Thinking of witty lines to introduce the article with is only getting harder and harder as more and more shows air. Don’t be surprised if I end up having to shorten those writeups as well.
High Potential gives us a fast-paced episode with “Eleven Minutes,” where a murder of a middle-aged man leads Morgan and Karadec on the trail of his gambling problem, then start unraveling an entirely different conspiracy afoot. Felt like this one had a ton of plot for a procedural episode but never felt rushed or implausible. And, as you can see from the header image, Morgan starts opening up more on the progress in finding Ava’s missing father.
Only Murders in the Building gives us “Flatbush,” where the trio’s investigation follows the widows after Charles’… uh, indiscretions the last episode, and takes them to Oliver’s old neighborhood, which gives Oliver and Loretta a lot to discuss and bond over as we learn more about Oliver’s childhood, where his love of the theater started, and why the Arconia matters to him. Mabel’s complicated relationship with Althea gets more of a spotlight here, and as we close out, we see the heavy hand of string-pulling that’s thwarting our investigators… and that might put our heroes in danger or might reveal a number of other things. Another good episode in a solid season.
Bob’s Burgers kicks off season 16 with a fun new song and a story largely told in flashback. “Grand Pre-Pre-Pre-Opening” starts with Bob’s struggle to finally raise the prices of his burgers, while the kids write a concept album about the restaurant (mostly songs about what a terrible decision it was, if Linda feels trapped by it, things of that nature). Bob and Linda recall the initial decision to open the restaurant and everything that went into that– including the birth of Tina– in flashback. Aww. Nice start to the new season.
English Teacher is back, and we decided to get started on season 2. (It’s on a strange schedule; FX seems to be burning it off over a few weeks, but the whole show is available on Hulu now.) I was curious among other things how I would respond to the show in the wake of the allegation against Brian Jordan Alvarez. I’m not gonna pretend I’m making some principled decision one way or the other here, but one thing I’ve found when it comes to artist scandal is that, honestly, how the scandal affects my experience of the art matters as much as anything (well, as well as whether I’m financially contributing to something I’m morally opposed to and things like that). I haven’t seen it in decades, but I can still watch, say, Chinatown, because many, many people collaborated on that movie, and I don’t feel like Roman Polanski’s presence or the things he did are all over it. Someone like Woody Allen, though, I feel his work is personal enough (explicitly so in Manhattan) and is so about him that I find it inseparable from the things he did. Even when the scandal is minor– the Aziz Ansari bad-date story on now-defunct Babe.net– I felt like it affected how I viewed his material, because so much of it was about dating as a millennial, and that incident made him seem full of shit on the topic. Louis CK I was wearying on even before the allegations became public, but once they did, it’s really hard not to see how CK is seemingly using the stage and screen to present the worst parts of himself as a form of absolution and in some cases even to draw the audience into participating in his fetishes. That former point on CK is probably the biggest worry I had with Alvarez; if Evan is essentially autobiographical, that both makes the allegations much more believable and makes me wonder if he’s doing something similar, presenting himself as a needy, self-centered mess but who still has a good heart deep down, in order that we might forgive him for his transgressions. But English Teacher is also collaborative enough that I thought it could be more of a Chinatown situation, especially since the supporting cast are usually the funniest part of the show.
Anyway, all that said… I don’t want to seem like I’m also seeking absolution here. I could make up some shit like “My beat for this website is to report on what I think is the best TV no matter who makes it,” but that would be shit and you would know it would be shit. The honest truth is that season 1 was one of me and my wife’s favorite shows last year, and having more shows we can watch together is important to us. It’s also true that if we hadn’t regarded it so highly, we might have been willing to let it go. We don’t pay for the show and we liked it enough to give it another chance despite the above. I guess if there’s a formula for “quality of work” / “seriousness and quantity of accusations” * “is my knowledge of said accusations affecting my experience?”, English Teacher fell on the right side of it, for us, for now.
Anyway, onto the actual show. After two episodes I was getting a little worried, because Evan’s ego and lunacy still lead him to project his issues onto others, particularly in that first episode with the school play. But episodes 3-6 are all very funny, and interestingly, bring in guest characters that drive a lot of the comedy. Grant invites the faculty (that we know) to dinner at his house one night, and the best comedy comes from two of the guests– Grant’s daughter Abby’s boyfriend, who Evan is convinced is gay and closeted or hiding it, and Brit, a date Markie brings who ends up attaching to Gwen and driving her insane– and how the others react to them. Other episodes bring in Evan’s mother (who drives him nuts because she’s just like him, naturally), and a military recruiter who comes to the school. Joseph Lyle Taylor shows up as a Texas Tech football coach on a recruiting visit. (You probably know him best as Doyle Bennett from Justified.) My worries were also somewhat assuaged by signs of Evan actually growing up, particularly in the college-essay episode, where he finally gets over himself and projecting his insecure ego on the other students like we saw in the season premiere.
Markie remains my favorite character, with his combination of a football-is-life worldview and a surprising open-mindedness and understanding of human nature; guidance counselor Rick started featuring more later in season 1, and gets even more to do this season, including a killer showcase as a deals-closer during college admissions week. Generally, though, Carmen Christopher plays Rick as someone who’s just guidance counseling until he strikes it rich through one of his harebrained business ideas or through gambling (which he loves and is thankful is not addictive). And Enrico Colantoni is still great as Grant, revealing more of the qualities that led him to be a principal (and a pretty darn good one when he wants to be), while still maintaining his Steve Billings-esque “keep this out of my hair” attitude. So, the show is still as funny as it was last season, for whatever that’s worth to you.
Beavis and Butt-Head gives “Life Savers” / “Tattoo”, a funny episode that first involves the duo attempting, badly, to rescue an injured Mr. Van Driessen from the woods (where they are only to look for a “naked swimming hole”). And then Beavis wakes up with a tattoo he doesn’t remember, and has to figure out what it says and how it happened. You might figure out pretty easily how it happened once you see it. There’s a lot of good comedy in both of these.
Chad Powers premiered on Hulu September 30, but we haven’t started it yet. (There’s also no guarantee we’ll stick with it; that will depend on how much we enjoy what we do see.)
And Abbott Elementary returned for season 5 last night, but we didn’t have time for it.
30 Rock, because when you start the Dennis arc in season 1, you gotta finish it.
Bob’s Burgers, for some reason I felt like season 10’s “Wag the Song,” and that reason is that the end-credits crossover song between Jimmy Jr. and Zeke’s song and Gene and Louise’s gets into my head way too often.
N/A
How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) is premiering to BBC One tomorrow, according to my sources (which now include the BBC’s own website). I’ll try to get ahold of it and report back. Smiling Friends returns to [adult swim] for season 3 this Sunday.
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About the writer
Captain Nath
Born on the bayou, thriving in the mountains. Writer, gambler, comedian, singer-songwriter, bon vivant, globetrotter, and all-around Renaissance Man with perfect opinions about TV and music. Pronounced with a long A and with the H.
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Department of
Conversation
“Fiscally liberal, socially conservative.” So many gold Dennis lines.
“Let me tell you something about 20-year-olds, my friend: Half of them are 16.”
What did we watch?
Prince of Darkness – Gets scarier and scarier as it goes along, the homeless in thrall are the most standard trope but the eldritch elements and implications push Carpenter’s mythology into surrealism and nightmare imagery. The implications here are so dark that Pleasance’s poor priest can’t even pray at one point.
Andor S2E9 – Oh hell yeah. Gripping TV – there’s a 20 minutes chase here that is outright hard to pause – though Bix continues to have been the most rote plotline, like space opera Michael Mann, even if it sort of works.
My Carpenter hot take is that this one isn’t great; some of Carpenter’s scariest individual scenes, admittedly (the ending in particular is incredibly spooky) but terribly plotted, failing to escalate well, and the ideas are straight up gibberish.
BRING BACK DOWNVOTES
I’ll bet this is how Guillermo feels!
“The Thing and Breaking Bad are, respectively, the pinnacles of their particular artforms” is the comment I would leave to summon so much downvoting energy from Guillermo that the button would return via sheer force of will.
If you could also work Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Punisher: War Zone into that comment I would hack the website to bring back downvotes myself.
Downvotin’s too good for ‘im!
After all this criticism, I’ve reflected on my actions and decided I was correct, justified, and handsome.
– Zapp Brannigan every day
Horror isn’t exactly my bag, but I really like PoD for the camp solemnity of its mood given the low budget and pretentiousness of it’s premise. It teeters on ridiculousness but its rigor keeps it from falling into absurdity, and it also boasts one of the greatest horror images (and homages to great works of art) that I’ve ever seen, packing a wallop that I never saw coming.
Yeah, I feel like Bix’s plotlines only rarely work for me, which is a shame in a show that is otherwise strongly geared to my interests. But getting Mon Mothma out of the Senate and off Coruscant alive is such a great barnburner of a sequence. And after acknowledging in yesterday’s article that it’s often annoying when media tries to make you applaud, I’ll be a hypocrite and say that I’m a sucker for her big speech. It helps, of course, that we’ve had multiple episodes to understand both her and the forces she’s criticizing, and that there are immediate, dramatic consequences for what she’s doing and she knows that going in. Aaron Sorkin could never.
It’s funny because after hearing about the speech and posts making fun of OTHER viewers applauding it, it’s less applause-worthy in context and more character-focused and dramatic. This is a fascist society, and as you mention, criticizing the leader directly has those pesky consequences.
What makes this speech different from most others in this show is its dramatic construction. The viewer knows the reality of Ghorman and what the consequences are, and the writing is carefully, slowly pushing Mon to the edge, to see if she’ll really jump. The first half of the speech is worded so that she can still have an out, but once she takes the plunge (“genocide”) there’s no going back, and the rest of the action follows from that.
Also, it’s a great detail that we get to watch her work the speech the night before, which most shows hardly ever bother with.
Aw, man, I wanted a live blog of episode 9. It’s probably my favorite of the season, and I wouldn’t argue with anyone who picked 8 or 10– the latter of which has an equally thrilling sequence – but the entire Senate sequence is amazing and thrilling enough to not ever get old.
M*A*S*H, Season Two, Episode Nineteen, “The Chosen People”
“He says this is his farm and you are on his land.”
“That settles it. Let’s go home.”
This is one where a family of Koreans moves into the camp and Radar gets accused of getting a local girl pregnant. The show uses its premise to criticise American racism (mainly through Frank), and ironically it got accused of racism itself (including by original film director Robert Altman) for portraying Koreans as backwards farmers; I think, while broadly correct, it oversimplifies the show’s portrayal of Korea, with characters like Pat Morita’s Pak. Hilariously, Frank ends up the MVP of the episode; he looks so pleased when Henry asks him to talk to the relevant officer, and there’s a rare example of him getting on famously with someone, at least until he gets propositioned.
There’s a typical translation set of jokes, which leads to the great gag of Pat Morita’s character translating Hawkeye’s Korean as “Mazel Tov”.
Big Night – obviously I’m a big fan of cat movies, was trying to work out if there was a subgenre that my girlfriend was particularly attached to and she suggested food / chef movies. I then asked if she’d seen this one, and she hadn’t, so obviously we had to put it on. On my first viewing I found the first half a little slow as it gets the pieces into place for the titular “big” “night” but I was a little more charmed by the low key comedy-drama of the early stuff this time around, especially the scenes with Campbell Scott as the slightly odd car salesman. It definitely gets to the fireworks factory once they actually start the party though, the food all looks great and Shalhoub and Tucci actually cooking some of it in long takes works wonderfully. A really fun one, gonna have to see what else I can dig up in the Food Movie genre that neither of us have seen (Eat Drink Man Woman seems like a big shared blind spot).
Oh and also Alfred Hitchcock Presents but we’ll get to that later.
Love Big Night. Do not, as you will see later, love this Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes. And no one even makes a timpano in it! Or has a cat! What a downer after Big Night.
I liked Hitchcock’s pitch-blank intro / outro more than the actual episode I think, just didn’t really feel like a story they’d quite figured out. Looking forward to your write-up, as always!
I remember hearing a radio interview with Tucci when this came out where he talked about doing these scenes with Shaloub in Italian, calling cut, and then starting to offer direction in Italian. Which of course is not a language Shaloub speaks.
Adolescence, “Episode 1”
Stylistically, I don’t know how much this gains from making each episode one long take; there are moments where it works, like when the inability to do shot-reverse shot in dialogue sequences sometimes leads to lingering on one character’s face and their reactions to what’s being said, as if we’re being forced to sit with it in the same way they are, but there are also moments when we’re just following somebody down a hallway, and this does not need to be a scene.
That’s my only gripe. I know this is supposed to get even more intense later on, but it’s very good right out of the gate. One of the choices I can see the show making is to focus–this seems to be partly about how even good people with good intentions cannot figure out how to deal with this, so the potential for institutional and personal fuck-ups is minimized, at least for right now, to better concentrate on the dark and still unknown kernel of Jamie’s mind. Even then, you still have an entire SWAT-style raid on a house to arrest a thirteen-year-old who, killer or not, wets himself with fear. So it’s not indifferent to any problems on that end. Still, the show has picked a core question–how did this boy become a murderer?–and it’s going after that with little to no distraction. (Again, at last so far.)
Great performances, great gradations in morality and purpose. Even the good cop, bad cop-style interrogation by Bascombe and Frank feels like it’s telling us about their individual characters, with the “soft touch” family man who, despite his knowledge, can’t unsee the age of the child in front of him vs. the less sentimental woman who probably can’t help seeing her younger self in the victim (and who’s probably intuited that taking a more aggressive stance with a boy who likely hates women could get a strong response).
So far, solicitor Paul Barlow is a particular highlight, and it’s good to see someone committed to criminal defense being painted in a good light without them being forced to conveniently only represent the innocent. But the first episode probably belongs to Stephen Graham as Eddie, Jamie’s dad, who spends most of the runtime trying to protect his son before being confronted, to his horror, with the fact that he doesn’t really know him–but will choose to love him anyway, even if he has to figure out what that will even mean.
Is anyone besides me watching “The Lowdown”– It kind of fits in with a lot of the shows that track interest here; being a rural mystery (Tulsa, specifically)with quirky characters spouting a lot of humorous dialogue at a fast pace. It also boasts a great cast led by Ethan Hawke with strong supporting work from Jean Tripplehorne, Kyle McLaughlin, Peter Dinklage, Keith David, and a slew of TV veterans, some from “Reservation Dogs”. For all of those pluses it feels a bit forced and stretched out for TV episodes, but it is pleasant enough.
Would be interested!
I want to check that out soon. I’ve heard good things, complete with Terriers comparisons.
Haven’t yet, but what I’ve heard about it, and Hawke’s performance, does have me interested.
threw on some Robotech, hoping to introduce the kids to my favorite anime as a child. Huge flop.
Once you get over some of the anime conventions (putting a civilian city right next to the sdf seems like a bad idea) it’s still great. I could just watch the action scenes on repeat, the masses of looping, high-arcing rockets, the fighter transformations, the laser barrages are all mesmerizing. I’m going to keep trying till those little philistines learn to appreciate it.
only murders. Oliver’s flashbacks to his other killing me.
Love your thoughts on English Teacher and the difficulty of problematic creators. Like we talked about on your Discord, it’s easy with someone like Rowling, who is using her money on something so obviously evil; it’s thornier with a guy like Alvarez. I’m fact, I’d also throw in another aspect to your moral formula – what are the consequences? Who will suffer and how?
I also have a kind of internal equation determining whether or not I’ll keep engaging with, let alone somehow paying for, art made by someone morally reprehensible (and still alive), so it’s always interesting to me to see how other people’s shake out. I like seeing the behind-the-scenes thought process!
I’ll have an episode of TV to throw into our WDWW thread, but in the meantime, I’m still doing my weekly episodes of Mr. Show, and the season three finale–“The Return of the Curse of the Creature’s Ghost”–was especially excellent. I also like that when my wife was pleased by David Cross’s post about the Riyadh Comedy Festival, she added that “between this and Mr. Show,” she was feeling very fond of him lately, and rightly so.
The X-Files has been on hold since I cancelled Hulu, but my DVDs have finally shipped, so I hope to be able to resume regular viewing next week.
Peacemaker, “Ignorance is Chris”
The big reveal I was waiting for finally happened! It completely makes sense that Harcourt almost instantly realizes what Chris has spent whole episodes not noticing–she’s sharper and a trained observer, and she presumably doesn’t have the same residual, ingrained “white as default” perspective he probably still does from growing up with his dad. Chilling adrenaline-fuel ending with Adebayo running from an enraged white mob. I’m assuming everyone will get out of this physically okay, but there’s still some potentially painful fallout here: I don’t know how dramatic Gunn is going to go with the fallout from this season, but I could see it really hurting Peacemaker and Adebayo’s friendship, at least temporarily, that he was describing this world as a paradise because it took him so long to notice how it would treat her and everyone like her.
Incredible Vigilante in this episode, first with his evidence locker room full of drugs and “blood money” he refuses to spend (everyone else immediately stuffing handfuls of cash in their pants the second he’s not looking is perfect) and his closet full of Beanie Babies that will pay off any day now, and then with his enthusiasm about meeting his alternate self (and his alternate self’s enthusiasm about meeting him in return). You beautiful, violent weirdo, you. Small detail here I really like: when he sees his parents in this universe are still together, he assumes his dad isn’t gay here, but we can work out that this is probably just a universe where it probably wasn’t safe for his father to come out. Also, I saw some interesting discussion about how some of the other alternate versions of characters here have presumably bought into this world’s horrific morality because they take their cues on right and wrong from the dominant culture, whereas Adrian, in any universe, is–partly because of a kind of neurodivergence–committed to his own highly specific vision of morality and pursues it at all costs. He’s still probably a guy who will kill people for vandalism, but he’s not influenced by the state sanctioning atrocities.
Hoping we get more focus on Adebayo in these last few episodes, since I feel like she hasn’t had as much to do this season, and obviously she’ll have some major concerns about how this is going.
Incredible Chris-and-Harcourt scene in this episode, with some phenomenal acting from Jennifer Holland.
Anyway, great to finally have it confirmed that Chris has been fucking around in the fireworks factory the whole time. This all took a little longer than I’d like, but the diversions have still usually been fun (and often either funny or entertainingly violent), so I’m mostly cool with it.
“Six cats! What would they even talk about?!”
I love Vigilante.
Year of the Month update!
Here’s a primer on some of the movies, albums, books and TV we’ll be covering for 1973 in October!
TBD: Patrick Mio Llaguno – The Long Goodbye
Oct. 14th: Bridgett Taylor: Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road
Oct. 15th: Lauren James: Working
Oct. 16th: John Bruni: Shotgun Willie/Sweet Revenge
Oct. 22nd: Lauren James: The Wicker Man
Oct. 20th: Sam Scott: Janos Vitek
Oct. 29th: Lauren James: Don’t Look Now
And this November, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al from 2018!
Nov. 10th: Bridgett Taylor: Aquaman
Nov. 24th: Sam Scott: Ice Cream Man