What I Have Been Watching: this pile

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is usually the domain of Toast admittedly spending too much time in front of the TV. Kent's stepping on toes (Toastoes? Toestys?) here mainly because he has a piles of TV shows in progress and maybe doesn't have too much to say about any of it. Maybe(?)

Best In Miniature Season 2 - CBC (8/8 episodes)

The Mrs. Kent has really gotten into miniatures over the past few years, and the first season of Best in Mini was a real kick in the pants for her start tackling doing her own minifying. I'm kind of envious of her dedication to the art form and the increasingly impressive results she's achieving.  As a competition show, Best In Mini stands out because it doesn't drown itself in contestant's personalities like far too many other shows of this ilk. It's about skills, and in the community of miniature artists, the skills are appreciated. These contestants, though all trying to win, aren't in competition with the others, they're in competition with themselves, pushing their skill sets to the limit, to try and meet or exceed the expectation of the judges. We only get the slimmest of glimpses into the personal lives of these artisans, and usually only in as much as it's relevant to the pieces that they're working on. It's a quiet, low-stakes, relaxing, and fascinating discipline, and it's amazing to see each artisan's strengths employed, but even greater to see them try something new and succeed or fail at it. 

Like the first season, it starts with building the house. Each subsequent episode is furnishing a specific room, with specific requirements, and it ends with the external setting. The level and depth of knowledge on design and multidisciplined craftsmanship required to succeed in the show is astounding, making the frontrunners evident from the get go, but also impressive to see artists find their groove, and improve and grow as the show goes on.  I felt the winner of the season came down to the one judge not understanding one of the contestant's stories and subjectively wanting something out of the story that the artist didn't feel fit, and was penalized for being true to their own sense of the story. 

Lego Masters Australia Season 3 - Discovery Canada (10/14 Episodes)

I freaking love Lego Masters Australia. After the Mrs. and I ploughed through season 1 & 2 on demand I craved more. Each episode is a freaking dopamine hit of giddy plastic joy. Each episode ends with a teaser for the next episode and I.just.want.it.now! 

Unlike the North American Lego Masters, the Australian version feels so much more connected to its builders, the community of Lego aficionados, and to the participants in the show. You get the sense that host Hamish Blake is having an absolute blast on set, as are the contestants, and they start to form kind of in jokes between them. It's very personable in a way that the spit-and-polish of the (North) American Lego Masters, as hosted by Will Arnett, is not. Likewise, the solitary judge, "Brickman" Ryan McNaught, seems to be personally invested in the brick building journey of the contestants. The level of emotion that comes out of him as he has to eliminate a duo, especially later on in the season, is so heartfelt and genuine. These aren't just contestants to him, they are proteges or pupils. He will lean into someone mid-build and offer a gentle suggestion, whether it's to help them get unstuck from a particular problem, or to try and push them past their comfort zone. The US Lego Masters judges, while definitely interested observers, do not seem to have nearly the same investment level.  There is a reason for that, and it's how the shows are structured.

The Aussie Lego Masters, unlike any other competition show, really wants to spotlight the builders skills, and gives them many, many opportunities to shine. It's a show that starts with 8 groups of contestants and this season didn't eliminate an group until episode 3, giving each team at least three or four builds before elimination. That's a lot of opportunity for them to prove themselves and something which I wish other such shows based around skill sets would take to heart and employ (Best in Miniature could do well with a structure like this at least early on, although, there's only so many rooms in a house).  Past contestants come back as special guests to great fanfare which speaks to the sense of community the show builds...it creates legends even in the losers of previous seasons (that young season 1 contestant Jordy is now a regular player on the show as a production assistant, but onscreen seen typically in a janitorial role, is a perennial delight).

It's the highlight of my week, tempered only by the fact that Discovery has started editing the shows down to an hour, which means there are dramatic jumps in the episode timelines and we miss some delightful content (in the Marvel themed episode, we missed an entire judging segment, much to our disappointment and frustration). 

Doom Patrol Season 4 - HBOMax (6/12 episodes)

[Season 1, Season 2, Season 3]

I think my problem with Doom Patrol at this point rests entirely in how disconnected the characters are from each other in this series. This season seems to be trying to reconcile past lives, as Vic (having had all his cyborg parts removed and is now just a boring normal guy) gets reacquainted with old friends in Detroit, Rouge tries to atone for her past misdeeds (which Rita cannot let go of, for obvious reasons), Larry is still wrestling with his closeted past as well as his alien offspring/parasite, and the saga of Jane and the war of her personalities continues. We meet a new character, Casey, as we return for a one-off with Dorothy, both of whom are dealing with daddy issues. Despite all the continued weirdness (which I love) and the great scoring from Clint Mansell and Kevin Kiner, it feels like we're treading so much water with these characters, particularly waters we've tread before.

I am, however, torn by my fatigue with the show because, at its heart, it's a show about trauma, surviving it, coping with it, and moving past it as much as one can. It's very potent, and kind of important in this regard. It's a show that uses its weirdness expertly as metaphor, without ever bashing you over the head with what they're doing. If you want to approach it just as a show about weirdos facing weird things, it works on that level, but digging even one layer deeper reveals so much more complexity, and there's a lot to identify and/or empathize with. But it just feels like it doesn't quite know how to get to where it wants to go, or how it wants to say things. It's like when I write my long-winded reviews that circle the point I'm making but take forever to get there.  Except I know I don't need to pad for time.  Hoping the "part 2" of this season brings the series to a satisfactory conclusion.

Ted Lasso Season 3 -Apple TV+ (6/12 episodes)

[Seasons 1 & 2]

The good news is Ted Lasso is funny again. Where the second season seemed really, really weighed down, and troubled, this season has inflated the flat tires and replaced the busted rubber. Its nowhere near as tight as the pretty-much-perfect season 1 -- its massive success means the show can run episodes at whatever length it wants, and it does.  I can only imagine how tight a comedy it might be if held to a 25 minute standard...or it's quite possible it might not even work.

This season seems to have clear directions, chief of which is to conclude with Ted ultimately no longer being Coach of AFC Richmond, but also it seems like the show is setting itself up for life without Jason Sudekis. It's trying for a redemptive arc for Nate (after his flat-out villainy last season, it's a tall order), it's setting Rebecca up for a pretty big journey, and the triangle of Keely-Roy-Jamie finds a fourth participant pushing the edges out. The members of the team, so far, are treated almost exclusively as a collective unit, with individual personalities and stories dismissed in favour of the hive, but a few wrinkles such as eccentric superstar Zava joining the team or reporter Trent Crimm being ever present as documentarian shakes things up in a very enjoyable way (James Lance's Crimm is such a welcome addition as regular cast member).

The show seems less interested in driving towards a happy ending than it does settling in, and I think that could ultimately be a good thing. I mean, if people want 3 seasons in-and-out with Ted as the gravitational center, it might be less satisfying as a result, but if the show is pivoting to a Ted-less spin off, it's certainly setting a good foundation for it.  Either way, I'm much happier with this season than the last one, and feel more entertained, and maybe even more invested, as it slips a bit more into sit-com mode than "prestige TV". Excited to see where it goes.

Stargirl Season 3 - AmazonPrime (5/13 episodes)

[Seasons 1 & 2]

Superhero fatigue is definitely real. I'm a lifelong comics reader and I used to devote myself to seeing every tangentially superhero-related mass media product out there. These days my comics pile is so much smaller than ever before, my investment in big superhero universes has dwindled to almost nothing, I'm not rewatching the big tentpole movies as frequently as I used to, and even good superhero TV, like Stargirl, feels exhausting to me. 

13 episodes? Why?

I like Stargirl, it uses themes of legacy (my favourite subject matter for comic book superheroics) to build its own in-world history, so it has a setting where battles between superheroes and supervillains existed before its first episode began. Over the past two seasons its teenage characters have been thrust into the midst of all that history and it all seems to come spiralling back improbably to this quaint town of Blue Valley.  It stretched that credibility for all it could, this season, everything comes springing back, and it feels like we're treading familiar ground. Getting caught eating your own tail is something all TV shows have to face inevitably, but it seems like superhero shows do it more frequently and more often than regular programming. I'm not sure what it is. Probably budget and contractual limitations, forcing the re-use of characters and sets and effects and whatnot... it means that the superhero worlds on TV don't ever really grow, they just get more crowded.

What Stargirl really needed, at this stage, was to break out of Blue Valley, to go out into the world beyond, but the show couldn't afford it, so instead we're stuck with new angles on returning villains to a not-unwatchable but ho-hum result.  Season 3 is the series' final run, and we'll probably get around to finishing it, but it seems like it's going to be a chore, rather than a delight, despite the presence of Joel McHale as series regular.  Hoping to be proven wrong.

Grand Crew Season 2 - NBC/City (8/10 episodes) 

[Season 1]

I was so excited for Grand Crew to return, that I kept looking and looking and looking for it since the start of the year, with no trace. Then, suddenly, I was three weeks behind. They just snuck out the gate as seems to happen with big three network TV shows that aren't returning reality TV competition shows. It's seriously to the point with network TV where it feels like legit dramas or sitcoms don't even belong there anymore.  Eyes are always upon cable or streaming, it's like nobody's paying attention to what ABC/CBS/NBC is doing unless you're over 60.

Grand Crew exists in the tradition of hangout comedies of yore. It's basically contemporary Friends, but, you know...LA instead of New York. And a wine bar instead of a coffee shop. The gender balance is also off, with Nicole Beyer's Nicky and Grasie Mercedes' Fay as the two lone female leads, and Fay is kind of positioned more as a romantic foil for Aaron Jennings' Anthony and Nicky's immediate new BFF rather than as a lead all her own.

It's a really funny show, with Carl Tart (playing Sherm) the clear breakout of the cast. I knew Tart from before the show from his devastatingly hilarious character improv on Comedy Bang Bang, and he delivers just as large here. My biggest worry is that nobody's really noticing. 20 years ago he would already have a movie.

This second season doesn't quite hit as high or as funny as last season, primarily because the writers are trying to involve us too deeply and seriously in the characters lives and their romantic entanglements. Where 25 years ago two seasons of a show could spread out this kind of storytelling over 50 episodes, here they're trying to do the same amount of investment in less than half the time, and I'm just not that into it. I would rather the funny over the character beats any day.  This is a proper sitcom, it's not "prestige TV" so its attempts at serializing even light melodrama comes off as too heavy for its weight class.  Still, it's a good crew, and I would like to spend more time with them. Hoping the season 3 pickup announcement comes soon.

I Saw This!! Bid Adieu to '22 (TV Edition)

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent (me) 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.  Or, maybe not so bad.  What's the worst that could happen?

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Parallels - Disney+

I watched Parallels so long ago that it feels like I watched it in 2021.  Is that possible?  (No, it debuted in March).  So far on Disney+ I've not encountered many foreign language D+ "originals", and yet Parallels is a French production, but promoted as a D+ original.  Curious.  

Anyway, the show is a 6-episode sci-fi drama that clearly was inspired by Netflix's smash German time travel mind-fuck, Dark. I was expecting, given this being a Disney production starring teenagers, that this would be a stripped-down drama, one with more teen angst in the Young Adult mode, but to my surprise it doesn't hold back from some heavier emotional implications.  A group of four friends head to an old bunker they've turned into a hang out space, only to get caught in the side-effects of a supercollider experiment.  After the experiment, two of the teens are missing, Bilal and Sam.  Sam's troubled younger brother, Victor, and his crush, Romane, are left behind, unable to explain to their families what happened to the others.  Meanwhile Sam finds himself in an alternate reality where everyone else is gone and a cloud of suspicion surrounds him and Bilal shows up, but a 37-year-old man.  What happens after I've basically forgotten at this point, but I recall being impressed with the mystery while at the same time being completely unable to shake the feeling that this was all familiar territory.  It really did have so many shades of Dark that I couldn't help but compare the two.  Dark was an ambitious multi-season epic that required deep investment into the plot, characters and timelines.  Parallels is a much slimmer affair, to the point that its finale, while providing closure, doesn't seem wholly satisfying to what it built up to.  Then again, with only six episodes, most clocking in between 30 and 40 minutes, there's not a lot of runway to really build up to something big.  

If you haven't seen Dark, this is like an entry level version of it, if you want to test the waters to see if you can both handle the timey-wimeyness of it, as well as subtitles.

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The Old Man Season 1 - FX

Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow together again, for the first time?  Without doing a minimum amount of research, it seems like Bridges and Lithgow should have been in a whole string of movies together and that this series was a marked "reunion" of the two.  Kind of like how Heat brought DeNiro and Pachino together for the first time, but it seemed like the two had been acting in films together for years.  Anyway, the Old Man should have been EVENT television, but we're in a serious golden age of TV, an abundance of riches, and as such, this union of two massive acting talents kind of fell under the radar.

The Old Man finds Bridges as an old time operative who has been operating off the radar for a very, very long time.  But, just because he's been carefully working in the shadows doesn't mean that people aren't still looking for him.  When his current guise is compromised, he runs, and winds up sheltering as a border with Amy Brenneman.  The two have a bit of a thing, but when she's threatened by her association with him, he essentially kidnaps her to keep her safe.  This dynamic is the most potent, as well as the most difficult aspect of the series.  Bridges genuinely likes her and is affectionately trying to keep her out of harm's way, but at the same time Brenneman is completely at his mercy in a very much damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't way.  But, she also proves herself adaptable with her own level of cunning and shrewdness and I do quite love how her story plays out.  Meanwhile, we learn about Bridges' daughter (Alia Shawkat) who is his inside man at the CIA, working directly under Lithgow as his protege, and close family friend.  There's definitely conflicted emotions in all of that that do get explored rather nicely.

And then, this whole time, we're thinking "The Old Man" is Bridges, or possibly both Bridges and Lithgow, but no...they were both working together for a time under The Old Man (Joel Gray) who is both above and beyond the normal pecking order of operations in the world of espionage they exist in.  Add to the mix a hitman and his handler (Gbenga Akinnagbe, Ecko Kellum) who have their orders and their own objectives, and it all swirls into a grand mess of who's-really-in-charge and what's-the-real-threat.  It's a twisty, exciting, gripping series that would maybe have been tighter as a film, but it's never a bad time with either of its two leads on the screen (it keeps them apart for the bulk of the first season, save for a scintillating phone call or two, so that when they do eventually come together it feels like a suitably massive moment).  

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The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 1 - Amazon Prime 

I tried reading The Lord of the Rings once.  I got bored very, very quickly.  I've watched Peter Jackson's films a couple times.  I do get bored, frequently, watching those (most of The Two Towers holds my attention, though).  I skipped The Hobbit films, because I knew if I found the LOTR trilogy boring with all the intricate details from Tolkien's books filling out the world, that a trilogy based off one much slimmer book would be dicey viewing.  I was not at all excited for The Rings of Power, if based on Tolkien's works at all, it'd be loosely off the materials collected and expanded upon posthumously.

But, the wife, she likes her fantasy.  And there's the curiosity factor of seeing Bezos put his money where his nerdy heart lives, putting a billion dollars into a season of television like a man for whom money has lost all meaning.  So I watched The Rings of Power and found myself...surprisingly...invested.  Where others, for valid reasons and for toxic ones, have found LOTR:ROP unwatchable, I actually looked forward to that hour every Friday where I would be transported to Middle Earth, watching hobbits and orcs and dwarves and elves explore their religious beliefs, call into question their societal tenets, confront their prejudices, all in the name of quests, quests, quests.  Like the slow sci-fi of Andor, this is slow fantasy, taking its time, exploring its world, the people that live in it, and how they live in it.  How they choose to accept or defy the order of things.  I thought, based on the trailers, that LOTR:ROP would be populated by a cast of not-ready-for-primetime-players, the type of fantasy cast you'd see on the syndicated productions like Xena or Hercules but I was surprised there too.  They may not be big names or recognizable faces, but they are talented, attractive people who buy into the world, and make it all come to life.  And jesus, do they ever look great doing it.  The sets, the costumes, makeup, hair, armor, weapons, decor, all of it is to.the.nines.  It's gorgeous, and the razzle dazzle of an opulent production does go a long long way.  Do I remember a single character's name?  No.  But I can picture the whole season pretty vividly in my mind.  As much as I can get bored by fantasy, I really did like every story in this (but the stuff with the dwarves was my favourite).  Your mileage may vary.

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She-Hulk: Attorney At Law Season 1- Disney+

I really dig She-Hulk as a character. Since John Byrne's meta-adventurous run in the late 1980's with the character, Jen Walters has been mainly positioned as a fun character in the Marvel Universe.  Before Deadpool was addressing his audience in the comics, She-Hulk was breaking the fourth-wall, but not in an imp-ish way that other comedic characters would in comics.  She-Hulk's adventures still mattered, still had stakes, but there was a narrative device, and an injection of Looney Tunes into the proceedings that really made her title stand out.  The 20 years later, the Charles Soule run of She-Hulk, on which the TV show is loosely riffing on, focussed on Jen as a lawer, and on making a workplace sitcom set in a law office and courtrooms, basically a superheroic Ally McBeal, with only a minimal amount of fourth wall breaking.

I was really into the idea of a She-Hulk TV show, especially with Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany in the lead (she was outstanding in that show, and having heard her on comedy podcast, knew that she could more than handle a sitcom leading role).  But then the trailer came out, the one with the unfinished Shulkie, and the trailer wasn't selling the comedy very well either.  I was nervous.  And that nervousness bled through to watching every episode, week-by-week, and it never let up.  I was not relaxed watching the show the first time around, and I was nitpicking it to death, to the point that I had convinced myself that it was a show that tried too hard and failed.

But, I gave it a second shot, binged it in one sitting, and found myself absolutely delighted almost every moment.  Knowing what was going to happen, knowing who the players were, not anticipating any surprises, taking myself out of MCU-SPECULATION-MODE (which is a horrible place to be sometimes) and just sitting back with the show, it's super-duper fun. It's really not trying too hard.  It successfully negotiates adapting the character, adapting the Soule run, integrating different aspects of the MCU, introducing new aspects to the MCU, playing with the fourth wall, and getting more than a few laughs every episode, while also investing you in the character and her journey in a big-budgeted sitcom kind of way.  It's impressive.  Sure, not every scene with She-Hulk looks perfect.  It's a tough effect to pull off even on a heightened Marvel TV budget, but, once you're used to it, it's mostly good enough for now.  I mean, do I have the hots for the big green lady?  What I think is the biggest contributing factor She-Hulk brings to the MCU is sexuality.  With the exception of Tony Stark's more lecherous tendencies in the early Iron Man movies and a tepid love scene in the Eternals, sex is almost never acknowledged in the MCU, but here Jen is sexually active, and sexually proactive. In perhaps my favourite turn of events, she wheels Matt Murdock (so great to see Charlie Cox again, and playing the character in a lighter capacity) who then is the next morning seen doing the walk of shame barefoot in his Daredevil costume, boots in hand.  My favourite single moment of the series (it makes no logical sense, but it's still brilliantly executed).  It's great fun, with a great cast (love Ginger Gozaga and Josh Segarra, and Patty Guggenheim's Madisynn is the ultimate scene stealer), and lots of epic moments all pointedly fun.  I went from thinking this was maybe not good to now thinking it's maybe the best Disney+ Marvel show.  Can't wait for more, but also can't wait to watch it again.

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Lego Masters Season 3 - Fox

Lego Masters Australia Season 1&2 - Discovery

Lego Masters UK Season 1 - AmazonPrime

I've written about Lego Masters a few times now on the blog, and I'm unabashedly a fan of the show.  The third season of the North American version, hosted by Will Arnett, I was so excited to watch week to week, and I was bursting with Canadian Pride as we had a few very strong teams in competition this year.  What I genuinely like about the show is how, despite being a competition, the competitors clearly begin to bond with each other over time and there's a real sense of comraderie between them, as well as the judges (Lego certified builders Amy and Jamie) who clearly respect the talent as well as the people.   Some of the challenges this year included building life-sized dogs for a dog show, playable mini-golf holes, recreating a Marvel scene, and building a workable water fountain.  After the first four or so teams are eliminated it becomes pretty clear who the top teams are, yet there are still surprises that happen, technical failures that were unpredictable that can sink even the most talented team.  As always, the editing format of the show can be grating.  I HATE that the show opens with a preview of the show, teasing the challenge and which teams might be having trouble with them, rather than just letting the show play out, and I also, direly, detest the cut to commercial when something dramatic is about to happen and the 30 second replay when it comes back from commercial.  It's maddening.  As well, the editing of the timing so that we hear Arnett call out how much time is left, but it's clear when it cuts to different teams and their builds, it's not aligned with the actual time.  I don't appreciate the deception for "dramatic storytelling purposes".

Which is just one of the reasons why Lego Masters Australia has proven to be the superior entry of the Lego Masters franchise.  Lets get this out of the way, the first season of Lego Masters Australia was a bit of a gong show, with some of the participants being way, way down the talent ladder compared to what we'd seen on Lego Masters in North America for 3 seasons. But Season 1 of LMAus also pre-dates Lego Masters in North America by 2 years so it really set the template for how the show should run and I bet at that time the Lego Community was maybe a little dubious about a talent show of Lego building.  The second season of LMAus, though, wound up with three teams in the final that produced a build that could have bested the winners of any of the three seasons of LM in North America, so it was a huge step up for season 2.  

What makes LMAus stand out, though, is its host, comedian Hamish Blake.  Where Will Arnette's on-screen personality is full of fake ego and braggadocio that kind of keeps him at a bit of a distance from the competitors, Hamish is utterly boyish and playful, frequently doing bits with, and around, the competitors.  Blake also does a talking head confessional to the camera (something Arnett doesn't really do) and really brings a hugely comedic aura to the show (it's no wonder he's won awards for his hosting of the show) that is infectious.  The show's format also is different, and took a bit of getting used to, but I like it more.  Rather than 10-12 teams starting off, the show only starts with 8 teams.  They do an initial, non-elimination build to compete for the "golden brick" (which the team can use at a later date for immunity from an elimination challenge), then they do a build for which the winner gets to skip the next elimination build, and then it's only on the third build that a team gets eliminated.  This way we get to see each team produce at least 3 builds before one is eliminated.  It's more focussed on the talent than the competition this way, and I do love it.  Also with the smaller starting roster it lets the teams develop their sense of camaraderie with each other faster, and we as an audience get to know them more easily.  The first season had one team with a super-talented but utterly maddening, ego-centric twerp that pushed around his partner who went maddeningly deep into the show, which fuelled the show when maybe the builds weren't as strong as we're used to.  Season 2 had a lot of surprises, including an underwater build, and designing a brand new Star Wars ship, among others, which really pushed the challengers to pretty amazing heights.  The finale of Season 2 was easily the best of the 3 North American and 2 Australian series.  I'm eagerly awaiting the domestic release of seasons 3 and 4.

Less exciting was Lego Masters UK.  The format of the show is decidedly different, at 4 episodes the first season.  Though I should stipulate that Season 1 predates even the first season of LMAus it's still wild how drastically different the show is.  Starting with a roster of 48 teams, quickly winnowed down to 8, and then eliminating two more in the first episode, it's a dodgier talent pool than the first episode of LMAus.  Like, two teams of kids under 12 made it through to the top 8.  It seemed clear to me that this was an early prototype for the Lego Masters format, and there wasn't much figured out, in terms of how they wanted to present the show, who they wanted to have on the show, and what the target audience was.  It's structured like a tepid British all-ages documentary, with the host narrating what's going on and providing lame puns as transition points.  It borders on painful.  The "brick pit" were kind of majestic places in the North American and Australian versions, here, it's all just Rubbermaid towers...so many drawers really making it hard to find things and build fast.  And the challenges were cute, but super short, with 3 hours, or sometimes no prescribed time limit, leading to mostly pedestrian builds across three episodes.  The final episode provided the two finalists something like ten days to create their builds, which did lead to some pretty massive displays, and they were pretty nice, but I couldn't help but wonder what any of the top three teams from any of the other LM  series would have done with 10 days of building time.  There's a two more seasons of LMUK floating out there (I'm hoping they improve the format but if they didn't it's probably why there's only 3 seasons) and apparently 3 seasons of a Dutch LM series (which looks to be more in the NA/Aus format)

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For All Mankind Season 1 - AppleTV+

As far as streaming services go, AppleTV+ has the hardest time selling me on their wares. I've been hesitant to explore what they're offering, if anything because they don't promote what they offer very prominently.  I think of all their shows the only one I recall seeing a trailer for was The Morning Show which only seemed to be selling the idea of Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carrell, no other indication as to what it was about.  I found Severance (my favourite show of '22) via Adam Scott promoting it on a podcast, and Mythic Quest was trumpeted highly by tv critics during its first season, but not promoted well by Apple.  For All Mankind is something that should have been an easy sell to me and other nerdy based on it being the product of Ronald D. Moore of Battlestar Galactica fame (with Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi)...plus, it's sci-fi, in that it presents an alternate history of the space race.  It really starts with the conceit of "what if Russia landed on the moon first?" and takes its cue from there.

The first season rockets through the late-1960s and 1970's, taking a big jump through time and progress every few episodes.  It mixes fictionalized version of real life individuals with wholly new characters fleshing out that the Cold War became a lot more about the Space Race.  Joel Kinneman (Suicide Squad) is the de-facto lead character of the series, playing Ed Stafford, as a fictional Apollo 10 astronaut who orbited the moon, and felt the pull to land, but followed orders instead, costing them the "first man on the moon" status.  Ed and his old guard of astronauts find themselves in a heightened environment, flush with funding and keen to compete to achieve the next great milestone.  From the onset, the idea is that the moon was just the beginning, that Mars is next.  The series has a pretty large cast - astronauts, ground support, administrative, housewives and children.  Shantel VanSanten (The Flash) plays Ed's wife Karen, and at first I judged the role as being a real thankless one, just another stay on the ground, anxiously watching TV cut to as the men do the derring-do, but the role becomes much more that of who's left behind, particularly late in the season when Ed is effectively trapped on the moon base (yep, this season ends with a moon base having been established) and she's having to deal with increasingly difficult situation at home, alone, and make the decision on whether it's good or not for Ed's mental health to know what's happening.  There's also some spotlight roles for female astronauts, with the episode "Nixon's Women" probably my favourite of the series so far, with one wife of an astronaut joining the program (logically, and being pushed through because of her attractiveness, plus the marketability of a husband and wife astronaut crew) and the pleasure of unflappable Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger - Lost) joining the cast full time.  

The first season works so well because of its rapid pace, burning through time and letting the audience keep catching up to them and all the benchmarked changes to the timeline compared to our own.  That tracking of the changes in the realities is probably my favourite part about watching the show, but I also enjoy how grounded and methodical it is, not afraid to just wallow in jargon if it means maintaining the air of authenticity.  It's a good looking show, probably a pretty expensive first season of television.  We've started season 2 which starts with a 10 year time jump, but I found it gets bogged down in petty drama, rather than the exacerbated pace of rocketing through time and teasing out the alternate reality.  We stalled out on it at the half way point but have been encouraged to stick with it for an apparently dynamite season 3.  Will report back.

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The Resort - Showcase 

I was drawn in with Cristin Milioti (Palm Springs) and William Jackson Harper (The Good Place), as they're two very likeable personalities who I was thinking I should be paying more attention to.  Together in one place is a good a starting point as any.  Very quickly, as Emma and Noah, we're introduced to the idea that their 10-ish year marriage is on unstable foundation.  Emma seems particularly detached and Noah can't seem to get through.  The resort they're headed to is on a tropical island, and Noah hopes it's enough of a break from real life that things can be shaken up.  But I don't think what happens was the kind of shake up he had in mind.  During a quad-runner tour of the island Emma has an accident, spraining her wrist and getting banged up...but she also finds and old Motorola Razr flip phone.  She starts to obsess on its origins and, after locating a power supply and replacement battery in town, finds out that it belongs to a college-aged American kid who disappeared from another resort that was destroyed in a storm 15 years earlier.  Emma convinces Noah to let her investigate things before turning the phone over to the police, and it draws them into something much bigger and more confounding then they could have imagined.

The series jumps back and forth in time, between Emma and Noah's often fruitless and certainly amateur investigation, and Sam (Skyler Gisondo) and Violet (Nina Bloomgarden) meet-cute romance that has the spectre of tragedy looming over it.  Emma and Noah's investigation seems to only do enough to provoke people who thought this story long since forgotten, and the show keeps asking the question does it actually spell danger or does it only feel dangerous?  Then, in the mix of it all, is a third storyline about the mysterious, unhinged Alexsander Vasilakis (Ben Sinclair), owner of the doomed resort, who claims to be a man displaced from time, and his memories are leaking out of his ear.  His friend Baltasar (Luis Gerardo Méndez) is the lynchpin of both timelines.

What's quite wonderful about The Resort is how it upends its status quo every episode.  You're never quite where you think you are with the series, and each episode ends in a way that provides you with no clue as to where its going.  It's not a puzzlebox mystery, so there's no frustration with these pivots, just surprise. The tone of the show shifts as well, from dramatic, to comedic, to suspenseful, to serene and back as it weaves its story, that, slight spoiler, does take a metaphysical turn, but also earns what it asks of its audience.  It knows what its showing is hard to comprehend and its characters reflect that.  And along the way, we get a pretty intense dissection of Emma and Noah's life together, and it's quite affecting.  As well, I was very, very pleased that the show concludes, decisively, at the end of its 8 episodes.  It's a mini-series, not a franchise or left with any dangling loose ends.  It's kind of rare that we get such a concrete and satisfying conclusion to a story.

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1899 Season 1 - Netflix

Speaking of Dark and puzzle boxes, the creators of Dark return to netfilx with another compelling puzzle box mystery, this time set on a turn-of-the-century ocean liner, with a multicultural, multi-lingual cast, and the ominous disappearance 4-months earlier of a predecessor ship.   Truth told, I had a lot to say about this series when I watched it and started writing about it over a month ago, but a blogging mishap to my words, and enthusiasm to rewrite those word, away

So, in brief, 1899 is a bit of a marvel resulting in part from Netflix's global outreach. There are no less than 6 languages at play on the ship, and there's nearly no storytelling gymnastics at play to try and get all the characters to speak English.  This is a show from German creative team, so if anything, it seems to jump into German a little more often than I expected.  The opening moments of the film are a dream sequence which triggers the puzzle box into motion, but it's only once our Captain makes the unpopular decision to turn off course to see if an emergency broadcast is coming from the missing sister vessel that the mysteries start to unfurl.

What Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar are so adept at is not just negotiating their puzzle box elements (it's apparent that they learned from Lost's mistakes, and they have the answers to all their mysteries, but also that the mysteries are only important as long as the characters care about them) but in having them service the story and characters, not just fill space with intrigue.  Across 8 episode they blitz through so many of the confounding things they introduce, and at the midway point, they have a massive event that shakes up the cast quite dramatically.  

I was all in on the series right up until the end when we get a reveal that...spoiler...isn't too dissimilar to the ending of the American version of Life on Mars (and that one left a bad taste in my mouth, so it was an unwelcome reminder).  My hope is that, like with Dark, Friese and bo Odar's big reveal in this finale is just another upending of the status quo and our expectations, and that there's an entirely other drama and purpose to come.

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Atlanta Season 4 - FX

Season 3 of Atlanta, produced during the crest of the pandemic and in Europe took an almost detached form from what Atlanta had been before.  It was almost more of an anthology of detached stories than any sort of serialized production.  I mean, Atlanta has been operating in this mode almost from the beginning, but it sort of forgot about its connections between its characters, and certainly it felt set apart from its titular home city.  Season 4, then, returns home for 10 episodes that, at least in the first half, reach for a more comedic tone, while still doubling down on the surrealism and still steeping itself into the topics that seem to be weighing heavily on Donald Glover's exceptionally talented mind.

There's Earn's going to therapy and making decisions about his future in both career and family, Alfred facing both his own mortality and that of his career's (literally buying a farm), Darius' adventures in trying to return a bad gift or take a spa day in a sensory deprivation tank, Van confronting her parenting skills after taking her daughter to a casting call only to have Lottie get trapped in a crazy-time version of Tyler Perry's Atlanta-based studios.  The only one-off episode is a wild modern-style documentary about "the Blackest movie of all time: A Goofy Movie" which is as compelling as it is fake, which is to say completely.

With the exception of the very serene, laid back and nonthreatening "Snipe Hunt", Glover and company reach for greater comedic highs, and even greater absurdity than ever before (and they reached pretty high before), and mostly accomplish it.  I enter every episode of Atlanta with a pit of dread in my stomach, and I need a good 10 minutes with every episode before I know what I'm sort of in for, tone wise.  But at the same time, I've been watching long enough that I know Glover loves a good rug pull.  In the second episode, "The Homeliest Little Horse", the rug pull is one of Atlanta's biggest laughs, but, in typical fashion, one that really makes you think about the implications of it all and make a decision on how much you agree with it.  It's an absolutely fabulous, hilarious, utterly compelling, thought-provoking, frequently challenging show, one that I wish could continue forever, but at the same time one that I know we were lucky to even get 4 seasons of.  Each episode is a mini-movie, often playing with genres, and most are worth coming back to on their own merits, as well as part of the whole.

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Letterkenny Season 11 - Crave

For the past two years, new seasons of Letterkenny have been released on Christmas day, and for the past two years, the wife and I would blitz Letterkenny in its entirety prior to the new season dropping.  I love the show -- I'm a huge fan -- and I do like how connected I am to it as an international success, dripping in Canadiana as it is.  But I have to say, 11 seasons of Letterkenny may be too much in one concentrated dose.  I'm so familiar with the first 7-8 seasons that I know most of the beats (but by no means all the jokes) by heart.  The more recent seasons, 9 and 10, are a little more mysterious, as I've only seen them once or twice prior, and then the new season, bingeing all 6 episodes at once, becomes a bit of an overload.  As my wife and I slip into Letterkenny-isms throughout the month of December -- telling each other to "figger it out" or "pull your finger outta your ass" or "skoden" -- it becomes to much to take in the new things, to properly absorb the new content in any meaningful way, to the point that I start to wonder if the new content isn't maybe not as up-to-snuff (up-to-schneef?) as prior seasons.

Did I laugh at Season 11? Heartily. But, because the latest season is so overpowered by my entrenched familiarity of what came prior, it doesn't feel as good, it doesn't yet feel a part of the whole.  Is it just that? Or is there something, maybe, lacking about an episode that spends its time debating which Old Dutch potato chip flavour is its best (especially when All-Dressed, the most Canadian chip of all, is excluded from the running).  It's kind of an one-note joke that has peaks and valleys within, but it's only elevated by the "what the actual fuck is going on here" questioning of an outside party stepping into the proceedings.  

Prior seasons in the middle would end with a bit of a little emotional cliffhanger, whether it's Wayne getting suckerpunched by another local bruiser, Tanis beckoning Wayne to the barn, or that Marie-Fred moment (or that other Marie-Fred moment). The past two seasons have been missing that little end-note cue to wonder about when the show returns, that little character moment to contemplate the implications of.  This season has a runner of Wayne helping out a local degen who wants to turn over a new leaf, but ends with a very melancholy failure to do so, and it's a kind of heaviness the show's never had before that maybe almost breaks its reality.  It points out a sort of in-world, small-town justice system that calls into question the whole order of things (Stuart telling Wayne about the rumours Jivin' Pete was spreading when he was buying drugs off him makes Stuart complicit in Jivin' Pete's drug addiction, and it's odd that Wayne doesn't do anything about that, more over is seen hanging out with the skids on a regular basis).

I'm probably overthinking it. Someone needs to tell me to pull my finger outta my ass.

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His Dark Materials Season 3 - HBO

My final viewing for '22: the finale of this adaptation of the Philip Pullman His Dark Material trilogy.  It ends a long way away from where it started, and it feels like it's grown up so much, in part because of the bigger break between seasons as a result of the pandemic which means young Lyra (Dafne Keen) and Will (Amir Wilson) have visibly grown out of childhood and into young adults.  It also is much heavier, more head-on in its critique of blindly following religious leaders and treating stories literally. The series has been leading to a literal war between heaven and Earth, but it posits Heaven and Hell as just other dimensions, angels and demons as just other forms of beings unlike our own, but still struggling with the same quandaries we all do.  

As it builds and builds towards an epic confrontation, its a story that's constantly taking a step back to look at its characters and the context of the situation, and how it's shaping them, it's a series that wants us to think of the past as we consider the future, to look at how we've changed as people before we decide that others cannot change.  It's a series that sends the message of live life, be curious, explore, but do good when you can and be mindful of what harm you are capable of.  There's not explicitly an anti-war stance, but it clearly is a story that embraces love and peace as answers far more than fighting and death.

My favourite aspect of the story is the idea of us each having our own death, a spirit so to speak that follows us from our birth, and knows us like no other.  When our time comes, we meet our death, and reflect on life as they move us to the next stage of existence.  That next stage, in Pullman's worlds, can be a number of things, but ultimately it's a return to everything, becomeing one with it all.  Dust.  It's much the same conceit as in the finale of The Good Place and this connection between the two series made me feel all sorts of warm tinglies.

I worried about the third-season yips with HDM, that the series would be hamstrung by declining viewership and tightening budgets, but there was clearly an investment that was made by HBO and they delivered where it mattered most.  The world of Mulefa, and it's elephantine inhabitants really came to life on an impressive scale, and the angelic battle in the sky was stunning in its presentation.  Though I haven't read the books, but I understand the reputation they have now.  

So this is Christmas Leftovers (2024) part 2

Tired of Christmas content? Me too. Speed round:

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Zoey's Extraordinary Christmas (2021, d. Richard Shepherd - Amazon Prime)

The What 100: Zoey (Jane Levy) got superpowers due to a freak accident and can now hear people's inner-heart's songs, and this weird telepathy manifests as song-and-dance number to pop music. 2 seasons later mow her boyfriend, Max (Skylar Astin...ugh, he's in this?) for some undetermined reason also has the power and is all about helping people whether they really want it or not. This is Zoey's first Christmas since her dad's death and she wants to recreate the perfect Christmases that he used to host, but  everyone is still grieving and not in the mood for holiday cheer.

(1 Great) There's a moment where Zoey's brother, David (Andrew Leeds) abandons his "family newsletter" full of all the wonderful things that happened to his family this year (all made up) and instead writes with honesty about what a difficult year it's been. I started sobbing. It has been a difficult year. There are a couple of moment s where this movie lets down the veil and allows honest emotion to shine through all the pretense. I imagine this is what the show was good at? 

(1 Good) I think Jane Levy is insanely charming, charismatic, funny, talented actress and am never sorry to watch her work. 

(1 Bad) I cannot stand Skylar Astin and never like watching him work.

META: I've had Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist on my long list of "to watch" shows for quite some time but watching this special, the two-seasons-and-a-movie finale that wraps up the show, I think I'm good. This does pretty well at standing on its own and being accessible if you haven't (like me) watched the show before. It explains the premise and sets up the "where we're at now" very quickly and concisely in the opening minute or two, and then sets off from there with a big shopping mall production number featuring Alex Newell.

As much as I like Jane Levy, and thought she was incredible with everything she is asked to do here (great comedic physicality), I don't know how much I liked Zoey... she appears here as a subtly self-centered character (Toasty, who wrote about this when it came out in 2021, and had watched the pretending two seasons, confirms that angle). Her friend Mo has this very minor side plot about dominating their boyfriend's kid's Christmas pageant that, had Zoey even bothered to inquire about, could have maybe steered them away from (Newell is a non-binary performer, I didn't catch whether Mo also used they/them pronouns). But Zoey just kind of takes more than she gives.

As noted, besides Levy and the characters playing her family (including Mary Steenburgen and Peter Gallagher), this finale had such "theatre kid energy". So much of the acting here is "performance", lacking subtlety, and the script is more of a blunt cudgel than gentle feather.  So it's to its credit that it manages to find genuine heart more than once.

But yeah, I'm good. Maybe I'll swap it off the list for My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

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Lego Masters: Celebrity Holiday Bricktacular (2024, 2-episode special)

The What 100: Four teams of two, consisting of one celebrity paired with one former Lego Masters contestant, square off against each other in holiday-themed brick builds for prize money to be donated to charity.  This year's celebs are Sophia Bush (One Tree Hill), Lil Rel Howery (Get Out), Eric McCormack (Will and Grace) and Holly Robinson Peete (Christmas In Evergreen).

(1 Great) The first build of the competition was inspired by Home Alone and the teams were tasked to build minifig scale homes with seasonally-appropriate booby traps. Hearing Brickmaster Amy, with her delightful Irish accent, say "booby" (buh-beyh) over and over again delighted Lady Kent and I so. Maybe the second best inflection on "booby" next to Maya Rudolph.

(1 Good) I find Arnett's hosting generally amenable if too "dad-joke" inspired but when Arnett locks in with a contestant comedically his game goes up many, many notches. Here with fellow Canadian performer Eric McCormack, they seem to have history and a very similar sense of humour, so the pretense of a rivalry between them lasted the whole show and kept paying comedic dividends. 

(1 Bad) What I enjoy most about watching Lego Masters is the often surprising, creative, phenomenal builds the contestants make, defying the brief and pushing bricklaying into an art. With these "Bricktacular" specials, the celebs are not brick masters, and the final builds may be nice but they're not at all "wow" inducing. There's also no real stakes to the competition, no eliminations...

META: I thought about doing one of my Advent Calendar posts about Lego Masters but in the "A Toast To HallmarKent" format, telling it as "Her story" from Hallmark queen Holly Robinson Peete's perspective. It would have been silly and fun, but I didn't have the energy.

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The Holiday Junkie (2024, d. Jennifer Love Hewitt - Crave)

The What 100: Jennifer Love Hewitt co-writes, directs and stars in this Lifetime-produced Hallmarkie where she plays Andie, the proprietor of an interior decorating/event coordinating/schedule planning small business. Her mom (Kristen Chenoweth) died the prior Christmas and she's still dealing with he grief when she takes on this venture capitalist client whom she hopes to impress so she can pitch her idea to evolve the business into a commercial brand of products. She goes to the guy's mansion in the perfect small town, where she will live-work for a week setting up, and she meets handyman Mason (Brian Hallisay, aka Mr. Love Hewitt). They clash at first because he's a Christmas grump (turns out his fiancee dumped him last Christmas to travel the world), but her enthusiasm returns his Christmas spirit and he shows her her potential for both business and life in a PST.

(1 Great) The film is dedicated to Love Hewitt's mother Pat, so there's a legitimate personal investment in this very stereotypical holiday romance movie, and it's felt. There's deep-seeded pain in the talking about/thinking about/being reminded of her mom scenes which really resonate on a level that most "dead parent" arcs in your average Hallmarkies do not.  Exploring this grief is more the point of the movie than any other aspect.

(1 Good) The supporting players here are top notch. Greg Grunberg is Mason's best friend, Lynn Andrews as Andie's gay best friend, Debra Christofferson and Joseph C. Phillips as the diner owners Andie makes friends with... they're all great. I guess this is what happens when you cast in L.A. versus from regional theatre.

(1 Bad) J-Love's haircut. It's like she said to hairdresser "I'm going to star in a Christmas romance, give me the Chabert." Doesn't suit her at all. Also, the first meeting of Andie and Mason is some of the worst acting. I guess when you've been married a decade and had 3 kids together it's hard to pretend like you don't know each other.  They both do fine beyond that.

META: I wasn't intending to watch this, it was just on when I turned the TV on, and I was mystified by the hair and wardrobe choices, such that I didn't recognize J-Love at first.  I wondered what cheap, shot-in-Winnipeg, Canadian off-brand production this might be. But as it went on I started to recognize various "that person" actors and the Hollywood back-lot sets. It's still a cheap production, just not the shot-in-Winnipeg, Canadian off-brand kind of cheap.

KsMIRT: October bleeds

K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month (uhhh..?) Kent steps through the TV series he completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.  These "reviews" were actually written at the end of October and just needed to be formatted...so precious little time/energy to do so. I mean, formatting documents is what I spend half my days doing as is, who wants to do more of that when the work day is done?

This Month:
Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy Season 1? (2024, Disney+, 4/4 episodes)
Only Murders In the Building Season 4 (2024, Disney+/Star, 10/10 episodes)
Midnight Mass (2022, Netflix, 10/10 episodes)
Agatha All Along (2024, Disney+, 9/9 episodes)
Lego Masters Australia Season 5 (2023, CTV, 14/14 episodes)

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Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy 

The What 100: Sig (Gaten Matarazzo, Stranger Things) is a total Skywalker fan-boy who also is force-sensitive kid and eager for adventure. His loving brother Dev (Tony Revolori, The Grand Budapest Hotel) finds out Sig is force sensitive he encourages him to follow what the Force is telling him, which takes them to an ancient Jedi temple. Sig accidentally pulls out a single brick holding the fabric of the universe together, and when the dust settles everything's fucked right up.

(1 Great) When I saw the trailer for this, it looked like a lark, a goof, just a ridiculous "what if" scenario where nobody is like we remember them. Turns out, underneath, there's actually a character-centric story which pits Sig as the new hope against Dev, who is now a sith lord.  Where I thought the story would just be stepping through all the changes eventually being made right, instead, it's really just about one brother caring for another while trying to do the most good he can.  Matarazzo and Revolori are great in their voice roles here, even if the character drama is simplified for a child audience.

(1 Good) In the end, the universe isn't righted, it remains all fucked up, and given that it's Lego, that's OK. It's more fun that way. It's kind of bold to abandon the known Star Wars universe in favour of this weird remixed one.

(1 Bad) I've seen a few Lego Star Wars productions at this point (on top of the video games) and what I have the most difficulty with is the Lego look. It's not the reality of Lego...where characters and spaces are limited to their blocky brickiness and the kind of knowingness that their reality is made of of brick parts. Instead, it's literally the look. With Star Wars I want amazing ships and cool lightsaber fights and oddball designed sets, and while those are here in principle, they look terrible in Lego form and I never stopped wanting them to be in nearly any other medium than animated Lego brick.

META: This is a 4-episode mini-series that...well, doesn't end. Altogether, the 4 episodes *could* form a short Lego Star Wars movie, perhaps the first in a trilogy? It features some great voice talent on top of Matarazzo and Revolori, including a bunch of Star Wars veterans reprising their roles in a different context: Mark Hamill, Naomi Ackie, Ahmed Best, Kellie Marie Tran, BIllie Dee Williams, and many of the Clone Wars voice cast. 

It's Lego Star Wars so it's not deeply memorable, nor is it as funny as The Lego Movie or even The Lego Batman Movie, but it's also surprisingly not as interested in being a joke machine as its trailer may have indicated. It's nothing I'll obsess over, but it's enjoyable enough with some fun little gags for the Star Wars nerds. 

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Only Murders in the Building Season 4

The What 100: In one of the biggest losses for the show thus far, Charles' longtime friend and stuntperson stand-in Sazz Pataki was shot and killed in Charles' apartment, a seeming case of mistaken identity. This leads Charles into a bit of an emotional tailspin. Mabel is verging on homelessness, and is unsure of the career opportunities before her. Oliver and Loretta try a long distance relationship which puts him in as much of an emotional tailspin as Charles. A movie is being made out of the podcast which brings celebrities, excitement and more attention to the Arconia and the mysterious west-building tenants. 

(1 Great) The central murder here is a pretty good one, with Sazz being killed, and then completely disposed of before anyone finds her, it's dark and haunting...at least to start. It gets pretty out-of-hand quickly, at times taking pretty broad strides away from the central mystery into complete other mysteries. It's a bit chaotic, but the show makes it work... even if it undercuts how seriously bummed, and angry, Charles is. But the sentimentality, the performance Steve Martin gives of Charles' grief (and maybe guilt) is very affecting.

(1 Good) The show's penchant for bringing in celebrities in smaller parts hits a whole new dimension this season. With the movie of the "Only Murders..." podcast being made, our trio gets casted, with Eugene Levy as Charles, Eva Longoria aging Mabel up, and Zach Galifianakis resentfully playing Oliver. And that's just the start, with Paul Rudd, Meryl Streep, Amy Ryan, Jane Lynch and Davine Joy Randolph all returning, as well as Molly Shannon, Melissa McCarthy, Kumail Nanjiani and Richard Kind among others. You can either find it very "stunt-y" or you can embrace how much fun the show is and how many people want to be a part of it. And, honestly, I have to give the show credit for not stunt-casting every role. There are still quite a few plum parts that are being filled by characters actors and up-and-coming comedic talent. As much as season 1's very story and character focus was the highlight and it's only been a bit in decline since, it's still committed to dishing out fun, and it's fun.

(1 Bad) I was initially very enthusiastic about this season, but that has waned a bit as it falls into its usual rhythms of drumming up a suspect Number 1 each episode and then writing them off by the end of the episode. While this season doesn't do so each episode, it does keep pedalling on that particular cycle. 

META: What I thought was going to be a pretty heavy season, based on how it started, has wound up being one of its sillier ones, but the final two episodes do start to circle back on the emotional aspects, particularly on the just mutual respect and admiration in Charles and Sazz's friendship. It all ends with, of course, yet another murder in the building (though I already have my theories) but not before Tea Leoni, looking very sterling, and with the huskiest "noir dame" voice tantalizes the crew with a seemingly unrelated mystery that's clearly going be the focus. 

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Midnight Mass

The What 100: Crockett Island is home to a small, remote fishing village off the east coast with a populace of around 120. A new priest is assigned to the island church, noting that the vacationing octogenarian monsenior fell ill while on holiday in the holy land. But Father Paul has a secret, a secret he's sharing with the faithful, and only the faithful. The sudden spate of "miracles" cause some islanders to question whether these are truly gifts from God, or something else entirely.

(1 Great) The first episode is an absolute masterpiece. It's an ensemble mini-series and the first hour so adeptly introduces us to every major player in the story without needing to drop gobs of clunky exposition. We get a sense of some characters by their actions, or their demeanour, or how other characters talk about them. We learn about some characters more from what they're hiding than what they're showing us. We meet probably two dozen characters in this town in this first episode, and we kind of know each of their deal, at least on an instinctive level by the end of that first hour. Plus we have a total sense of the island, its tempo, the dynamics of working and living there...we know the confines, the limits of the place and how people are able to reach the mainland. It's just an incredibly immersive environment, even without the creepiness and weird shit that is just lurking in the backgrounds. This isn't a show about a horror visited upon people, but a show about people who have a horror visited upon them...and they're convinced its a godsend, so they welcome it. 

(1 Good) I am not a religious person. My spirituality could best be described as "absent for attendance". While I have no patience for overtly religious productions that largely serve as confirmation bias propaganda, I do always appreciate a production that clearly comes from a point of examining what it means to be faithful and religious, especially in modern times.  And I have even more respect when it's critical of blind faith, or faith weaponized as a tool of power or control, or faith as superiority complex. In having a large cast of characters Flanagan could explore faith and religious belief in layers, with Bev (Samantha Sloyan, Hush) on one end of the spectrum -- the most vile of people who choose to interpret the text of the bible to serve their own selfish, racist and judgmental nature -- to Riley (Zach Gilford, There's Something Wrong With The Children) who has completely lapsed in his belief, to Ali (Rahul Abburi) a Muslim teen who gets caught up in the fervor of the miracles at the church and abandons Islam for Catholicism. It's a rich show, with a lot to say while still very adeptly delivering some good spooky shit.

(1 Bad) There's a moment where former childhood sweethearts Riley and Erin (Kate Siegal, Hypnotic)  talk about what happens when you die that was really overwritten. I liked the sentiments each of them had, but the way in which they were conveying them to each other was not like two people in a room who were having a conversation, but like stage monologues with the performers projecting out into the audience. Its relevance comes back again later on, twice even, so it's not purposeless, but it's like Flanagan just had these ideas which needed to be expressed, point-counterpoint essays that carry the themes of spirituality vs science in the show forward, just very awkwardly. To be honest, I'm really nitpicking. I absolutely loved this mini-series. It was incredible.

META: Toasty's been singing the praises of Mike Flanagan for the better part of the last decade, and I'm only now catching on. I blame Toasty for not selling me on it hard enough.  Midnight Mass is very, very Stephen King influenced, but for me King is an idea man who writes to his idea, where Flanagan, from what I've seen of his work so far, is a planner. I don't know if I've ever gotten the sense that King knew where he wanted a story to end where I thing Flanagan, at the very least with Midnight Mass, the path, while not at all obvious, seemed entirely deliberate and purposeful. It's an exceptionally satisfying watch.

[ToastyPost: we agree, other Toastypost: we still agree]

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Agatha All Along

The What 100: Since the events of Wandavision, having been bested by the Scarlet Witch, Agatha (Kathryn Hahn, Free Agents) is caught in an unreality, and can't seem to find her way out, until a witchy ex-lover (Aubrey Plaza, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre) snaps her out of it, and a teen injects himself into her life looking for help to find the legendary "Witches Road". They're going to need a coven...

(1 Great) Episode 7 "Death's Hand in Mine" is a particularly great episode of television and just an incredibly well constructed character spotlight piece for Patti LuPone's Lilia. The structure of the show started with two episodes of getting the coven together and discovering the Witches Road, making the journey through a series of trials that should ultimately provide them with a power upgrade. The episodes that follow had a pattern of being character-centric to a member of the coven, and then they die at the end (spoiler). So when this episode put Lilia in the crosshairs, its end result was inevitable. And yet, it's the journey, and the journey is one incredible example of timey-wimey storytelling that would make even the best Doctor Who scribe green with envy. 

Also great, Aubrey Plaza. Always.
Kathryn Hahn too.

(1 Good) If there's one thing the basement-dwelling, mouth-breathing neckbeard trolls hate, it's an empowered woman. If there's another thing they hate, it's an empowered gay character. If there's a third thing they hate, it's a d-tier superhero character getting a prominent spotlight over whatever "kewl anti-hero" is in their top-50 personal favourite of boy-rage-power-fantasies.  So, just on its mere existence, Agatha All Along gets a big thumbs up from me. But even more so because it's not in any way, shape or form intended as a loogie-in-the-face to the aforementioned trolls. If anything it's not even paying any attention to them, not considering them in the slightest. It's just selling the shit out of this witches adventure that's part folklore, part Wizard of Oz, and part escape room horror (it's not too far askew from Cube, in its own way).  It's the right mix of genre premises with a nod to both its MCU history and future but dwelling in neither. 

(1 Bad) If there's a "bad" to Agatha All Along at all, it's that it's saddled with "Marvel" expectations. The show is small, and contained. It's a cast of seven primarily, with each episode introducing a fairly static set-piece as the "escape room" they need to solve. I'm sure just because it's Marvel it cost more than the average show, but for Marvel, it still pared things down in a way that some might call ...theatrical-looking.  The road, for instance looks every bit its on-set homage to Wizard of Oz, complete with painted backdrops that, at one point a character literally cuts into and walks through. But even that is an intentional choice in the end, to not completely mask the pastiche. As I said, being "Marvel" is going to set expectations, even when expectations have seemingly been dashed over and over, that Agatha All Along isn't going to live up to. But it did quite well anyway. 

META: There's a scene early in Star Wars: The Acolyte (I seemingly bring this show up once a week) where a group of space witches start an incantation that leads to singing and moaning and undulating, and in my head, if not out loud, I said "this is where it loses people". And I smiled. I was challenged by that scene of women moving and moaning not with any sexual connotation but as a moment of power induction, as a moment of collective purpose. I acknowledged my immediate reaction to it, which was to balk, but I then analyzed that reaction and came out on the other end appreciative of the fact that we don't get much representation at all of the power of feminine collective, especially in the masculine-dominated space opera and superhero genres. So when the coven in Agatha All Along begins their, well, far more harmonious chant that was the song "The Ballad of the Witches Road" (from Frozen songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez) I got the same feeling of this event being about feminine unity and solidarity, even as I whinged a little bit (the song is reinterpreted many ways throughout the show, and I think this initial example was maybe my least favourite?).

Was this whole show all an excuse to bring Wanda's superhero offspring Wiccan into the MCU for the inevitable (and anticipated) Young Avengers? I think if it were a far lazier show that didn't really care about any of its other characters, it would be an easy criticism to lob, but it does so much without putting too much weight or expectations on Billy's shoulders, nor without the burden of setting up expectations. It lives entirely within its own microcosm of Wandavision and Agatha All Along without needing to easter egg the hell out of it.

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Lego Masters Australia Season 5

The What 100: Contest of champions (and almost-champions), the winners and runners-up and a wild-card or two from the past four seasons of Lego Masters Australia return in their teams of two to see which pair will be dubbed "Lego Grandmasters". Some of the most insane challenges and incredible builds in all of Lego Masters, globally, happen in these 14 very bingeable episodes.  

(1 Great) I don't watch a lot of "reality" or "competition" television, but, next to Taskmaster (original UK flavour), Lego Masters Australia is my happy place. I've written before about some of the differences between LegoMA and the American version, but what really, really comes through in LegoMA is the sense of community, not just between the contestants but the also host and judge. Especially with all these contestants being returning contestants, there are established dynamics and running jokes that continue. Plus, the contestants are fans of the show and know each other's work, so they know the calibre of the competition, and it's pretty fierce. Also pretty loving. But they're pushing each other to the breaking point.

(1 Good) Lady Kent and I have watched a lot of brick laying between four seasons of US Lego Masters, the prior 4 seasons of Australia, whatever that was in Lego Masters UK... and episode 7 might have been the most stressful and intense build of them all. It finds the remaining teams having to collectively build a Rube Goldberg machine that will move a tennis ball through a continuous obstacle course from one build to the next, start to finish. There are easy ways and hard ways to go about it with design challenges needing to be met in each segment, but with square blocks and notoriously finicky motor systems, there's a lot of potential for things to go awry.  

(1 Bad) Why did they need to bring Kale back? In season 1 of Lego MA, there was this wee squeaky-voiced know-it-all who was so full of self-importance and arrogance that would constantly tell the judge, Ryan "Brickman" McNaught (recognized as one of the world's premiere Lego builders) that he had no idea what he was talking about. Kale's partner in that season you could tell was suffering by the end. Here he returns with a runner-up from Season 1, Trent, and, at the very least, Trent seemed to know what he signed up for. It's hard to see Kale as anything but a drama-generator, and it's minutes before he starts pissing people off (least of all, me).  If what works for the show is the sense of community, this man is like The Big Bang Theory (that's a joke for me and my Greendale Human Beings out there) 

META: Unlike American reality TV shows, LegoMA doesn't eliminate contestants every episode, or even every other episode. With 8 pairs of contestants, 14 episodes and 3 sets of contestants advancing to the finale, that means 5 of 13 episodes are elimination episodes. It would be easy to say there's drama every episode when we don't find out until the end whether it's an elimination contest or not, but I've figured out the formulae. Basically the first two or three episodes are non-elimination as they are showcases to see what the contestants can do. Then if there are any challenges of a technical nature, those are non-elimination because the technical side can unfairly advantage the experienced (and a lot of randomness present in technical challenges). And, if there's ever a "sponsored" episode (eg. Disney, Marvel, Star Wars) there's no elimination. So, I think with only one exception, I predicted when an episode would be non-elimination.