen King's wheelhouse.
I binged all four seasons of this series in a week. Once I started I was just enraptured by it's crass charms. I can't believe I put off watching this show for this long.
Although Silicon Valley runs through the same issues that many comedic series do--a mismanaging of plot and humor and characters evolving into a more simplified version of their earlier selves--the first half of this show is really stellar.
It's funny, unique, and frequently functions as a scathing commentary on the world in which it is set. The antics that the characters go through at the beginning are solid because it shows them scraping by tooth and nail, only to narrowly win by mistake. But in the beginning, the mistakes are derived from their own intelligence and ineptitude. This is best exemplified in season two of the show, which is, in my opinion, the peak.
But there's something that becomes kind of stale about the rest of the show, although thankfully it is never dull. The plot arcs and character evolutions feel either rushed or meaningless (or both) to the point where I wonder what what the MO in the writers room at times. Here's what I mean: look at Richard's character. In the beginning he is a socially awkward, physically meager straight man who stumbles into realizing that he might be brilliant coder. At the end of the fifth season and beginning of the sixth, Richard is basically just a caricature of Zuckerberg. Whereas earlier seasons show Richard agonizing over decisions to the point of sabotaging the company, the latter portion just show him as a ruthless CEO who is either unaware of how he affects others or has just abandoned ethics for the sake of success. I don't have any issues with the idea of this being his arc in theory, but the execution lacks some of the grace and self-awareness that makes the best instances of character development shine. And it's made worse from the fact that within the final episode, that arc is basically reverted.
Not that anyone is really asking my opinion, but I think that this could have been greatly remedied by a greater reliance on having plot arcs overlap between episodes. Although it happens throughout the entire series, the last few seasons of Silicon Valley rely on introducing massive issues that are resolved within the same ~30 minute runtime. It's hard to latch onto any one of these issues as any real threat because Richard and CO will likely succeed anyways. If some of these problems were introduced in a more organic way and the protagonists were left to solve them over the course of a couple episodes, they would feel more substantial. Which, in turn, would make them feel more accomplished and talented, and therefore Richard's arrogance and megalomania would feel more justified. It would also allow for the reversing of that arc to be more organic as well.
All that said, I clearly really enjoyed this show from start to finish. I binged the entire thing in about a month. Many of the characters are charming and their antics were frequently funny. I will miss this show, even if it was definitely time for it to end.
It's a ride. A ride of zany misadventures, unbelievable puns, terrible decisions, nihilism, and utter depression. I came into Bojack Horseman late into its life cycle. I watched the first season several years back but didn't catch up with the rest until season five dropped last year.
I am a person who really attached myself to this show. While I never saw myself in Bojack completely, I see myself in pieces in many of its characters. I see the missed connections, the bad timing, the sadness engulfing life's small moments. But what always made Bojack Horseman so special was its perseverance. It never quite lets things stop. There's no easy solution, no easy out. Life is messy. It's insane it took an animated show about animals living equally among humans to really nail that, but here we are.
I can't really express what this show has meant to me in the year that I've been engulfed by it, so I'll leave you with a quote:
Life's a bitch and then you die.
Or sometimes, you keep on living.
The Good Place is special and although I've been incredibly critical of what is, by all accounts, a smash hit, that does not take away from its strongest pieces: a heartfelt focus on acceptance and inclusivity and an aggressive stance on progressive social values. It has a lot of good going for it. The jokes are often incredibly odd, the performances are solid, and it does want to to do something unique.
But in the era of Shur's dominance of television sitcoms, The Good Place always fell solidly in the middle ground for me. I never felt entirely sure that the plotting was executed at a even pace (even though I respect the gamble of the first season), the jokes fall SO heavily on the reference side of things at times, and visually it's a bit garish (even though I do understand it's an implicit play on even lighting of other sitcoms). It's fine. Not my favorite. Falls in line tonally with the last season of Parks and Recreation for me.
