Here We Go Again

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. This had been sitting on the watch list of a couple of years, but there was always something else we wanted to watch more. And honestly, we should have watched it sooner, because it was a LOT of fun. Tatiana Maslany was brilliant, obviously - she always is. Anyone who's seen Orphan Black knows that she can nail anything - drama, comedy, any kind of character, she's got it, and she proves it again here.

It was the rest of it that surprised and delighted us. The writing was genuinely good, on point with brilliant zingers and the serious undertones. I know some people didn't like the breaking of the fourth wall, but it worked so well (at least it did right up until the last ep, which I thought took it too far). The costume design was superb - everything too big on her as Jennifer, and short and tight as She-Hulk. It is possible to be a Hulk and not rip your clothes on a daily basis with a good tailor and a little thought given to fabrics 🤣🤣🤣 The end credits, done as courtroom sketches were hilarious. The little changes each ep made them mandatory watching even when there wasn't a little episode cap part way through.

So many people obviously put so much thought into all the little details of this series. It's a shame about the weak magic-wand-waving in the final ep, but the rest of it rocked.


Ripley (Netflix). This one was also hanging on the watch list for the better part of the year. I saw very little about it on my tumblr dash, which was surprising, and I took it to be a negative, and honestly? That was real.

Andrew Scott was fantastic, no surprise there. The writing was good, solid and well thought out - no plot holes, some interesting tweaks. The direction was nailed - truly classy, beautifully framed and set up, an Emmy fully deserved. Though having said that, while I understand the choice to shoot in black and white and go full on with the period noir style, it has to be something of a crime to film on the Amalfi coast and not show the colours. I couldn't help looking at it and wishing I could see the sea, the sky, the art and architecture in all their glory.

In the end, though, its biggest failure is that it didn't make me feel. At all. You would think that with eight episodes, they could truly involve me with the characters and their lives and... nope. The 1999 Anthony Minghella film with a third of the running time gave me ALL of the feels, and the Netflix series was all style with no heart ☹️


Cobra Kai season six (Netflix). This had been a long wait! No way in hell was I going to watch five eps a year ago, then five eps five months later, then the final five of the season almost a year after it started. What drugs were Netflix on? In hindsight, having watched it, I can see why they thought it could work, because each batch of five eps covered a mini-arc, but still - an in-universe time jump of a month doesn't justify five months off air 😭

But watched all in one batch, I really loved this season. Cobra Kai has had its ups and downs over the years - as I've mentioned talking about earlier seasons, there was too much reliance on the old writing trope of 'inter-character drama that could have been solved with a five minute conversation if they weren't idiots'. But this season avoided that, and the characters all had reasons for what they did, or didn't, and everything made sense. I loved the ending too. From the start, Cobra Kai has been Johnny's redemption story, and in the end, it stayed true to that and let him take centre stage to complete his arc. It definitely gave me the feels ❤️


Cagney and Lacey. After I read Sharon Gless' autobiography, I got curious, because obviously she talked a lot about the show. I did see some of it when it aired, but I was a kid, and also I never saw it consistently. Gless had been reluctant to take the role when she was offered it, because she was the third actor to play Cagney. Loretta Swit played her in the initial film, but her commitment to M.A.S.H. excluded her from the follow up series. Meg Foster got the role for season one, but that season was canned after only six eps when the network decided it wasn't working. So it was offered to Gless, who initially turned it down. She was shooting a film with Michael Douglas, who was becoming quite the hot property, and she thought her film career was about to take off. It was actually Douglas who convinced her to take the role, pointing out that playing a cop on TV had been very good indeed for his career 😁 (That film Gless shot with Michael Douglas sank without a trace.)

I watched the abortive first season with Meg Foster, and you can see why it wasn't happening. Foster wasn't bad, but she wasn't great, and she didn't have the range. She couldn't play angry. You just never believed her when she yelled - her voice wasn't strong enough to carry that conviction. The difference when Gless took over for season two was immediate.

Season two was... fine. But it was very much episodic TV of its era. There was a bit of continuity, but not much, and when it was missing, you really noticed it. There was one ep, for instance, when information was leaking from the department, and Cagney and Lacey were bullied into spying on their fellow cops and reporting to IA. When the other detectives found out, they started getting the rats in their desk treatment. At the end of the ep, the leak is found, but the titular pair were still being ostracised, and the closing line was Cagney saying that things weren't going to be normal again for a long time. But of course, the very next ep, it was like it never happened.

After that I jumped ahead to season five, and now it was getting to be genuinely good. The continuity was there, actual arc plots and mini arcs running through the season. Things that happened in early eps were mentioned again half a season later. Events had consequences. Now it was the Cagney and Lacey that got all the acclaim, and you could see why it was really groundbreaking TV, and for more than being just the first series to have two female leads. You have to feel for poor Meg Foster, though - you film a show that gets canned for being crap, then it comes back to critical acclaim and gets Emmy nominations for both its leads every year it runs, when literally the only two things that changed were a different actor taking your part and a jazzy new theme tune. Ouch.

One of the saddest things about watching Cagney and Lacey was how little has changed in forty years. There are episodes about racism, about the awful way immigrants are treated and made scapegoats, about misogyny and sexual assault, about the fight for reproductive rights and the hideous people who attack women going into clinics, and damn. It's still the same old shit going on. People don't learn anything 😭

One of the crazy things about watching Cagney and Lacey at the same time as Cobra Kai was seeing Martin Kove in both, forty years apart. Holy hell, he is in amazing shape for a guy in his late 70s. I would have thought he was a decade younger...

Or potted opinions on various things I've been watching over the last few months that aren't the endless cycle of Burn Notice.

The Witcher season 3. It was fine? I didn't dislike it, but I wasn't much invested. I think the main problem I'm having with The Witcher is that it has a large cast, few episodes per season and long gaps between seasons. I spend half of each new season trying to remember who all these people are, what their relationships are to one another and who's previously betrayed who. There's a lot of intense politicking, which is something I normally enjoy very much, and I probably would here if I could remember what it all meant. I get the feeling I'd be into it more if I watched the whole thing straight through instead of one season every couple of years. Jaskier continues to bore me intensely, though his fling-wait-er-mayberelationship?? with the prince was cute.

Good Omens season 2. This was exactly what I expected, given what I'd seen from the trailers. Okay, not Gabriel and Beelzebub, that came as a surprise XD But the overall tone, with more great flashback scenes, the increasing gayness but definitely not with a happy ending (because that's for season three) - it followed the middle-of-a-trilogy pattern, and I enjoyed it.

The Great season 3. More of the same, but also not. One of the things I really enjoyed about this show is that despite the endless chaos and smutty humour, there is plot going on underneath it all and some serious commentary on society and some of its more appalling aspects. Characters are killed off, some unexpectedly, others less so, and it manages to balance being crazily funny with stuff actually happening. I particularly enjoyed the character development of Marial's child-husband this season, he was glorious XD Which of course makes it even more annoying that this show has now been cancelled, because of the usual streaming service bullshit. It costs too much per episode and it's no longer bringing in new viewers, just keeping old ones, which isn't good enough for the business model...

Strange New Worlds season 2. Love! It took me about half way through the first season to really get into it, and get used to some of the characters, but season two picked that right up and ran with it. I haven't enjoyed a Trek series this much since DS9. Everyone involved knows and cares about what they're doing, and it shows. The whole series captures the mood of original Trek so well, with the same entertaining mix of silly fun and serious drama. The writers know what they're doing, and their love for Trek and other genre shows really comes through. The cast are all great, there isn't a single character who doesn't work, and the crossover with Below Decks was hilarious.

Barry season 4. Partly what I expected? This was clearly never a show that was going to end well for just about anybody involved, and in that I wasn't wrong. I absolutely was not expecting the time jump and Sally's decision, but she certainly came to regret it. It was well written and brilliantly acted as always, if a little bizarro, but that's always been true too. It stuck to its guns the whole way through and ended when it should have done.