What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is from The Domein of Toast, he (i) admittedly spending too much (almost all?) time in front of the TV. Kent's not stepping on toests but yeah, he (me) has a piles of TV shows in progress and maybe doesn't have has too much to say about it.
Pt. A is here.
A handfull of one-(or couple)-episoders.
The TV is very very heavy with Spy TV this year, and I thought this would be the one that would stand out, adding a bit of Mission Impossible glitz to all the by-the-books British & American style thrillers. It has the sex appeal and sexy sexy people. It has a MacGuffin in a briefcase and even neat names for Good Guys vs Bad Guys (Citadel vs Manticore; wouldn't it be neat if a show just used two random D&D monsters as the agency names? Owlbear vs Illithid?) but whether it will stand out for me, or not, is yet to be determined because.... well, ep01 did not catch me.
Annnnd, how is that only a week and a bit since I watched the first episode, and I don't recall very much about it, at all ? I remember a fight on a train, and sexy Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and a jump forward to a memory deficit Richard Madden (he doesn't remember what happened on the train, nor who he actually is), and that's... it. I am thinking I may have fallen asleep and will have to rewatch ep1.
Heroes from a feminist viewpoint -- it's shameful that in 2023, we are still so far away from basic, accepted by all, equal rights, to the point we have to use angry, superhero media to express the point. Or maybe in this current era of the back-treading of such rights, this show is even more needed?
The show begins with many viewpoints focusing on the emergence of a (super)power exhibited by a subset of young girls - an electrical power. There are abused orphan Allie (Halle Bush, debut) and Seattle highschooler Jos (Auli'i Cravalho, Moana) in the US, Roxy (Ria Zmitrowicz, Mr. Selfridge) the gangster's daughter in the UK, and aspiring [not girl] reporter/YouTuber Tunde (Toheeb Jimoh, Ted Lasso) in Nigeria, who observes it happening to the girls in his town. The worldly viewpoints create the setting as a global event, literally Girl Power metaphor come to life.
It's pretty easy to see that the show will be about the ostracization of these young girls for having an ability few (want to) understand but only see as dangerous. Oh, it can be very dangerous, but I have a feeling the electrical power is just the stepping stone towards something else. Hopefully it treads more than the political statement, and gives itself room to breathe.
We did three episodes and this was a big a nope from me.
I had recalled this from last year as the next (big) thing for Sara Michelle Gellar (Buffy-verse) as a werewolf hunter, but only recently remembered it had already aired. I grabbed three episodes. It starts strong enough, maybe even impressively, in a massive wildfire threatening a small northern California town. Tree line burns, animals are panicking and a school bus full of kids is trapped on a jammed road. There is a stampede, and the kids are caught in it. It is a brutal, bloody, deadly encounter full of smoke and panic and ... something else hiding in the smoke, grabbing kids, biting a few, slaughtering others. But my first hint of the lunacy (pun intended) should have been recognized, when the best reaction to the terrible situation would have been GET BACK ON THE BUS. The kids weren't hiding from the fire, but from the stampede. And yet they ran around like panicking rodents. The rest of the two episodes had me yelling at the screen for all the Why Are You Doing That's.
Plot. Two of the kids are bitten during the stampede -- Blake (Bella Shepard, A Girl Named Jo) and Everett (Armani Jackson, Chad); Blake runs off because she has a shitty family situation and runs from everything, and Everett ends up in the hospital where his quickly healing injuries cause his family to give We Are Disappointed With You face, despite him being COVERED IN BLOOD. So yeah, the kids are bitten/infected, but heal quickly (look, Blake's acne healed as well, so now she's hot) and are confused about the changes happening to their bodies... groan, even I cannot continue on that usual metaphor. But wait! There are more hot teens! The Briggs twins are werewolfs too, but THEY were born that way. And that night of the fire, is also Full Moonish. There is lots of Not Talking About It (a TV trope I loathe) and shitty cops (seriously, these are possessed-by-evil-aliens level bad cops) doing weird shit (seriously, you are arson investigators, so why do you need three full squad cars to apprehend a teenager boy for QUESTIONING), giant CGI werewolf lurking in the shadows and bushes (like, downtown, where he should be very fucking obvious) and lots of horny horny teens being awkward, and horny. Well, at least the gay kid is not awkward. Just horny.
I won't be watching any more episodes, so I won't find out whether SMG is actually just a terrible arson investigator or actually a werewolf hunter who (badly) pretends to be investigating arson. Also, do they actually investigate arson during massive burn-down-towns wildfires?
What's up with that poster? Based on the few episodes I have seen, the kids are the stars, not SMG.
Based on a popular post-apocalyptic novel series (Wool) that I absolutely loved. but for some reason, this show isn't doing it for me. It should have hooked me with one episode, and maybe if I hadn't read the series, I would be? I really don't get it. It's totally PA and with a grimy, rust-punk aesthetic that I should totally dig, but... it's not grabbing me, despite being very faithful to the source material.
That paragraph was very... bipolar. And, me responding with Other Voice immediately after not so much?
So, it's The Dark Future. People (whoever is left) live in a massive, multi-levelled silo underground. They produce food, water, electricity, raise animals on grass covered levels, and have ancient machinery that provides for everything, as long as it's kept in good repair. There was a rather big, impactful rebellion some years ago which destroyed much of the electronic archives, so they don't know what happened to stick them inside a silo, nor what is outside that keeps them trapped inside. BUT they know, via scripture level statements, that nobody goes outside, but to wipe clean the lenses that show them the wasteland outside. And nobody does that unless they profess they want to go outside, and that is the most heinous crime. Ask to go outside, and you WILL go outside. And die.
We start when the very popular Sheriff (David Oyelowo, Selma) asks to go outside. He confesses that he has been thinking about it since his wife did so years before. So then we get another even older flashback of her going outside, after getting mixed up in a conspiracy about ancient tech and ancient knowledge that they are not allowed to know. That is what inspires her to go outside. And kills her.
We are then left with an Engineer, the extremely valuable people who Keep The Lights On and she is now investigating what the Sheriff learned, and what he learned from his wife. And that's where I left off, despite the Engineer being Rebecca Ferguson (Dune) who I should be willing to watch in anything. And just might be. Not sure yet. Just not compelled. Yet.
Can someone explain to me, Why? It's PA, its Rebecca Ferguson, its rust-punk, all things I love. Why is it not grabbing me?
Again, this should have hooked me, and it kind of did with the setting, which I absolutely love (retro-futurism) but ... it is so .... bleak?
I have this story inside my head, a story in the world of The Jetsons, but set below those houses and apartment buildings in the clouds. A grimy world that is set below the shiny plastic and robot housemaids and flying cars. This show is sort of set in that grimier world of retro-futurism, where the future was supposed to be flying cars, and living on the moon, and Optimism.
But it isn't.
Jack Billings sells dreams, dreams of a house (time share?) on the moon, in a subdivision where everything is provided for you. Given that most retro-futurism is set in that 50s-ish era when suburbs were being touted as the Only Way To Live, this clicks. Except, its all a lie. Billings may be brilliant at what he does, with a loyal crew of sales people who actually believes his bullshit, but he knows better, and during the off scenes, we see the impact. Add to the mix the now grown son he abandoned and ... wow, this is weighty. Like the bullshit story Jack is selling his chumps, I felt I was sold a bullshit story about flying cars and robots that take out the garbage, when I ended up getting a sad story about sad people doing sad things. Of course, that is the point, but...
And yet, the narrator said, he still felt compelled to continue watching it... someday.
As I was saying, TV is heavy with the spies this year. I remember being fond of the original movie. Well, not the original original movie but the Arnie & Jamie Lee Curtis movie from 1994, which was based on a French film. So, Spy Guy living a double life, until his wife finds out.
New series by Matt Nix, who did one of our fav shows Burn Notice!! And it stars Ginger Gonzaga whom we loved in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law! We should love it! And yet, we don't. Its a big ol nope from me. Its just incredibly low-brow, low-effort TV making. All the jokes fall flat, most of the characters are cereal box cardboard thin and the plots are cookie cutter.
Meanwhile, its almost like this show was made in spite of the previous show. For one thing, it actually stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Luke Brunner, in essentially the exact same plot as before, except with a twist (a tweest!). This time he's retiring from his international spy activity, to return home to his seemingly idyllic family life. Except its not. He's actually divorced from his wife, and is deluded enough to think he can win her back. But at least he will have his perfect daughter who adores him, right? Riiiiight?
During his retirement party, he is re-activated and sent to Guyana; the son of a cartel lord he murdered decades ago has returned to pick up where his Evil Druglord father left off. Even after Brunner funded the kid's comfy life, feeling guilty for having deceived them and left him fatherless. So, off to Guyana Brunner goes, only to find out that someone else has been previously embedded in the drug lord / arms dealer's compound -- his daughter, who has pulled a True Lies on Brunner! She's also a spy, and didn't know her dad had been one, but was recruited by the CIA who didn't bother informing Luke. Lies all around! SNAFU !
I mean fubar.
Where the other show falls entirely flat, this actually had me chuckling a number of times. For one, its entirely inappropriate, dropping f-bombs everywhere, and dripping blood whenever it can. The humour, especially from Luke's support team is on point, while actually double-downing on the quickly revealed toxic, dysfunctional family esthetic that should be there in all shows with this plot. We only watched one episode, but I will probably watch the rest, even if no one else likes it.
All shows I've been curious about but will likely never get around to watching. AppleTV+ has invested a lot into big, expensive, star-filled sci-fi TV shows that I seem to want to have nothing to do with. Not sure why that is.
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