What are you watching right now?

[Cavaliere (moderator emeritus)]

Criminal Minds: "Amplification"

[JD DeLuzio]

We're three-quarters through Licorice Pizza and will finish it this evening. It's well-acted and well-made, but we're not feeling the excessive love that it received. It's.... okay.

[JD DeLuzio]

Also... W. Kamau Bell's We Have to Talk About Bill Cosby, which may be the go-to documentary for now about whether we can separate the artist (and activist) from their life.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

My recent reading, All In Color For a Dime (specifically the chapters which deal with E.C. Segar's Popeye and Walt Kelly's Our Gang), has influenced my TV watching.

OUR GANG: I am not nearly as familiar with the history Hal Roach's Our Gang shorts as I am with, say, The Three Stooges, but there are several good collections available. I decided to start with 1938, when MGM acquired the rights from Roach. Although I have seen some of the pre-Spanky/Alfalfa ones, I know I haven't seen any of the earliest ones from the silent era (beginning in 1922). after further study, I have determined that I may need to proceed backward from here.

POPEYE: Back in 2007-2008 I bought the three sets of Popeye theatrical shorts covering the years 1933-1943 (123 of them), but after that, unaware that the series (of DVDs) continued,  I stopped buying. Now I am watching volume one of "The 1940s" which begins the color era. This collection of 14 cartoons actually picks up in 1943 where the previous volume of black and white films volume left off. 

[Jeff of Earth-J]

THE LOST STOOGES: This is a documentary by Leonard Maltin about "Ted Healy & His Stooges." I remember hearing about this and being interested when it was originally released in 1990, but I didn't do anything about it. I finally bought a copy on DVD in the early 2Ks when Tracy and i were working our way through all of the Three Stooges' shorts. I enjoyed it then, but the completist in me wanted to see more than clips, so I also tracked down copies of their early feature film appearances in Gold Raiders, Meet the Baron, The Captain Hates the Sea, Rockin' in the Rockies and Soup to Nuts (not to mention their later films with curly Joe DeRita), but sometimes their appearances were nothing more than cameos. It was then I discovered that Leonard Maltin's The Lost Stooges isolated just the Stooges' bits from those films. I just watched it for a second time and this time I do know what I'm missing (not much). 

[Captain Comics]

We just finished Stranger Things season 4.

Tonight we'll watch the last episodes of the latest seasons of The Boys and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

We're also watching For All Mankind, Westworld, Wellington Paranormal, Dark Winds and Ms. Marvel.

There may be more. We watch a lot!

Shows we have basically abandoned because there's always something better on:

We're All Dead Already (my wife is tired of zombie shows)

The Walking Dead (see above)

Riverdale

The Flash

Superman & Lois

The Watch

Raised by Wolves (Canceled after season 2, or we'd probably be watching it. Knowing that it ends with no resolution is a disincentive.)

[Richard Willis]

I watched a lot of the Three Stooges years ago. They aren't something I seek out anymore, but I recently watched this 68-minute movie which has an uncredited performance by the original Curly along with Moe and Larry. The movie is a hodge-podge or stars, and their performance is a reasonably long scene. Overall, the movie is pretty good. It's available on Amazon Prime for $2.99.

Hollywood Party (1934) - IMDb

[Jeff of Earth-J]

Yes, Hollywood Party is one of the films excerpted on the Maltin documentary. (I don't need to see the whole thing.) I also have Rare Treasures from the Columbia Pictures Vault on DVD which contains three theatrical cartoons (two of them similar to Hollywood Party), five shorts featuring Shemp Howard (1938-1940), nine shorts starring Shemp Howard (1944-1947), ten shorts starring Joe Besser (1949-1956) and four shorts starring Joe DeRita (1946-1948). 

[Richard Willis]

Speaking of Columbia, the IMDB trivia for Hollywood Party says it was their last work for MGM before leaving for Columbia.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

STRANGER THINGS: We're currently up to episode five of season four. Tracy and I agree that this is the best season so far. It's an entirely new storyline and therefore presents a jumping on point, but a brand new viewer would be hopelessly confused by all the characters' interrelationships. It is, however, a great re-jumping on point. There are three separate-but-related story threads, and lots of new characters. Looking forward to the final five episodes.

On deck is season two of Hulu's Only Murders in the Building and that Obi Kenobi series on Disney+.

[JD DeLuzio]

We're following the final episodes of Better Call Saul, and I'm one-quarter of the way through Performance (1970), which I've long wanted to see.

[Richard Willis]

Captain Comics said:

We just finished Stranger Things season 4.

Tonight we'll watch the last episodes of the latest seasons of The Boys and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

We're also watching For All Mankind, Westworld, Wellington Paranormal, Dark Winds and Ms. Marvel.

I saved the new seasons of The Boys and Stranger Things until I had all the episodes to binge (soon). Just finished Ms Marvel, which was great. I've been watching Better Call Saul and Evil as soon as new episodes arrive. I'm very far behind on all the Star Trek shows. I'm done with all the Star Wars shows. I'm starting to watch the new season of The Orville, which continues to be very good, and What We Do in the Shadows. I'm still watching the CW shows, though the Riverdale shows tend to accumulate. Looking forward to the return of Stargirl and the debut of Sandman and She-Hulk.

Since I last remarked on it, I realized two things about Dark Winds. (1) This season and next are only six episodes each and (2) there were three one-hour adapted TV episodes about Leaphorn and Chee in 2002 on PBS. All of these, past and current, were adapted from a series of books by Tony Hillerman, and are very well done

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hillerman#Joe_Leaphorn_and_Jim_C...

He wrote eighteen books in this series. His daughter, Anne Hillerman, has written another seven since. her father's death

[Captain Comics]

My wife is a big Hillerman fan, which is why we're watching Dark Winds. The last of the first season has dropped, so we'll finish it soon. I assumed that the seasons were six episodes each because each season would cover one book. Yes? No?

We're also watch Shadows, which I failed to mention earlier.

And we're about halfway through The Umbrella Academy season 3.We have now watched farther into the story on TV than I've read in the comics. (This is true of The Boys as well.)