I Saw This!! What I Have Been Watching: 2025 Edition (Part A)

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our [retired] 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 cuz that would be bad, very bad.  

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me (usually Toast, but Kent this time) spending too much time in front of the TV and not writing about it. Bad Kent! Bad! But it's in part because Kent is tired and busy can't review everything.

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Nobody Wants This Season 2 - 2025, Netflix (10/10 episodes)
created by Erin Foster
[Season 1]

Season 2 picks up where Season 1 left off, with Noah (Adam Brody) realizing that being with Joanne (Kristen Bell) may cause waves in his Synagogue, but he's willing to ride those waves for love. But just because they've committed again doesn't mean anything is going to be easier for them. 

Alright, let's be frank, I barely remember what happened in this second season of the show. If you want a recap, I'm sure there's many websites out there doing episodic recaps. I'm not that guy, this is not that site. Here's what I recall (and how I felt about it):

Joanne strives to win over Noah's mom. I like that Joanne doesn't take much shit from anyone, including Noah's mom, and she's not the cliched romcom lead who is quirky and klutzy and neurotic about her relationship... ok, she is a bit neurotic about her relationship. But in order to put complications into the show, the main characters need to overthink things, and be in their head too much.

Joanne and sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) get into a fight which drives a wedge between them for a significant part of the series, and the feud also leads to Joanne getting evicted from her apartment, and so some of the conflicts of the series is about whether Noah and Joanne are ready to move in together.

Meanwhile, Noah has lost the promotion, and so he leaves his beloved Synagogue, and finds himself instead at a nu-age Hollywood synagogue (run by Seth Rogen in his 500th TV role this year) that really doesn't seem to be interested in the traditions of Judaism at all, and it makes him miserable.

My favourite part of the series is the friendship between perpetually unfiltered Morgan and Noah's awkward brother Sasha (Tim Simons). Sasha is married to ball-busting taskmaster Esther (Jackie Tohn) and this season works hard at humanizing Esther, showing that she knows her attitude puts people off and she's self conscious about it. Her getting in the way of Morgan and Sasha's friendship loosens to funny time-limited, supervised visits, but the season starts driving a wedge between Sasha and Esther (because Sasha wants another child, Esther most definitely does not) and seems to be leaning towards actually pairing off Sasha and Morgan, which seems like a terrible idea.

A romantic comedy is typically all about the chase and/or overcoming the obstacles. When there are no natural obstacles left, a TV show built as a romcom needs to start manufacturing them, and while Nobody Wants This maintains a pretty high level of likeability and a pretty solid assortment of natural obstacles, the big complication that threatens to divide Joanne and Noah at the end of the season is pretty much bullshit.

I look forward to a third season but I also worry about it.

(Also, both Brody and Bell are in their mid-40's but it's clear that the show is presenting them as if they're in their mid-to-late '30s. The tone of a relationship and the future it presents is very different between these two ages. It's a good thing both performers are in incredible shape... Bell's shoulders and lats, migawd.)

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The Lowdown Season 1 - 2025, Disney+/FX (8/8 episodes)
created by Sterlin Harjo

When I put on the first episode I was in the midst of rewatching all the films of the Coen Brothers, and what was clear as mud was that the Coens were a particularly big source of inspiration for Sterlin Harjo in the execution of this series. 

There's a cinematic wasteland of bad Coens-esque productions out there, and this is most definitely not one of them, in part because it's clear that Harjo is inspired not just by the Coens but also by the same materials that inspire the Coens, particularly vintage detective fiction.

It also doesn't hurt that Harjo has his own decidedly strong and singular voice honed over a number of film projects (all remain relatively unheard of but now must be demanding eyes on them) and seemed to come out fully formed in the FX series Reservation Dogs, undeniably one of the best TV series of the past 25 years.

The day after watching the pilot I saw One Battle After Another, a film which rapidly consumed my excess brain space, and a film which, in many respects, seemed to have kinship with The Lowdown...or at least operating in the same temperature. A refrain in the first episode of The Lowdown - "There's nothing worse than a white man who cares" could very much be applied to Paul Thomas Anderson's latest as well.

The Lowdown stars Ethan Hawke (in probably my favourite performance he's ever done) as Lee Raybon, an investigative journalist, or "truthstorian" as he dubs himself, and very much a white man who cares. And it's not performative caring. He legit is fighting for everything he believes in and to great sacrifice to himself.  There's no glory in what he's doing. The papers and magazines he writes for are not in the least prestigious and, like all news media these days, just flailing to keep their head above water. 

Lee had written an article, an expose on the man campaigning for the Oklahoma governorship, Donald Washburn (Kyle MacLachlin) and his family, and shortly after its published, Washburn's brother (Tim Blake Nelson) apparently committed suicide. Lee smells something fishy around it all and begins peeling back the layers of a potential conspiracy involving the rich Oklahoma muckety mucks and a white supremist church with their own private army of ex-cons.

Lee's life is put in jeopardy many, many, many times, but where with most it would be a deterrent, for him its just more fuel and ammunition to charge forward. 

The show is an incredible tonal balance of comedy, mystery, intrigue, drama, intensity, the whole spectrum. With all apologies to Noah Hawley's Fargo TV series (a show I love, mostly), this is the best example of what a Coens-esque TV should or could look like. It's an incredibly exciting and entertaining and thought provoking ride the entire time, and even the singular interlude episode winds up being an entirely welcome interruption thanks to Peter Dinklage's incredible performance.

The show is entirely well casted, with Jeanne Tripplehorne as the femme fatale, Kaniehtiio Horn as Lee's ex, Star Wars:Skeleton Crew's Ryan Kiera Armstrong as Lee's daughter, Keith David as a concerned party to Lee's actions, and the dozen other supporting players that pop in and out in this wild neo-noir. 

The best show of the year? Yeah, probably.

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The Studio Season 1 - 2025, AppleTV+ (10/10 episodes)
created by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg

Spoiler Alert, but The Studio ends with Seth Rogen's character, Matt Remick, head of Continental Studios, standing on stage in front of a theatre full of people trying to get a chant going... "Moo-vies. Moo-vies. Moo-vies" and invariably the chant picks up and ultimately fills the theatre. Remick is elated.

It is, in context, just another of the many utterly absurd moments of the series. Here Matt and company have been trying to "Weekend at Bernies" their CEO Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston) who had overdosed on mushrooms at Matt's party the night before, and ..ah, it was a whole thing. But the point being, a theatre full of people chanting "Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies" is so, so stupid in context, and yet...and yet, there's a power to it, to reaffirming that, yes, movies are awesome, and sometimes you just want to be excited about the concept of them and that they exist.

I don't take to cringe comedy well. I've done my time with it, and I generally try and avoid it when I see it coming. I can small-dose it, but I really am not enamoured by people being awkward and making things worse for themselves with either no self awareness or an inability to stop themselves. The Studio is sort of a cringe comedy, but it's so nestled within satire that it effectively tempers the cringe. 

The series finds Matt Remick appointed as the new head of Continental, and it's a role that Matt feels he's earned, but it rapidly becomes clear he maybe doesn't have the stomach for it. He loves movies, but loving movies doesn't make a studio money, and the compromises Matt must make at every turn seem to tear him up inside. But at the same time, Matt has to contest with his own pretentiousness, his own ego, his own film snobbery, he has to play politics with artists and agents and press and public relations and his own producers at the studio. He has to contend with the ever-shifting nature of Hollywood and what is trending, what is successful.

The Studio is the latest in a long line of "behind the scenes" at a studio, but it does so with stars in its eyes and a knife with which to stab it in the back. It loves it and reveres it and loathes it wishes there were something better at every turn. It's this balance of admiration and detestation that makes the studio work so well. It's a show that's aware that it's better to have studios than not, but that they're also fundamentally broken and will probably never get fixed.

Rogen and Seth Goldberg direct each episode, and their style for the series is to construct the episodes as a series of one-shots. So each episode will have anywhere from one to a half dozen edits, and that's it. If you don't notice it, it means the show is doing its job at being entertaining, and if you do notice it, it's hard not to be impressed.

It's a series loaded to the gills with guest stars, from Charlize Theron to Zac Efron to Ron Howard to Zoe Kravitz to Ted Sarandos to Martin Scorsese to getting Sarah Polley out of acting retirement, but it's all backed up with a core cast of great comedic performers including Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Hahn and Catherine O'Hara.

I can't get out of this review without mentioning that the big "tentpole" picture at Continental Studios is a Kool-aid Man movies starring Ice Cube. It's ridiculous and never ceases to be entertaining as the studio execs labour over the decisions they need to make on such a production.

There's also an irony to having a TV show that's really an honest love letter to movies. Moo-vies. Moo-vies. Moo-vies. Moo-vies. Moo-vies Moo-vies. Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies. Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies!