K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month (ahem) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.
This Month:
Bad Monkey Season 1 (2024, 10/10 episodes, Apple TV+)
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 (2024, 8/8 episodes, AmazonPrime)
Nobody Wants This Season 1 (2024, 10/10 episodes, Netflix)
Slow Horses Series 4 (2024, 6/6 episodes, Apple TV+)
Squid Game Season 1 (2022, 9/9 episodes, Netflix)
Unsolved Mysteries Volume 5 (2024, 4/4 episodes, Netflix)
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The What 100: Andrew Yancy is a police detective with a problem... he can't let go. It's got him in trouble before, and it will get him in trouble again. Having been booted from the Miami PD to a small cape on the southern tip of Florida, Yancy's motormouth and unwavering conviction that the worst should be punished have now got him suspended and working as a health inspector. When a severed arm is reeled in by a fishing tour boat, Yancy can't just follow his chief's directions to just get rid of it. Instead it takes Yancy on a winding whirlwind of romance, action, deceit, and even a little magic.
(1 Great) Vince Vaughan. I was reticent to watch the show, mainly because I haven't watched anything with Vince Vaughan in it in a long, long time. Sometime after Made I just realized I didn't like his energy, his arrogance. But either I have softened or Vaughan has, because the energy he gives off as Yancy is astounding. Yancy is a very upbeat guy, very positive even in the face of bad things happening. Even if he genuinely dislikes someone he still tries to go at them with positive vibes, kill them with ...well, not kindness...affability. He's a lot. He's always talking, but the way in which Yancy twists moments, changes the timber of a situation...it's not that he de-escalates (though I think in his mind, that's what he's doing) but instead of making people want to shoot him, they just want to smack him. It's a skill. He's charming in a way I haven't seen from Vaughan. He carries a high energy vibe that still seems, somehow, chill. And I like the way he wins people over with compliments, just as much as I like it when he pisses people off with the very same tactics.
(1 Good) It's so hard to limit myself to just 1 Great and 1 Good thing with this show. I enjoyed it so, so thoroughly. I haven't mentioned that the show hops between South Florida and The Bahamas, where an unscrupulous land developer has impacted the small coastal town there. Jodie Turner-Smith was a real surprise for me in After Yang, a stunning woman but also a strong performer who, seemingly out of no where is acting alongside Colin Farrell. She turned up again in a smaller part earlier this year in Star Wars: The Acolyte and had real presence. Here she's The Dragon Queen, the mystical protector of the island who doesn't quite believe in her practice. Her role in the whole proceedings seems very outside the centre, but she gets her own story arc that weaves in and out of the main thread and it is both beautiful, intense, and tragic.
(1 Bad) If I had one complaint, which is not even really a complaint because I enjoyed this show pretty thoroughly, it's that it felt maybe an episode too long. The eighth episode felt like it was barrelling towards its conclusion and the ninth episode felt like it was resetting for the finale. In actuality the ninth episode was more about setting up character resolution where the finale was about closing out the plot, so it has its place...I think in this modern age of shortened seasons, any sort of breathing room feels like wasted space, even when it's certainly not wasted. It speaks more to changes in modern storytelling on television and how we consume it, than it does about quality of storytelling or even purpose of storytelling.
META: What got me into Bad Monkey, past my Vince Vaughan reticence, was Bill Lawrence's name in the trailers. I liked Scrubs, I loved (still love) Cougar Town, I really liked both Ted Lasso and Shrinking, so he has a very winning track record with me. I knew that there would be something here that I would enjoy, as I always do in his productions...I just didn't think I would enjoy pretty much everything. This may be, I'm boldly stating, Lawrence's best show.
There's a minor character, the owner of the charter fishing boat that opens up the series played by Tom Nowicki, who winds up being the narrator for the series. He's somehow in the head of every character (including Neville's pet monkey Driggs) telling you there innermost thoughts, sometimes at inopportune times. He also provides the best "previously on" recaps maybe ever, or close to it. The bit is he hates doing the recaps, and he lets you know this. They're spiteful recaps.
I could see some people finding the show a little unfocussed, the way it darts between Yancy's story, the Dragon Queen, Neville, Yancy's sometimes-girlfriend Bonnie, and others in ways that don't directly connect to the central crime story that Yancy is working on... but I love the fact that this show is more interested in the characters as characters than it is in them as agents servicing the main story. It a show where the world doesn't exactly gravitate around its main character and the main character's interest, and that's damn refreshing.
The cast is uniformly phenomenal, with Vaughan, Turner-Smith, joined by Michelle Monaghan, L. Scott Caldwell, Rob Delaney, Meredith Hagner, Natalie Martinez and so many more. Even minor players in the story make multiple appearances, and it's always a delight to see them pop up again.
I imagine a second season will only see some of these players return, for obvious reasons, but the experience to see how it jumps around a whole new ecosystem of characters Yancy endears himself to (or pisses off) absolutely puts a smile on my face just thinking about.
An utter treat of a series.
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The What 100: Lord Sauron has disguised himself as an elfin deity and wormed his way into Celebrimbor's forge, encouraging him to make more rings of power, rings that he himself will taint with his darkness, thus eliciting control over their wearers. The dark elf Adar and his army of Orcs, aware of Sauron's return, are on the warpath to find and vanquish him once and for all, and they don't care what they have to destroy along the way. King Durin, wearing one of the tainted rings of power starts making some terrible decisions for the Dwarven realm, leaving his son Durin conflicted over his devotion to his father and doing what's right. The Stranger and his Harfoot companions get separated but each find new allies who are somewhat familiar. Back in Númenor, following the awful defeat against Adar's army, the queen finds herself challenged, and her throne wrested from her by the most evil-looking guy in history. And other stuff. A lot going on in Middle Earth.
(1 Great) I could have just watched just a whole series about Prince Durin IV and his turmoil over, first, his spat with his father following his actions last season, and then the dire situation as Khazad-dûm enters a dark age following a tremor. And when King Durin III puts on that ring, and starts getting money hungry and going mad with an unquenchable thirst for riches, it's just really wonderful melodrama. I love all the dwarf actors - Owain Arthur is probably my favourite performer on the show. Just real soulful, deep-thinking performance in such a heavyweight layer of makeup and prosthetics and wigs and wardrobe.
(1 Good) I've been strangely invested in the journey of The Stranger and the Harfoots Nori and Poppy in both seasons, even though their trials have kind of been the most gentle and most disconnected from the central plot. As disconnected as they are, they also provide a very whole-view look at Middle Earth, a "what else is happening" outside of the main conflicts, and their Hobbitsy adventures are so much more gentle than what's going one elsewhere, it's a nice respite. But that gentile nature of their story means that any threat seems that much more severe.
(1 Bad) There are entire character plots that just get shoved aside, like Isuldur seems to be an afterthought every time he pops up. It's like "oh right, him!" His story gets tied up with Arondir, the ronin Elf, who I loved in the first season, but has no storyline at all here. His human love interest died last season, and his attempts to connect with her son don't work out, so he takes off and just roams realm looking for action. He's a badass fighter with the coolest chest plate ever, but he gets nothing. Ok, that's actually 2 Bad...well, here's a third... I freaking hated everything going on in Númenor. Just the most blatantly evilest group of fucks with the most obvious tactics of riling up crowds into supporting them in overthrowing the queen. They're goddamn Republicans and it was just too real.
META: At about the midway point of this season of The Rings of Power I was starting to stretch a leg out, ready to step away altogether. I didn't but so much of the show was about the corruption of power, of the people in charge, and how it was all so inevitable that it was all going sour everywhere. Given that this show takes place, what, 1000 years before The Lord of the Rings trilogy, it just means that it all goes very dark, very quick and doesn't come out of that darkness for a very long time. I don't know if showing people the descent into darkness works as a cautionary tale or just reinforces the hopelessness of opposing it when people are acting so irrationally. There really isn't any light this season to guide the way and it's feeling quite oppressive...and feels like it's only going to get worse from here.
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The What 100: Joanne hosts a successful dating and sex-themed podcast with her sister, Morgan. She's been very unlucky in love and her frankness about talking about it has garnered her a sizeable audience and a pretty relaxed lifestyle. Josh is a rabbi -- some might even go so far as to call him "Hot Rabbi" -- who has just exited a long term relationship with his very devoted (and attractive) girlfriend after she dug out an engagement ring out of a locked drawer. Everything was perfect on paper, but the sparks were not there. At a mutual friend's get-together Joanne and Josh meet, and sparks fly, but can a rabbi really be with a gentile and keep the respect of his family and congregation, and will being in a stable relationship impact Joann's podcast success?
(1 Great) One of my favourite aspects of the delightful friends-sans-benefits sitcom Platonic was how low stakes it was. It didn't spend much time at all revelling in drama or tension. It presented its characters as conscious, conscientious, thinking human beings who don't immediately always jump to the tropey sitcom conclusion to create tired hijinks for our amusement. It's a comedy of rapport, and I'm on board for any show that wants to be such. Here, not only are the characters presented as thoughtful, but they're also observant, and they're open to conversing about difficult topics. Sitcom comedy was borne out of withholding and misunderstandings. Cringe comedy exploded out of the rise of Seinfeld which was not just withholding, and misunderstanding, but genuine selfishness and bad behaviour. It's really time for our entertainment to show us a new way of coexisting, a new way of engaging with one another, a way that shows us that bringing up a mistake or a shameful emotion with a loved one is far better than hiding it, only for it to explode like a time bomb.
(1 Good) The cast here is uniformly awesome. Kristin Bell is a bankable and reliable comedic presence at this point, and though it's sometimes hard to shave the Eleanor-from-The Good Place feels from my brain, she's really fun. Adam Brody is charming, funny, and thoughtful, very aware and receptive and open. He is the ideal dreamy nice-guy boyfriend, who happens to be a rabbi. As a duo they're exceptionally cute together and they play off each other well. They're both over 40 now, but playing like they're in their late 30s, which works, but just barely. The real flavour of the show though comes from their respective siblings. Morgan (Justine Lupe, Mr. Mercedes) is both fearless and shameless and will shake up any room she's in, usually for the better, but not always. Sasha, Josh's brother, (Timothy Simons) is less fearless and shameless than he is kind of oblivious. He's desperate to be included and so he includes himself in everything whether he's invited or not, wanted or not. Morgan and Sasha become platonic buddies is one of the most far fetched but delightful spins of the show (a lesser show would create some weird secret romance, but here Sasha clearly loves his domineering wife [probably because she's domineering] and family, he's just happy to have a new friend who actually wants to talk to him).
(1 Bad) Nobody Wants This does a great job at showing the stakes for Josh: he's up for head Rabbi at his synagogue, and the faith has a very strong edict to congregate and procreate, so his relationship with Joanne, while providing him the sparks he's always thought a relationship should have, threatens his professional life, as well as creates friction with his family (his sister-in-law is best friends with his ex, his mom is really against the pairing). For Joann, there's less intense focus on what she's risking. According to Morgan, at least, her being in a happy relationship is having an effect on the podcast (she's telling boring stories), which is being eyed for purchase by Spotify. Most of the gamble here is the romcom threat of "losing the guy". It's a fairly savvy show, but (from my very male perspective) it doesn't adequately emphasize what she's giving up or sacrificing, it rather seems to only imply that she should.
META: A very quick blast of research finds that show creator Erin Foster a) looks a lot like Kristin Bell, b) worked a lot with her sister (including as Insta influencers and as creative heads for the dating app Bumble among other things), and c) converted to Judaism before getting married. So this show, while not autobiographical, comes from a place of authenticity and truth. It's a really charming romcom that isn't about the act of getting together, but about what it takes to stay together. It's not even that interested in the drama of tearing Joanne and Josh apart but instead the joys and rewards of unifying and being together. I feel like this is such an antidote to Hallmarkies, and we're still a week away from those things ramping up. EEP
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The What 100: There's a terrorist attack in central London. Meanwhile River Cartwright's grandad, suffering from dementia, shoots a man he thinks is River in his house. River fakes his own death and takes the place of this man, heading into France on a passport that's actually a "cold body", one of many MI-5 fake identities created for their field agents. But how is this one "in the wild" so to speak, and now in River's hands? It all billows out into something very personal and very dangerous.
(1 Great) This is the first season where it feels like Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb is a supporting character and not the lead, and that's actually a good thing. Lamb has been so front-and-center that it's left him a little exposed as a character, as someone who is very much who he is, and not likely to change. River's always been the secondary lead of the show, and giving him the full spotlight here reveals the wild depths of his history and, in learning his origins, has potentially disastrous ramifications for The Park. It's the most character-centric of the series yet, and it really, really works.
(1 Good) Nothing is stagnant in this show, things are always moving. When we ended last series, Taverner was looking to finally be accepting her place as First Desk, but this season we learn she's right where she was last season, with instead new First Desk Claude Whelan, a died-in-the-wool bureaucrat appointed to the position. He's an idiot, and an idiot is dangerous in his position. Taverner's used to playing games with other very intelligent intelligence officers, so manipulating an idiot is surprisingly difficult. Whelan is played by James Callis who played the conniving Baltar in Battlestar Galactica... his character here is not that different than Baltar in ambition, but Callis plays him much, much differently. Kristin Scott Thomas as Taverner really revels in that steely, all-business, woman-with-secrets-that-you-will-never-know energy. I really hope one of these series deep dives into her life and history. The games at the Park were some of my favourite bits this season.
(1 Bad) Oh God, I get angry watching this series week-to-week. I just want to eat it all up in one bite. It's so consumable, and it just pulls you through its story. You can tell these were crafted out of novels because they're so perfectly structured to deliver the right amount of story and character moments for every ongoing character. We lose some, we gain new ones, and it's a roller-coaster where you're not sure what's happening to start with and it unfolds alluringly and brilliantly. So yeah, it's great, but I don't like being confined by AppleTV's pacing (I could always wait...but I can't, I look forward to it too much).
META: Mick Herron's Slough House series currently consists of eight full length books and five novellas. I really, really wish that they would produce the novellas as like a standalone episode or extra-length episode between the series'. So far we've only missed one, between series two and three, and there's two more series before there's another one, so we'll see... or maybe once they tap out of the eight books, they'll just do the novellas as specials to keep it going... I dunno, I just want it all...without having to actually read. Yuck!
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The What 100: You know what Squid Game is already. I'm just that fool who waited two years to watch it. Ok, quickly... 456 desperate individuals sign up to play games in hopes of winning a massive cash prize. Once they learn it's games of death, well, it ultimately doesn't change much, and the people enlisted will see it through to the bitter end. A detective, looking for his missing brother, infiltrates the compound and starts to uncover what, or who, is behind it all.
(1 Great) Despite this series being absolutely something right up my alley, it got real popular, real quick and you know me with popular things...I bristle. Well, if that many people like it, then it can't be any good, because people who make things popular generally have terrible taste. It was watching Lee Jung-jae in The Acolyte (second Acolyte references this post) that drove me to finally watch it. He was such a charismatic and soulful performer in The Acolyte that he really made an impact and I wanted to see more from him. And yeah, he's absolutely great in this. Here he's Gi-hun, a man in debt, divorced, and just mooching off his diabetic mother. He's not a good guy. It's not even that he wants to be a good guy, but he knows he should be. If he wants his daughter to respect him, if he wants his ex (whom he obviously still loves, but knows she's better off without him) to respect him, if he wants his mother to live and have a good life... then he needs to be a better man. But he doesn't have the tools for it. And then he's offered an opportunity. It's within the confines of this horrifying environment that Gi-hun learns to be a better man, supporting other players, trying to understand people and help them survive, and giving most people the benefit of the doubt when it's obvious he shouldn't. He's obviously going to be the victor, because the show is centred around him from the beginning, but can he actually live with himself if he does survive?
(1 Good) So much of the show, being such a phenomenon, was spoiled for me before I even watched it, but even if it hadn't been so popular, I probably could have guessed the rhythms of it. It's a formulae for a group of people in a confined space. They tribe up, there are betrayers, there are people who appear one way but are revealed to be something else...there are archetypes to these things and this plays right into them. But, the Squid Game offers the contestants an out...if they collectively, by majority vote, decide to end the games, they all get to leave. And after the first game, in which over a hundred of them are murdered, they decide to leave. So the second episode finds them back in their lives, back in their abysmal lives which have no hope, no promise of reward, just more misery. It's its most bold critique of capitalism in this second episode showing how without a social safety net people fall into despair and ruin with no opportunity to get out. As such, the Squid Game, with its death-or-prizes alternatives, seems like the more appealing option. It's unfortunate that it's the high-point of the season only two episodes in, but it's a great episode.
(1 Bad) Like I said, Squid Game relies upon tropes for character drama and conflict so it can feel pretty routine. It's only the games themselves that electrify the series, but even then I found the games to be oddly primitive, and designed with a lack of competitive spirit in mind. They're games of death designed to kill, not to be won. The way the games masters manipulate their players especially outside of the games is all part of their fun, which is less fun to watch knowing that it's all stacked against them. it feels like the games masters are just the writing staff who want to see as much death and misery and heap it upon the audience It should be a poignant commentary, about our fascination with observing human misery from a distance, but it never really does ask the audience to consider their role as spectator in all of this. So it loses its juice, its motivating factor if it's just entertainment and not asking anything of its audience in return.
META: I've said before how much I like the "man-hunting-man" subgenre of thrillers, your "Most Dangerous Games" and "Hard Targets" but this sort of "game show" version is another sister subgenre in the "Running Man" or "Hunger Games" style where it's a spectator sport. I thought it was going to be more of a spectator sport, much more public in a dystopian future, but no, instead it's a secret spectator sport for only the richest of rich to observe. The detective who finds his way into the back-end of the Squid Game, and starts digging into its secrets unfortunately demystifies it too much, in a way that breaks the logic of it. If they're stealing 400+ people off the streets of Korea each year for decades, leaving behind a lot of trace evidence like their weird cards, surely people will take notice. I dunno, I found the more I learned about the behind-the-scenes, the less I bought into it.
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The What 100: An upsetting double homicide in broad daylight in a public park in Cleaveland. Roswell revisited. A paranormal investigator and his ghostly companion. Cattle mutilations are back (and really haven't ever left).
(1 Great) "Great" sounds too enthusiastic to talk about the very upsetting story of the two friends murdered in Cleveland. It's not great, it's fucked up and horrible, and the interviews with the loved ones of the victims is heartbreaking. But it's also compelling the circumstances around it, and just how bizarre the situation is. Each season of Unsolved Mysteries on Netflix has had one of these... a murder case so unusual that it kind of breaks one's brain about how it could happen in the first place... and they linger with you, unanswered questions that, were I closer to the case, would drive me mad. In this case, two friends of about 40-years-old meet up on a park bench. Within clear eyeshot is a parking lot where sits a truck. The two friends are executed, shot in the back of the head, and the guy in the truck sees and hears nothing. Less than 15 minutes pass between the time the woman last used her phone and their bodies are discovered. There's a busy road that goes right by there. Any suspects that knew the victims have been ruled out. Gang related? Hate crime (the man was black, the woman white)? But how brazen an act, and how is there nothing to go on? It's viscerally upsetting.
(1 Good) The investigation into the rash of cattle mutilations in Oregon in between 2019 and 2022 is just freaking bizarre on its own, but when put into the context of thousands of reported cattle mutilations across the US and Canada since the 1960s it's the silent epidemic that nobody talks about. The surgical precision of the removal of skin and the tongue and, often, genitals, why? To what end? And the weird states that the cows are found in, sometimes upside down on fences, or sitting upright in full rigor, with very little blood on the scene... just completely eerie. A true unsolved mystery that wants to lean into the "alien abduction" of it all but holds itself back at least somewhat by talking all angles. Just wild.
(1 Bad) As much as UM gives us some upsetting cases of murder, and mysterious mysteries, sometimes its exploration of the paranormal just seem like weirdos or mentally unstable people putting on a show, being excited about things they're making up. The case about the paranormal investigator and his ghostly companion just made me giggle. The revisiting of the Roswell crash made it seem more and more like "this is a thing because people want it to be". Here's where I've settled on Roswell... if there were actual aliens, and the President of the United States is advised about it, do you think Trump could shut up about it. He's worried about Mexicans, you don't think he'd be stirring up shit about grey aliens if they were real? He would not be able to contain himself.
META: The past couple UM volumes have been more paranormal-heavy than I'd like. It's always been an aspect of the show, but I like the weird crime (doesn't even have to be murder) aspect far more, and it seems far more helpful to talk about unsolved crimes than it does about sasquatches and aliens. But I love how the show upsets me with the horrors of humanity, and I've always had a bit of a soft spot for entertaining these flights of metaphysical fancy. I wish this were a weekly show again.
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