BAILS:
Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party: Season 2
Novelty only lasts for so long.
Bajillion Dollar Properties: Season 3
Man. In this day and age, where there are a thousand TV shows and a dozen ways to watch them, it blows my mind that there are still shows that get caught up in copyright limbo or whatever. Seeso shut down earlier this year, and once it did, all of the shows on it just sort of disappeared right along with it. Bajillion Dollar Properties was one of these, and probably one of the better ones. Some of the Seeso orphans were quickly picked up by other networks, which is why a show like HarmonQuest had a second season elsewhere. But Bajillion Dollar Properties? It's just gone. It doesn't exist on the Internet anywhere, but no one can upload it anywhere either, because it's copyright-protected, even though, again, no one is currently selling it legally on the Internet. Mind-blowing! Baffling! I mean, I do get it, I think - the rights holders are waiting for the right offer, or they're contractually restricted from offering it on another streaming service for a certain amount of time. But still - this is a show I'd gladly pay a small amount of money to see, so why can't I see it? Gah! The first episode of the third season of Bajillion Dollar Properties was available on YouTube, so I went ahead and watched it, but I'm bailing. This isn't on me, or on the show - it's on friggin' Seeso, or NBC, or whoever has this but will not release it. Oh well!
FAILS:
Dynasty
It's a reboot of that 1980s nighttime soap I'm sure you've all heard of but never seen. (The one that wasn't Dallas.) Brought to you on the CW by the makers of The OC and Gossip Girl, which I respectively loved and barely tolerated. When Marissa and I saw the very first promo of the show - a catfight ensues when a young woman's new boss says, with a sneer, "call me Mom" - we were all in. And then I actually watched five or six episodes, and then I backed way the hell back out. Marissa's still in, as this campy glitzy trash ride fills some sort of hole for her that Gossip Girl left behind. Me - I wanted more camp, more absurd rich-people-are-just-the-trashiest flavor, more men and women in $5,000 outfits trying to just beta the shit out of each other. Alas, this show seems to be taking itself just, like, ten percent too seriously for me. And it's about twenty percent too bad to pull off what it's trying.
Lore
Lots of hype for this one! Apparently it's a respected and beloved podcast about some real weird shit from history. Amazon turned it into a six-episode TV show for Halloween, which makes perfect sense. I threw the show on my enormous backlog and thought little of it. But then I heard someone say it was a terrible show. And then I asked Keith about it, and he agreed that the show did the original podcast no justice. And, suddenly, excited by the prospect of watching what was allegedly a terrible show in order to justify cutting it from my backlog, my watchlist, whatever you want to call it - this was a very enticing proposition! And that's exactly what I've done now. (It's possible I have a problem!) But, yeah, the show stinks. You can't just take an existing popular podcast and intersperse it with some shitty acting and overlay it with bland visuals and call that a television show. Otherwise every podcast would and could just become a TV show. No! Let's not do that!
Future Man
The premise and the cast of this Hulu original were enough to grab me, but one half-hour episode in it was clear to me that it wasn't going to be worth it to stick around for thirteen more. There's this big old loser playing the world's hardest video game - a game no one has ever beaten - and then when he finally does beat it, surprise! It was a test! A test sent back in time by some super-soldiers who wanted to find out the person from the past most capable of helping them win their war against- no, fuck it. This needs no description. The whole thing is completely stupid, and doesn't make any sense, and it's not even funny. Seems like a show that maybe Hulu stole right out from underneath Adult Swim, somehow.
Knightfall
Nothing to see here aside from an extremely bad medieval show about the persecution of the Knights Templar by the King of France after the Crusades. Look, I figured this was going to be a dumpster fire going in, but I made it through two seasons of History's Vikings and it wasn't even bad. There was a chance this was going to be good! It wasn't. Two years ago I called Kurt Sutter's Bastard Executioner the worst show of 2015. This was only barely better than that Flamin' Cheeto dump.
Runaways
I actually made it a decent way into this one, and didn't hate it - by far the best Marvel show of all time! But at a time when I'm disgusted by how much television I watch, there aren't many easier cuts to make than an hour-long show I like but don't love, you know?
Lore
Lots of hype for this one! Apparently it's a respected and beloved podcast about some real weird shit from history. Amazon turned it into a six-episode TV show for Halloween, which makes perfect sense. I threw the show on my enormous backlog and thought little of it. But then I heard someone say it was a terrible show. And then I asked Keith about it, and he agreed that the show did the original podcast no justice. And, suddenly, excited by the prospect of watching what was allegedly a terrible show in order to justify cutting it from my backlog, my watchlist, whatever you want to call it - this was a very enticing proposition! And that's exactly what I've done now. (It's possible I have a problem!) But, yeah, the show stinks. You can't just take an existing popular podcast and intersperse it with some shitty acting and overlay it with bland visuals and call that a television show. Otherwise every podcast would and could just become a TV show. No! Let's not do that!
Future Man
The premise and the cast of this Hulu original were enough to grab me, but one half-hour episode in it was clear to me that it wasn't going to be worth it to stick around for thirteen more. There's this big old loser playing the world's hardest video game - a game no one has ever beaten - and then when he finally does beat it, surprise! It was a test! A test sent back in time by some super-soldiers who wanted to find out the person from the past most capable of helping them win their war against- no, fuck it. This needs no description. The whole thing is completely stupid, and doesn't make any sense, and it's not even funny. Seems like a show that maybe Hulu stole right out from underneath Adult Swim, somehow.
Knightfall
Nothing to see here aside from an extremely bad medieval show about the persecution of the Knights Templar by the King of France after the Crusades. Look, I figured this was going to be a dumpster fire going in, but I made it through two seasons of History's Vikings and it wasn't even bad. There was a chance this was going to be good! It wasn't. Two years ago I called Kurt Sutter's Bastard Executioner the worst show of 2015. This was only barely better than that Flamin' Cheeto dump.
Runaways
I actually made it a decent way into this one, and didn't hate it - by far the best Marvel show of all time! But at a time when I'm disgusted by how much television I watch, there aren't many easier cuts to make than an hour-long show I like but don't love, you know?
TALES:
Great News S2 E1: "Baordroom Bitch"; S2 E2: "Squad Feud"
Just a few months back, I said of the first couple episodes of this show, "This wasn't awful, but God, who has the time or patience to stick around and wait for big network sitcoms to figure their shit out anymore?" Here's the good news - Great News has apparently figured its shit out! And all it took was bringing in Tina Fey to play what's essentially the female version of Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock - the all-knowing, insanely wealthy and powerful wonder-boss. But no, from what I saw, Great News also seems to have realized that the very concept of a cable news network is a fruitful territory ripe for lampooning here and now in our era of - sigh - "fake news" and "heightened discourse." The show seems to have pulled way, way back on the mother-daughter workplace embarrassment as a well for laughs, and it's all the better for it. This is even the type of show I could see myself really enjoying - it fills a 30 Rock hole that Kimmy Schmidt just plain can't - but, alas, who has the time for more television?
The Last Man on Earth S4 E1: "M.U.B.A.R."
After bailing on this show as the calendar turned, I came back for the season premiere just to see Jack Black get shot one second into his cameo appearance. That's comedy gold, folks. I didn't think Jon Hamm could be topped. The next time they do this, they should just have a big name guest star straight up play a corpse from the start. But the rest of this show is still the dumbest mess, I'm happy to say. I don't miss it! But I wish it well.
I Love Dick S1 E5: "A Short History of Weird Girls"; S1 E8: Cowboys and Nomads
As you may recall, I tried two episodes of this bizarre and unique Amazon series in the summer. It just didn't stick with me, which was a shame, because I really wanted to enjoy it. Then the TV critics' year-end best lists started coming out, and "A Short History of Weird Girls" was on one critic's list of the best TV episodes of the year, so I gave it a shot. I liked it fine, probably even a little better than the first two episodes of the show. And then I realized if I watched the finale it'd kind of be like I watched the whole season even though I only watched half of it - it's not like I was following the plot threads through two episodes, so maybe, sure, let's see where and how this thing ended. And I didn't care for that episode at all. So, smart bail, after all. Not for me! I love that a show as quirky as this exists, but this just wasn't my cup of tea. Sorry, Jill Soloway! I'm still in on Transparent.
Taboo S1 E8: "Episode 8"
So I'm collecting input for my big old collaborative year-end TV rankings, and what do you know, two people include Taboo on their lists. And they don't just include it; they each rank it third overall. Wow! I mean, I hated Taboo. That's maybe too strong a word - there was always decent production value and acting, I just couldn't muster up two shits to give about the story. I bailed after three of eight episodes. So I decided, much like I did with I Love Dick, to go ahead and skip right to the finale, watch it, see if there was anything I was missing here. And... no! There wasn't! Same old shit! Ugh. What a waste. What a depressing way to spend one of my last two hundred hours or so of 2017. Womp! But at least I'm confident all over again that this show sucks. Tom Hardy - you're better than this!
Okay, cool! I don't think I'll do this again next year, these dumps where I talk about all the junk I'm not actually watching whole seasons of. It's been fun! But there have to be better avenues for posts like these. Eh. We'll see. Happy 2018, all of you!
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