Whatcha Bleedin' Watchin'?

[Dr. Insomniac]

Series premiere of The Rehearsal was unnerving. The length Nathan was willing to go just to plan every single social interaction. It's great he found comedy and TV work as his calling, because it's easy to see another universe where he's a real life Jigsaw.

As for other HBO shows that recently came out, Show Me a Hero was brutal, in a way that makes The Wire look a little naive. You get the sense this is David Simon's cold realization that while his show became so renowned that even politicians and former presidents praise it, none of them did a single thing to help Baltimore, and it's honestly gotten worse.

And Time Traveler's Wife, that was definitely Moffat shamelessly ripping off his own Doctor Who episodes. Not to say I disliked it, show was fun for what it was worth, but I felt like that meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood every time something happened. Like Rose Leslie essentially playing Amy/River but in an American accent.

[Avaitor]

Sasquatch liaisons may be one of the greatest lines ever conceived. I will never not be jealous of the "night owl".

[Dr. Insomniac]

Robin seemed kinda harmless before the numbers shit, and then just casually admitting he doesn't drive with a license plate and crashed his car more than once.

[Avaitor]

Robin seemed kinda harmless before the numbers shit, and then just casually admitting he doesn't drive with a license plate and crashed his car more than once.

Don't forget smoking from a bong right before getting out on the road.

I also really liked the most recent BCS episode, but clearly not everyone did. It was surprising to do a full flashforward after only spending minutes at a time at most with Gene, but I liked seeing him pull off (possibly) one more heist. And it's nice to see Jim O'Heir again, I can't think of the last time I saw him since Parks and Rec ended.

[Dr. Insomniac]

I don't get why Robin of all guys is the trigger of the "Is Nathan Fielder a bad person?" discourse on Twitter. There were plenty of NFY guests I felt bad for like the travel agent and Billy's Neighborhood Toilet lady, or Kors from the first episode here, but Robin? Even his family admitted that he's a crackpot.

And yeah, the new BCS was interesting. I understand anybody who was hoping for the tension to ramp up even further are disappointed at how mellow the episode is outside of Jimmy briefly coming to terms with the fact Chuck's dead. But it was fun seeing Carol Burnett.

[Avaitor]

It is funny that we hit the discourse right before the next episode showed us someone who very likely caught onto Nathan's shtick and noped the fuck out. He'd make for a better argument towards Fielder being a bad guy than Mr. "anything's possible".

But man, that most recent episode was something else. The lengths Nathan goes to for his work is incredible.

[Dr. Insomniac]

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Finally go around to watching The Boys season 3, and it was fine, but I can't help but feel like this show, despite all of it's massive improvements from the source material, kind of gets a free pass just because it's taking the piss out of the superhero genre when it's really popular to do that. The funny thing is, the show is unironically at it's best when it has those genuine moments of people doing the right thing rather than exploiting the cynical side of superhero media as well as throwing in a bunch of edgy gross-out humor and kills for shock value (The whole Hero-Gasm bit just had me rolling my eyes for most of it). That stuff feels just as juvenile as the superhero stuff it's lampooning, except at least that stuff doesn't claim to be for adults.

That said, my main thing that I've always felt about the show is that it has pretty mediocre to bad writing and lackluster directing for the most part. What holds it together and even elevates it, IMO, is the performances. All of the main cast is pretty good, and Atony Starr as Homelander deserves all the praise in the world for his performance. He makes that character terrifying more than anything else about the production. Likewise, Jensen Ackles as Soldier Boy in season 3 really brought layers of nuance and intrigue to what I was fully expecting to be a cringe-inducing Captain America spoof would have been completely one-note. Thankfully it was a lot more than that, and again, I think a lot of that has to do with the performance. And of course Karl Urban is always great, and again, it's telling of his ability that he actually makes us give a shit about such a morally and ethically bankrupt protagonist. I'd go so far as to say that if it weren't for the cast, this show would probably become unbearable for me due to all of the other stuff that I don't like about it.

Anyways, while I caught up to it a while ago, I do want to mention that Barry has probably been one of the best TV shows that I have watched in a long time. It's the first time since the early seasons of Game of Thrones that I have watched something that continually surprises me with it's story turns (all of which actually make organic, narrative sense and aren't just there to surprise or shock the audience) and continually keeps going in directions that I don't see coming. It also helps that it is genuinely hilarious most of the time but can become seriously intense and dramatic on a dime at will and makes it look easy in how seamless the transition between tones is.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Ackles may have made Soldier Boy a little too charming though, because it made both Butcher's refusal to let him kill Homelander and Ryan and the idea that he could be worse than Homelander feel so hollow. And I don't think Soldier Boy is secretly misunderstood either, because he's got his own list of sins, but the show never makes a good enough case for why he's worse than the show's current main villain.

[GregX]

Just watched the trailer for the next season of Cobra Kai.

I'm looking forward to Daniel and Johnny being on the verge of coming together only to go back to hating each other due to an unfortunate Three's Company esque misunderstanding while some of the pupils switch dojos.

[Dr. Insomniac]

So the new Sandman's biggest problem is that they're more or less adapting individual issues into hour-long episodes. The amount of stretching it takes to turn 30 pages of comic into 50 minutes of show is exasperating.

[Avaitor]

There's just too much TV out there, and while I'd like to see a lot of it, I can only make time to focus on one at a time, or watch some in little chunks. Some of the most recent things I've seen/am watching include:

The Bear- Funny that I got into this a good bit after the discourse died down, but that's for the best. As a former line cook, I had some uncomfortable callbacks here, with the penultimate episode in particular reminding me of one too many insane rushes I've had to deal with. But that's part of the appeal of the series for many people, how accurately it represents that torturous line of work. It's a good show, and I'm looking forward to the second season, which I assume will be an improvement but considerably less popular.

For All Mankind- I like this one a lot. It feels like the kind of prestige drama that's not being made as much nowadays, or at least isn't the center of attention it used to be. I'm usually wary of timeskips in TV shows, but I do like how each season represents a different decade or so, and I find it funny that instead of using makeup to make the actors look older, they just get wigs and/or wear frumpier clothing. I do think that the second season was probably the best so far, and that the brothers storyline tends to kill the mood, but I'm still hoping that the show gets its full five seasons. It probably will, even if it isn't the killer app for Apple+ that it should be.

The X-Files- Buffy's always going to be my 90's sci-fi show of choice, even if the emperor's clothes are never getting put back on (and of course, I'm watching that again for my blog- almost done with season 5!). But I've wanted to do a full X-Files watch for a while now, and when I saw that Tim Brayton was reviewing the first season, one episode a week, I decided that now was a good time to get aboard. So far, we're past the halfway point of the first season, and it's interesting to see how the show has evolved at this point. For one thing, the "Mulder = optimistic, Scully = skeptic" jokes are a little inaccurate, since more than once already she's proven to be just as, if not more open to the possibility of outside forces as he is. I'm having fun, but so far I'm not getting that much more out of seeing it all the way through as I was when I'd put a random episode on, but I've found a couple of episodes that really impressed me which I haven't seen before, like "Ice" and "Beyond the Sea". The former is an obvious rip-off of The Thing, but that's also part of the charm.

Party Down- This was a rewatch, although I only did the first season so far. I'll do the second soon, as I wanted to refresh myself for the revival. Honestly, I don't think it's a good idea to bring the show back, at least if everyone is still working the same job they were a decade ago. That's just kind of a sad thought. And while some elements have aged since the first time I saw this, it's still an entertaining ensemble comedy with a killer cast. Mostly, at least- I don't have much use for Kyle, who doesn't get much to do beyond being a dimwitted pretty boy. Henry and Casey are also flat as the romantic leads, but that's par for the course with their character tropes. It sucks, because Adam Scott can be quite funny when he gets a little more to do. Parks and Rec learned this when they toned down Ben's role as the straight man and focused on his anxiety while adding in his nerdy instincts. Love the rest of the cast, though, including Jennifer Coolidge's brief stint at the end when she replaces Jane Lynch. And the guest cast is more stacked than I remembered. I hope J.K. Simmons and Joey Lauren Adams return for the new season somehow.

She-Hulk- So far, s'right. At this point, I've accepted that the Disney+ shows will never impress me for more than a couple of episodes, tops. I'm really just watching because I love Tatiana Maslany, and she is good. So is Ruffalo, who I feel has accepted that this is the closest thing to a solo Hulk movie that he's going to get. As someone who read some of the She-Hulk comics from the 80's and 90's, I wish that it could be a little more self-referential, but I also understand that they're afraid of being compared to Deadpool too much.

There's plenty more that I'd like to get to, as well as shows that I'm hella behind on. Ah well.

[Dr. Insomniac]

X-Files was always one of those shows where I keep saying "One day, I'll sit down and watch every episode of this" before thinking to myself "But you know the arc episodes eventually go nowhere, right? And those revival seasons you watched were shit. Why not just narrow it down to the Vince Gilligan episodes? Or Millennium? Millennium looks cool." then watching one episode and getting distracted by something else.

Watched a little of Wiseguy recently, because "Hey, Jonathan Banks as a cop? I can pretend this is the Mike prequel we won't get, even if Steven Bauer also showing up makes that a little weird". And finding out it's another one of those 80s-90s shows that took baby steps up in introducing serialized TV to primetime before HBO codified it and convinced everybody else to do it was interesting, as well as being yet another gritty cop show from way back that nobody talks about because The Wire memoryholed them all.

[talonmalon333]

Sounds like I missed some Cobra Kai discussion. It's one of my favorite Netflix shows right now. I watched it for the first time in the weeks leading up to season 4, and I enjoyed it so much that I watched it all again in the weeks leading up to season 5 (which was a surprisingly short time length). It's really a show that never loses its momentum, at least for me. Part of that is that they found a sweet spot in episode length averaging around 30-35 minutes (just enough time to cover more material than a typical 20 minute show, but without feeling a bit too long which many Netflix shows suffer from). Of course the characters are wonderful and the comedy is great. I also love how the show manages to take an outlandish idea that high school karate is the most important thing in the world, and presents it so well that I can just happily buy into it. Certainly requires a suspension of disbelief, but as long as the writing is tight, I've never had a problem with that in the past, and I won't now. When I rewatched it leading up to season 5, I found myself constantly thinking "Wait, I think *insert storyline*  subplot is coming up. Can't wait" or "Hey *insert new character* is being introduced in a few episodes. I'm pumped!". There was never a point where I felt fatigued watching the same show I had watched less than a year prior.

It's funny because I watched the Karate Kid movies as a kid. The original was a classic and the sequels were varying degrees of entertaining. Never would have thought that a Karate Kid sequel show was what I needed, but I like being surprised that way.


In contrast, maybe a Lord of the Ring prequel series was the show I found out that I didn't need? I won't lie, I didn't dislike Rings of Power, but this show could have been better if they cut a half hour off a lot of those episodes. I only made it through the first season because I'm hoping it's building up to something good. They also could've made Galadriel a more interesting lead. It's a surprise too, because while I hear the show pulled in record viewership for Amazon... I feel like I never see the show on social media, or discussed by word of mouth, or even show up on billboards. Rarely do you found a show that is simultaneously an apparent hit, while also being completely irrelevant in pop culture. Especially when you consider that its direct competitor, House of Targaryen, gets all the talk.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Watched The Last of Us premiere, and it's basically exactly what I expected it to be: a padded out version of the video game's story. The story itself is basically nothing all that original for a zombie/post-apocalyptic story if you've seen enough of them (and yeah, I know it's fungi instead of a virus, but they're still fucking zombies in concept). I mean, it's competently done in both cases of the game and the adaptation (so far), but I've gone on record in that I feel The Last of Us is a pretty overrated game that critics praised to high hell because that's when we entered the age of it being more important for games to feel like movies than actually be a game first.

It'll be interesting to see non-gamers react to this series. I still suspect it'll get praised and such, but to me it's a pretty OK story at best and seeing it finally actually made into a live-action series pretty much confirms that at least to me, the story is nothing that special when paired up with other genre greats. I do like Pedro Pascal's performance, so there's that, but I think it's fair for me to conclude that I just don't buy into the hype around this IP, and probably never will.