ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING s4: Funniest season yet.
SHARDLAKE s1: Not really sure I can root for any of these people, whose moral compasses seem to fluctuate wildly. Maybe if I'd read the book, or lived in the 16th century, I'd understand better. Doesn't matter, I guess, with Henry VIII as king. They'll all be executed eventually.
DARYL s2: They seem to have completely forgotten that one of the terrors of combat specific to this world is that when you kill an opponent, you will see them again in a very short time. People fighting in catacombs and tunnels and castles kill people on this show and leave them behind, which is a recipe to being bitten from behind. But the writers never use that gun on the mantlepiece. Even Daryl is just morning-starring away, and leaving potential walkers on his six, but nothing ever happens. Also, the walkers in France are supposedly more dangerous: Some have acidic blood, others are fast zombies. etc. But it seemed a lot more dangerous in the U.S. for some reason. If you ignore that part, it's a pretty good show. And short!
THE PENGUIN: Great crime show, with great acting.
WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS: We're three episodes into the last season. So sad that it's the last season, because it's still great.
I happened to see a listing for the Gilligan’s Island episode called “The Kidnapper” (Don Rickles). I recorded it. The first image on the screen was of several palm trees against the sky. For some reason, it jumped out at me that the trees were perfectly trimmed. Since this is an uncharted island, they should look like this:
Not this:
JD DeLuzio > Richard WillisNovember 29, 2024 at 5:48am
Waaait..... Are you saying that Gilligan's Island wasn't realistic?!?
It was amazing how much luggage most of them took on a three-hour tour.
Captain Comics > Richard WillisNovember 29, 2024 at 3:52pm
That's because Thurston Howell was on the run from the Mob, and took all his money with him in a bunch of suitcases. His mistress, Ginger, brought half her wardrobe. Because the plan was to meet another ship (or seaplane) out at sea, where Thurston and Ginger would be taken to safe haven somewhere in the South Pacific. The Minnow would be sunk, and when a few drowned bodies turned up, it would be believed that Howell and Grant were dead as well. Safe from the Mob, Thurston and Ginger would live it up in some tropical paradise.
It's possible the Skipper was in on it, as he might have had to know where the rendezvous point was. But maybe not, as the other ship might be able to find them by shadowing the Minnow on its tour route and using radar/sonar. And it's difficult to say whether Grumby put to sea with a hurricane offshore because he's an idiot, or because he was in on the scheme and planned to use it as cover. It's likely he did know Howell's plan, or he might have asked some questions about all the suitcases. Or maybe Howell just bribed him to STFU, and he remained ignorant.
Either way, I suspect the Skipper would not have survived the rendezvous. Howell would want to tie up that loose end. Ginger might also have met with a grim fate, too, as hot babes are a dime a dozen to a rich man. Who knows when dealing with Thurston Howell III?
We'll never know. Alas for Thurston's scheming, fate intervened when the Minnow was almost sunk for real.
The Baron > Captain ComicsNovember 29, 2024 at 4:39pm
There was an episode where it was revealed that the radio station the Skipper listened gave the previous day's weather report by accident. Still kinda sus, I'll admit.
Of course, there was another episode where it was revealed that the Howells, Ginger, Mary-Anne and the Professor were all suspects in a murder case. I always wondered what Five-O thought of that when all of their suspects just happened to get on the same tour boat which then vanished off the face off the ocean.
JD DeLuzio > Captain ComicsDecember 10, 2024 at 8:26am
This does make a small amount of sense of the series. Perhaps the island sits in some mysterious reality vortex that draws all manner of things to it: floating cargo, rock bands, surfers....
Simultaneously making my way through Agatha All Along (2024) and Tiny Beautiful Things (2023), which both feature Kathryn Hahn in wildly different roles. I'm liking both shows for different reasons, though I get thrown a little by some of TBT's fractured narratives, and I'm no stranger to fractured narratives.
Although the "Young Clare" parts of TBT are based on the author's (Cheryl Strayed's) life, the "Adult" parts are almost entirely fictional, drawing from her column/podcast and ideas about what her life might have been if she had made different choices. Some of her actual adult life was chronicled in Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Trail Coast (2012), which was made into the movie, Wild (2014). It stars Reese Witherspoon, who produced TBT. I've neither read the book (a bestseller, though one which received mixed reviews) nor watched the movie, but I think I might do both at some point.
Both Agatha and Clare frequently make terrible life choices.
Mutsuko Erskine appears in two episodes of TBT, her second role ever. I immediately recognized her from Pen15 (2019-2021), where she played Yuki Ishii-Peters. She took the part at the urging of her daughter, who co-wrote and co-stars in the show and thought her mother would work well playing her character's mother. So far as I know, she had never acted previously. She did so well that she has an episode of her own in Pen15's second and final season.
I watch a lot of documentaries. Most recently I saw the new Beatles '64, which covers some generally familiar territory in a great deal of depth, and gave me another look at my birth year.
Atomic Reaction (2023): after a slow start, this develops into a thoughtful look at Canada’s involvement in the production of uranium for the Manhattan Project, and the after-effects for the Japanese, the Dene, and the people of Port Hope (the Ontario town where the uranium was processed). Canada was the world's largest producers of uranium for a few decades, with basically one client. Port Hope is now better-known as a place where people shoot movies when they want a stereotypical picturesque small town, but the town is still dealing with the consequences of the uranium processing. A lot of people took superfluous building material from the facility (with the company's blessings), spreading contaminated material throughout the region. That they filmed most of Stephen King's It Parts I and II there now seems chillingly appropriate.
I mentioned somewhere that we watched BLACKADDER from start to finish. There were only four seasons with six episodes each, so it really didn't take long. I'd seen a few before, but watching them all in order gave context to some of the running gags. Plus, it was fun to watch Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry and others essay different roles over the series. Also, it's suggested that all the Blackadders were related, so one could assume that all of the Laurie, Tony Robinson, Fry and Tim McInerny characters were descended from their original roles as well -- giving us the sad, subtextual commentary that World War I ended a lot of bloodlines (Blackadder Goes Forth).
The characters played by Hugh Laurie and Tony Robinson didn't change much. The Blackadder family fortunes seemed to diminish with each series, but the character seemed to get smarter, more sarcastic and cunning scheme-ier. Fry's characters ranged a bit, but could be generalized as "clueless, abusive authority figures." McInerny went a full 180, from Lord Percy Percy fawning on Blackadder to Captain Darling, Blackadder's foil. The first season is funny, but is the weakest -- they were still getting their sea legs. Plus, Blackadder was an idiot and Baldric was the smart one; they realized their error and reversed that dynamic in subsequent series. Still, lots of fun, beginning to end.
We are currently watching THE AGENCY, with three episodes to go in the first season. It stars Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Jodie Turner-Smith and Richard Gere. It started pretty slow, but we're fully engaged now. Fassbender plays a well-regarded CIA agent at London Station who is pulled abruptly from a yearslong undercover assignment. Despite his training and intelligence, he has fallen in love with someone in his undercover assignment and continues the affair in London in secret. This reveals probably the weakest part of the show, in that Fassender and Turner-Smith both play enigmatic, emotionally remote characters (Turner-Smith's character is also more than what she appears to be on the surface) so there isn't much chemistry. The strongest part of the show is that it suggests how genuine espionage probably works when there's nobody named James Bond around. Also, we love both Fassbender and Jeffrey Wright in just about everything they've done.
We also watched STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS, the final season, start to finish. We enjoyed it, but I feel like it was the weakest season of the series. Maybe because they knew it was ending.
We subscribed to Paramount+ (for a month) for Lower Decks, but discovered to our delight that it had the entirety of GHOSTS UK. We had watched the first three seasons, but never could wrangle the lat two. Here at last they are. We adored this show, and my wife cried at the end. I miss all those characters! I want ghosts in my house that I can talk to!
That started us on GHOSTS U.S., which is not as good. Maybe we wouldn't have noticed if we hadn't already watched the superior UK version, but it's very sitcommy. Everybody's quipping, and as my wife said, "They seem to be trying too hard." Everybody's Hollywood pretty in the U.S. version, which I think works to the show's detriment. The UK characters ranged in attractiveness, just as the characters ranged in depth and personality, which gave it a verisimilitude that the U.S. version lacks. One character in particular we find irksome is a gay, closeted Revolutionary War officer, mirroring the UK version's gay, closeted World War II British Army officer. The latter's sexuality was played for pathos, and (spoiler) when he came out to his fellow ghosts, the emotional payoff was touching, and felt earned. (He was also a martinet, and that part was played for laughs.) By contrast, the mincing, silly U.S. version is played in wink-wink-nudge-nudge fashion for laughs. It's one-dimensional, it's insulting to gays of the past who had to stay in the closet or lose their careers (like the UK officer), and in 2025 it just isn't funny. That character is the worst offender, but pretty much all the ghosts are over-the-top caricatures of their more nuanced British counterparts. My wife tuned out in season one, and if I'm going to watch the rest of it, it will have to be on my own. I may, since I loved Rose McIver in iZombie. But it may be too much trouble to find TV-watching time without my wife.
Speaking of UK-U.S sitcoms, we watched all of the UK THE OFFICE. Once again, it didn't take long: Three seasons, totaling 14 episodes. How do British actors make a living? Six episodes a year isn't much of a paycheck! And the last "season" (which the Brits call "series") was only two episodes!
Also once again, we see that the UK version has an adult vibe, whereas the U.S. version is a quippy sitcom with static characters. Maybe I need to go back and re-watch the U.S. version, but in this case I think it was an improvement. The British Office was virtually mean-spirited; Ricky Gervais' character was so awful and cringey that sometimes it was hard to watch. Nobody does comedy of manners better than the British, and this show often had me physically squirming on the couch with every word out of the lead character's mouth.
It says something that the UK story was finished after 15 episodes, with all storylines wrapped up and all characters geting pretty much the ending they deserved, but felt longer. Whereas in the U.S. it ran for 9 seasons of mostly 22 episodes a season, with the show making changes only when reality forced them to (like when Steve Carell left the show). I should mention that the U.S. version had the time and space to develop a lot more of the characters, many of whom became terrific bits, whereas the UK version focused mostly on the Michael, Jim, Dwight and Pam analogs to the virtual exclusion of others.
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ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING s4: Funniest season yet.
SHARDLAKE s1: Not really sure I can root for any of these people, whose moral compasses seem to fluctuate wildly. Maybe if I'd read the book, or lived in the 16th century, I'd understand better. Doesn't matter, I guess, with Henry VIII as king. They'll all be executed eventually.
DARYL s2: They seem to have completely forgotten that one of the terrors of combat specific to this world is that when you kill an opponent, you will see them again in a very short time. People fighting in catacombs and tunnels and castles kill people on this show and leave them behind, which is a recipe to being bitten from behind. But the writers never use that gun on the mantlepiece. Even Daryl is just morning-starring away, and leaving potential walkers on his six, but nothing ever happens. Also, the walkers in France are supposedly more dangerous: Some have acidic blood, others are fast zombies. etc. But it seemed a lot more dangerous in the U.S. for some reason. If you ignore that part, it's a pretty good show. And short!
THE PENGUIN: Great crime show, with great acting.
WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS: We're three episodes into the last season. So sad that it's the last season, because it's still great.
I happened to see a listing for the Gilligan’s Island episode called “The Kidnapper” (Don Rickles). I recorded it. The first image on the screen was of several palm trees against the sky. For some reason, it jumped out at me that the trees were perfectly trimmed. Since this is an uncharted island, they should look like this:
Not this:
Waaait..... Are you saying that Gilligan's Island wasn't realistic?!?
It was amazing how much luggage most of them took on a three-hour tour.
That's because Thurston Howell was on the run from the Mob, and took all his money with him in a bunch of suitcases. His mistress, Ginger, brought half her wardrobe. Because the plan was to meet another ship (or seaplane) out at sea, where Thurston and Ginger would be taken to safe haven somewhere in the South Pacific. The Minnow would be sunk, and when a few drowned bodies turned up, it would be believed that Howell and Grant were dead as well. Safe from the Mob, Thurston and Ginger would live it up in some tropical paradise.
It's possible the Skipper was in on it, as he might have had to know where the rendezvous point was. But maybe not, as the other ship might be able to find them by shadowing the Minnow on its tour route and using radar/sonar. And it's difficult to say whether Grumby put to sea with a hurricane offshore because he's an idiot, or because he was in on the scheme and planned to use it as cover. It's likely he did know Howell's plan, or he might have asked some questions about all the suitcases. Or maybe Howell just bribed him to STFU, and he remained ignorant.
Either way, I suspect the Skipper would not have survived the rendezvous. Howell would want to tie up that loose end. Ginger might also have met with a grim fate, too, as hot babes are a dime a dozen to a rich man. Who knows when dealing with Thurston Howell III?
We'll never know. Alas for Thurston's scheming, fate intervened when the Minnow was almost sunk for real.
There was an episode where it was revealed that the radio station the Skipper listened gave the previous day's weather report by accident. Still kinda sus, I'll admit.
Of course, there was another episode where it was revealed that the Howells, Ginger, Mary-Anne and the Professor were all suspects in a murder case. I always wondered what Five-O thought of that when all of their suspects just happened to get on the same tour boat which then vanished off the face off the ocean.
This does make a small amount of sense of the series. Perhaps the island sits in some mysterious reality vortex that draws all manner of things to it: floating cargo, rock bands, surfers....
Simultaneously making my way through Agatha All Along (2024) and Tiny Beautiful Things (2023), which both feature Kathryn Hahn in wildly different roles. I'm liking both shows for different reasons, though I get thrown a little by some of TBT's fractured narratives, and I'm no stranger to fractured narratives.
Although the "Young Clare" parts of TBT are based on the author's (Cheryl Strayed's) life, the "Adult" parts are almost entirely fictional, drawing from her column/podcast and ideas about what her life might have been if she had made different choices. Some of her actual adult life was chronicled in Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Trail Coast (2012), which was made into the movie, Wild (2014). It stars Reese Witherspoon, who produced TBT. I've neither read the book (a bestseller, though one which received mixed reviews) nor watched the movie, but I think I might do both at some point.
Both Agatha and Clare frequently make terrible life choices.
Mutsuko Erskine appears in two episodes of TBT, her second role ever. I immediately recognized her from Pen15 (2019-2021), where she played Yuki Ishii-Peters. She took the part at the urging of her daughter, who co-wrote and co-stars in the show and thought her mother would work well playing her character's mother. So far as I know, she had never acted previously. She did so well that she has an episode of her own in Pen15's second and final season.
I watch a lot of documentaries. Most recently I saw the new Beatles '64, which covers some generally familiar territory in a great deal of depth, and gave me another look at my birth year.
Atomic Reaction (2023): after a slow start, this develops into a thoughtful look at Canada’s involvement in the production of uranium for the Manhattan Project, and the after-effects for the Japanese, the Dene, and the people of Port Hope (the Ontario town where the uranium was processed). Canada was the world's largest producers of uranium for a few decades, with basically one client. Port Hope is now better-known as a place where people shoot movies when they want a stereotypical picturesque small town, but the town is still dealing with the consequences of the uranium processing. A lot of people took superfluous building material from the facility (with the company's blessings), spreading contaminated material throughout the region. That they filmed most of Stephen King's It Parts I and II there now seems chillingly appropriate.
JOY TO THE WORLD: Today is December 25th and you know what that means: "The Starseed will bloom and the flesh will rise."
I mentioned somewhere that we watched BLACKADDER from start to finish. There were only four seasons with six episodes each, so it really didn't take long. I'd seen a few before, but watching them all in order gave context to some of the running gags. Plus, it was fun to watch Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry and others essay different roles over the series. Also, it's suggested that all the Blackadders were related, so one could assume that all of the Laurie, Tony Robinson, Fry and Tim McInerny characters were descended from their original roles as well -- giving us the sad, subtextual commentary that World War I ended a lot of bloodlines (Blackadder Goes Forth).
The characters played by Hugh Laurie and Tony Robinson didn't change much. The Blackadder family fortunes seemed to diminish with each series, but the character seemed to get smarter, more sarcastic and cunning scheme-ier. Fry's characters ranged a bit, but could be generalized as "clueless, abusive authority figures." McInerny went a full 180, from Lord Percy Percy fawning on Blackadder to Captain Darling, Blackadder's foil. The first season is funny, but is the weakest -- they were still getting their sea legs. Plus, Blackadder was an idiot and Baldric was the smart one; they realized their error and reversed that dynamic in subsequent series. Still, lots of fun, beginning to end.
We are currently watching THE AGENCY, with three episodes to go in the first season. It stars Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Jodie Turner-Smith and Richard Gere. It started pretty slow, but we're fully engaged now. Fassbender plays a well-regarded CIA agent at London Station who is pulled abruptly from a yearslong undercover assignment. Despite his training and intelligence, he has fallen in love with someone in his undercover assignment and continues the affair in London in secret. This reveals probably the weakest part of the show, in that Fassender and Turner-Smith both play enigmatic, emotionally remote characters (Turner-Smith's character is also more than what she appears to be on the surface) so there isn't much chemistry. The strongest part of the show is that it suggests how genuine espionage probably works when there's nobody named James Bond around. Also, we love both Fassbender and Jeffrey Wright in just about everything they've done.
We also watched STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS, the final season, start to finish. We enjoyed it, but I feel like it was the weakest season of the series. Maybe because they knew it was ending.
We subscribed to Paramount+ (for a month) for Lower Decks, but discovered to our delight that it had the entirety of GHOSTS UK. We had watched the first three seasons, but never could wrangle the lat two. Here at last they are. We adored this show, and my wife cried at the end. I miss all those characters! I want ghosts in my house that I can talk to!
That started us on GHOSTS U.S., which is not as good. Maybe we wouldn't have noticed if we hadn't already watched the superior UK version, but it's very sitcommy. Everybody's quipping, and as my wife said, "They seem to be trying too hard." Everybody's Hollywood pretty in the U.S. version, which I think works to the show's detriment. The UK characters ranged in attractiveness, just as the characters ranged in depth and personality, which gave it a verisimilitude that the U.S. version lacks. One character in particular we find irksome is a gay, closeted Revolutionary War officer, mirroring the UK version's gay, closeted World War II British Army officer. The latter's sexuality was played for pathos, and (spoiler) when he came out to his fellow ghosts, the emotional payoff was touching, and felt earned. (He was also a martinet, and that part was played for laughs.) By contrast, the mincing, silly U.S. version is played in wink-wink-nudge-nudge fashion for laughs. It's one-dimensional, it's insulting to gays of the past who had to stay in the closet or lose their careers (like the UK officer), and in 2025 it just isn't funny. That character is the worst offender, but pretty much all the ghosts are over-the-top caricatures of their more nuanced British counterparts. My wife tuned out in season one, and if I'm going to watch the rest of it, it will have to be on my own. I may, since I loved Rose McIver in iZombie. But it may be too much trouble to find TV-watching time without my wife.
Speaking of UK-U.S sitcoms, we watched all of the UK THE OFFICE. Once again, it didn't take long: Three seasons, totaling 14 episodes. How do British actors make a living? Six episodes a year isn't much of a paycheck! And the last "season" (which the Brits call "series") was only two episodes!
Also once again, we see that the UK version has an adult vibe, whereas the U.S. version is a quippy sitcom with static characters. Maybe I need to go back and re-watch the U.S. version, but in this case I think it was an improvement. The British Office was virtually mean-spirited; Ricky Gervais' character was so awful and cringey that sometimes it was hard to watch. Nobody does comedy of manners better than the British, and this show often had me physically squirming on the couch with every word out of the lead character's mouth.
It says something that the UK story was finished after 15 episodes, with all storylines wrapped up and all characters geting pretty much the ending they deserved, but felt longer. Whereas in the U.S. it ran for 9 seasons of mostly 22 episodes a season, with the show making changes only when reality forced them to (like when Steve Carell left the show). I should mention that the U.S. version had the time and space to develop a lot more of the characters, many of whom became terrific bits, whereas the UK version focused mostly on the Michael, Jim, Dwight and Pam analogs to the virtual exclusion of others.
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