I Saw This!! The unfinished TV seasons of the COVID years (pt2)

(part 1 here)

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write about it cuz that would be bad.. like bad, bad, not good bad: 

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The show/season: Superman and Lois Season 1 - cw/ctv scifi

Episodes Watched: 12 of 15 

Why I no finish?:  I've talked before of my CW DC superhero fatigue, and while I felt that Superman and Lois really distinguished itself and distance itself from the "Arrowverse" of the past, it still got bogged down in CW-ness.  I liked the show quite a bit.  I liked that Superman and Lois had an established and committed marriage full of love and respect, and I liked that the show just jumped right into the kids being teenagers.  One of the twins having superpowers (the awkward, anxious one) and the other (the popular jock) not, could have been a big point of contention, but the show seems to remember they are twins and that they support each other in a way non-twin siblings wouldn't understand. While I think the move to Smallville affords the show a lot of interesting opportunities for commentary on, well, what is happening to American small towns, we've already done Smallville and it's kind of my least favourite Superman setting.  The show seemed to run it's course by the 10th episode with some spinning wheels in between. It's a problem all CW shows have, filling episode orders rather than fitting a season to a story line. 

Will I return to it?: I would like to but I feel exhausted just thinking about it.

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The show/season: Y: The Last Man season 1- Showcase

Episodes Watched: 3 of 10

Why I no finish?: I loved the comic book of Y: The Last Man.  It's one of my favourite Vertigo books ever.  It's adaptation to film or TV has been circling in development hell for well over a decade.  I was once really excited to see it, but as I've gotten a lot of distance from the comic (a re-read is probably necessary at some point) my excitement to see it come to any screen has certainly lessened.  And frankly, it's probably a victim of seriously unfortunate timing, debuting in the midst of a pandemic.  Not an ideal time for a show that's about a pandemic that wiped out all of the genetically male population on the planet, save one man and one monkey.  I was engaged with the show, and I thought it wonderful that it incorporated transgendered persons into the story as well, but I just wasn't in the mindset for it, and I think the masses felt the same.  It was not renewed for a second season.

Will I return to it?: Seeing as the series will not finish its story, there's not really any point in going back to it.  However, I may decide to give it a go again if I'm extra curious following a reread of the comics.

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The show/season: Star Wars Visions - Disney+

Episodes Watched: 4 of 9

Why I no finish?: It's Star Wars.  I love Star Wars.  But I don't love Star Wars blindly.  There's Star Wars I don't like (Rise of Skywalker, Resistance), and there's Star Wars I just won't watch (Freemaker Adventures). And then there's this: an anthology of non-continuity, anime-influence Star Wars shorts.  

I'm not an anime guy. Paging Dr. Wenowdis. But I thought I would try it anyway, because the love for Star Wars, though not blind, is strong.  The first "episode" is titled "The Duel" and is animated in a style that I can only think to describe as 1980's manga.  It's mostly black and white, in a very line-heavy, scratchy illustrated style, with little pops of monochromatic colour throughout.  It's set in a Star Wars reality that resembles feudal Japan, and it's all really quite gorgeous and exciting.  It's one of my favourite things to happen to Star Wars ever, just so striking and bold, taking Star Wars back to its western and, moreso, samurai roots (just two of many influencing forces on George Lucas).  I would love to side-step out of regular Star Wars continuity for a while and just live in this one.

And then there's the rest of the shorts, of the three I've seen, they're the usual mess of flash and strobe and big heads and eyes and gaping mouths and yelling and just a style I do not connect with at all.  "The Ninth Jedi" is pretty but way more anime than Star Wars.  "The Twins" is an even bigger mess that distorts Star Wars in a way that nauseated me.  Disney+ tells me I watched "Akakiri" but I don't even remember the slightest bit about it (and a quick scrub through it revealed only the slightest recognition). I started "Tattoine Rhapsody" and got about 2 minutes in before I had a "hard nope" out of it.

Will I return to it?: It's possible I may get bored one Sunday afternoon and watch the rest. I'll definitely be going back to "The Duel" with some frequencey.

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The show/season: Star Trek: Prodigy season 1, CTV SciFI

Episodes Watched: 2 of 10

Why I no finish?: I like Star Trek. I love Star Wars. Star Trek: Prodigy feels like a Star Trek version of The Clone Wars cartoon, and it's like mixing milk and orange juice.  I think the animation was good and the design and story was good, but it didn't all fit together for me, and didn't feel recognisably like Star Trek.  It's not something I disliked, but I wasn't enjoying it, so I just didn't continue.

Will I return to it?: Nope.

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The show/season: Yasuke season 1 - netflix

Episodes Watched: 5 of 6

Why I no finish?: On my friend GAK's radio show, he played the soundtrack to Yasuke and I fell in love with it.  It's such a bold sound, blending beats with traditional Japanese sounds and heavy synthetic textures, one of the best soundtracks in a long time. Musician/Producer/Artist Flying Lotus also shares the "story by" credit on the show with creator (and animator/writer/director/designer) LeSean Thomas, bringing to Netflix this anime (it's a very American-styled anime, about the same aesthetic as the recent Masters of the Universe: Revelations) about an African samurai in 16th century Japan.  The show is full of great character designs and intensely violent action, as well as some meat for the characters, specifically for Yasuke who can't hide being an outsider.  I did find the injection of fantastical technology into the show presented a bit of a disconnect from the era, but a few bold fight sequences later and I came to accept it.  Frankly I binged 5 of the 6 in one afternoon and just didnt' get back to that last episode

Will I return to it?: For sure. Eventually.  But I feel I need to start back at the beginning again.

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The show/season: The Great season 2 - amazonprime

Episodes Watched: 2 of 10

Why I no finish?: I got through season 1, that was enough of a triumph for me.  As I said in my brief writeup, I struggled with it. For season 2, it remains a very funny, tremendously well acted, gorgeously shot, staged and costumed satire, but it also remains so dark.  And I just hit a point where I didn't like any of what I was confronted with.  I've reached a state of awareness of the horrors of humanity that I don't need to be reminded of them even with the sharpest and most cutting of humour backing it up.  But what got me the most was that I wasn't really rooting for anyone...at a certain point ambition for power and the desire to lead just becomes distasteful, and so everyone in this show has become unsympathetic.  Watching an underdog triumph over a despised adversary, only to become a comparatively unlikeable figure isn't fun for me. So I stopped

Will I return to it?: No.

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The show/season: Landscapers - HBO

Episodes Watched: 2 of 4

Why I no finish?: Even at only 4 episodes this true crime drama felt overlong and draggy 2 episodes in.  I love Olivia Coleman, and great as she is, she wasn't compelling enough for me to care about finishing this story of two late-stage middle-aged lovers who may or may not have murdered people and buried them in their back yard.  The way the story was told, as well, seemed kind of the dullest avenue possible, just slowly and methodically.  There's only a tinge of humour where I think it really wanted to play it up, while also being respectful.  The characters though, are just kind of dour and sad.

Will I return to it?: No

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The show/season: Saturday Morning All-Stars Hits! season 1 - Netflix

Episodes Watched: 2 of 8

Why I no finish?: SNL's Kyle Moony put a lot of love into this retro spoof on 90's Saturday Morning cartoon blocks, the type that just don't exist anymore, where a youthful host (or two) present cartoons to kids for three hours.  In this case the 3 hour block is condensed into 25 minutes making the cartoons about 6-7 minutes long each.  And the cartoons of course spoof some of both the hits and weaker sauce offerings of the era.  Here there's a "radical dinosaur" who now lives and goes to high school in the modern age but is just kind of depressed all the time.  There's an Alvin and the Chipmunks-meet-Alf-meet-Care Bares thing where the art-making creatures live in secret in the dude's garage where they hang out and get high.  The Strongimals are space animals fighting a valiant war against their nemeses (Thundercats style) only to come to modern-day (90's) Earth to be very confused by mundane reality, like sandwich shops.  The hosted scenes feature twins Skip and Treybor (both played by Mooney) who have a energetically antagonistic attitude towards each other that seems to solely be worked out on screen rather than in private.  It's conceptually funny, the kind of shit I loved 15 years ago with Wonder Showzen and the like...I just don't have a lot of time for stuff like this today.  But I like it.

Will I return to it?: Probably in fits and starts.  I mean, I get what its doing immediately and I worry that it's just running the joke into the ground further each episode, but I also want to watch just it case it does go somewhere gloriously weird.

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The show/season: Macgruber season 1 - Showcase

Episodes Watched: 2 of 8

Why I no finish?: I like Will Forte a lot of the time, but not all the time, and Macgruber the movie didn't do much for me.  A lot of people seem to think the film was hilarious but I recall it being a rather flaccid comedy that forgot the jokes.  And now it's a TV series, bringing back Ryan Philippe and Kristin Wiig from the movie, adding Billy Zane and Laurence fucking Fishburne.  It's funnier than the movie, from the two episodes that I watched, but Macgruber, as a character, is exhausting. Forte likes to play comedic protagonists who intentionally keep you at arms length with their selfishness, but add in Mac's cowardice and idiotic belief in his own (sorely lacking) capabilities, and I'm not always sure who the joke is on.

Will I return to it?: Not likely.  I tried. This character's just not for me.

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