Sinfish

Lara Croft confronts her double daddy issues while unraveling ancient mysteries. That is the problem of course. The series wants her to be competent and do adventuring, but wants to explore her trauma simultaneously. This is not an easy thing to do, and ultimately it isn't carried off with grace. Plus, you're adding realism but still using video game logic. In the first episode her and her substitute daddy are confronted by 4 armed gunmen who have the drop on them and demand they return the artifact they just stole. This isn't life or death, but Daddy #2 decides to fight to the death while armed with a knife and his protege Lara Croft is armed with her fists. It's senseless and it's also made clear that Lara Croft and Daddy #2 are the criminals here. Look, we know Indiana Jones has daddy issues but they're revealed organically in the course of the adventure. Imagine if Indiana Jones made the daddy issues the precipitating focal moment of Indiana Jones life and remove all the charm and wit and you get this rendition of Lara Croft. Worse, it seems pointless to set it after her initial adventures but reset her progress in working through her issues to year one. They should have just rebooted the franchise if they wanted to give her a teenager's psychology. Also because this is set after the modem prequel games you get treated to what amounts to a recap episode that suffers all the usual problems of recaps as the first episode. She has an entire downward spiral to rock bottom and reboot in the span of about 15 minutes. It's just an attempt at the aforementioned pathos they want to hit, but we can't possibly care because it's the first episode and she's literally a rich girl with a mansion and as far as we can tell, her dead father figures basically took enormous risks and deserved to die while also giving her terrible advice. There's also a complete disregard for physics or common sense, such as jumping through the air with no rotational motion, then being thrown a shotgun, catching it in midair, which she then extends her arm and the gun. This should slow her nonexistent rotation, but instead she somehow spins 360 degrees and then she draws her arm back in to shoot which somehow completely stops her rotation, and then she aims and shoots towards the camera. Alrighty then. There's also sidekicks from the games that are cardboard cutouts, including a tech guy who can magically do anything asked in a couple of seconds without any sensible effort. It's the laziest rendition of the tech guy trope and we just don't need this.

Sunny is ostensibly about a robot, but the robot's entire life revolves around it's forced love for the main character, who is a deeply rude and unpleasant person with no friends. Because it's best not to dwell on this, there is a railroaded plot where the Yakuza are involved trying to get Sunny's secrets so they can create murderous robots, but this not only requires you to ignore common sense, but also results in you realizing this was definitely written by a white person who **** Japan without actually understanding it at any level because the Yakuza are a complete caricature and the show insists on them being able to flagrantly ignore the police. But yeah, because Japan is the setting, you get a lot of Japanese flavor, but it's clearly from an external eye **** it. This was embarrassing enough 30 years ago, but in today's world where literally anyone has instant access to millions of hours of Japanese media, it's incredibly lazy. By far the most interesting character is the main character's husband, but not only are we are left wondering why he married the garbage bag that is the protagonist, episode 1 establishes he is very likely dead, and so everything we see about him is through flashback or similar narrative vehicles. The robot character is also just plain too stupid and childlike to really ask hard questions about humans creating intelligent robots, and unfortunately so is the show. It's not terribly bad television in the end, but it sure isn't worth watching with the plethora of better options.

Worst TV I've seen this year. Insultingly obvious theme trying to mask how little there is to it with magical realism. What if to display the problems women face in the world, metaphors are real? That's the entire theme of the show, and the horse is dead after the first half of the first episode. Casually insults much better actual authors for no apparent reason, and has whole conversations between black women who drop the race card every three sentences despite ostensibly being about feminism. It is hard to imagine how obnoxious the writer of this episode is, but I can safely guess they've made an entire career out of complaining about racism. Most TV explicitly written for children is deeper than this puddle of a show.