We’ve watched a bunch of stuff I haven’t reported:
Andor season 2: Excellent. The original plan was a five-season series, with each season representing one year, and one year closer to the Battle of Yavin. Since Yavin is the beginning of the Rebel Alliance/soon-to-be-restored Republic dating convention, Andor covers years 5-1 BBY. Because of expense, Disney truncated the five-year run to two years, which is disappointing, as I would have avidly watched five years of this. But amazingly, the second season, which gave three episodes each to 4 BBY 4, 3 BBY, 2 BBY and 1BBY, did not feel rushed or squooshed. And the last episode bleeds directly into Rogue One: A Star Wars Tale. Great stuff. Now that I think about it, I might have said all this before. But it's worth a repeat.
Umbrella Academy season 4: Dreadful. How did that manage to turn this funny, quirky, sometimes heartwarming show into such drek? It probably started with destroying their best character (Five). I could go on and on, but it’s too depressing. Oh, also, the ending basically said, “None of this mattered. Move along, Johnny. Nothing to see here.” So if you never watched Umbrella Academy before, you don’t need to start now. (Although the first two seasons are fantastic.)
Secrets We Keep is a murder mystery set in a wealthy enclave in Denmark. It’s basically a critique of the liberal Danish elite, who are depicted as hypocrites when a Filipino au pair (of which there are a lot) turns up dead. The lead character always tries to do the “right” thing, but without fail, always makes the wrong move. Decent, with lots of travel porn.
Ironheart season 1: Gave up in the middle of the second episode. I don’t really want to watch Iron Man without Robert Downey Jr., but gave it a try. But I found none of the people in this story believable or interesting. I learned my lesson with Echo: If something looks this boring by episode two, it’s not going to get better.
Revival: We watched the first episode, and liked the actress who plays the lead character, Melanie Scrofano (Wynonna Earp). She might, however, be slightly too old for the part. When she’s with her college-age sister she looks like the student’s mother; when she’s with her father they look like contemporaries. (It doesn’t help that the actor who plays the father is too young for the part. In the comics, the father was white-haired and at retirement age, and this actor looks 40-ish. Just like Scrofano, who is probably pushing 40 if she’s not there yet.) It wasn’t so compelling that we’ve gone back for episode 2, but we will eventually.
Last of Us season 2: We gave up after episode 2. We love Pedro Pascal in everything (except Wonder Woman 1984, but that was just a bad script), and loved Bella Ramsey in Game of Thrones. And we really enjoyed the first season. But Ellie has always been kind of hard to take as a character, and with season 2 she has become insufferable. Without Joel there to leaven the scenes, we find her unwatchable. So we’re not watching.
I hear that season 3 is going to focus on Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). Shrug. We don’t like her, either. This is what happens when you don’t give the audience anyone to root for: They leave. I honestly don’t care what happens to any of these people.
Wheel of Time season 3: Another show we gave up on. My post-surgery eyes had trouble with scenes where everyone was throwing light at each other, but I soldiered on (with diminishing understanding). But the non-CGI scenes weren’t much better. I’ve never read the books, but it’s clear the central figure is Rand al’Thor, about whom I don’t much care. I’m just there for Rosamund Pike, and while I suspect the writers are doing what they can to put her in the center of the story, it doesn’t quite work – it feels ham-handed, and she’s still not in enough scenes to make me happy. Also, it always feels like the battle scenes are rigged to put the good guys in desperate straits, when they’ve already been demonstrated to have the power to win whatever battle they happen to be in. It’s like when a magical hero in a comic book is in a story where things get worse and worse and worse, and then he remembers at the very last minute when all hope is lost that he’s got a “Beat This Particular Bad Guy” spell, and wins. No bueno.
Fortunately, Wheel of Time has been canceled, so I feel no need to finish the season.
The Glass Dome: An expert on child kidnappers returns to her Swedish home town for her step-mother’s funeral, a town where she was kidnapped as a child – and escaped, although the kidnapper was never caught. Now it seems he’s up to his old tricks again after a two-decade absence, as girls disappear and turn up dead. She helps the local police in an ad hoc capacity and the hunt (and psychological drama) is on. It was OK, with lots of travel porn, even though I guessed the ending.
The Åre Murders: A suspended Stockholm police officer returns to her home town just as a teenage girl is murdered. She joins the local cops in a “loan” sort of way, and eventually moves back full time even after her suspension is lifted. There’s a brewing romance with a married colleague, and the first murder is solved by episode four, and second one solved by episode six. That makes me think this is intended to be a running series. It was also OK, with lots of travel porn.
The Bridge: We were looking forward to this one, which is about a murder on the bridge between Denmark and Sweden. (There’s an American remake set on a bridge between the U.S. and Mexico.) We didn’t even know what language it would be in. Turns out the language was English, because it was dubbed! We hate dubbed, so we didn’t watch it.
SQUID GAME: Started watching this from the beginning tonight. We watched season one back in '21, but I wanted to re-watch it before starting season two. One thing led to another, and now there are three seasons.
I've been watching the results of the latest sumo tourname t from Nagoya. I only started following sumo this year. It takes a while to get into, but it's interesting stuff. There's this Ukrainean kid that wrestles as "Aonishiki" who's doing very well for himself.
Superman (2025). I posted a generally positive review under the last video, only to release I couldn't edit it and I had to delete and repost again. The movie has many, many good elements, but it, too, required editing.
Short version: an enteraining mess that should have been a lot better, given that they have the right cast and they understand these characters.
Jimmy Olsen’s connection with Eve Teschmacher stretches credulity even in an unabashed comic-book movie. The nascent Justice League who cannot agree on their name are very entertaining. Terrific, in fact. Metamorpho was one unnecessary character too many. Worse, the role of both undercut Superman and Lois as characters, and shortchanges the conflict with Lex Luthor.
Edit: let Lois do the research that falls into Jimmy's lap, minimizing Olsen's role, and just have Lex use kryptonite in the prison sequence, rather than bringing in a character. Let Superman find his way out of the mess, in time to rendez-vous with Lois and Mr. Terrific.
I just completed the run of The John Larroquette Show, an early 1990s sitcom I never noticed when it was live. This was Larroquette’s first project after Night Court, and NBC wanted to capitalize on his name and multiple Emmy wins, so it changed the name from the original, Crossroads.
The premise was Larroquette played John Hemingway, recovering alcoholic and night manager of the Crossroads bus station in St. Louis. The original opening credits spell it out: John is a happy drunk, with a pile of shot glasses stacked in a pyramid before him, gleefully drinking one after another. He also distracts a bar partron so he can steal his drink, and has some laughs with an old lady as they imbibe together. But soon he’s giving the bartender his watch to pay for another drink, he’s woozy when only halfway through the stack of shot glasses and eventually, literally, falls down drunk. Then he’s down and out in raggedy clothes sharing a beer with a pooch, and the sequence ends with him going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
The first season mined its humor from John's struggle to keep his sobriety and come to terms with the dirt he did during the decades, plural, he spent drunk. Like the baby son he abandoned when he split with his first wife, now all growed up. Like the daughter he never knew he had with some groupie at Woodstock, also now all growed up (played by Mayim Bialik) who tracks him down. Like the scam artist who comes to town and takes his assistant manager's life savings; John fixes that by setting said scam artist to be busted by the police. Like having to defuse a hostage situation (on his birthday!) because a man with a gun wants his mother to have a decent burial — and then saving the gunman's life when he has a heart attack.
Speaking of the assistant manager, the other characters are an appropriate motley crew. Mahalia Sanchez, the assistant manager, is a divorced single mom with three or four kids (it was never clear which) and a tendency to find men who either steal her money or treat her bad in other ways. Dexter Walker, played by Daryl “Chill” Mitchell, the Angry Young (Black) Man, runs the lunch counter. (This was years before the unfortunate motorcycle accident that would leave Mitchell paralyzed from the waist down. He did not, however, let it end his acting career.) Heavy Gene is the janitor. Oscar is the inscrutable homeless and often drunk duffer who lives in a phone booth in the bus station. There’s Carly, The Hooker with a Heart of Gold.
Also, there's Adam Hamilton and Eve Eggers, uniformed St. Louis P.D. cops who hang out at the bus station all the time. Notice the double-barreled puns in their names: ADAM and EVE, HAMilton and EGGers. They are both lazy, cowardly and openly corrupt. I don't mean in a never-paying-for-meals sense (although they never pay for meals and expect not to); I mean in a “Hamilton has a slush fund in the Cayman Islands he calls ‘BRIBE MONEY’ and uses it to pay bribes to get back on The Job after he is suspended” kind of way. After years of watching the copaganda from Dragnet, Adam-12, The Rookies, and even the warts-and-all portrayals from Police Story and Hill Street Blues, it was and is a shock to my system that any show would dare to present cops this way. But it does.
Also, Officer Eggers is a very butch woman, although she’s straight; several episodes deal with her trying to be more feminine, but, frankly, John is more feminine that she was.
The first season was the best, but it didn’t set the world on fire and the show was nearly canceled. Larroquette persuaded the network poobahs to give it another chance by easing up on the mood. Even during Season 1, the credits change to show clips of the different cast members. And in the Season 2 opener, John moves into a nicer, brighter apartment and is instantly smitten with Catherine, the divorcée across the hall who is an ER nurse. Said divorcée is played by Alison La Placa, who was all the rage back then.
Unfortunately, too much of Season 2 is spent on John’s on-again, off-again dalliance with the neurotic, indecisive Catherine, and it also sets up a love triangle between John, Catherine and Carly, no longer The Hooker with a Heart of Gold. In the retooling to make the show brighter, Carly had an epiphany after she rewarded John for defusing that hostage situation with a free night of passion – well, it was his birthday – and decided to become respectable. So she bought the bus station’s bar. And she had an often-unrequited love for John.
In this new vein, the show went from being witty to being silly. The emphasis on John’s sobriety faded. The night shift at the bus station was canceled and all of the characters moved to the afternoon shift, even the homeless drunk living in the phone booth; they had him sober up and run the shoeshine stand. John’s character changed; he used to be the smartest man in the room, one people came to for help with their problems (despite his track record for making them worse), but he devolved into a smug blowhard. He and Catherine get engaged … and both of them are no-shows at the wedding.
For some reason, in Season 3, there’s an episode where there was a power failure that causes a mass escape of animals from the zoo. From that, Officer Eggers falls in love with a stray dog that actually is a wolf. John tells her this and insists it has to go back to the zoo. Eventually, she does so … by slipping the wolf into an enclosure at the PETTING ZOO. AIso, during Season 3, there was a running gag in several episodes about different characters failing to notice an escaped elephant in plain sight.
Also, Catherine loses her job and fears having to move back home to Utah — as if a nurse can’t find a job anytime — and buys the bar from Carly. She fancies herself to be a singer, despite being terrible at it, and she and Carly break up with John, but neither of them can stay away. Catherine decides she wants a baby, with John’s help; Carly proposes to John and he does show up at that wedding … with Catherine declaring in the Season 3 finale she’s pregnant with John’s baby. In the Season 4 premiere, the three of them try living together, until Catherine admits she had a phantom pregnancy and leaves the show.
Season 3 was a chore to get through. I could almost picture the network poohbahs in the writers’ room, telling them, “NO! IT’S NOT STUPID ENOUGH!”
I soldiered on to Season 4, only the find the show was cancelled six episodes in, with six more unaired. It’s a blessing they weren’t; this show had potential and flushed it down the drain.
SQUID GAME: We started watching season two tonight. I was going to wait until we finished season three and moved on to something else before I commented, but Tracy had a comment of her own: "I didn't want to watch this show or become involved with these characters, yet here I am. And I'm kind of pissed about it."
I just completed the run of The John Larroquette Show . . .
Thank you for this, CK. It's the perfect capsule review. You provided enough detail to inform the reader of what the show was about and what was going on; at the same time, you provided your observations and opinions on its quality. This is the kind of thing I enjoy reading, even if I'm not a fan of the particular show.
I was not a fan of this one. In fact, I never saw it. The promos and the blurbs in such outlets as TV Guide was enough to tell me that I wouldn't like it. So, I never gave it a try. I knew about the format change in season two (TV Guide, again), but frankly, I was surprised when you stated that the series actually survived for three seasons and part of a fourth. I didn't think it had made it that far.
I don't care for television series about "loveable losers". I find the perpetuating misery too depressing---and, honestly, annoying. And from what you said, that approach worsened after season one. I'm a firm believer that every sitcom should have (at least) one "voice of reason"---Andy Taylor, on The Andy Griffith Show; Alex, on Taxi; Barney Miller, on Barney Miller; and even the Professor, on Gilligan's Island. Not that these characters can't have an occasional stray moment themselves, but largely, they are the solid characters whom steady the world for all the madcap players. From your description, John Larroquette's character started that way. But once that was lost, if I had watched the show, I could've predicted its downslide.
Thanks for this review, CK. It made for some interesting reading.
ClarkKent_DC > Commander BensonJuly 27, 2025 at 6:50pm
You're very welcome, Commander. I confess this one turned out longer than I had intended but when I write these things -- well, anything -- I let them go to what seems to be their natural length. After all, I'm not writing for a publication with an artificial limit on word cournt.
That said, I still have a responsibility to make it interesting to the reader; I can't (or shouldn't) blather on without ceasing. Thank you for letting me know I hit that sweet spot.
Replies
WONDERFUL WORLD OF TUPPERWARE: A kitschy half-hour 1965 "infomercial" about Tupperware.
We’ve watched a bunch of stuff I haven’t reported:
Andor season 2: Excellent. The original plan was a five-season series, with each season representing one year, and one year closer to the Battle of Yavin. Since Yavin is the beginning of the Rebel Alliance/soon-to-be-restored Republic dating convention, Andor covers years 5-1 BBY. Because of expense, Disney truncated the five-year run to two years, which is disappointing, as I would have avidly watched five years of this. But amazingly, the second season, which gave three episodes each to 4 BBY 4, 3 BBY, 2 BBY and 1BBY, did not feel rushed or squooshed. And the last episode bleeds directly into Rogue One: A Star Wars Tale. Great stuff. Now that I think about it, I might have said all this before. But it's worth a repeat.
Umbrella Academy season 4: Dreadful. How did that manage to turn this funny, quirky, sometimes heartwarming show into such drek? It probably started with destroying their best character (Five). I could go on and on, but it’s too depressing. Oh, also, the ending basically said, “None of this mattered. Move along, Johnny. Nothing to see here.” So if you never watched Umbrella Academy before, you don’t need to start now. (Although the first two seasons are fantastic.)
Secrets We Keep is a murder mystery set in a wealthy enclave in Denmark. It’s basically a critique of the liberal Danish elite, who are depicted as hypocrites when a Filipino au pair (of which there are a lot) turns up dead. The lead character always tries to do the “right” thing, but without fail, always makes the wrong move. Decent, with lots of travel porn.
Ironheart season 1: Gave up in the middle of the second episode. I don’t really want to watch Iron Man without Robert Downey Jr., but gave it a try. But I found none of the people in this story believable or interesting. I learned my lesson with Echo: If something looks this boring by episode two, it’s not going to get better.
Revival: We watched the first episode, and liked the actress who plays the lead character, Melanie Scrofano (Wynonna Earp). She might, however, be slightly too old for the part. When she’s with her college-age sister she looks like the student’s mother; when she’s with her father they look like contemporaries. (It doesn’t help that the actor who plays the father is too young for the part. In the comics, the father was white-haired and at retirement age, and this actor looks 40-ish. Just like Scrofano, who is probably pushing 40 if she’s not there yet.) It wasn’t so compelling that we’ve gone back for episode 2, but we will eventually.
Last of Us season 2: We gave up after episode 2. We love Pedro Pascal in everything (except Wonder Woman 1984, but that was just a bad script), and loved Bella Ramsey in Game of Thrones. And we really enjoyed the first season. But Ellie has always been kind of hard to take as a character, and with season 2 she has become insufferable. Without Joel there to leaven the scenes, we find her unwatchable. So we’re not watching.
I hear that season 3 is going to focus on Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). Shrug. We don’t like her, either. This is what happens when you don’t give the audience anyone to root for: They leave. I honestly don’t care what happens to any of these people.
Wheel of Time season 3: Another show we gave up on. My post-surgery eyes had trouble with scenes where everyone was throwing light at each other, but I soldiered on (with diminishing understanding). But the non-CGI scenes weren’t much better. I’ve never read the books, but it’s clear the central figure is Rand al’Thor, about whom I don’t much care. I’m just there for Rosamund Pike, and while I suspect the writers are doing what they can to put her in the center of the story, it doesn’t quite work – it feels ham-handed, and she’s still not in enough scenes to make me happy. Also, it always feels like the battle scenes are rigged to put the good guys in desperate straits, when they’ve already been demonstrated to have the power to win whatever battle they happen to be in. It’s like when a magical hero in a comic book is in a story where things get worse and worse and worse, and then he remembers at the very last minute when all hope is lost that he’s got a “Beat This Particular Bad Guy” spell, and wins. No bueno.
Fortunately, Wheel of Time has been canceled, so I feel no need to finish the season.
The Glass Dome: An expert on child kidnappers returns to her Swedish home town for her step-mother’s funeral, a town where she was kidnapped as a child – and escaped, although the kidnapper was never caught. Now it seems he’s up to his old tricks again after a two-decade absence, as girls disappear and turn up dead. She helps the local police in an ad hoc capacity and the hunt (and psychological drama) is on. It was OK, with lots of travel porn, even though I guessed the ending.
The Åre Murders: A suspended Stockholm police officer returns to her home town just as a teenage girl is murdered. She joins the local cops in a “loan” sort of way, and eventually moves back full time even after her suspension is lifted. There’s a brewing romance with a married colleague, and the first murder is solved by episode four, and second one solved by episode six. That makes me think this is intended to be a running series. It was also OK, with lots of travel porn.
The Bridge: We were looking forward to this one, which is about a murder on the bridge between Denmark and Sweden. (There’s an American remake set on a bridge between the U.S. and Mexico.) We didn’t even know what language it would be in. Turns out the language was English, because it was dubbed! We hate dubbed, so we didn’t watch it.
We quickly gave up on the American version of The Bridge, but there's also a UK-French version called The Tunnel that I think we finished and enjoyed.
SQUID GAME: Started watching this from the beginning tonight. We watched season one back in '21, but I wanted to re-watch it before starting season two. One thing led to another, and now there are three seasons.
I've been watching the results of the latest sumo tourname t from Nagoya. I only started following sumo this year. It takes a while to get into, but it's interesting stuff. There's this Ukrainean kid that wrestles as "Aonishiki" who's doing very well for himself.
Superman (2025). I posted a generally positive review under the last video, only to release I couldn't edit it and I had to delete and repost again. The movie has many, many good elements, but it, too, required editing.
Short version: an enteraining mess that should have been a lot better, given that they have the right cast and they understand these characters.
Jimmy Olsen’s connection with Eve Teschmacher stretches credulity even in an unabashed comic-book movie. The nascent Justice League who cannot agree on their name are very entertaining. Terrific, in fact. Metamorpho was one unnecessary character too many. Worse, the role of both undercut Superman and Lois as characters, and shortchanges the conflict with Lex Luthor.
Edit: let Lois do the research that falls into Jimmy's lap, minimizing Olsen's role, and just have Lex use kryptonite in the prison sequence, rather than bringing in a character. Let Superman find his way out of the mess, in time to rendez-vous with Lois and Mr. Terrific.
I just completed the run of The John Larroquette Show, an early 1990s sitcom I never noticed when it was live. This was Larroquette’s first project after Night Court, and NBC wanted to capitalize on his name and multiple Emmy wins, so it changed the name from the original, Crossroads.
The premise was Larroquette played John Hemingway, recovering alcoholic and night manager of the Crossroads bus station in St. Louis. The original opening credits spell it out: John is a happy drunk, with a pile of shot glasses stacked in a pyramid before him, gleefully drinking one after another. He also distracts a bar partron so he can steal his drink, and has some laughs with an old lady as they imbibe together. But soon he’s giving the bartender his watch to pay for another drink, he’s woozy when only halfway through the stack of shot glasses and eventually, literally, falls down drunk. Then he’s down and out in raggedy clothes sharing a beer with a pooch, and the sequence ends with him going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
The first season mined its humor from John's struggle to keep his sobriety and come to terms with the dirt he did during the decades, plural, he spent drunk. Like the baby son he abandoned when he split with his first wife, now all growed up. Like the daughter he never knew he had with some groupie at Woodstock, also now all growed up (played by Mayim Bialik) who tracks him down. Like the scam artist who comes to town and takes his assistant manager's life savings; John fixes that by setting said scam artist to be busted by the police. Like having to defuse a hostage situation (on his birthday!) because a man with a gun wants his mother to have a decent burial — and then saving the gunman's life when he has a heart attack.
Speaking of the assistant manager, the other characters are an appropriate motley crew. Mahalia Sanchez, the assistant manager, is a divorced single mom with three or four kids (it was never clear which) and a tendency to find men who either steal her money or treat her bad in other ways. Dexter Walker, played by Daryl “Chill” Mitchell, the Angry Young (Black) Man, runs the lunch counter. (This was years before the unfortunate motorcycle accident that would leave Mitchell paralyzed from the waist down. He did not, however, let it end his acting career.) Heavy Gene is the janitor. Oscar is the inscrutable homeless and often drunk duffer who lives in a phone booth in the bus station. There’s Carly, The Hooker with a Heart of Gold.
Also, there's Adam Hamilton and Eve Eggers, uniformed St. Louis P.D. cops who hang out at the bus station all the time. Notice the double-barreled puns in their names: ADAM and EVE, HAMilton and EGGers. They are both lazy, cowardly and openly corrupt. I don't mean in a never-paying-for-meals sense (although they never pay for meals and expect not to); I mean in a “Hamilton has a slush fund in the Cayman Islands he calls ‘BRIBE MONEY’ and uses it to pay bribes to get back on The Job after he is suspended” kind of way. After years of watching the copaganda from Dragnet, Adam-12, The Rookies, and even the warts-and-all portrayals from Police Story and Hill Street Blues, it was and is a shock to my system that any show would dare to present cops this way. But it does.
Also, Officer Eggers is a very butch woman, although she’s straight; several episodes deal with her trying to be more feminine, but, frankly, John is more feminine that she was.
The first season was the best, but it didn’t set the world on fire and the show was nearly canceled. Larroquette persuaded the network poobahs to give it another chance by easing up on the mood. Even during Season 1, the credits change to show clips of the different cast members. And in the Season 2 opener, John moves into a nicer, brighter apartment and is instantly smitten with Catherine, the divorcée across the hall who is an ER nurse. Said divorcée is played by Alison La Placa, who was all the rage back then.
Unfortunately, too much of Season 2 is spent on John’s on-again, off-again dalliance with the neurotic, indecisive Catherine, and it also sets up a love triangle between John, Catherine and Carly, no longer The Hooker with a Heart of Gold. In the retooling to make the show brighter, Carly had an epiphany after she rewarded John for defusing that hostage situation with a free night of passion – well, it was his birthday – and decided to become respectable. So she bought the bus station’s bar. And she had an often-unrequited love for John.
In this new vein, the show went from being witty to being silly. The emphasis on John’s sobriety faded. The night shift at the bus station was canceled and all of the characters moved to the afternoon shift, even the homeless drunk living in the phone booth; they had him sober up and run the shoeshine stand. John’s character changed; he used to be the smartest man in the room, one people came to for help with their problems (despite his track record for making them worse), but he devolved into a smug blowhard. He and Catherine get engaged … and both of them are no-shows at the wedding.
For some reason, in Season 3, there’s an episode where there was a power failure that causes a mass escape of animals from the zoo. From that, Officer Eggers falls in love with a stray dog that actually is a wolf. John tells her this and insists it has to go back to the zoo. Eventually, she does so … by slipping the wolf into an enclosure at the PETTING ZOO. AIso, during Season 3, there was a running gag in several episodes about different characters failing to notice an escaped elephant in plain sight.
Also, Catherine loses her job and fears having to move back home to Utah — as if a nurse can’t find a job anytime — and buys the bar from Carly. She fancies herself to be a singer, despite being terrible at it, and she and Carly break up with John, but neither of them can stay away. Catherine decides she wants a baby, with John’s help; Carly proposes to John and he does show up at that wedding … with Catherine declaring in the Season 3 finale she’s pregnant with John’s baby. In the Season 4 premiere, the three of them try living together, until Catherine admits she had a phantom pregnancy and leaves the show.
Season 3 was a chore to get through. I could almost picture the network poohbahs in the writers’ room, telling them, “NO! IT’S NOT STUPID ENOUGH!”
I soldiered on to Season 4, only the find the show was cancelled six episodes in, with six more unaired. It’s a blessing they weren’t; this show had potential and flushed it down the drain.
SQUID GAME: We started watching season two tonight. I was going to wait until we finished season three and moved on to something else before I commented, but Tracy had a comment of her own: "I didn't want to watch this show or become involved with these characters, yet here I am. And I'm kind of pissed about it."
I just completed the run of The John Larroquette Show . . .
Thank you for this, CK. It's the perfect capsule review. You provided enough detail to inform the reader of what the show was about and what was going on; at the same time, you provided your observations and opinions on its quality. This is the kind of thing I enjoy reading, even if I'm not a fan of the particular show.
I was not a fan of this one. In fact, I never saw it. The promos and the blurbs in such outlets as TV Guide was enough to tell me that I wouldn't like it. So, I never gave it a try. I knew about the format change in season two (TV Guide, again), but frankly, I was surprised when you stated that the series actually survived for three seasons and part of a fourth. I didn't think it had made it that far.
I don't care for television series about "loveable losers". I find the perpetuating misery too depressing---and, honestly, annoying. And from what you said, that approach worsened after season one. I'm a firm believer that every sitcom should have (at least) one "voice of reason"---Andy Taylor, on The Andy Griffith Show; Alex, on Taxi; Barney Miller, on Barney Miller; and even the Professor, on Gilligan's Island. Not that these characters can't have an occasional stray moment themselves, but largely, they are the solid characters whom steady the world for all the madcap players. From your description, John Larroquette's character started that way. But once that was lost, if I had watched the show, I could've predicted its downslide.
Thanks for this review, CK. It made for some interesting reading.
You're very welcome, Commander. I confess this one turned out longer than I had intended but when I write these things -- well, anything -- I let them go to what seems to be their natural length. After all, I'm not writing for a publication with an artificial limit on word cournt.
That said, I still have a responsibility to make it interesting to the reader; I can't (or shouldn't) blather on without ceasing. Thank you for letting me know I hit that sweet spot.
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