American Crime Story: Season 2

Despite being a big fan of The People vs. O.J. Simpson, I was decidedly not at all excited for The Assassination of Gianni Versace. I'd like to say that I was wrong not to be, and that this season of American Crime Story was quietly excellent. But it wasn't! This never really grabbed me, and aside from its premiere and finale - the only two episodes that had to do with the titular murder of Gianni Versace, really - I just found myself not really caring.

I've heard some people say that by focusing on the closeted gay killer and his spree of killing mostly closeted gay victims, and not the famous gay victim, the show was being bold about the plight of gay men in the '90s. I'm sorry, but I just don't see it that way! By focusing on the killer, the show is jumping through hoops to find ways to empathize with, you know, a sociopathic torturer and serial killer. I'm all for exploring motivation through empathetic means - what might have driven such a person to do such terrible things? - but this season had nearly nothing to do with the way he was able to hide from the FBI in plain sight in Miami, or the way the public did or didn't care about this spree of dead gay men. I mean, the show is called American Crime Story, and I get that it's going to explore and maybe even grotesquely celebrate famous American crimes, but this season intermittently bored me and rubbed me the wrong way.

Still looking forward to the Katrina season coming later this year. That story sounds intriguing and ethically complex in a way that "insecure gay guy murders people" doesn't quite.

Take My Wife: Season 2

Perhaps the biggest casualty of the great Seeso collapse of 2017 was Take My Wife, a scripted comedy series about barely-fictionalized versions of real-life married comedians Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher. The second season had finished production but not yet started airing when Seeso shut down operations, which meant there was this sad little orphan season of television - completely ready to be seen, but stuck without a home.

The good news is that about a month ago the season was made available on iTunes and Google Play, and apparently later this year it will make its way to Starz. Good! I was always rooting for it to find a home; I didn't absolutely love the first season, but it was a cute enough show, an easy and enjoyable watch, and above all it was a show worth rooting for - not just about two gay women, but largely and substantially made by members of the LGBTQ community. That's a concept I can get behind, and I happily threw down ten bucks for this season of television.

But man, here comes the bad part. And I don't know how to say it without just saying it, so I'll just say it. Okay. This was not great television. This was, at worst, almost impossibly unfunny. The best thing I can say about it - and this is earnest, not sarcastic or cutting - is that it seemed like everyone involved had a great time making it.

But I don't want to dwell. Besides, throw every caveat and grain of salt you can think of on my own assessment - I'm straight, white, male, cisgender, and there's an assload of TV and other content out there "for me," and maybe this is not "for me," and you should disregard the way I feel about it entirely. (But... I did like the first season, and I do like Esposito's comedy, and I do like Butcher's comedy, and I support everything this show is doing, and so forth, and so on. So, you know, maybe this just wasn't very good.)

Regardless! I'm glad this found a home, I'm glad I bought it, and I'm glad to have seen it.

High Maintenance: Season 2

I'm sure I've said this or something like it before, but the strengths of the anthology story-telling format are also its weaknesses. New characters, new story, every weak? Great! That means when there's an episode I just can't muster a shit about, I don't even have to pay attention to it - next week will have something totally new. But on the other hand, when there are excellent episodes filled with fascinating characters, hey, sorry, there's no momentum sustained on a week-to-week basis.

Even the very best serialized shows still know how to use the idea of "episodes" to their advantage, telling focused stories every week, shifting character perspectives or even tones form week to week, the final product of the "season" being greater than the mere sum of its parts. But that's neither here nor there.

I was a fan of the first season of High Maintenance, which aired on HBO back in 2016. It was six half-hour episodes long, and it felt wholly new and refreshing, just to follow this unnamed weed dealer around on his bicycle as he visited and sold to various clients in New York. Generally we'd follow the lives of those clients, seeing the dealer ("the Guy") from a third person perspective for the most part, and in a limited capacity. It worked! I think I ended up placing High Maintenance fairly high on my year-end rankings in 2016.

Here in 2018, in its second season? Eh. Something felt off. Maybe it's just TV fatigue - so, so easy to be let down by television when you watch too much of it, and what felt new and fun even as recently as 2016 might feel completely trite by now - but I'm more ready to blame the show's shifting focus. We still saw new characters and clients every week, sure, but here in the second season it felt like the primary focus was on the Guy, the dealer - ostensibly the show's main character, sure, but also not as much of a character in the first season as he was a character-linking plot device. And maybe the expansion from six episodes in the first season to ten in the second was a bit much, a bit ambitious. Definitely there were fewer memorable moments for me here in this second season despite nearly twice as much content.

I'll probably be back for a third season as long as HBO is - this is still a very easy show to watch, after all, and in its best episodes I think it's very funny and tightly made and clever. But, yeah - it's trending downward! Sorry!

Ascension: Season 1

Here's a miniseries I've had my eye on for a little while. Ascension aired three ninety-minute episodes on Syfy across three nights back in 2014. It's been hanging around on Netflix for some time and I finally took the plunge the other night, because I'm a sucker for space-based sci-fi even though it's perpetually disappointing and shitty.

The premise here was kind of cool. (They always are!) An enormous life-sustaining spaceship took off in the 1960s, bound on a 100-year journey to Alpha Centauri in order to colonize other solar systems. We begin our story in the present day (2010s) exactly halfway into the ship's journey. Most of population of the ship at this point has been born on the ship, out in space, never knowing Earth. And most of the population will die on the ship, out here in space, before reaching Alpha Centauri. They're the ultimate lost generation, then, facing existential dread and questioning their purpose and fate, and it shouldn't be that surprising at all when the ship experiences its first ever murder.

Everything falls apart pretty quickly, the show flailing all over the place with space magic and "higher power" garbage, unveiling twist after twist that completely realign the mission's paradigm - I would have absolutely bailed after the first two episodes had there been more than one remaining. Worst of all, what had been sold to me as a "miniseries" very clearly ended on a big old hook for a second season, with nothing wrapped up at all.

But the show's biggest missed opportunity in my opinion was in its depiction of the society on board. Again, this is a collection of people born from the people who went up into space in the 1960s - probably very patriotic and militaristic, certainly more than a little sexist and racist by today's standards - and yet when we meet them in 2010 they're just sort of... culture-less. Like, a lot of the women have Pan-Am stewardess-looking hair and outfits, but the captain is a black guy, women hold very important positions of power - how? Why? Even a hokey throwaway line like, "we realized after the great Oxygen level crisis of 1984 that a man's leadership capabilities aren't affected by his skin color" would have gone a long way toward fleshing out some semblance of history for this very unique group of people. Like I almost hate to bring this up, but why would there even have been any black people being sent on the colonization effort in the 1960s? (For what it's worth, I can't recall there being any Asians.) I also can't recall if the ship was receiving any radio transmissions from earth in the form of newsclips, music, sports scores - do these people know about the Miracle on Ice? About 9/11? About Taylor Swift?

I digress. Don't watch this one. There just isn't enough meat on the bone, and even if you find yourself invested in the actual stories here, there's no real payoff.

Corporate: Season 1

Here's a new one on Comedy Central from a couple of relative unknowns, Matt Ingebretson and Jake Weisman. They're the cocreators and stars of Corporate, a show about a ridiculously big and evil corporation - think of some sort of hybrid of Lockheed Martin, Walmart, and Monsanto. Of course, the show's as much about the banality of corporate culture in 2018 as it is about the inhumanity of it - not that the two are mutually exclusive. In that respect it feels like an updated Office Space or like, Dilbert, even.

For me, the show started out really strong. It seemed to have an immediate identity and tone - relentless, mainly - and its episodes felt crisp and pointed. But it faded kind of quickly, succumbing to very standard tropes like "Casual Friday goes bad" and "this meeting is endless!" before turning things around for a memorable finale.

I liked it! But it didn't seem to have a whole lot of gas in the tank after a promising back-to-back premiere. Can't say for sure if I'll be back for Season 2 - but the show definitely will be, and I think that's a good thing.

Love: Season 3

And just like that, Love is dead. After three seasons! Eh, that sounds about right.

I've touched on this before, but I can't say I ever loved this show. It was tolerable, decent, low stakes - just very forgettable television, really. It's a longform rom-com from Judd Apatow about two deeply and differently flawed people and their burgeoning romantic relationship. Apatow has said before that he specifically wanted the show to focus on the moments between the moments you'd see in a two-hour movie. The dead-end do-nothing hang-out sessions, the minor bickering, the weird sex, the lulls - and I see what he went for, and I think he did it pretty well. I think Love was, all things considered, very close to the best possible version of itself.

But it never really grabbed me in any way. Three Marches in a row now, I've spent a few consecutive nights chugging a season down, not really dwelling on it or thinking about it for the fifty-one weeks in between those hearty servings. And now it's gone, and that's all fine and good, and I can't imagine it makes even a footnote in any future references to this Peak TV era.

I think the major factor preventing me from really investing myself in Love was the relationship at its core. I like Gillian Jacobs plenty - or at least I did on Community - and Paul Rust is perfectly serviceable as this sort of whiny, nerdy, needy man-child - you know the type and you know it well, dammit. But the characters themselves - and I know this was intentional - they sucked! They were just an awful lot to handle, and everything about them being together felt wrong and forced and weird and bad. An easy contrast to make is to a show like You're the Worst, where the two main characters are so deplorable and broken that their relationship is a tragic comedy, comic tragedy, whatever you want to call it. Mickey and Gus aren't vile or terrible - they're just a little unpleasant. Which, again - fine! Human! But not necessarily a pair of people I ever found myself rooting for, if that makes sense.

I'll close on a positive note, which is to say that the breakout star of this show has to be Australian actress Claudia O'Doherty. As Mickey's roommate Bertie, she's quirky, hilarious, adorable - and not just because of the accent! (Okay fine, the accent does some very heavy lifting.) I hope we see plenty more of her in the years to come.

Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China

Bah. Really didn't care for the first Assassin's Creed game, and thought that if I ever had a shot to break into the franchise it'd be through one of these spin-off platformer things, free on Xbox Live back in some month or another. It's a five-hour "quickie," just twelve levels of a stealth-based platformer game in decent-looking 2.5D. Ho hum, nothing special.

And it turns out, that was exactly the problem - it's nothing special! There's just nothing fresh or new or even very different about this game, aside from perhaps the stealth mechanics. But in terms of the rest of the gameplay, and of the overall look and feel and game design, and of the characters and the story, man, this was jsut sort of five hours gone from my life! Pardon the melodrama, but really, I was just overwhelmingly bored by this game, even though it was exactly what I figured it would be. I guess if I want to play another "same old" stale platformer, then I might as well literally play the same, old ones. Long gone are the days where I give a shit about beating every free game thrown my way, and perhaps stuff like this is best left in its digital celophane wrap.

I feel the need to stress - this wasn't bad. It just felt so completely inessential and unmemorable - and who's got time for that?

Tom vs. Time: Season 1

Cards on the table, I don't dislike Tom Brady, despite what my mother-in-law may think. I think he's truly one of the hardest-working and most dedicated people on the planet, and that he's earned every dollar and accolade and Super Bowl ring he has, and I can check my hometown bias here but I really do think he's the greatest quarterback of all time.

But that doesn't mean it's particularly interesting to see him selling his brand, so to speak. The lifestyle and real estate porn bits were fine, as far as docu-reality TV goes, but at the end of the day this was just "Keeping up with Tom Brady," I guess - a documentary that amounted to eighty or ninety minutes of... nothing substantial, nothing eye-opening. Here he is, in a cabana with his supermodel wife. Here he is, on a bros weekend to Montana with some teammates in the offseason. Here's his daughter, there's his son. Watching the Olympics last month, I quickly got tired of half of the puff pieces - and those lasted, like, five minutes, and often had far more interesting shit to say than "I knew this team was coming together after the Jets game."

Brady has said, of the series, that it's just nice to get "his story" out there. And that's fine and commendable, and presumably at forty he's allowed to be sick of taking flak and criticism from coaches and radio doofuses alike. But I can't help but shake the notion that, this close to the end of it all, he was better off waiting until retirement to make something like this - or at least until the offseason!

I don't regret watching this any more than I regret watching, oh, fifty to a hundred hours of NFL football last season. I'm still a Patriots fan, after all! But this is an early frontrunner for "least essential 'TV show' of 2018."

Crashing: Season 2

Speaking of low stakes TV, raise your hand if you feel like what we need in 2017 and 2018 is another half-hour comedy about a doughy white male comedian. Yeah, I thought not. I was late to the Crashing train last year (wait, that doesn't sound-) but after some light prodding from Sweeney I gave it a try - I'm not saying it's hard to pass on an eight half-hour episodes from HBO, but come on, it's easy as hell not to, right?

Crashing is the semi-autobiographical story of Pete Holmes, a way-too naive and wholesome and religious guy with nothing in his life but the dream of being a standup comic. His wife leaves him (and leaves him homeless) in the pilot episode and the first season mostly just consists of Pete meeting (and crashing with) various other standup comics. Here in the second season, Pete sort of finds a shtick as a college performer and pursues a relationship with a female comic, but otherwise this is exactly the same show it was last year - which isn't bad! This was never going to be deep or deeply funny; it's a show about a dude learning how to be a comedian. It's almost like a love letter to standup comedy in general, the idea that you've got to tank and bomb and put in horrible hours in front of dead crowds for years before you get a sense of who you are as a comedian. Certainly not the greatest premise out there, but it's a show that seems completely comfortable with exactly what it is.

Victoria: Season 2

Victoria is light and fluffy and low-stakes enough to make Downton Abbey look like Breaking Bad, and there's really no compelling reason to watch it. Jenna Coleman is charming (and just way too attractive to play Queen Victoria, come on now) and the guy playing her husband-cousin Prince Albert is humorously German enough, but this is just complete popcorn television, a hilariously over-exaggerated version of history and something I'm positive I've only stuck with for two seasons now because it airs in the dead-ass middle of winter here in America.

Still - I like it! It'll never so much as sniff the top half of my year-end rankings, but it's such an easy show to give half of my attention for eight hours a year. I've already made the Downton Abbey comparison, but another easy one is to The Crown - The Crown is nearly objectively a bigger, better, stronger show, but it's also got this completely stiff upper lip (like Queen Elizabeth herself, no?) while Victoria spends entire trivial episodes on, like, getting a makeover in France, or getting lost in the woods in Scotland.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's refreshingly low-stakes - even when it touches on assassination attempts and potato famines - far more memorable for its depictions of King Charles Spaniels and Albert loving Christmas trees.

What's the term for this, again? "Feel good" television? Just doesn't seem like there'd be an intersection between "trivial fun TV" and "British monarchy period drama," but, hey, here we are.