What TV SHOWS are you watching?

Gary Sax wrote: We just went through Ted Lasso S1 again to prep for the new season!

Same here. So good.

2 days until Ted Lassoooooooooooooooool!

Still in production but scheduled to arrive this year, Neil Gaiman is producing the Sandman for television. Nothing but a teaser at this point, but this might be fun.
m.imdb.com/title/tt1751634/

And also in production is a second series of Good Omens written by Gaiman using a plot sketched out by Pratchett that didn’t make it into print due to the two being unable to find the time to collaborate on the manuscript. Kind of bittersweet as I think I’d much prefer to have the book version from an alternate dimension where they did get around to writing it.

I laughed out loud three times at Ted Lasso last night. It’s still great. The characters still feel like themselves. I’m glad Danny Rojas finally got a real storyline and screen time. My only concern is that Rebecca and Roy Kent’s storylines feel vestigial, but the showrunners did nothing in the first season to earn anything less than my complete faith that they know what they’re doing.

Anyway, what I really want to talk about is some of the chatter I’ve heard around the show in the lead up to the second season. It feels like they’re treating it like comfort food, look at the nice guy be kind to everyone and make them better and happier. I guess that works as a very surface reading, but it sells the series short, treats Ted like a contemporary Pollyanna. Het’s not. The series admits the world is hard, and Ted is a flawed person with real struggles, but he and everyone else can be more than those things rather than grubbing and wallowing in them. It’s a corrective to the bleakness of Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire that has ruled the television conversation for decades. Ted is the modern incarnation of Vanity Fair’s Dobbin, the character who is good and kind without being weak, naive or gullible.

I didn't love the first episode but it has earned leeway with me.

Three of my four kids are in front of the TV watching Teletubbies. They’re 24, 18, and 18.

Is weed legal there?

Gary Sax wrote: Is weed legal there?

With a prescription.

Boo Bahs came on next, and acid is still illegal.

Atlantic Crossing - Really good 7-episode drama series centered around the relationship between US President Franklin Roosevelt (Kyle Maclachlan) and Princess Martha of Norway. Mostly a Norwegian production so you see WWII almost entirely from their perspective. The series starts with the Germans invading neutral Norway and ends after the German surrender.

Do the Olympics count? It's stolen all my TV watching time. NBC's broadcast network still sucks at Olympic coverage, but they're never going to change. Peacock is a waste of money although it might be useful after the games end. Occasionally NBC is worth watching, though. Bobby Finke's 1500m win was good. The Italian and the Qatari sharing high jump gold put a smile on my face.

Netflix’s Queen Sono is the most generic thing I have seen in years. The only thing remarkable about it is the absolute lack of original ideas within it. It’s a spy show. You can probably guess most of the limp vegetables that went into this hot water of a soup. A lead with a troubled past who plays by her own rules. An investigation into a murder that implicates her own government. Old friends from whom she must hide her work. Tangled allegiances and misplaced loyalties. Enemies in a private security company and revolutionary militia. Magic glasses with instant facial recognition technology. A final race against the clock when a massive public event is threatened by a terrorist bombing. Absolutely nothing you haven’t seen before except this time it’s set in South Africa. There are even jokes about a vegan cleanse and fake woke friend. Am I positive I didn’t turn on any given night of CBS?

IMDB claims Sono is Netflix’s first fully African-produced series. It seems more likely that the Netflix algorithm farted out the scripts after watching all the other spy shows on the platform and running a few lines through Google translate. What a waste of time and energy.

It’s not bad. Production design is pretty nice. Every main and secondary character has their own storyline. It doesn’t drag across six episodes, even if they ultimately feel like an overloaded sizzle reel for the real show as nothing is really resolved. It’s just entirely uninteresting.

Out of desperation for something to watch the wife and I fired up Jean Claude Van Johnson that old (by streaming standards) show with JCVD as a spy masquerading as an actor. I remember the pilot from way back when Amazon was posting them and letting the audience vote, I guess this one got picked.

Anyway, it's actually pretty funny, JCVD is always down for mocking himself (the fantastic JCVD attests to that) and this is no exception.

Only a few eps in but it is really fun. Not even sure if it got a second season. Might have to do The Tick after this

The White Lotus is a weird show. I like it, but it’s strange. It follows several dysfunctional couples/families that arrive at the titular hotel in Hawaii at the same time and gradually start interacting with each other. It is basically a slow descent into a type of madness, where they are emotionally falling apart. It’s very intriguing.