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 definitely been trademarked by him. Yup, sure has.
This month:
Lanterns Season 1 (HBO, 8/8 episodes)
Ted Lasso Season 4 (AppleTV, 10/10 episodes)
Sugar Season 2 (Apple TV, 8/8 episodes)
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Created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindleof and Tom King
The What 100: In 2016, Hal Jordan is the Earth's Green Lantern, a superhero powered by a ring that can do whatever the mind and the willpower of its bearer compels it. A Green Lantern is like a space cop, patrolling his sector of space, and protecting the planets within its sector from external threats. Hal Jordan's biggest threat is John Stewart, the man he's been tasked by his superiors to train as his replacement. John has been training his whole life for the gig, but Hal is not ready to give it up. Things only get more complicated when an alien presence is discovered in a small Nebraska town, leading Hal to believe there's maybe a bigger threat than Stewart afterall. Stewart, meanwhile, has to navigate his traumatic childhood programming, his military training, and requests from multiple angles to betray Hal's trust. Good thing neither of these men know fear. Oh, and in 2026, Hal Jordan is found in the same small town with a bullet in his head.
1 Good: I'll start with the good, and build up to the great. There's any number of ways to handle the Green Lantern mythos. It's existed for over 60 years has been built and rebuilt and twisted and expanded and contracted any number of ways over that time. But there's only been one stab at the Lantern mythos in live action before, and it was a real, real dud. A dud that left such a bad taste in pretty much everyone's mouths that even comic nerds haven't really been clamoring for another attempt. But with Damon Lindleof (Lost, Watchmen) in the mix behind the scenes (with my favourite comics writer for the past decade, Tom King also on staff, both sharing co-creator status with Chris Mundy), I knew that Lanterns wasn't going to be your typical comic-book adaptation. The early word was they were looking at True Detective as a template for how to structure the show, meaning that this version of Green Lantern was going to be pretty down to Earth. So the trick would be, for budgetary purposes, to keep it grounded but also keep it engaging. And for the most part, they succeeded. Let's get into a bit of the why...and why not....
1 Great: The cast here is everything.
Aaron Pierre as John Stewart is magnificent. While Hal Jordan has been kind of the primary Green Lantern in comics since the 60's, John Stewart was the most visible Green Lantern throughout the Justice League era of the late 1990s and 2000s. He has had his moments in the comics as well, but it was in animation that he became the Green Lantern to many. Pierre's performance here takes inspiration from the Stewart of Justice League but the show develops a new backstory, not just for Stewart, but for how the whole "chosen one" of Green Lanterndom works. I think it was incredibly important for the show to simplify the mythos but also to redefine it for its own purposes. Stewart was raised to be Green Lantern, raised to be without fear, and we see the man it built but also the effect that trauma has had on him, how disaffected he kind of is, but still not losing his compassion.
Hal Jordan on the other hand is egocentric, cocky, full of self-importance and has lost his way because of the power he possesses. Hal has a good heart, generally, with good intentions, generally, but over time he's lost sight of what his job as Green Lantern is, and now he's willing to make sacrifices and compromise his own values to get what he wants. He thinks it's justice, but it's really about an inflated ego. Kyle Chandler was never my favourite performer, just as Jordan was never my favourite Green Lantern, but Chandler is great here, as a snarky, grizzled, over-it asshole who thinks he knows best. In many cases he does, but not always.
Kelly Macdonald plays Kerry Kane, the small town sheriff (originally from Gotham, but with an accent from nowhere) who has three dead alien bodies on her hands, but doesn't care at all for the Green Lantern sticking his nose in her business. Kerry is the only one who can seem to put Hal in his place, to stop him from doing what he reflexively wants to do, to try and keep peace in her town when Hal is searching for war. But she can only hold him off so long.
There's others in the cast, including Garret Dillahunt, Poorna Jagannathan, and Laura Linney that also elevate the story with incredible, memorable performances.
1 Bad: For a show about a superhero whose power it is to make any kind of construct from the ring on his finger, there's not a whole lot of Green Lanterning going on. It's so obviously a budgetary thing, as the effects of the Green Lantern ring have never been a cheap proposition. It doesn't make it any less disappointed that we don't see more ring-slinging in the show. There's not a tremendous amount at all...there's very little in fact, and what little we do see is pretty tepid.
(META) The show really works in spite of not really accessing its core premise and instead relying upon procedural investigations and interpersonal intrigue and good old fashioned dramatic storytelling to keep propelling it forward instead of superhero action is both surprising and exciting. Addressing John as a black man having to come to terms with the reality of joining the space cops, everything he's trained for, and what that would have to compromise in him is the most remarkable part of the show. How the show jumps 10 years and the way that shadows him is just one of the many great strokes of the show. I don't think Mundy, Lindleof, and King could repeat not having much Green Lanterning in a Green Lantern show, but they made it work once, it's very possible they could make it work again.
Even without using the power ring all that often or to any great visual stakes, Lanterns still managed to employ a grander scale story and aspects of the grander mythos of the Green Lantern Corps into this small town procedural cop show. I'm very excited for more Pierre as John Stewart, and excited to see where they'll take him next.
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Developed by Jason Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Brendan Hunt, and Joe Kelly
The What 100: AFC Richmond, under the guidance of the team owner Rebecca Welton and chief marketing officer Keeley Jone, is starting up a womens football club, and they want the man who turned their men's club into a Premiere League team to work his magic once again. Ted moves back to London, his ex-wife and son in tow, and starts in a new chapter of this fish-out-of-water saga, with many familiar faces and a lot of new ones to greet him. One less than welcoming face, though, is assistant coach Alice Chilton, resentful of this male American taking the head coach role of this very English women's football team.
1 Great: I'd be lying if I said I was immune to the delight of spending time in the AFC Richmond world again. Even though this season is incredibly wobbly in terms of character development and it short changes the new women's club far more than it ever did the men's club in its first season, it's also pretty exciting to have a largely new cast of unique characters to explore alongside catching up with some of the old faces we knew and loved.
1 Good: I have to give top marks to Tanya Reynolds (The Decameron) as Coach Chilton as the highlight of the season. Her performance as the chilly, standoffish, but on-the-outside-looking-in Alice showed so much heart and vulnerability underneath an ice-block of an exterior. It's a very different character and performance than Roy Kent or Nate Shelley (thank the gods for that) but she very quickly became the reason to watch the show.
1 Bad: Before I tuck into the bad, I will just reiterate that I did, every week, enjoy watching this show. But the choices the writers make here, over and over again, were confounding. Why is Ted basically a passenger in his own show. Ted's storyline is basically "I'm ready to date again". That's it. Does he date anyone? No, but he's ready.
And Rebecca is given a storyline early on where she doubts her feminist credentials after Alice criticizes her for hiring a man instead a woman for head coach, which is not only out of character for Rebecca but stupid in context of everything we've seen 3 seasons prior. There's also the fact that a waiter refers to her pejoratively as a sex worker, and the episode where she's flustered into inaction because of relationship woes.
But that's nothing compared to every ridiculous plot they give Keeley this season, which undermines all of her growth from the prior seasons, and often infantilizes her. That she spends half the season doubting whether she's good at her job and the other half worrying about whether she should get back together with Roy or not is the biggest waste of Juno Temple's talents and the showrunners should be ashamed. I would say that the season ends with her being pregnant is the final straw, but Brett Goldstein's note perfect reaction saves it.
(META) I was done with Ted Lasso by the end of Season 3. I didn't need to see any more. It didn't seem to know where it wanted to go, really, anyways, so it was best that it didn't continue. And now it has, and in this new season, I see the path forward. There is an incredible cast of actors on the Lady Grayhounds that we just don't get to spend much time with. We spend more time with May and the barflys down at the pub than almost any of the team,which is a real shame. Its not that I don't want to see the vestiges of the prior seasons return (loved seeing Jamie Tart again, and a lot of the cameos, not all, were well integrated) but what the show doesn't do with this new team that it did with the old one, as well as the sad storylines for Rebecca and Keeley show a definite weakness in the writers room when it comes to the show's female characters.
That all said, Hannah Waddingham really came to play this season, and she has a few moments that are exceptional comedy gold, including her doing her Roy Kent impersonation.
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created by Mark Protosevich
The What 100: John Sugar is back! Well, that's the thing, John Sugar never left. When all his other alien brethren departed, Sugar just couldn't leave Earth behind. Part of it was he's still looking for his long lost sister, but the other part is he's kind of "gone native" and is addicted to what the planet has to offer, for good and for ill. But with none of his old friends around, and nobody reaching out, and his human friends living their own lives, Sugar is lonely. He's investigating who ratted out his people's infiltration of the earth to the government, while also taking the case of a boxer whose petty-criminal brother seems to have inexplicably gotten entangled in something very huge. He also, maybe, kinda falls in love.
1 Great: Colin Ferrell does a very convincing job at being the kindest, most empathetic being to ever exits. He seems so effortlessly compassionate and ready to give anyone a chance to be their best self. If he can help elevate them he will. It's my favourite part of this very weird neo-noir detective/alien show, and it's not lost on me the point that this kind of compassion seems to only be able to come from an alien.
1 Good: I only really know Tony Dalton from his role as Jack Duquesne in the Hawkeye mini-series (and his re-appearance in Daredevil: Born Again) but I really, really liked him as that character. He seemed devilishly charming in Hawkeye, but it was a red herring... he was just genuinely charming. Here, it's very much the opposite, as the leader of an LAPD task force that is severely corrupt and up to some atrocious shenanigans, he play an incredibly evil, yet very human villain. ACAB man, ACAB.
1 Bad: I don't know if the second season of Sugar could ever live up to the first, because the first season spent more than half its episodes hiding the fact that Sugar was an alien. It was just a hardboiled L.A. detective story that was very involving up until the reveal. Here the story is split three ways, and it's at least one way too many. Sugar's dalliance with a fetching, age-appropriate lawyer (Laura Donnelly) was obviously building to something that takes the full season to get to, while his secondary plot of researching who sold his people out also takes until the season finale to get to the point...both seem almost a distraction from the very involving case he's working on. The show had a very hard time balancing the harsh things Sugar was going through in the main case with his other case, and then the tone shift into romance never truly fit.
(META) The final episode of the season resolves the main plot early and then deals with the other two threads it had been sewing all season. It leaves the show with a little bit of a rug pull and some answers that only pose more questions, the only thing is....they're not at all compelling. The "alien" side of Sugar is so second fiddle to the private eye side that leaning into this for a cliffhanger doesn't yield the resulting excitement I think the showrunners were hoping for in order to get a third season. If a third season does happen, I imagine it will be at Farrell's insistence rather than any big desire from AppleTV or "fan" response (is there a "Sugar" fan community?).
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