cherold

What is wrong with the critics? This new series from Tina Fey is every bit as funny as 30 Rock. Ted Danson is his usual entertaining self and Holly Hunter is terrific as his political frenemy. I had doubts about this for maybe the first 5 minutes of the first episode but 3 episodes in my girlfriend and I absolutely love it.

The below paragraph is one of the critic quotes metacritic used. Assume every statement as its opposite and you've got a perfect description of this peculiar series: Creator Alena Smith has thought the world out well, and the show feels grounded in its own reality. It doesn't overdo the ironic modernity, instead sprinkling a handful of mild swear words and slang terms into each episode in a way that doesn't take the viewer out of the story.

Seasons 1 and 2 were lots of fun; a 70/30 comedy/horror mix that was imaginative and nuts, with Bruce Campbell once again breezy fun as ash. In season 3 they flipped the ratio, offering up less and less comedy in favor of increasingly joyless horror and tedious, repetitive action. By the final episodes I was skipping through just to find out how it all ended. Apparently ratings really dropped this season, so I'm calling it an unforced error. You can't create a comedy show and then go full horror without expecting to lose some fans. Even if the series hadn't been cancelled I was going to give up on it.

Roseanne put some liberals in a quandary, because they thought the series was funny but didn't want to watch a show helmed by a rabid conspiracy theorist who believes lizard men rule the world. So I was relieved when I watched the first episode of the reboot and though, meh. As with the original series, Roseanne, who can't act and isn't all that funny, is supported by a talented cast to make up for her deficiencies. Unfortunately, only Goodman manages to capture what made the original series so good; everything he says is funny or though-provoking, but even other hugely talented people like Laurie Metcalf and Sara Gilbert don't seem to be able to recapture their characters. Perhaps they're just out of practice. The writing is weak. The back and forth between Jackie and Roseanne is shrill and uncomfortable but not actually funny. Roseanne is very old-school, which tends to put me off. The only really retro old-school series I watch is One Day at a Time, which is much funnier, and even though I don't care for it as much as modern sitcoms like Kimmie Schmidt and Corporate. It's not as bad as the final years of Roseanne, but it's not nearly good enough for me to bother with.

My initial feeling through the first months of Superstore was that it was cute and watchable but nothing special. But as the series continued it became increasingly funny. It's generally sweet but with an edge, and it's a show that makes a serious attempt at diversity that reaches in all directions, giving us a gay asian for progressives and a sweet hard-core Christian for those who feel that constituency is underepresented in Hollywood. And even the characters that seemed the most cartoonish at first have been given increasing depth without losing the basic characteristics they began with. I like this series more with each passing year. And I don't say that about a lot of shows.

This first episode has the same grim humorlessness that turned me off of True Detective. It's very focused on atmosphere but not so focused on character, at least to start. Even Teddy Roosevelt just comes across as part **** group of serious men being serious about a serious thing. I'm also not big on serial killer stuff.

There are a number of good things about The Gifted. It does a good job of portraying a war between two sides and showing how this battle toxifies as each side digs in, increasingly convinced they have no choice but all-out war. The cast is solid. The story arc is fairly interesting. And I love the triplets that show up near the end of the season. But having watched season 1, I don't really see myself watching season 2. Because somehow the series never quite reaches that next level where it becomes must-watch. It's consistently fine and pretty good at keeping you watching from one episode to the next, but with better series like Legion in this world, it just doesn't do *quite* enough for me.

I never heard of the youtube channel Miranda Sings until I read reviews of this series, and having been neither able to make it through the pilot nor through any of the several videos I checked out, I can say this series isn't for me. But the lead does have some talent playing a no-talent - the opening song in the pilot is cleverly bad - so I can see where this might really appeal to some people.

This absolutely riveting drama starts with a woman inexplicably attacking a stranger on the beach. The series does a wonderful job of keeping viewers guessing, with a twisty story that constantly surprises but holds together all the way to the end. Jessica Biel and Bill Pullman are both terrific as broken people trying to find a way out.

This enjoyable dramedy focusses on an autistic teenager and his family. Sam is an interesting, quirky character who you feel for even though he's not especially likable. The cast is uniformly excellent, but the standout is neither the lead nor the brilliant Jennifer Jason Leigh as the mom, but rather Brigette Lundy-Paine as the sister. Maybe it's just the short hair, but to me she's like a more kick-ass version of Angela Chase from My So-Called Life. I find her plight as the talented student in the shadow of the problem sibling extra compelling because of how rarely she gives in to self-pity. I feel it would be a better series if it was more her series than Sam's.

Has potential, was generally amusing, but the first episode didn't grab me in the way a comedy needs to grab me in a world with truly brilliant comedies like Corporate and Kimmy Schmidt.

Just finished season one of Altered Carbon. While I found it flawed and often confusing, I also found it riveting, watching the season in just about a week. The series takes place in a future where everyone's brain is recorded so that if you die the recording can be housed in a new body (called a sleeve). A revolutionary, kept in cold storage for a couple of centuries, is resleeved and enlisted by a billionaire to investigate that billionaire's murder in a previous sleeve. The series has a solid noir feel, although the sex and violence are so pervasive that it is more Mickey Spillane than Raymond Chandler. This is certainly more inspired by Blade Runner than Maltese Falcon, but Blade Runner is a good source for inspiration. (Anyone interested in more classic noir should check out the Hugh Laurie series Chance. The action scenes are solid, the nudity is frequent and generally gratuitous, and the whole thing has an epic, over-the-top feel that makes it hard to stop watching. The basic underlying premise does not, by the way, make a lot of sense. If you were born in your body, and your brain was being backed up, you still wouldn't want to die, because a backup is not you (though once you've died once it would be different. Same issue for the religious folks who think being resleeved kills your soul; if there's a soul, the chip is not recording it. Basically, which the series never says it, most of these people aren't people, they are computer simulations of people. Which is interesting, but it's weird no one in the series seems aware of something so obvious.

I don't understand why this series didn't get more love. Ricci was excellent as Zelda. Yes, too old, but she's one of those people who generally looks younger than her age, so she gets away with it. The rest of the cast is also quite good and the period detail is first rate. I wish the series had been renewed; it would have been interesting to see Zelda's descent into madness.

For those few people who appreciated the brilliant, short-lived corporate sitcom Better Off Ted, here's another chance to get your fix of searing, hilarious shots at the corporate world. This series is brilliant from the first scene of the first episode, which pins down the insanity of corporate rules. It is even more unforgiving than Better Off Ted, which at least offered a couple of likable characters. In Corporate, the closest thing to a moral center is a beaten-down drone who spends episode 2 creating a PowerPoint promoting war crimes. (Everyone, in fact, is pretty beaten down outside of the hilariously psychopathic CEO. I think Better Off Ted was a network series, so I'm hoping Corporate might survive longer on Comedy Central, which can probably take lower ratings. Corporate satire of this sort has, after all, a niche audience. So please give this a chance so it stays on the air. Because it is savage and brilliant and hilarious.

I watched the first episode of this. It's an anthology, so it's hard to know how the other episodes compare, but I could not get into this one. It had a vaguely interesting start, but the low-key, improvisational feel made it a little too close to real life to be all that interesting. I just didn't care about these people or their problems, and didn't make it to the end of the episode. Seems like something some people might really like, but definitely not good for me.

Based on the pilot, Please Like Me falls in the depressing comedy genre along with series like Louis. It's kind of funny sometimes, but everyone is low-key and uncomfortable, and it makes me feel trapped. The performances have a certain casual realism to them, but the only performance I actually enjoyed was the son's caustic second wife. She gave about two minutes of bright, sharp humor that was a relief. I don't plan to watch any more of this one.

This is a really funny show that seems to be making some effort at portraying the complexities of college life, as protagonist Zoey stumbles around, clumsily facing moral and personal dilemmas. The stories deal with drugs and sex in a way that's not preachy although also rather cautious. Her friends are a likable bunch, particularly the very funny twins (who also sing the theme song), whose toughness occasionally pops out through their adorable cuteness. This is not, perhaps, a normal person's college life. Zoey is prettier than most, and the series doesn't pretend she's not, and Zoey exists in that world of pretty, popular people that some of us didn't see a lot of. But the likable characters are getting fleshed out and the series does a good job of hovering between a John Hughes movie and an after-school special that doesn't moralize. The series has a different feel from Black-ish, but it's about the equivalent in terms of funniness. I'd definitely recommend this one.

This series is about a reluctant superhero trying to balance family life and heroics. Black Lightning is torn between duty to himself and his family and duty to the greater good. It's an easy decision to make when it's not yours, but how many of us, even with super powers, would risk our lives daily? The angst is nicely balanced with the action. Meanwhile, one daughter has super powers of her own, and has none of her dad's angst (so far). The series is successful both as a family drama and as a superhero movie. So far it's one of my favorites of the superhero genre (although it's no Legion). You'll see a bunch of really harsh reviews here that mention that there's a white cop who pulls over the black protagonist early on for no good reason. Some people are outraged about the portrayal of this even though it's well documented that cops pull over black drivers more often than white people. This is a series mainly focused on a vicious black gang, with the black superhero also being thwarted by the nice but ineffectual black cop, so if someone is obsessing over the five-minute scene with the white cop then they have an agenda. And that agenda is to slap down any series that even hints that black people might not always be treated quite as nicely as white people in America. They *should* be outraged that the cops pull over black drivers more than white ones, but no, they're just upset that a show takes a couple of minutes to point the fact out. Unfortunately these troglodytes are dragging the user score way down. Assume that if no Trump voters or **** trolls were posting reviews that the score would be 8 or 9.

This series is about a funeral home that also battles demons. It's referred to as the "family business" but they don't seem to actually bill anyone for all that work, so it appears to be more of a family hobby. I found the pilot underwhelming, but there were a couple of interesting moments that made me decide to check out episode 2. I made it half way through that one. The series is a mix of supernatural stuff and family drama, and none of the family drama stuff is that interesting. The family patriarch is sort of interesting, but his son is bland and the whole thing with working out the relationship with his daughter is tedious. There's a demonic nemesis who's quite good, but he's not on nearly enough to carry the show. Basically, boring with the occasional interesting moment.

While this series has been inexplicably compared with Stranger Things, to me it seems more like an attempt at something like Fortitude. But whereas Fortitude's first season was notable for its instantly intriguing story and fascinating characters, Dark is a plodding show with uninteresting people doing uninteresting things. After reading reviews that made it sound interesting I watched the pilot, which was very slow. Then I read a little about it on wikipedia and discovered that it's got this weird sci-fi story that is barely hinted out in the first episode. I made it through half of the tedious second episode - in which there's still little indication that anything interesting is coming, and then I just couldn't take any more of it and stopped. The other series you could compare this to is The OA, which was also, more justifiably compared to Stranger Things. But at least The OA had an intriguing start that hid how terrible the series would ultimately become. Dark seems to go out of its way to keep you from knowing there will every be anything interesting or entertaining presented to the audience.

I am perplexed by the negative response to this series, which I find very funny. It's one of those series with a bunch of wacky people being wacky, with a Ted Baxterish captain, a Russian gambler who runs constant side bets on every drama, a stripper, and two flight attendants, one witty, one neurotic, and an English guy the neurotic one may or may not wind up dating. Plus guest stars that includes a corpse. I almost didn't watch this because of all the negative reviews, and probably did so only because there was a short-lived TV series in an airport years ago that I really liked. I should ignore critics, but there's just so much TV it's hard to check out everything. Anyway, ignore the critics. At least watch the trailer on youtube, which convinced me to give the series a chance. Seriously, it's very funny.

There are some shows you know you'll love in the first five minutes, and some you know you'll hate, and Runaways falls into the second category. From the first episode, there was this slow, aimless feel to it, reinforced as it went along by the introduction of a lot of bland characters one after the other. In spite of the Marvel connection, the feel was more teen drama than fantasy, which made more sense once I learned it was from the people who did the OC. Fans of that show, I take it, are the target audience, rather than people who want an exciting action/fantasy series like Legion or The Gifted. If you want some teen drama threaded with a superhero theme, you're welcome to it, but I certainly won't watch any more of this tedious thing.

I recently learned that the guy who rebooted Doctor Who (Russel T. Davies) and the guy who was the best Doctor Who (Christopher Eccleston) had, before Doctor Who made a miniseries in which a guy claims he's the second coming of Jesus Christ. I was excited to hear that, tracked it down, and ... barely made it through the first half. It's actually pretty boring. There's some very good acting from Eccleston, Lesley Sharp as a friend, and Mark Benton as a creepy personals date, but the series is incredibly talky and slow moving. It's a very sincere attempt to consider what would happen if Jesus made a reappearance, but not a very entertaining one. Yet the reviews were very favorable. I have a theory that there is something in people that simply adds extra significance to anything that features God or the Devil, which is my only explanation for a sappy movie like Song of Bernadette getting an Oscar nomination for best picture or the slow-moving The Exorcist becoming a huge commercial hit. I am an atheist who doesn't find God and the Devil inherently interesting. There are movies that use Christian folklore that I really like, such as Bedazzled or Come to the Stable, but I don't have the visceral reaction to religion that others seem to have. Eccleston is a great actor. Davies is a great screenwriter. But this did nothing for me.

Amy Sherman-Palladino has had difficulty moving beyond her wonderful Gilmore Girls. Her attempts at shows no like Gilmore were poor, her terrific Gilmore Girls clone Bunheads failed, and she didn't really have another hit until she made a bit more Gilmore Girls. But Sherman-Palladino is no one-trick pony, and with Mrs. Maisel she has succeeded in making a successful show about a Jewish comic who, while as witty as a Gilmore, is a distinct character in her own right. And instead of some cute teen to bounce things off of, Mrs. Maisels gets a surly manager, hilarious played by Alex Borstein, who deserves an Emmy. It's a great series, funny and engaging with lovely period atmosphere. I'd say it's every bit as good as Gilmore and Bunheads, and my girlfriend, who wasn't a Gilmore fan but loves this, would say it's much better. Fingers crossed it continues for many years.

I tried to watch the movie She's Gotta Have It years ago and gave up on it, but I still thought I'd give the TV series a chance. After all, Spike has learned a few things since then. But you can't tell from the pilot, which is pretty close to inept. There is a sledgehammer quality to what I saw (maybe 15 minutes). The lead character complains about characters hitting on her and then there's a pretty endless series of people talking to the camera. Everything is blunt and obvious. It's hard to understand how the guy who made Summer of Sam and Do the Right Thing can make something so awful. But he has.

Just saw the pilot. Some reviews lead me to expect a show that was dour and humorless in its offstage moments, but it's actually a sharp, witty series onstage and off, with a terrific performance by Melissa Leo as Goldie. And while yes, it reminds me of Vinyl, it's not nearly as over-the-top in presentation and while I was in high school back then and only remember how suburban high schoolers dressed, it's certainly true to the look of early 70s movies.

Season 1 was terrific. Season 2 became less and less interesting, and more and more convoluted, as it progressed. I had totally lost interest by the end. Much of the problem was the hallucinogenic craziness of the first season was gone, so you were just stuck with a pretty dumb revenge & betrayal tale.

This show has an interesting premise, and after only one episode I can't really predict how well it will handle that premise, but I found the first episode too slow and soggy to continue. It's hard to say what this series is. I've seen it described as comedy/drama/horror/satire, but that gives the impression of a lot more punch than this show has. There are moments that I suppose are mildly comedic, although not especially funny. It's got elements of a political drama, but not an involving one. Horror would suggest some element of suspense or chills, which were absent. Satire would require some bite, but the series seems to want to be a political show without politics. We don't know what the budget fight is about, the two people who will clearly have sex eventually do some mild political sparring that carefully avoids any significant conflict, and the approach is very much the both-sides-are-recalcitrant trope that doesn't jibe with the current reality of the anti-compromise Tea Party situation of the real world. (The series actually makes the Republicans seem slightly more reasonable, since their senator is just a drunk who wants to cut a deal while the other side's senator is quite Machiavellian; was this produced by a Republican or just by someone bending over backwards to even things out?). At some point the series may explain the invaders' purpose and why they like that Cars song so much, but based on the first episode, I don't expect the explanations to be compelling.

The first season was so much fun, but I thought, this will never survive; it's just not what people watch. So I was shocked when it got a second season. And that second season was even funnier than the first. And I thought, this amazing show is a hit after all, hurray. And now I learn it was canceled. Explains why the second season finale was so neatly wrapped up. It's nice they gave us that, at least.

Wow, this is a crazy series. The pilot is an oddity, in that it alternates crazy scenes of hyper-violence and crazy characters with the quiet tale of a world-weary preacher with a violent past trying to be good. Both elements are solid but feel a bit disconnected, and I'm still not sure how they're going to mesh, but the series is still terrifically entertaining. I do want to comment on the user review of Phil_T_123. I haven't read the original, so I can't compare the two. But Phil suggests that this is going to be a preacher-helps-the-town show. This seems like a bizarre misreading, since near the end something horrific happens which suggests the preacher's power is not benign at all. I will be surprised if Phil is right; to me, it seems the makers have something darker in mind, even if they don't follow the original's trajectory..

Considering it's created by Hurwitz and has gotten rave reviews, I found the pilot episode disappointing. The jumping in and out of character is clever and I liked the way the show poked fun at doing standup in series, I appreciated the attempt to find alternative ways to move through layers of time, there was a great bit by a sharky agent who just wants to "be best friends" and the opening ad parody was pretty amusing. The cast is first rate. But overall, I just didn't laugh that much, and the show felt like it was trying to hard to be clever but was willing to do so at the expense of making the story (such as it was) work. Overall, it felt jumpy and episodic and a bit uncomfortable. It wasn't bad, but it didn't make me want to watch any more episodes.

There were some exciting moments in the first episode of this series. Unfortunately, they were all in the trailer for the rest of the season. That first episode was so slow, so static, so uninvolving, yet the trailer promises intrigue, mystery, betrayal, danger. But I don't believe it. Nothing this boring is going to reach that level of melodrama later on. I suspect every interesting moment from the show is in that trailer. One episode was quite enough.

I'm still enjoying this show a lot, but it has gotten a bit dumber this year. Many things don't make a lot of sense, like the war over Murphy (the reward is vague and intangible) or little things like the giant cheese (if you've ever played Katamari Damacy, you know what happens when things stick to a ball). I also feel a little sorry for the actress who was suddenly turned into a feral girl in a stripper costume, although that is fun; I hope they progress her storyline though. Still very silly and entertaining, I just wish they were maybe 20% less idiotic. There is a line.

I made it through the pilot, but just barely. The dialogue is atrocious; the writers were seemingly determined to get all the backstory taken care of in the first episode, leaving little room for anything but exposition. The characters are generic (outside of Wynona's sister, who is the one bright spot). The premise isn't especially intriguing, and there was little in the way of excitement.

When I saw Judd Apatow was working on this I assumed it was some sort of comedy, but based on my not laughing once during the first episode I guess it's not. Instead, it's just this rather bland drama about a couple of not particularly interesting people. Like a lot of TV shows and Apatow productions, attractive women and unaccountably attracted to unattractive guys. The attractive female lead is dating an unattractive, unpleasant junkie, while the Woody-Allen-level guy is dating with a much more attractive woman, then is inexplicably roped into a threesome, and will eventually date the more attractive female lead. Someone else in the user comments said, well maybe women aren't that shallow and his charm makes up for it. And yes, women are definitely more picky about looks than men (although good-looking men really do well with women, so let's not claim women are entirely personality driven), but the thing is, the guy, while he seems fairly nice, is neither that charming nor that interesting. So I think we have to consider this more representative of TV logic than real life logic. Still, I've loved a lot of average-guy-gets-hot-gal series (Flying Blind, Big Bang Theory) so that wouldn't be a problem if the series were actually funny or interesting. But it's not.

There were only 6 episodes of Police Squad! Now there are more, even if the title and cast are different. If you want the rat-a-tat-tat of silly jokes, this is your show.

The pilot for this show was promising. It seemed like a pretty good premise, in spite of stuff that didn't make much sense like bringing along dangerous criminals (still waiting for an explanation of that). But the second episode was quite dull, and the special effects were pretty bad, even for television, so I think I'm done.

First off, I like the idea of bringing back the original cast of a movie decades later and having them play slightly younger versions of their original characters. It's really more interesting than doing the obvious and bringing them back to play aged versions of their original characters. But the series - or at least the first episode, which is all I saw - didn't do anything with it. The actors play the characters they played just the way they played them all those years ago, without a wink. Which feels like a missed opportunity. Still, that wouldn't be a problem if the series was funny. But I didn't laugh once. Some of the jokes may rely on your having seen the movie enough times to be intimately familiar with it - I liked it a lot when I saw it, but that was a long time ago - but even then, *something* should have been funny. Still, humor is down to individual taste; a lot of people seem to think this is funny. I'm just not one of those people.

The reviews I read of Baskets described it as interesting but not especially funny. Weirdly enough, I found it much funnier than Master of None, which critics claimed was wildly funny. So go figure. It's a downbeat, rather cynical show, and with all the really great comedies out there nowadays, like Kimmie Schmidt, I doubt I'll watch any more of this one. But it's pretty good, overall.

The Colony is, I assume going for a slow build. The first episode moved slowly, offering little information as it followed it's bland leads. The only bright moments come courtesy of that guy who used to be on House, whose cheerful approach to collaboration suggests that it's a lot more fun to be the bad guy. Perhaps this is all building to something, but life is short and I don't plan to watch any more episodes.

Some dumb comedies are smart in their dumbness, and some are just idiotic and cheap, and Idiotsitter falls in the latter category. I don't know what show the critics were watching, but it must have been a different Idiotsitter. I gave up on this one halfway through..