Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including The Umbrella Academy and The Terminal List

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

This may or may not be my last lot of reviews before the traditional TMINE August vacation. It feels like the amount of TV being released in July has died down now, but there’s a whole bunch of new shows coming in August that actually look quite good – Netflix’s The Sandman and Disney+’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law being the most obvious ones – so I might have to forego my usual ‘if it comes out in August, I won’t watch/review it’ rule.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83ClbRPRDXU

Let’s catch up with the regulars, which have pretty much all come and gone now.

Ms Marvel (Disney+) has proved to be the most boring of all the Marvel TV shows so far. The middle episodes in particular took the rather strange decision to be more or less focused on the partition of India and Pakistan and what a bad thing that was. It’s funny how US TV shows, when they do actually decide to go to another country, always focus on Some Terrible Wrong Thing From History That We Should Be Sorry About, isn’t it? I mean we should be sorry about the Partition, but not exactly in the way that the show says we should, in its simplistic way, and is that really the way to engage teenage viewers? It did manage to do a couple of interesting things in the final episode, but honestly, beyond the cameo in the end credits, I’m a bit sorry I wasted my time on this.

Superman & Lois (US: The CW; UK: BBC One) proved engaging enough to the end. The final episode had some lovely callbacks to Superman: The Movie but it was an ending where essentially the show came up with a big resolution to the big problem by creating an entirely new set of rules for the problem. I’m not even 100% sure I understand what happened. Also, after wondering why Superman & Lois in no way references the show it spun off from, Supergirl, for two seasons, the show decided in the final episode to declare that Superman is the world’s only superhero. Wait. What? It makes sense in context, but how does that work? Anyway, it was all very enjoyable as a season. I liked what they did with Adam Rayner’s character. I liked the innovations with the Superman mythos that setting it so late in his career have allowed it to do. Roll on season 3.

Obi-Wan Kenobi (Disney+) got progressively better with each week, more so as the Darth Vader and Obi-Wan moments increased, until the final two episodes which were actually pretty great. Some very cool Jedi moments, but I wish there’d been more Leia in the final episodes. Probably, actually, the Star Wars TV spin-off I’ve enjoyed the most so far.

For All Mankind (AppleTV+) has been getting progressively more exciting and more interesting each week, with pay off after pay off from previous episodes and seasons really making it worthwhile viewing. The parallels with true 90s history are amusing – what if the Republicans had come up with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell? – as are the new conspiracy theories about space travel the world has hatched, and the Mars exploration is proving suitably cataclysmic. I’m not 100% sure the ‘son of Gordo’ storyline works, though. That’s a little bit too OTT.

The Orville (US: Hulu; UK: Disney+) is slowly finding its feet again. The jokes and funny moments are returning, and we’ve had SF cameos from the likes of Bruce Boxleitner (Tron, Babylon 5) to amuse the old school viewers (practically all of them?). The attempts at debates about philosophy and morality are usually very confused, with the continuing clumsy mixing of trans/gender discrimination issues ultimately making the show’s one big through-season debate a little pointless. But it’s generally been decent viewing, even if the show’s 1 hour+ runtime for episodes makes them a bit more of an endurance than they should be.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+) remembered to get serious again towards the end, with a couple of characters getting written out, perhaps in preparation for some interesting new arrivals next season. The season finale itself was nothing short of miraculous, being a redoing of my favourite the original series episode Balance of Terror that asked the question “What if Captain Pike had been the captain of the Enterprise in that episode?” and came to a very surprising answer, given Pike is the hero of this piece and Star Trek is generally a very pacifist show. I actually think in a lot of ways it might almost have been as good as the original episode, taking a lot of its predecessor’s strengths (its theatricality and discussions of war) and marrying them with this show’s usual strengths.

Also surprising was the inclusion of Kirk himself in the episode, since it was a very unshowy, un-Shatner performance by Paul Wesley. That allowed you to avoid being blinded by performance tics to see the nature of Kirk’s character better, so it was actually a surprisingly powerful episode for both Pike and Kirk. Overall, a generally great first season that’s probably now my favourite Star Trek since the original series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pACASI7EXvk

Stranger Things (Netflix) came back for its final couple of episodes, which were very good. I’m not sure they really warranted the wait from the previous batch, since they didn’t do anything especially different or climactic. The Russian end of things all felt a bit superfluous and unnecessary, too. But they were suitably exciting and strong, packed with all the things that Stranger Things does so well. Including Kate Bush.

The Old Man (US: FX; UK: Disney+) continued to be very strong and very surprising, right up to the end. You thought it was definitely going to do one thing and it ended up doing something completely different instead. There is a plot revelation in episode two or three that makes you think “Really? Oh come on?” However, the next few episodes did get round to justifying it so it doesn’t feel quite as unlikely as it all initially seemed on first viewing.

There are some sterling performances from all the cast. Obviously, Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow and Joel Grey are great, but I wish Amy Brenneman had had a chance to do better shows and movies since she’s really good and Alia Shawkat is proving a revelation in a dramatic role. Leem Lubany (Condor) is similarly surprisingly superb, but even the supporting cast (The Wire‘s Gbenga Akinnagbe) do well with dialogue and scenes that are wonderfully theatrical/literary.

Weirdly, it’s only seven episodes long and the season finale doesn’t really feel like a season finale. I was expecting an episode eight to clear everything up. But there’s a second season at least, so I’ll definitely be tuning in for that.

Only Murders in the Building (US: Hulu; UK: Disney+) returned for a second season… but I gave up midway through the first episode. It felt a little too full of itself and charmless this time, and the arrival of the likes of Amy Schumer as herself felt a little forced.

Talking of shows I gave up on midway through the first episode, I gave The Terminal List (Amazon Prime Video) a whirl. That has Chris Pratt playing a Navy SEAL who goes on a mission that goes a bit pear-shaped and then goes on a personal mission to track down and kill those responsible for the deaths of his mates.

This is one of those shows where there’s clearly a lot of military advisers on hand telling everyone how to make it authentic but where the plot hasn’t had anywhere near that level of attention. Apart from the fact Pratt really isn’t a great actor – he got very, very lucky with his comedy roles, but without the laughs, he’s a bit of a charisma vacuum – the show made very little attempt to engage the audience. Bangs! Explosions! Patriotism! Isn’t that enough? What do you mean you want characters and innovative thinking? Soz.

Anyway, it actually felt like a step down from CBS’s SEAL Team, so I decided not to bother. Amazon – continuing to be the best at making B-grade action TV and movies.

Lastly, we had the return of The Umbrella Academy (Netflix). I managed to make my way through the entire season, which wasn’t quite as good as the first season but was definitely a step up from the second season. That gave us an alternative reality with a different Academy for us to enjoy that was full of some suitably silly and bonkers moments, such as a superhero who is just a cube. Marvellous. Good plotting and a great soundtrack, as per usual, too.

The characters were a little less well drawn, I thought, though, with a lot of character developments that came out of nowhere or that ignored previous character developments. What was up with Klaus, for example? And while Ellen Page’s transition to Elliot Page was incorporated into the plot, it did feel a little bit of an arbitrary character development that came without explanation and few questions from anyone. Would that all the world were so woke, hey?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs6alRuY1UU

But what have you been watching?

The Old Man
Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including Ms Marvel, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Old Man

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

Let’s keep this short and sweet or else I’ll never get anything down! And I have a lot to cover.

Superman & Lois (US: The CW; UK: BBC One) seems to be operating on a fortnightly to three-weekly schedule at the moment. It’s been interesting and as good as always, even if it starting to feel like Smallville: The Parenting Years, . There’s an interesting ‘post-Metropolis’ vibe to the whole thing, like Superman’s youth was in Metropolis and now he’s older, things that we took as read (he won’t tell people his secret, etc) are no longer clear cut, since honestly, he’s getting on a bit now. So there have been some interesting format changes, at least.

Star Trek: Picard (US: Paramount+; UK: Amazon Prime) I finally watched to the end and it turned out to be okay by the end. Not total bobbins and the finale almost made up for the bobbins that went before it. But it was all a supertextually ‘We’re all old now and isn’t it a bit young and silly to be having fights, even with your arch enemies, so why don’t we just be nice to one another before we’re all dead.’ Which is fair enough I guess.

I watched another episode of The Essex Serpent (Apple TV+), which did suggest that maybe there really was a serpent (interesting!), but as usual, hints of adultery and failing marriages put it in my bad books for a couple of weeks so I got no further. Some interesting points around mass hysteria, though.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+) has been really fun. Maybe a little too fun? Remember those old episodes of Star Trek with Harry Mudd and the like? Like that much fun. I mean we’ve literally just had space pirates that have a spaceship that has a steering wheel off a ship.

Still awesome, though.

The Orville (US: Hulu; UK: Disney+) is back in new homes on both sides of the Atlantic. That seems to have forgotten it’s a Star Trek piss take that’s supposed to be having fun and appears to now think it actually is Star Trek and there’s not supposed to be fun in Star Trek. One funny line in the latest episode (there’s three new ones already) and zero in the first, which was basically one of those vaguely philosophical ones they do: can suicide be justified? Seems like if you want to watch funny Star Trek, you have to watch… Star Trek.

For All Mankind (AppleTV+) has made its return and has made it as far as the early 90s. Except the show postulates in a vaguely Watchmen-esque way that the continuation of the space race means that we’d be about 10-30 years ahead of where we were back then, with people doing video conferencing on their Apple Newtons. This season: we’re going to Mars and maybe socialist black Elon Musk, rather than the US and USSR, will be the man to get us there. There’s reduced soapiness at least, and it’s nice to see that our old guard are maybe not as liberal as people would like them to be. So I’m actually enjoying this one a lot more than season two. Particularly since this season opened with an episode that was almost as good as Gravity.

Stranger Things (Netflix) also returned and while not a marked improvement over season three, did feel a lot less repetitive and more innovative. This first batch of eps from the season (there’s a couple more to come next month, then another season after that) is a lot more grown up than the previous episodes, too, with some properly scary stuff going on. But most of it has the show’s favourite characters split up at the beginning, with the rest of the season then either about getting them back together or how 11 is going to get her powers back – which ultimately involves an explanation at last for why Hawkins is such a horror show. I really enjoyed it. I watched it over one weekend, which is something I generally don’t manage to get to do these days. There’s at least one really good new character, maybe two (no spoilers), as well.

And even if none of that was any good, there is one truly great scene that has justifiably propelled Kate Bush to the top of the charts again as a result. Watch it for that scene at least, because it’s actually incredibly moving – oddly enough.

After the jump, the new shows I’ve been watching. Although I might have to be brief on that, too. Sorry!

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Ms Marvel, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Old Man”
Mythic Quest
Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including Mythic Quest

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

Last week, WHYBW pulled a sickie, thanks to the Covid vaccination giving me possibly the worst illness I’ve had in years. I’m better now, but not looking forward to number two in July… Thankfully, invalidity still didn’t stop me from watching TV, so I’m up to date with pretty much everything.

Debris (US: NBC) has continued to be pleasantly unpleasant. Although each episode still ends with some heartwarming proof of the delights of human nature, it’s usually accompanied by something horribly unpleasant and some Fringe cast-offs, such as (spoiler alert) a telekinetic/telepathic girl ramming a relative’s head into some metal shards to stop him using his own mind-control to get our heroes to shoot themselves . There’s also lots of distrust and backstabbing, and the effects of the miraculous space debris seem largely to be settling down on things passing through other things – with suitably biologically unpleasant results.

The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (Disney+) concluded with accompanying name change (no, no spoilers) in a slightly odd way, it has to be said. A magnificent speech and the bits in the Smithsonian were desperately moving, but the final half seemed more like an effort to set up about half a dozen spin-off shows and movies than a decent denouement. Plus for a show called The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, there really wasn’t much Winter Soldier this episode.

For All Mankind (Apple TV+) also had a very moving as well as exciting season finale. Lots of soapiness in the preceding episodes that was very draining and slowing of the plot, but how can you knock (spoiler alert) Moon War! and its own outer space version of the Cuban Missile Crisis but in the 80s? Plus props for references to Space: 1999. All in all, not as good a second season as the first and everything sort of petered out with various storylines, such as Molly’s medical condition, but I imagine season three will pick that up. All I can say is, thank God we’re into the 1990s now. I’m so sick of 80s nostalgia and period pieces.

Last up, we had the return of Mythic Quest (Apple TV+). Not 100% inspiring this one, which I think was written by one of the cast members and saw our heroes and heroines return to the office after a year of Covid for their annual pick-me-up LARP party, only for it to go disastrously wrong. Some good chuckles to be had nevertheless and some nicely cynical moments. Also surprisingly big budget, as we entered actual fantasy sequences towards with some solid effects, and with a surprise guest voiceover by Anthony Hopkins. But I’m hoping the series-proper is a little bit more focused on the bad behaviour and the niceties of game design than this ep was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEtkCO2GG-c

But what did you watch?

Nosferatu
Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including Nosferatu and Vampyr

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

It’s been a quiet week for TV, less for movies at TMINE. TV-wise, it’s just been the regulars: For All Mankind, Debris, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier and Superman and Lois. And they’ve all been fine.

The cosmonauts in FAM made the show more interesting than previous weeks, but not greatly so, and the changing attitudes to gay relationships in a little over a decade was well happened; Debris was more scary science with everyone in boiler suits, which was good; TFatWS was better than the first episode, funnier, with some interesting things to say about race, thanks to good old Carl Lumbly (Alias) and the arrival in the MCU of (spoiler alert) Isaiah Bradley; and Superman and Lois was alternately exciting and tear-jerking, thanks to the return of Airwolf‘s very own Michele Scarabelli as Martha Kent.

All good viewing, all staying on the recommended list, but nothing that made punch the air or something. It should be noted, however, that Superman & Lois isn’t back until May now, since Supergirl has now got its timeslot. How odd.

Movies-wise, I got about halfway through The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020), but was a bit disappointed by the lack of scorching Aaron Sorkin dialogue. Good cast and I might try to watch the rest of it, but I’m not enthused.

I did manage to watch all of LA LA Land (2016), in which tedious Ryan Gosling tries to explain the joys of jazz to Emma Stone. Hated it. Lovely song and dance numbers, beautiful design, but you’ll want to kill Gosling by the end of it.

Meanwhile, a couple of classic German black and white movies were leaving MUBI so I figured I should try to watch them while they were still on: Vampyr (1932) and Nosferatu (1922). Nosferatu is the more famous but while it’s a visually stunning adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with some truly iconic moments, it’s not a great movie. Plus the soundtrack given to this silent movie for the MUBI release was borderline comic. It would have been about a thousand times better with the soundtrack on this trailer.

Vampyr is a slightly more haunting affair based on elements from J Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly. Again, visually great but with a plot that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I think it’s worth watching them both to say you’ve watched these two foundational movies, but don’t go in thinking you’re going to be thunderstruck by how awesome they are.

All in all, not a bad week of viewing, more an uninspiring one, if you see what I mean?

But what did you watch?

Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including Debris, Coming 2 America and Can’t Get You Out Of My Head

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

What a busy week I had last week! So much so, even the current reduced TMINE service was out of the question. However, fingers crossed, this new regular Monday slot is going to work out better with my new schedule.

I’ve continued to watch the usual thing: Young Rock (US: NBC) is more or less the same as always, being a comedy, although last week’s was the first to stick to more or less one time zone. So not much to say about that. I’ve watched another ep of For All Mankind (Apple TV+), which was fine – a bit dull, but with one big emotional scene – but I’ve not caught up with the latest yet.

However, I have watched new things!

Can’t Get You Out of My Head

Available on iPlayer

I gave a couple of episodes of Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head a whirl, which given there are six of them that are about two hours long each in some cases was about as much as I could do.

And it’s pretty good, almost back to the form of The Power of Nightmares, as well as a return to some of its ideas, so it’s almost a rounding up of Curtis’s work of the past 20 years. Some of it is counter-intuitive and backtracks, so now Vladimir Putin is largely powerless apparently. He also manages to link all manner of unconnected things in surprising ways that end up making surprising sense.

But a lot of it you feel like shouting “That’s nonsense!” at, only to realise you’ll see it’s all true in about 10 years’ time (cf The Power of Nightmares). And it’s also very depressing. But then that’s the news right now.

Also, if you play Adam Curtis Bingo as a drinking game, you will be hammered by the end of the first hour.

However, I honestly can’t face watching four more episodes. Seriously, it’s too long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thd5bBUNEw8

Coming 2 America (2021)

Available on Amazon Prime

Sequel to the 80s comedy classic that sees Eddie Murphy discovering he has a son in America and bringing him back to his how country to become his heir. Slight problems: he already has three daughters, all of whom would be better monarchs than the new guy; and Wesley Snipes runs the neighbouring country of Nexdoria and expects his daughter to marry Murphy’s son.

And I know everyone hates it, but I loved it. Would happily watch it again. For starters, it’s co-written by Kenya Barris (#BlackAF, black-ish et al), who is a genius, and there are genuinely laugh out lines, as well as some great callbacks to the original. The story isn’t just a retread of the original – more an inversion – and although one can question why a prince who went to America to find his equal partner would find it hard to let a daughter take over from him, you can sort of see how it’s commenting on how young radicals become conservative in their old age as they tire of trying to fight the system.

Importantly, while it’s clearly not a film made by Africans, it’s very definitely a movie made by Black Americans – director Craig Brewer is most famous for Hustle & Flow (2005) – and it’s far more imbued with Black American culture and values than the original was. This feels like a movie made by Black Americans for Black Americans, that in part comments on their own feelings about Africa and satirises them. And there are the occasional nods to knowledge of African culture, such as Snipes’ talking about ‘aunties’

Equally importantly, turns out Snipes is a comedy genius and he gets to do a little bit of martial arts. Bonus!

Debris

Available in the US on NBC and Peacock

At first look, Debris feels like one of those generic NBC mystery shows (cf Manifest) crossed with a Fox/CBS procedural. The central conceit here is that an alien spaceship entered our solar system and then started to break up, raining down debris on the Earth. However, whatever that spaceship is made from, it’s got weird properties that seriously mess up physics – and people. The US and UK launch a joint taskforce to gather as much of the debris together as possible to prevent all manners of disaster happening, with Jonathan Tucker (Kingdom, The Black Donnellys) and Riann Steele (Holby City) playing CIA and MI6 officers respectively.

So far so ordinary. Both sides are also keeping secrets from one another and there are shadowy individuals also collecting the debris for their own use. Each episode so far has also had heartwarming endings that tell us something about the human spirit. Yuch.

However, this is probably the closest thing we’ve had to The X-Files since it first started in several ways. Firstly, it’s got a great electronic soundtrack. Secondly, it’s just plain disconcerting. The effects the debris have genuinely feel alien and more like magic than science, with resurrections and cloning just not as we know it. It’s almost Fringe-like at times. I mean Mulder and Scully didn’t go everywhere trailing huge suitcases containing hazmat equipment and who knows what else. It’s clear this is hugely dangerous and mindwarping stuff, right down to Tucker (spoiler alert) having to shoot one of his own clones in the second episode.

This is quickly joining my regulars list. I hope it maintains the same level of uneasiness throughout.

But what have you been watching?