KsMIRT=Kent's Month In Reviewing Television, where each month (or whenever) Kent steps through the TV series he completed watching recently-ish as relayed in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format that's set the world on fire. That's right, it's Kent's fault.
This month:
Untamed (2025, netflix - 6/6 episodes)
Deli Boys (2025, disney+/hulu - 10/10 episodes)
The Eternaut (2025, netflix - 6/6 episodes)
---
The What 100: A young woman takes a header off of El Capitain at Yosemite National Park. Ranger Kyle Turner investigates with his newly imported-from-L.A. partner Naya Vasquez. Turns out the girl is connected to a missing persons case Turner investigated a decade earlier. Also drugs. Also a private investigator begins sniffing around a different missing persons case from around the time Turner lost his son, a trauma he 's still not recovered from.
(1 Great): The show opens incredibly strong with two climbers scaling El Capitain when one climber looks up to see a body hurtling towards him. It's chaos as she collides with him and winds up getting tangled in his ropes. Turner's (Eric Bana) arrival on scene and premilinary investigation of the body (still dangling) is a really gnarly and unique moment in the long pantheon of detective mysteries. It also very effectively sets up some of the main and supporting cast, including Milch (William Smillie).
(1 Good): Milch was by far my favourite character in the show. He first presents a surely, sardonic sonofabitch ranger who doesn't like Turner very much, so we're immediately to think Milch is the asshole. But no, really, Turner's kind of the difficult one, the exceptionally flawed lead, and yeah, Milch's general demeanour is unpleasant, but he's a decent guy overall. If this were an ongoing series with a 20+ episode season, Milch would likely be the fan favourite who the show bolsters to more and more prominence.
(1 Bad): [Spoilers here] This should have been a movie. It belabours its characters' "secrets" while also telegraphing them so profoundly that after only two of the six episodes I was exhausted by them. The show fakes you out with Turner's dead son from the onset, though by the end of the episode it's clear this is the situation, but then the show teases out what happened, and how it connects to a missing persons case, and how all of these things tie together like a Celtic knot of mystery and intrigue and...frustration. This would have worked much better as a straightforward mystery with our characters' traumas and burdens laid out at the beginning. We learn by the end that Turner's ex, Jill (Rosemarie Dewitt) was responsible for the death of the man who killed her son, and that Turner covered it up... it would have been far more fascinating if this was up front information that then raises stakes and tensions as the private investigator show up and starts probing. I dunno, maybe not. It's interwoven narrative (which you know Sam Neill is caught up in in some way because...Sam Neill... that doesn't get revealed until midway through the final episode, and it's kind of dumb).
META: Also why I think this should have been a movie... they could have actually shot it in Yosemite, instead of Chip Kerr Park in BC, where they composite in shots of Yosemite and it really triggers the Uncanny Valley receptors. I was hoping there would be a plethora of gorgeously composed shots of the park wilderness, and, well, not so much. It's not a terrible looking show, but there's not a lot of care put into its cinematography. It feels direly like television, and I really want it to look like a movie. Instead we basically get neu dad TV.
---
The What 100: Self-made millionaire deli and convenience store baron Arshad Dar is dead, having taken a golfball to the temple on the golf course. Arshad's spoiled, privileged sons, business grad Mir and new-age party boy Raj are his inheritors, only the company is then raided and fortunes siezed by the Feds as they suspect it was a front for importing and distributing cocaine. It was, but the raid proves nothing. All Mir and Raj are left with is one remaining deli shop and the life-threatening responsibility of retaining the front. They do have help though from Auntie Lucky who may be conspiring against them as much as helping.
(1 Great): I started into Deli Boys because of Poorna Jagannathan, who left a pretty big impression as Nalini, the main character's mom in 4 seasons of Netflix's Never Have I Ever. She had such great screen presence and she was able to convey layers in her performance that went so far beyond the "mom" role of in a teen sitcom (it helped that the show was also interested in her as more than the "mom" character) . As Lucky in Deli Boys she's not the maternal type in any real sense, she's a fucking boss, a stylish badass, with no damn time for nonsense. She comes off as cold, calculating and vicious but Jagannathan turns what would be a reprehensible character into a pure comedic force reacting to a world of fools around her. She's always the smartest person in the room, but isn't ever respected as such. As the series builds, her character evolves, developing the smallest shred of heart for the two young dipshits who are in way over their heads.
(1 Good): Deli Boys is a comedic goldmine of offbeat characters and eccentric weirdos and full fledged dumbasses that it's a non-stop parade of delightful discoveries as we watch two very naive, spoiled rich kids try to utilize whatever untested skills they have in this very scary and intense world where they really don't belong. The best parts of the show are how the characters bounce off each other, usually in genre or convention subverting ways. Mir and Raj are kind of the chief offbeat weirdos that set the tone for the show, Mir has a desperate need to please and succeed and live up to the image of Baba that he's established in his mind, while Raj's free-wheeling, no-worries sensibilities bash up against the super-serious world he's entered. The boys feel a need to connect to their Baba by trying to sustain his illicit empire that they never knew about, but at the same time they find new strength in themselves and each other. It's late in the series that it really starts to connect all the emotional dots, but they're in the show's foundation from the start, and it winds up pretty rewarding. Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh as Mir and Raj respectively are both really great in the show, tremendously fun performers in very different but complimentary ways.
(1 Bad): Is there a bad? I don't think there is a bad. The worst part for me was getting over the hurdle of watching these good boys "break bad". It's a convention I'm so generally exhausted by, largely because shows of "good folks gone bad" try to really tug on the intensity of normal people getting involved in organized crime and being way out of their depths. Deli Boys could have easily made these parallels but turning it into cringe comedy instead of dramatic intensity, but they instead go a different way, through character-centric resolutions and genre subversion. It's constantly surprising and frequently hilarious, even as it occasionally descends into quasi-Tarantino-esque violence.
META: Just a goddamn surprise out of nowhere. It's a pretty hilarious show from the start and yet for the first half I kept anticipating it to turn into something I wouldn't enjoy anymore, whether it be changing Mir and Raj into characters I don't like or it letting go of the comedy for something more uncomfortable. But there was no turn. By episode six I had settled in and could trust the creators were committed to the comedy and the characters were on a journey that had some substance, it was a smooth and tremendously enjoyable (and satisfying ) binge in the back stretch.
---
The What 100: A strange snowfall has occurred in Buenos Aires, an extremely rare occurrence for the city. The only problem is one touch of the snow on bare skin means death. The city becomes a ghost town as those who have not succumbed to the snow are sheltering in place. Our protagonists are a group of friends who were playing poker when it all started. One of the players, Juan Salvo, cannot sit tight, he needs to head out into the city and find his wife and daughter, only to learn the snow is not the only deadly thing outside.
(1 Great): Now obviously the show is based on a legendary-in-Argentina comic, so it has a roadmap to play by, and despite being set in modern day, it's said to be a fairly faithful adaptation. But it could very easily not have been. It could very easily have been a cheaply made in-name-only adaptation which follows a group of people bunkered down while a sci-fi event occurs outside. It does start out that way, but it effectively grows and grows in scale with each episode, and it manouevers the characters, at least in some cases, in surprising ways. This is grand-scale sci-fi that isn't subverting tropes so much as works its way through them like passing through towns on a highway. It slows down enough to have a look around, and then forges on. For something based on a 60-year-old story, it didn't feel dated in the slightest, and it constantly surprised me on where each chapter turned to.
(1 Good): I loved the Buenos Aires setting and how the show and story explore the city. As a North American/Anglo viewer of film and television I get so used to the sights of L.A., New York, Vancouver, Toronto, and all the other stand-in places we see. I can't think off the top of my head what the last production set in Buenos Aires I might have seen, if any. The show isn't as much a love letter to the city, because it puts it through the wringer, but it's definitely keen to use it and many of its landmarks... you can feel the pride in doing so.
(1 Bad): Overall, The Eternaut is a good-looking production, but at time the digital snow triggers the Uncanny Valley receptors. Come to learn that the production needed to use AI tools to aide in doing the work, and I will neither hand wave away the necessity for modest-budget productions to use an available tool to accentuate their work, nor will I excuse it for not employing actual artists (technicians?) to do the work.
META: What sold me on The Eternaut was one image from the original comic of an man in a scuba diver's mask and hooded jumpsuit carrying a rifle amidst the snow. It's a striking image from Solano López that made me immediately want to read the comic but it's out of print (published in English by Fantagraphics in 2015, a new edition coming later this year). The image and the title are so evocative, my mind raced with the potential story being told. The first episode of The Eternaut seemed perhaps a little too conventional, but the series' grand sense of adventure kicked in and every episode continued to pay off in new and exciting ways.
This is also suuuuuch a Toasty-styled product, I'm so very surprised he hasn't written about things and we haven't even talked about it in person.
Eternaut. Watched, pretty much binged it just after it came out. When I did my attempt at getting back into writing about TV, I forgot entirely about it. When we were sitting in a cafe and I wanted to say, "OH ! I watched this show..." but I forgot. Yes, it was very VERY me. I loved it.
ReplyDeleteWatched one ep of Deli Boys; it didn't click for one reason or another.
Watching Untamed now. Shadows of British murder-mystery but I wish I got more of the environment it was set in. But we are only two eps in, so maybe as time goes, the setting will become more of a character.