I saw a trailer for this show, assumed it would be about lab-grown animal meat, made a mental note to watch it and then forgot to watch it. Only the next day did I learn it was a hoax documentary! And a very clever one, I think. If I’d watched it live where would the penny have dropped for me? Hopefully at the “pain is subjective” part with the blatantly evil CEO. After that things start to get so over the top it’s obvious it’s a satire but on the other hand the past few years have felt like a satire as well.
Anyway, right now in Britain the cost of living crisis is still going on, but all the newspapers seem to care about is Nigel Farage’s bank account. Maybe we should just eat him.
2022 was the worst year of my life. Sorry. Coming off my tablets caused an apocalyptic mental breakdown and getting back on them took months. Couldn’t work, couldn’t function. For three months all I was able to do was sit around and watch TV.
Luckily there was some good TV to watch. Lemme pay a little tribute to it now.
Obi-Wan Kenobi
I had been looking forward to seeing the missing bits of Obi-Wan’s story on screen for over a decade. God, I wish I’d been better when it finally, finally came to me. I know the show was a little clunky in plot and dialogue but I loved it, I loved seeing other less-celebrated characters like Owen and Beru as well and seeing them gain more layers (and some badass lines.) And then Qui-Gon at the end to top it all off. DAMN that was a moment.
*
The Orville
I was really bad when I started watching this but yet I have nothing but good memories of actually watching it, if that makes sense. When I first had a look at it I wasn’t impressed with the pilot episode, I thought it was dull and unfunny, but then I stumbled across episode 8 of the first season, the one where the kids have to survive on the cannibal planet, and I was like “This is the same show? Holy crap!” So now I’m a fan.
Still cannot BELIEVE Seth MacFarlene of all people created this.
*
Ms Marvel
This show was SO GOOD. I’m so glad Kamala Khan got an adaption that was respectful of her and her fannish personality! I suppose her powers have changed slightly, I wouldn’t have done that but whatever, I can overlook it. It was such a colourful and sweet show AND it had a lot of things to say.
*
My Name Is Earl
Obviously this isn’t a new show, it’s an older one, but I’d never watched the whole thing from the beginning. It was excellent right up until season three, where it took a sudden and drastic nosedive. (This was around the time of the writers’ strike, if I remember rightly.) It probably could have gotten back on its feet after that but nope, it was cancelled on a cliffhanger after season four. Sigh.
*
Raising Hope
However! The My Name is Earl story is sort-of resolved in the first episode of Raising Hope, made by the same people, so I watched that too. I’m glad I did, it’s a very silly show but very sweet and wholesome. (And it got to end without a cliffhanger, hooray.)
*
The Umbrella Academy season 3
A show about the end of the world that somehow still managed to cheer me up in my worst days. It deserves props just for handling Elliot Page’s transition as well as it did, actually… just being totally chill about it and not even making it a particularly big deal, which is totally in-character for everyone. Awful selfish people but come through when it counts! Love those guys.
Remember how I made that post a week or so about getting to visit the Millennium Dome? I mentioned how there was a children’s TV show to go with one attraction, but it was mostly lost. Well, I found the first three episodes!
Presenting The Timekeepers of the Millennium! It used a combination of live-action, puppetry and CGI to take kids on a irreverent ride through British history. Well, sort of. Kids of the time probably wouldn’t have actually learned a damn thing from it, I know I didn’t, but who cares! They built a park inside a doooooome!
Well, regardless of the quality of the actual Dome, this show isn’t all that bad. The two main muppets are charming enough and all the actors playing historical figures seem to be having fun at least. Also let’s face it, the demographic for this was definitely “tweenagers who would pester their parents into taking them to the Dome so they could meet the characters” and no-one else. There was indeed a Cogs and Sprinx running round the Millennium Dome back in the day!
(no using that image please.)
RIP Timekeepers! I found out recently that their ball-pit-like Dome attraction was about the only one in the building not sponsored by some evil mega-corporation so they got that going for them too.
Me, a person who’s just lived through a pandemic, seeing the Sweet Tooth poster: Oh this looks so cute! Kinda Tim Burton-esque I guess, maybe wholesome
Me, a person who’s just lived through a pandemic, actually watching Sweet Tooth: OH OKAY NEVER MIND.
…..
Sweet Tooth is very good! But wholesome it is not. It’s horrifying, really, in that it poses the question “Would the average person accept the killing of an unwanted child if it meant they themselves got to live?” and answers it with a depressingly firm “yes.” It also presents a very bleak view of how people might act in the wake of a truly deadly pandemic, which obviously hits much closer to home now than it would’ve done when the original Sweet Tooth comic was released in 2013. Yeesh.
But APART from the deaths and burnings and plagues and executions and experimentations and abuses it does have a geniunely sweet found-family story at its core, which was lovely to see. It takes the very well-tested plot of “hard bitten survivor must escort special child through the apocalypse” and sure it’s super cliche but I loved it, Nonso Anozie and Christian Convery bounce off each other so well.
Also as a forever fan of The Last Man on Earth I was so happy to see Will Forte in this, and him really getting to stretch his acting chops too. Dude is so underrated as a serious actor, I swear.
Not the original one with *spits* Ricky Gervais, the much better and as it turns out GENIUNELY HEARTWARMING one with Steve Carrell and co. I didn’t expect to love it but I did! Really good fun, really hilarious and really sweet at the end.
And now I know where all the memes come from! My god this show apparently barely had a line that wasn’t meme’d! “Dwight, you ignorant slut?” The Office. “Yeah, I have questions, number one, how dare you?” The Office. “Looks into the camera like I’m on The Office?” THE OFFICE.
It is the WILDEST, DUMBEST, WORST show ever and I regret so much I didn’t watch it when it first came out. It’s the most so-bad-its-good fun I’ve had watching TV in ages, if I can ignore the fact that a lot of the “storylines” (trust me, the quotation marks are needed) are crassly ripped from the headlines half the time. Lemme recap-
Here are, in no order, (some of) the most ridiculous things that have happened during the episodes I’ve watched:
-A man has a hyper-rare medical condition which makes him appear dead. He ends up on an actual autopsy table (ick) and upon waking up scares the autopsy guy so much he passes out and cuts himself with the chest-cutter-open tool. When the emergency services turn up they VERY REASONABLY suggest that the guy wear a medical alert bracelet to stop anyone cutting him up or burying him. He says no because he “likes to feel alive” or something. Well, screw the next autopsy guy who slices himself open then.
-Four flashbacks, one after the other and only barely in coherent order, reveal that a man abused his wife into suicide but she once shot a bullet into the tree she hung herself from. Man decides to blow up the tree (??) and the bullet explodes out and kills him.
-Kenneth Choi gets in a car accident and ends up with a spike in his head. He lives! He’s put in a induced coma and everyone very briefly worries. His flaky girlfriend gets a stern lecture about how she’ll have to be there for him if he survives. He lives again! His so called friends get him a “welcome back” cake shaped like his face with a spike through it.
They look all smiley and attractive (all of the unattactive folks on the show are obviously murderers or victims) but these are awwwwwwful people.
-There is what appears at one point to be an actual zombie?
-There’s a guy called Buck who’s a poorly drawn sex addict with very few other characteristics. His name rhymes with “fuck.” He’s insufferable.
-Abby the lonely 911 operator who narrates the show and Buck find themselves in a situation where they have to rescue a small child from a swimming pool that a live power cable somehow fell into. Aw an incarnation of my beloved old whale floatie, bought from America during a holiday, has a cameo as “Thing Buck thinks he can jump on to get through the ELECTROCUTED POOL”
My whale friend was named Kyle. I’m so sorry Kyle. Also guess I’m not going in one of those small personal swimming pools which seem to be a staple of American culture again!
-Abby goes on a date with Buck and he immediately almost chokes to death on his food. I think the universe wants him dead, as do I.
-A lift plummets! The mother and son inside don’t die on impact but they do get trapped as water slowly rises around them. I forgot how that happened but Los Angeles apparently is up there with the Death Star in terms of health and safety rules. I’m never going in a lift again either.
-Buck attempts to rescue a guy from a dangling rollercoaster, and fails as the guy falls dramatically to his death. He angsts for about an episode but later it turns out the guy was suicidal anyway and this…fixes things? What?
-A man gets a massive live tapeworm removed from, ur, his rectum. (Don’t watch this show while eating.) I feel so sorry for the poor actor whose agent called him up with, “Would you like to play ‘Man Who Has Massive Live Tapeworm In His Rectum?'” I wonder if he asked any follow-up questions.
I hear there’s several more seasons of this show and a spin-off. Oh god.
I am so darkly amused by the fact that none of the Stand trailers so far have mentioned that the story takes place after a deadly pandemic. Maybe they oughta just lean into it at this point.
The Queen but mostly Princess Diana! Honestly I always had a lot of sympathy for Princess Di. She was just a messed up kid thrown into the royal family and expected to fend for herself while everyone treated her like shit. (Wonder if they’ll mention the quite significant age difference between her and Charles :/ )
Okay The Watch doesn’t look terrible as a show (I guess) but it very obviously has NOTHING to do with the Discworld series it’s based on. So why even bother? Ugggh. Rhianna Pratchett’s thoughts are also mine.
If you haven’t seen this, it’s an Australian miniseries about a transgender girl starting high school, aimed at kids. The BBC just started showing it on CBBC so I watched it all today. It’s very good.
It deals with a lot of things that have (depressingly) been seen in the headlines. Everything from unhelpful adults to cyberbullying to friends suddenly turning out not to be friends after all. Oh some of the cisgender kids in this are awful and every time they came on screen I was like-
-except the main character in this, Hannah, is clearly a better person than me. Seeing her triumph over the bullies in every concievable way is extremely satisfying.
(Also, she is actually played by a trans actress! Evie McDonald.)
I also like that though we’re told about the insults and horrible things hurled Hannah’s way we don’t actually see them most of the time, which is good in that it greatly reduces the chances of anyone having to suddenly relive their own traumatic experiences when watching.
I hope this show encourages and empowers trans kids (it seems to be doing so) but I also kinda hope it makes certain cisgender kids change their behaviour.
Recently Channel 4 started showing trailers for a thing called Mary Kills People and it caught my interest. Turns out it’s best described as… I guess… a REALLY REALLY dark almost-comedy about euthanasia? Mary only Kills People who are already dying but are prevented by law from ending their own lives. Most of them are in pain and longing for a way out that only she and her illegal drugs can give them.
Again REALLY REALLY dark but it’s very good. It doesn’t shy away from the horrors of terminal illness or death. It also poses a lot of questions about them, none of which can be answered because there aren’t any answers.
On a much lighter note this show has a lot of gay characters in the main cast and they’re all well-developed and interesting! And all of them are women! So bearing that in mind I guess I’m sort of surprised this show never seemed to develop any of a following whatsoever? It doesn’t even have its own TVTropes page! And…
…well it is also finished now! It got cancelled, thankfully without a cliffhanger, after three seasons. Which sucks because there was so much more they could have done with it. Oh well. The story they did get to tell is extremely interesting so check it out if you can. I know Channel 4 has it on their player if you’re in the UK!
Oh hey! They’ve made a drama about a true-crime story I actually remember happening! The Charles Ingram Who Wants to Be a Millionaire case. It was big news for a couple of days, IIRC, and then, well, then 9/11 happened and it got pushed out of the news. (This is mentioned in the show itself too.) I couldn’t remember for the life of me whether the Ingrams got declared guilty or not guilty so that was a surprise too.
It’s a great show to binge-watch while on lockdown, anyway. (I say binge-watch. There’s only three episodes.) True-crime stories without particularly high stakes are my favourite kind of stories. It’s pointed out in the show itself that is stealing a million pounds from a company who had more than that to give away really a crime deserving of the sort of justice the Ingrams recieved? They didn’t kill anyone, didn’t hurt anyone. And I appreciate it left things open-ended as to whether they even did what they were accused of.
Also Michael Sheen is fantastic as usual. ALSO also about halfway through the show I drank a glass of water wrong and had a massive coughing fit, how incredibly ironic.
