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After Life (2019)
Not much else to say
There are thousands of reviews raving about the show already and I don't think I have anything original to add. The characters are all goofy yet grounded into a sort of realism where you might know a person in your own life who is sort of like that. It's classical dark humour as done by Ricky Gervais. It just works. If you don't like his other stuff, you won't like this either. But if you do like it, then it is great.
There are genuinely moving moments in the show sandwiched between really funny dialogues. It's just well written. It does not waste your time with nonsense. Within 18 episodes, you have a complete story and it's a fun journey.
Norsemen (2016)
dark humour at its best
Sadly, the show has been cancelled after 3 seasons. Sadly, the third season is a prequel season to the first two seasons leaving the aftermath to the 2nd season to the viewers imagination I guess. The humour is very dry and there's quite a bit of gore in it. The dark humour comes mainly from portraying Vikings somewhat realistically and nonchalantly while putting it into perspective at times ho w absurd some of it seems.
Still, those were really strong 18 episodes and I wish we could have more. There isn't a show out there quite like it. I also didn't find the humour vulgar or slapstick-laden. I don't really understand those criticisms of the show.
New Girl (2011)
typical mediocre sitcom
New Girl does nothing new. The 'quirky girl' schtick lasts for all of 5 minutes before it's revealed she was hot all along and then everybody is just weird. But they're comically weird. Because these are people in their 30's behaving like teenagers. They're my age basically and it's just comes across as moronic.
But it's a comedy, so one might just look past that and I did. The problem is that the show just isn't that funny. Most of the jokes were already done better in other shows. But maybe it has a story going for it, something to be invested in? Well, not really. It's on again off again relationships with the big season finale reveal quite literally always being 'I'm still in/again in/suddenly in love with X' and 'oh my god, whatever will I do now?'.
It also suffers from having next to no consistency. It introduces something as a joke but something that ought to become part of that person or arrangement etc. And then just throws it out the window and ends up with a bunch of forgettable and almost entirely unrelated episodes. We never really get to see some of the things happen the characters say happen - like you don't see people being truly best friends, just people making jokes about it. It's just pretty weak overall.
I watched the whole thing just to have something on while eating or working out at home a bit or doing some chores. It demands that little attention because it's entirely forgettable and keeps the same bland tone all throughout the series. And sadly none of the actors serves as a saving grace. They're all fine but nobody is really great and it's basically why you never saw them again.
The Bear: Fishes (2023)
frantic overdramatized mess
This is over an hour of overdramatized holiday family flick straight out of Hollywood. Everything is so stupidly over the top and frantic that I really wonder why people think this is the greatest thing to have ever graced TV. It's underdeveloped / unknown characters just yelling at each other. There is no good dialogue anywhere. It's not well written at all. It's not well directed either - all the camera shots that people seem to be excited about are just the same frantic movements in really crappy action scenes.
Seriously, it's like all the episode does is scream 'look! Dysfunction! Family drama! Wooooo!' at you for some atrociously spend 70 minutes. It's just so over the top, it's just stupid. I can't take it seriously. This is a caricature. This is a teenager dramatizing how horrible Christmas is. It's like a child's tamper tantrum written out as a script for a TV show and then acted out by really good actors. But it's just a self-indulgent mess that quite frankly you need to be a... big enough fan of the show... to fall for. What do people see in this?
Painkiller (2023)
too over stylized for the subject matter
That's really it in a nutshell. You have a rather important subject matter and often times, the show is just being silly for no reason. Too often are there these sort of comically stylized and overdone shots that go on and on with the hectic camera cuts that are totally out of place. The show tries so hard to 'show don't tell', they just dive into the most mundane symbolism they can find like showing you a close up of a dog's testicles to really nail the point about the scumbag CEO having the audacity to do this. But you still just have canine testicles close-ups, so what gives?
The character fill-ins are also all over the place and have more sideshows than actual development. Overall, a bit let down. I thought the massive issue and abuse that was shown could've used something more serious instead of trying to create a fun and relatable show.
Frasier (2023)
Pointless continuation
It just doesn't do anything new or smart or funny for that matter. The wit is obviously gone and the writing team just tried to make work what used to work. But the characters aren't there. The actor who plays Niles' son just can't replace David Hyde Pierce. And it's so incredibly lazy to try and make his son a caricature of his father / the character previously playing that same exact role. Then you try to make Freddie into the new Martin but that young actor is no Mahoney. For that matter, none of the actors are anything remotely close to the original cast except for Kelsey of course, who has played Frasier for over 20 years or so given Cheers and Frasier's long run as well.
It's still better than the incredibly stilted and polemic comedies of the modern age (well, most of them, certainly not all) but it's nowhere near the original - which itself lived more off of the actor performances than the actual plots or jokes. It was just such an incredibly well acted show but seeing how most of the outstanding cast is missing, I don't see this being any good. And I loved the original show and always thought they ought to make a modern series with the sons - the setting is there and all. But this is just subpar.
Wednesday (2022)
plot points are too convenient
What I mean is that everything that happens is triggered by some sort of accident or stumbling into a hint which leads to some other development. Wednesday is virtually clueless all the time and just does things at random (really, watch it again, nothing is achieved by anyone at any point that isn't coincidental luck). This puts a hefty damper on anything you'd want from a thriller.
So, as far as murder mystery goes, this is basically about as good as a crappy Scooby Doo episode. What redeems the show? Fantastic costume design, great shots all around and fitting set pieces. Just really good production here.
Then of course, as anyone would tell you, Jenna Ortega was outstanding as Wednesday. Sadly, only Emma Myers managed to come close in terms of performative prowess as her roommate Enid. All the other young actors are obviously talented but still overact at times. Of course, this could also just be bad direction.
Overall, the writing was contrived and just full of ex machina convenient plot points so nothing felt like it tied the story together. This happened, then that happened, then this happened... all the time. It was sometimes a bit funny, mostly it was just bland and uninspired though. The writers maybe just each started one thing and then finished another to explain this incohesive mess of a plot. Never mind the idiotic amount of stupid love triangles.
Barry: wow (2023)
Difficult to rate this
Because on its own, given what has sadly been done thus far, this makes sense and it ends well enough. Not like this episode is to blame for the prior episodes or the time skip. But I still really dislike how the show ended as a whole. I think a lot of the same could've been done without the skip. Or the skip could've played out over the course of a season. I don't know, it just seems wasted.
For example, Barry has had this whole thing about wanting to be a good person and sadly never came to grips with himself. He just got killed off then. Which is a fitting end but it just felt like the episode with his old comrade who told him it has to stop would be the catalyst for some change. Instead, he got over religious while hiding away with Sally. I feel like we got the weaker version of what could've been but maybe they really wanted to wrap this up in 4 and given that they started in prison, they could not have an escape + chase + finding himself arc all in on. Still - the trajectory for this show as basically a 10/10 for the first 2 seasons, a 9 for the third and for me, just a 7/10 because I really disliked the time skip.
Also, Hank not getting a happy end after being forced into situations and lives all the time was a bit bitter. Remember, hank was happy, it was his boyfriend who wanted to get back into being a criminal. I just thought Hank would find himself and out of this life. Ah, well.
Hacks: 1.69 Million (2021)
This is what happens
When you feel the need to make a statement instead of a TV show. You get a heavy handed nonsense script with over the top caricatures of real people. You examine the issue poorly and your solution to the problem is even worse. Someone gets triggered and makes an incredibly stupid decision and it's celebrated like the greatest thing since sliced bread. Good grief, how uninspired can you get?
Why does only one half of this pair get to have a backbone? Vance just bends over every single time and Ava is right every single time. Do the mommy issues run that deep with the writing staff that their self insert millennial trope gets to win every time without any word of recourse on the other side? Some jokes are still there but I hope we get much fewer episodes like this or I'll have to give this one up after a lot of promise.
A Walk to Remember (2002)
Surprisingly neat movie
I caught the movie on TV some odd 15 years back or so and something prompted me to remember it and look it up here and see how it was rated. Because I remember how cheesy it was yet I really liked it when I watched it and was actually moved by it.
The young actors really do an excellent job and just seem natural. It's just a very likeable movie that you can watch if you feel like watching a sad teen romance drama. It's certainly enjoyable, sort of like a stupid pop song that doesn't do all that much different from others but still somehow manages to stick with you.
I can only recommend it. Not life changing but for some reason, after all these years, I still remember this movie. There has to be a good reason for that.
The Rookie: Under Siege (2023)
a decent episode after 3 bad seasons.
Well, there it is. Maybe season 6 will continue along these lines and be actually worth watching again. I've become invested in the characters and try to watch some eps, but most have been so goddamn awful I just skipped through them to get the often absurdly stupid gist of what's happening and then I just was done. But oh boy, this one was actually worth watching.
Was the action still over the top? Yes. That lack of realism and the weird response to the awful situation weren't great. The ending where we get a monologue meant for the audience that just wasn't natural at all was also really bad. It's a crutch writing device usually reserved for amateurs, not multimillion dollar shows.
Still, a big improvement over the partially asinine nonsense they had thrown at us previously. Can we get much more of this and a lot less of children stealing helicopters and 60 year old teachers becoming top FBI agents in a week? That'd be neat.
Ted Lasso: International Break (2023)
Too cartoonish
For my liking, it was both too cartoonish and too melodramatic. The writers seem to have no idea how to write Keeley without the show deteriorating into a soap opera. Once again, she was the focus of a show that somehow saw less screen time for the main character after whom the show is named than virtually every side character.
The writers are so hung up on the idea of using screen time to show women in a good light that they forget that this isn't a showcase of positive womanhood - it's a TV show. And the episode simply fails to do anything to drive the plot forward properly. The grand conclusion by Rebecca by the end of the episode had already been established prior yet this is supposed to be something?
And once again, all problems just got solved by ex machina bs. Just whatever the character needed happened to fall into their hands. None of their resolutions or changes were achieved through any sort of exercise through adversity. It was simply conveniently handed to them by the writing staff.
Can't deal with your jerk ex? Let's just give you some power over him back after nothing else happened. Need a redemption? Play a sad violin. Have a strong adversary? Oh, he just kinda got other problems and those problems solve your problem. Cheers. So uninspired.
Barry: the wizard (2023)
a poor man's deep episode
There is an over-reliance on tried and tired tropes that happen in this episode, that I'm coming to the conclusion the writers really want to drive home a certain point and in doing so, abandoned why the show was liked and just tried to state things clearly instead.
The character development or character changes make no real sense or rather - they don't feel natural, they feel forced. They're all implemented so the writers can make certain points which they couldn't have made before. Now we have Barry and Sally being deeply religious or pretend religious and Sally is a drunk. It's lazy.
And what I wrote about last episode has come true - they had hank react to something from a decade ago. It's not believable. People don't have the same hang ups they had 10 years ago. The sense of immediacy is obviously gone, yet because that was the entire plot just 2 episodes prior, they have to address it. Never mind the ex machina near the end where obviously a dude from 10 years ago shows up at the right exact minute that was needed to open another plot point. No. Just no. The writing became very lazy and they tell a lot more than they show and rely on overused ways to do even that. Quite a dip in the quality of the show these last 2 eps.
Barry: tricky legacies (2023)
Not a fan of this one
So, we have an 8 or 10 year time jump and now they have a kid and live in the middle of nowhere. And the new plot setup is that after all this time, they're gonna make a movie. Does not really feel great to me tbh. I thought there would be more immediate consequences. Now, all the setup from the previous episodes - heck, the previous seasons - just got severely muddied. Because who cares about some death or torture or whatever from 8-10 years ago? How are you going to bring that sense of urgency back after such a long time skip?
I loved every episode so far, but this one does not sit well with me. Maybe they'll manage to surprise me and turn it into something good, but as far as I can remember, any time there was a huge time skip in a show, it never ended well.
Sure, the cinematography is really well done, but the story is constructed weirdly. Suddenly, things just resurface after a decade of isolation because someone wants to make a movie? And they're gonna kill Gene because of what? Why does he matter? The movie is not made by him, he weasels his way into it apparently. Everything else is known. Their faces, their story, everything. It just does not make any sense to me.
Ted Lasso: La Locker Room Aux Folles (2023)
Return to form
Finally the show returns to form with a great episode about camaraderie among men and the way it can be toxic like the Rupert / Nate situation or healthy like what the team has build. While it bothers me that they couldn't just state the truth that it's 3.5% who are gay and not 10% like they claimed (among men, women are a bit different), the rest of the episode was well done.
There even was some soccer in it and they showed how problems in the locker room lead to problems on the pitch and a good locker room leads to good results on the pitch. I hope the writers who wasted half the season on a relationship they just abandoned as pointlessly as they started it won't be involved in any shape or form for what's probably the last episode.
They literally trashed most of the 3rd season on lesbian representation that did neither serve any characters nor the story.
True Detective (2014)
10/10 then a 7/10 then still an 7/10
The first season of True Detective just might be one of the best things to have ever appeared on TV. Both the story and the actors are simply fantastic. Every episode is basically perfection and it's shot beautifully with a great score to boot. It's just must watch TV. 10/10
None of the season have recurring characters or an overarching story.
The second season is much worse. The character motivations are superficial and their personalities never fully explored. Partially because there were too many with too branching paths. The stakes feel incredibly low and one just doesn't care about the characters given their superficial selves - never mind them all being hard to root for to begin with. 7/10
The third season is okay. Actors are better (I mean, Ali is in this one) but the plot is heavily flawed. I don't want to spoil it so I'll just leave it at that but to me, the ultimate revelation in the last episodes in no way shape or form explained why anything happened previously. Nobody had any stakes left and there was SO much drama about the focal point of the story to turn out as it did.... just fell really flat for me. The personal drama of the characters bored me. 7/10.
The Newsroom (2012)
Good - but overrated
Genius? Really? The interpersonal relationships are taken straight out of quite literally any 90's romance / sitcom that didn't make it past the pilot or season 1. It's incredibly tropey. It was at times annoying that it was at the forefront of the show. It was the weakest part of the show and they insisted on having all these affairs and will they won't they situations. These people could have just been married or already have partners. It was absurd how every major character had to have someone from the office - another major character usually - be their love interest. Weak stuff!
Some of the characters were also a bit too free of faults. They were all overly idealistic goody-two-shoes type of people with zero 'darkness' to them (except Will during the first episode). That made the characters rather one dimensional as well. It's like you waited for them to go deeper but they remained flat and just magically got better because the plot just needed them to. Maggy is certainly the worst offender in terms of 'has done nothing but somehow suddenly can do things she couldn't before'. Her 'crisis' was also not dealt with in an interesting way. It was all tell and no show. Still, the characters were at least likeable, so that helped. The actors also did a fine job though nobody was amazing per se.
The humour hit home for me more often than not though. The 'behind the scenes' look albeit fictional was also interesting. It was a bit overly American propaganda for my liking but it's an American show, so that's to be expected. But it was really pathetic to ignore the plethora war crimes already having been committed by the US as they referred to themselves as the 'moral leader of the world'. Like.. wtf guys?
It was also supposedly to be about a neutral news network but it wasn't really neutral. You could tell it was written by liberals with liberal views (many of which I share) but in doing so it was rather one dimensional here yet again.
So, all in all, it was a good show. It was fun watching. But it failed being some sort of insightful or intellectual show like The Wire for example or Homicide - Life on the Streets. It's just not on the same level and I find it disappointing albeit not surprising that certain age groups favour it more than others.
The Rookie: The Choice (2022)
Jumping the shark and then 10 more sharks after
This is absurd. The entire premise is simply asinine. The timeline of things happening makes zero sense. I understand dramatization because it's TV but this just suspense of disbelief yet again. I think I'm done with the show as a whole after this. I loved the first 2 seasons, the third was a catastrophe, the fourth was hit and miss but the fifth is just atrociously bad. It's just convenient plot points one after another just to milk some story instead of grounding stories into something believable and real. All the women have become Mary Sue type characters, all the male characters sound like 20 year olds taking gender studies classes. It is so goddamn stupid, nobody is allowed to have any flaws whatsoever anymore.
Ted Lasso (2020)
It's Ned Flanders as a soccer coach
That's really all it is. It's fun enough but people rate this a 10/10 for what? It's not like it reinvented comedy. It gets almost everything about soccer wrong and the sports shots are atrocious. None of the soccer storylines make any sense whatsoever really and sadly so. Then you have the same old tired romance subplots while doing absolutely nothing with the team. You mix in some cringe pull-at-your-heartstrings moments and this is a masterpiece? I think not. It's a fun show but it keeps running the same exact jokes over and over and quite frankly, the actors are solid / serviceable but far from great.
The Rookie: In Justice (2021)
New writers - worse story lines
Since the season 3 addition of three (what seem to be) female quota hires for the writing staff, the quality of the stories have gone south.
Cheng and. Puryer had no writing experience whatsoever and replaced writers who were on the show for the 2 great seasons prior. Callaghan was a production assistant and now gets to write for the show. Puryear had a blog on the Huffington Post. Cheng's only qualification is being active on twitter and complaining about sentences uttered here and there that she finds offensive and being a minority.
This is ridiculous. The show now just puts factually unproven and at times disproven stuff into the character's mouths - it has nothing to do any more with actual police drama, it's just talking points by a select group of activists.
You went 40 episodes showing the police in a positive light albeit with some issues only to turn around and pretend there's now suddenly a systemic issue that is insurmountable. It doesn't match real world data. The entirety of Hollywood lets some dude with an Arts degree override ALL scientific / statistical evidence. This is idiotic.
I watched 3 more episodes hoping it would get better but that's it. This is now a show that just repeats the same garbage you get from Huffington post and other biased media outlets and makes character say these unnatural idiotic lines. There was literally a goddamn 3 minute dialogue between Nolan and the lawyer about how the only reason he has not been shot is his white privilege. This is just plain stupid.