fall tv '18

In season 5 Raphael Bob-Waksburg's Hollywoo satire goes bleaker and darker than ever before.

Thinly conceived anthology from the "My Name Is Earl" guy, back to peddle his usual mean, toothless shtick.

It's like Lost, but with the mawkish sentimentality of This Is Us at its sappiest. But wait! It's also a police procedural!

strong first season, darkly comic and deftly plotted, with a great cast

The writing on this show is so good. Time and again, the writers seems to write themselves into an impossible corner, and their response is to plow through the wall. You never know where things are going to go next.

Craziness is fun, or it can be fun to watch, anyway. Responsibility has its perks, but it isn't exciting the way irrational behavior can be; it's boring and predictable, or so the stigma goes. Now, as we enter the show's endgame, Rebecca's in a better place emotionally, but maybe the pure fun, the chaos isn't there anymore. Which is okay.

I'm gonna watch it someday, I guess, but I'm in no hurry. Billing this season as "Rick Grimes' Final Episodes" seems like a dumb move, and its hard for me to invest in a show that's just going to kill off its protagonist and keep going. This will make the show depart entirely from the blueprint of Kirkman's comic books, which let's face it aren't great, but at least have a story in mind: a father in a dangerous world fights to survive, to protect his son, and to make the world a place worth living in. Without that story, Walking Dead won't have much to make the grim slog worth it anymore, and it's already hemorrhaging viewers.
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Watching now, and I'm in that new season tabula rasa honeymoon phase, where I say "Hey, they fixed the show, and things are running smoothly now! Took 9 season to do it, but by Jove I think they got it!" Aside from the lousy sendoff for Rick Grimes, it's been pretty good. Characters get a little space to breathe, and to matter, to resonate with the viewer as actual people, and to connect in ways that feel real. I don't think that the show has ever really been able to do that, maybe for the main cast in fits and spurts, but never for the whole ensemble, and definitely never for new characters who've just been introduced. Come the finale, I'll be grousing again, maybe, but for now we're on easy street, and it feels so... tolerable.

Meanwhile, this shit can get gone. I don't want to see this effusive moron gush about a deeply mediocre tv show and think about how he's an abusive monster. I don't want to see a frame of it, and the best way to do that is probably not watch the flagship show period. Not on DVR, and certainly not live, where he will pop up and yammer away right off the bat when they cut to commerical. With The Walking Dead bleeding out in the ratings, the dumb little hype show might get the axe.

Jimmy McGill's slow corruption of the soul is as riveting as ever.

So, this pilot was not as good as the premiere of Futurama, which in turn I have long contended to be a subpar pilot, probably because I felt at the time that it wasn't as funny as an episode of the Simpsons. But that's the deal with pilots: they must establish characters, place and plot, and if the guys who made the pilot want another episode it should also make us laugh, feel or maybe just think. That's a lot to fit into 30 minutes, so sometimes characters come across a little too broad, jokes don't land the way they should, and exposition gets passed off as dialog. I did laugh a fair bit. There were times where I wasn't sure if I should laugh, which probably means Matt Groening hit me where he wanted to. And there were gags that fell astoundingly flat. For instance, why does a racist deer happen upon our heroes as they sleep? Do all the deer in this fantasy world talk? Are all the deer racists? Do out heroes know the deer are racists? Is this going to come up again? What bearing does it have on anything? Was it supposed to be funny? I can tell I'm getting a little too hung up on the whole racist deer thing. But it's fairly puzzling. Grasping for a punchline that wasn't there, one of my viewing companions said, "Rednecks hunt deer. They aren't supposed to BE rednecks."

Anyway, I'll keep with it for a bit. I hope we haven't seen the last of the off brand Keebler elf kingdom, because that was the funniest bit by far.

Horgan and Delaney wrote and star in this sitcom, about a london schoolteacher and a Boston ad executive who wind up in a family way after a drunken hook-up. Horgan has a knack for finding the charm of the most abrasive characters, and Delaney is similarly complex, a big-hearted easy-going lug who explodes into scathing fits of anger when under stress.

This show has a real problem with its secondary characters, any of which are barely more than one note two seasons in. I like it, though. The Murphys are all well drawn characters. Justin Long is funny as Kevin, the moody teen son, as is Bill Burr, essentially adopting the persona of his own father as cranky paterfamilas Frank. Laura Dern, naturally, is the MVP, with top-notch voice work. As Sue Murphy, long-suffering mother to the clan and now, in the wake of Frank's unemployment, the bread-winner as well, she shades her voice with just a hint of tension, which escalates into screaming matches in which she holds her own against the vociferous Burr.

Done with the last season. I've sort of warmed to the new episodes; they're not "new Simpsons episodes" bad. In fact, I've genuinely enjoyed some in this final stretch: "Game of Tones" is another elegaic foray into Fry's past life which stands the equal of "The Luck of the Fryrish" or "Jurassic Bark", "Stench and Stenchibility" is a disgusting yet heartwarming romance featuring Dr Zoidberg, and "Meanwhile" is a pretty good finale, which lets us see Fry and Leela grow old together while leaving the door open for future adventures, a neat way of having your cake and eating it too.

This is a big waste of time in the style of American Horror Story. Characters die and come back just because the writers seemingly can't spin the wheel of plot without them. There is no rooting interest; the Heathers are of course horrible and self-centered. JD is a dead-eyed sociopath without the rascally charm Christian Slater brought to the role. And Veronica is awful, too. The adults are oblivious, and the other students are sheep. Seemingly, the creators can't wait for someone to come along and kill all these strawmen they've created, and honey, that's a bad look.

This show is bad, and worse, it's boring.

season 2

watching On Demand, season 1

december 20th
Inevitably, this finale rushes through a bunch of obvious plot points. As such, it's a fitting culmination of this show, for all its fits and starts.

season 2

sorta reluctant to delve into the second season due to accusations of misconduct against showrunner Salim Akil.