Here We Go Again

I'm trying to get better about posting things in a more timely manner - today is apparently Good Intentions Day!

Gen V season 2 I'm still impressed by the quality of this. I honestly had zero expectations for a late teenaged spin-off of The Boys, but the writers are doing a great job. Beneath the deliberate silliness and grossness, the characters continue to be complex, all with their own story arcs and issues - none of them evil, none of them good, all just kids with problems who can go either way. There was an interesting narrative twist to the season's main plot, and the plot threads of Gen V and The Boys are now coming together in a way that makes upcoming series potentially very interesting indeed. I'm fully on board.


Castlevania Nocturne I took a while to get into this Castlevania sequel. The basic set-up is the same - a Belmont, a magic-using female alongside him and some other characters adding to the mix. I initially missed the banter, though - I'm always up for a series where the main characters bitch each other out in the most affectionate of ways, and this sequel doesn't have that the way the original did. These main characters are a little younger and more idealistic and vulnerable. The plot was interesting, though, and the historical references behind it (I have to feel bad for Maria, knowing where her beloved revolution is going - and Annette when her Saint Domingue revolution is going to get ripped apart and dragged down into chaos too).

I loved the return of Alucard - an older Alucard, embittered by so many years of caring for mortals. He was so happy when he saw him at the end of Castlevania, surrounded by his newfound village and playing with the kids, but how many times could he watch them all live and die without it wearing him down? Olrox was a great character, too - introduced up-front as the series villain, but far more layered than that. And I really liked the way this series used music and Edouard's singing. I've read some complaints that his singing wasn't that great at first and then it suddenly got better, and why couldn't the actor have done better from the start? But have those people considered it might be deliberate? That Edouard the boy from a Caribbean island might have been considered a good singer locally but maybe not so great on the world stage? And maybe when he becomes a supernatural creature, that might enhance his voice as well as his strength? I thought he was a delight.


Person of Interest season 4 Pros and cons here. I didn't like it as much as season 3, but that's mainly because I MISS SHAW DAMMIT! Shaw was so good - she added a lot to this ensemble, and suddenly having her gone sucks. I'm coming around to Root a little more as the show progresses and so does her character, but she's definitely not replacing Shaw.

I'll miss Elias too - he was devious and conniving and Very Much Not Good but also not exclusively evil, which is always a fascinating mix. But I can also see that the show had played out all the possibilities with him and was coming back full circle, so maybe best to draw a line under that. The problem is we now seem to be left with a straight fight against Samaritan, and the Samaritan people are just not interesting or charismatic. None of them. It might be a good thing that season five is half the length...

Pantheon (currently on Netflix) Animated sci-fi series in which people learn to upload the brains of the dead to computer servers. I only just heard about this, though it’s a couple of years old now. There are two seasons and it’s genuinely good stuff.

I personally preferred the first season, which is smaller scale, about what this kind of technology would mean for people, and how it might be used and abused. The second season is more full scale, world-changing political events. They’re both interesting aspects to the issue, but the first season was more about the characters themselves, and I got more emotional investment from that.


Doom Patrol season one (HBO) – I know this is years old, but mostly what I heard about it at the time was, ‘It’s fine, but whatever,’ so we never got around to it. A friend recently urged me to watch with considerably more enthusiasm, so we hit up the first season. It starts out very silly (poison gas farting donkey level humour), but we stuck with it, and by about half way through the first season I was much more invested. The characters never become what you’d call nice, but I very much liked the way they developed. Every one of them has their sob story that makes them inclined to want to do nothing but sit and sulk about how their lives went to hell, and they have to be bullied into doing, well, pretty much anything. But as more of their backstories are revealed to one another, they’re learning about themselves too. It developed some very interesting threads beneath the silliness.

The choice to cast one of the most gorgeous gay actors on the planet (Matt Bomer) as a gay man who spends most of the time with his head wrapped in bandages was in some ways a shame🤪 But he does get to be so much more than a pretty face, and really shows his range acting when his expressions can’t be seen. I’m left wondering though, as an American TV series, how many viewers would have got the joke about Danny the Street? I don’t think Danny LaRue ever made much of an impact outside the UK and Ireland.

I enjoyed it and I’ll watch more of it, but I’ll be doing it without spouse – he declared at the end of the season that it was still to silly and not his thing.


Person of Interest – Another one of the ‘sometimes mentioned alongside Burn Notice’ series that was on my list. I’m two seasons in now and definitely enjoying it. I really like the way it ekes out the backstories of its characters as it goes along – always enough to keep you interested, and in a way that makes it clear the stories were there all along. This isn’t a case of inventing bullshit as they go, there’s an actual Plan. And it refuses to make its characters dumb either. Carter spends a while chasing John, and then she has to find him, because she’s smart. FBI agent Donnelly has to figure it out, because he’s an areshole cop, but he’s definitely not stupid, and so the series can’t stagnate and get stuck in a rut. There are some good twists in the writing here and there – the reveal of Elias was a fantastic move.

Person of Interest definitely starts out darker than Burn Notice. BN takes multiple seasons to get to the point where it says, yeah, the US government and the CIA in particular are absolute bastards, because its main character doesn’t want to believe that. Person Of Interest begins at that point, with both main characters having faked their own deaths to get the hell away from their own government.

The first season started out genuinely interesting, flagged somewhat in the middle, then really picked up again at the end. I do feel this is a series that would have been better with slightly shorter seasons. Some of the current TV shows that only get 8 or 10 eps in a season need more. At the other end of the scale, Person of Interest did not need 22 per season. I genuinely think Burn Notice hit the sweet spot with around 16 eps per season. Anyway, it’s great entertainment and I’ll be heading on through the rest!


Castlevania (Netflix). Aaaand yet another oldie we dived into. We will start watching some more recent stuff soon, I swear! We’ve just been waiting for a bunch of current series to end so that we can binge watch once they’re done. Castlevania’s a lot darker than I expected from the impressions I’d got online, and it being based on a video game, which for us is definitely a plus! The quality of the voice actors they got for the roles was impressive too.

I love the character development of Hector and Isaac. They both have awful backstories and histories of betrayal that make them bitter and vengeance-driven, but as events move on around them, and they interact with a range of people, they gain more perspective on themselves and each other. When they met up again in season four, with their differing expectations, it was an absolute delight.

But the ending of season two – OMG, WTF BBQ! Trevor and Sypha, what the hell were you thinking??? Alucard just had to kill his father, because he went mad after the murder of his wife, Alucard’s mother, and you two just say, ‘Here, we’re assigning you a job, you get to be alone forever guarding an empty castle,’ and you two trip off into the sunset. Do you not understand how awful that was? Not to mention dangerous??? Dracula went crazy and became a threat to the entire world because he was lonely and sad, and you go and dump his son in the exact same situation???

And maybe Sypha gets something of a pass because she just didn’t understand what that means for Alucard? She’s early twenties maybe? She’s literally never been alone in her life, and never had a home she had any attachment to. She lived a nomadic life with a group of family and friends and everything was shiny. But Trevor Belmont should know! He's been in the exact same situation. The last survivor of his family, despised for his name, his family home left in ruins. He’s been desperately lonely for years and it made him bitter and antagonistic. Why would he do that to Alucard? He needed to be slapped so hard! They don’t even drop back in from time to time and say, ‘Hi, how are you doing, how about we catch up?’ They just bugger off and never think about Alucard again. Damn. Harsh, guys.

Anyway, my rage at certain characters’ choices aside, it’s a good show 😁

Being the binge watchers that we are, we never watch a series as it airs. It goes on the list, and then at some point, it reaches the top of the list and we watch an episode a day.

Earlier this year, Mythic Quest aired season four. We downloaded it right after the last ep aired, and then this month it reached the top of the list. We watched it, we thoroughly enjoyed it, and then we watched the finale that ended with Poppy and Ian snogging, before going OMG and leaping apart like they'd been burned, and it was perfect.

It followed through from everything that had been set up the whole season. Poppy and Ian had established work boundaries that they stuck to (mostly) so they didn't drive each other nuts. Ian had for the first time in his life spent the season trying to do the right thing for Poppy - screwing it up half the time, because he's Ian, but he was making an effort to be selfless for her, even when it cost him. He was working so hard to be supportive, and he succeeded often enough that it was genuinely noticeable. The arc worked. It made sense that they'd end up there.

I thought I remembered seeing somewhere that Mythic Quest had been cancelled and there wouldn't be a season five, so I ran a search to check and discovered that yeah, no more Mythic Quest. That was it.

I also fell over a massive fucking controversy.

Apparently there was a dual backlash to that Mythic Quest finale. Part of it was fans who were angry at having a cliffhanger ending that would never be resolved. Part of it was fans who thought that Poppy and Ian snogging came out of nowhere and made no sense. (What show were you watching? Seriously? But okay, you do you, I guess.)

Problem - Apple TV didn't like the backlash. So the ending to the show was re-edited. If you watch that ep on streaming now, Poppy and Ian hug and then go right back to working as normal.

That episode ending that we watched and loved? It doesn't exist any more outside illegal downloads. It's been scrubbed from existence. The episode ending that the whole season was building up to and leading the audience towards - it's just gone. What's out there now instead of a dramatic closer and an emotionally satisfying cliffhanger is... boring. Meh.

WTF people? This is the new world we live in now? It's bad enough that writers are scripting shows to circumvent fan expectations instead of completing the character arcs they've been building for years (GoT ::cough::) But to re-edit it after the fact? Catering to the loudest and most obnoxious subset of people, so that three weeks after an episode airs, it's altered to fit the mood of the day?

I do not want to live in this shitty new world. I want stories to be told the way they need to be told, the way the creators want them. Fuck this shit.

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...

Another round-up post!

Kaos (Netflix). This started out fun but frothy, then got a lot more complex and interesting by the end. Shame that it got cancelled, but it's easy to see why it cost too much to get renewed. Jeff Goldblum as Zeus was probably worth the money. Billie Piper as Cassandra? I don't know how much they paid her, but for the total of 15 minutes of screen time, that role could easily have gone to an unknown who would have been thrilled to have it. I enjoyed it, would have watched more, but I'm not devastated by it not happening either.

The Penguin (HBO). I know people were pissed off with this because of Colin Farrell in a fat suit, and I get why, but dear god, he nailed it, and so did the script. This wasn't just the story of Oswald the poor kid who became a criminal and manipulated his way up despite being overlooked and ridiculed. It was equally the story of Sofia Falcone, an intelligent woman who noticed things in a world where those qualities weren't appreciated, and the patriarchy crushed her for it. Seriously good TV on so many levels and I will say nothing of where it went because spoilers, but damn. Forget the DC comics angle, it works on its own merits as a standalone gangster series.

Interview With the Vampire - I finally got around to season 2, and I rewatched the first season right before, because this is a series that has much in common with Hannibal. Unreliable narrators and every detail matters, you have to be paying attention. The actors and the script are spot on. Bailey Bass in season 1 was a great Claudia - she had all the innocence and tragedy down. Delainey Hayles is awesome as older Claudia - so bitter, so angry, then growing resigned to her role and finding a way to take control and forge a new life for herself, even as it's all wrenched away from her. Eric Bogosian is fantastic as Daniel, picking his way through the details of the the various stories he's told, finding the inconsistencies and dragging them out in the sunlight, and Jacob Anderson as Louis is just brilliant, forced to unearth and confront his own failures and delusions. Every main character is their own variety of asshole, and it's a superb reworking of the books. The adaptation of Madeleine's story for the updated timeline was beautifully done.

Only Murders in the Building (Hulu) - I'd been avoiding watching this from the outset, because it pissed me off on principle. Two old rich white guys make themselves a comedy vehicle, but obviously there has to be a young pretty woman in it too, to make it commercial and palatable. Can you imagine the opposite happening? Two elderly female actors making a comeback alongside a hot young celebrity dude? That would never get greenlit. Ever.
But the reviews kept coming out, saying it was funny from the start, and every season got more praise, so eventually I had to cave and we watched the four seasons right through. And yes, it is really good, and really funny, also with a nice touch of tragedy and pathos. I do think it sometimes goes overboard and gets carried away with itself - Paul Rudd in season three as an insecure actor known for trashy movies trying to make a serious name for himself was perfect casting. Bringing him back for season four as his own stunt double with a bad Irish accent - not so much. But Meryl Streep was glorious and Jane Lynch is so good. And obviously Steve Martin and Martin Short are too, because they always were.

I finished watching White Collar, which is a late 2000s era doing crime for good causes polyamory vibes show that often gets mentioned alongside Burn Notice and Leverage.

It started off so well! The opening two parter was hilarious fun and established great characters and I was solidly into it. It had the same mix of plot of the week and little bits of arc plot each ep that early Burn Notice had, but it hit the ground running so much faster than Burn Notice. BN took a while for the writers and actors to really gel with the characters, but then when they did, it became amazing.

I loved the first season of White Collar. Really enjoyed the second. Enjoyed the third. And by the fourth it was starting to become stale. Nothing changed. The characters didn't change. Their relationships didn't change. The innate premise was whether Neal would be a thief for selfish reasons or for the greater good, and that same will he-won't he was driving every season's plot six years later, by which time it had frankly ceased to be tension at all.

I watched the whole six seasons through because I kept hoping there would be a change, that things would develop. Every now and then there were suggestions that it would. There was a great season ending where Neal was betrayed and Peter told him to run, and at the start of the next season Peter went off the books trying to track Neal down before his colleagues did. Imagine if that had been left to play out, to disrupt all of their lives, to send the series in a new direction? But no, by the end of the season opener, the status quo was re-established and everything went on as before. When I compare it to Burn Notice, with the people we met in the pilot and who they were by the end - there is no comparison.

There was so much wasted potential in the White Collar characters, in their situation and their moralities, in those actors because they're great. But at the end of all those eps, after all the traumas and moral conflicts they'd suffered together, Neal was exactly the same person as he was at the start, Peter was the same as at the start, and so were El and Jones and everybody. Frankly, the biggest character development was in Mozzie, who genuinely came to like and trust Peter.

Another thing I really disliked about the final season was Peter and El having a baby. It had been great to see on screen for five seasons a professional couple late 30s/early 40s without kids where the subject was never raised. Nobody acted like it was odd they didn't have kids, nobody questioned it, and why should they? It's a perfectly reasonable thing for people just not to have kids. And then suddenly El's pregnant at 40, and they're all, 'Oh, we've been trying for years, we just thought it would never happen!' Really? It's the first we've heard of it. So suddenly the show's selling the whole 'Now their married life is complete' angle and it's so ugh.

I'm glad I watched it, I won't ever watch it again, and frankly I'd say watch a couple of seasons for giggles and then don't bother with the rest.

I haven't done one of these posts for a while, and it's because we've watched a fair bit of stuff that was... fine? Not amazingly good, not bad either, just stuff we watched and moved on without making much of an impression. But we've found a couple over the last month that were interesting enough to talk about, so here I go!

Scavenger's Reign. I hadn't heard of this until a month or two ago, and apparently nobody else had much either. HBO certainly didn't promote it to me when they released it and I am very much the target market for this! So the first I heard was when it made its way onto Netflix.
An animated sci-fi series in which the crew of a damaged space freighter are forced to abandon ship and find themselves stranded on an alien planet, with a very alien ecology. The story is interesting and freaky, the animation is beautiful. What's particularly interesting is that you can see where the creators have taken inspiration from some of the oddest parts of biology from earth and then run with it, written it large scale, and created an incredibly unnerving and dangerous world where almost nothing is what it seems. Very cool stuff.

True Detective: Night Country The best True Detective was the first season, and one of the fun things in Night Country is that you can see the parallels. Take everything that was successful about the first series and do it again! Two cops who used to be partners, who now dislike each other, pulled back together by a new case that becomes tangled up with an old case. Corruption among the rich and powerful. Some potentially mystical goings on surrounding murders in a weird, otherworldly landscape (the Alaskan winter instead of Louisiana swamps). But this time the two cops are both women instead of men.
And guess what - it works! Because a good formula is a good formula, and when you have a good script and great actors, how can it go wrong? Also, older people should be allowed to have sex on TV more often - I'm all for Jodie Foster and Christopher Eccleston getting it on.

I went into this not expecting much. It struck me as the kind of thing that might be a bit too quirky for me (sounds odd, I know, but I do come across it sometimes). The first few eps were very much fitting that impression. The dandelion sprites are just not pressing my buttons.

The whole thing is so utterly catered to fanfic tastes though, with the characters and the relationships. If someone took a crack!fic, filed off the serial numbers and made it an original work but did it well for once, you'd have the Dead Boys Detective Agency.

And damn, episode seven is a killer. The meeting between Edwin and Simon. The flashback to when Charles was dying. Edwin's statement on the stairs and Charles' perfect response.

I definitely liked it by the end, I just didn't love it. I could wish that Esther was less cartoonishly evil, among other things. Imagine how effective she could have been if she'd been sinister and smooth and utterly superficially convincing? The same with the undead bureaucrats. I think I just prefer my fandoms with a little more subtlety.

Hope it gets renewed, will watch more, not going to make me actively fannish.

A few weeks ago, my friend Mary told me there was a Chinese TV series that she'd enjoyed called Three Body. And I went, 'Wait! Is that based on Liu Cixin's novel The Three Body Problem?' Mary said it was. She also said she hasn't read the book, but the forums say that the series is very close to the novel.

I've been evangelising The Three Body Problem now for more than a decade. It's one of the best, craziest sci-fi novels I've ever read (it's the first book of a trilogy - they're all good). And something you should go into knowing absolutely nothing about. Nothing. There's a trailer available on youtube but that contains too many spoilers. DO NOT WATCH IT unless you already know.

So we watched the series. And it was interesting because I've read the book and my husband hasn't, so he was getting the New Experience while I was spotting all the foreshadowing.

The series is indeed very close to the novel. It looks great too - the production values, cinematography and direction are beautiful. There are a few changes that make the story more visual, and one or two things I don't recall that I think were probably the Chinese censors getting in there. It's thirty episodes, and there's a period in the middle where the pacing feels a little slow (the SO was complaining about that; I agreed but it wasn't enough to actually bug me).

Anyway. It is good. Three Body is on Amazon Prime in the US, or available via other means like boat sites if you prefer not to give money to Jeff Bezos.

Interestingly, Netflix are releasing an English language adaptation of the book in March and the trailer for that contains fewer spoilers, but still too damn many.

Three Body was released in January of 2023, and I don't know if they're planning to adapt the other two books, but if they do, I'll be there.

So many things! So many GOOD things!

Ragnarok season 3 This was great, exactly as the whole thing has been. Ragnarok really nailed it - the line between the real world and the mythical one, weaving elements from Nordic mythology into the modern world beautifully. Laurits is awesome - doomed from the start to be trapped between worlds and families, trying to claw out his own best existence against all the odds. And everyone in the end fighting the age old battle, not against each other, but against fate. Can you change destiny or is it futile? I love a series that makes a choice to end and nails it down, and Ragnarok did. Netflix make some awesome foreign language stories.

Wednesday. I heard mixed reviews about this when it came out, which is why it went lower on the list and watching it got delayed. I fully understand why there was some backlash against it, because this is definitely NOT The Addams Family. The whole vibe of that series - that the weirdos are actually lovely people who will look after other outcasts of any kind - that's not this series. But it makes a lot of sense in context, because Wednesday was always the family member who rejected that outlook, who was the rebellious, sulky child. So focussing on Wednesday changes the series to her cynical outlook.
Catherine Zeta Jones is exactly as bad as I thought she'd be when I heard the casting. She ain't Morticia, can't pull it off at all. But fortunately this is Wednesday's series, and her family are only in two eps, so that's not enough to ruin it. The series is 100% Tim Burton in feel from when Tim Burton was reliably good, and we really enjoyed it. Good to hear there'll be more :-)

Reservation Dogs season 3 Damn. Another series that went all in and then called it quits when they'd said what they wanted. This series has always veered between comedy and serious commentary on Native American life and the injustices and deprivation they've suffered and still do, but this final series doubled down. There's some massive whiplash between episodes like Deer Lady and the lighter fare, but every episode packs a punch one way or another. It was great to see Ethan Hawke guest star in an ep that really needed someone with serious talent to nail it down and make it work, and he does. Watch all of it on Hulu.

The Consultant. Another one that got pushed down the list because of mixed reviews. And everything bad that I read was basically, 'It doesn't make any sense, it's not explained,' and people whined in a way that made it sound as annoying as some pretentious crap like Lost. But people, this is a SATIRE. It's insane, yes, and it's meant to be! Christoph Waltz is the personification of evil, which is exactly what he's so very good at.
It doesn't matter who Regus Patoff is, or where he comes from, or what he may or may not be hinted to be. The point is the commentary on every type of terrible manager who gets dropped into an industry they know nothing about and sets out to change everything, just so they can make their mark on the world. It's a commentary on capitalism and what people are willing to do for a promotion, or fame, or a pay rise, or a better office, everything people can be manipulated into doing for the most asinine of reasons. It's entertaining, and awful, and so many characters who could be reasonable people start to suck because they're set in competition against one another. Much better than the reviews - just don't ever try to take it seriously, when that's clearly not the point!

Archer season 14 Archer went out with a bang, and I'm so glad it did. When we watched season 13, it was a real let down. There was nothing new to say about these characters, all the jokes were just a rehash of what we'd seen before. We got to the end and said, 'Yeah, Archer's run its course, we won't bother with it any more.' But when we heard that season 14 was going to be the end, we decided to give it that last chance. And the writers had learned too - they switched things up just enough, with the introduction of a new character. It still felt like Archer, but not stale Archer, and there were in-jokes making fun of themselves and referring back to the past, and it worked. It was funny again. I'm glad they managed to give this cast and this concept a good send-off, because they deserved it.