Claws: Season 3

Man, I was just positive I'd already posted about this. It's the same silly, campy, central Florida-based show it's always been. I've heard it described as a feminist fantasy of sorts, which, sure, I see that. A group of somewhat put-upon nail technicians when the show began, these women became druglords in Season 2 and casino owners in Season 3. That's a dang empire, baby!

Tough to see myself coming back for Season 4, but, stranger things have happened.

Baskets: Season 4

It's weird - I never really loved Baskets and I'll sure as shit never rewatch it, but now that it's over - and not even over all too soon, after four seasons - I kind of feel like I'll miss it a little bit. Gah!

I mean, I won't. I won't miss this show because you can't miss any show when there are all kinds of TV shows you still haven't seen and even more you need to finish. But I will miss the general concept of something as weird and earnest as Baskets existing at all. I came for the Zach Galfianakis, but I stayed for Martha Kelly's put-upon monotone performance and Louie Anderson's whole bittersweet old lady gimmick and the show's weird overall fascination with Arby's and Costco and juggalos.

Eh. Well, so long you beautiful oddity.

The Detour: Season 4

Oh boy.

Here's me talking up the first two seasons of The Detour in 2017:

...might be the best pure comedy I've seen in a while... This isn't a reinvention or a reboot of a family road trip comedy, nor is it an inversion or a spoof or a parody - it's just a straight attempt at the genre done very well, very consistently

...the second season was even better, against all odds ...newfound sense of confidence to make all kinds of in-jokes and callbacks. I'm not saying this is Arrested Development or anything, but it might be the closest thing on TV today to that beautiful, excellent family comedy too smart for its own good.

That's some very high praise! Here I am a year ago with a take on The Detour after its third season:

...third season was undeniably the weakest one yet. ...The Detour is probably going to get renewed for a fourth season... but it's clear the show was running on fumes already in the third... I don't have very high hopes.

Well, I can't say I didn't see this coming, but the fourth season was just awful on every level. The initial premise, the cliffhanger from Season 3 - that the family's daughter has run away from her very messy family at, like, 16, and the rest of the family is traveling the world trying to find her - very quickly resolved in an unsatisfying way that left all four characters scattered and the show without any real story to tell. And it's fine for comedies not to tell big stories - nothing wrong with a hang-out session and an episode-by-episode conflict-and-hilarious-resolution cycle - but this wasn't that, at all. This was, "let's change the setting every episode and never really have an understanding of why any of the characters are where they are, or what they're pursuing, or what they're doing." There were too many episodes without the kids, and worse, there was an episode without the parents. The kids aren't really kids anymore - classic sitcom issue, frankly - but their characters haven't really become teens either - more like little adults. It just doesn't work! Neither does the increasingly broad, easy, groanworthy comedy the show opts for.

All this is fine - shows get shitty and shows get canceled all the time - but for a couple of seasons there The Detour was legitimately one of the funniest and most underrated shows of the decade. I would still recommend those first two seasons to anyone at all, but yikes was this a rough season. There've been murmurings that the show could be brought back for a fifth season on a different network, but at this point I don't think it's TBS that's holding it back creatively. Oh well!

GLOW: Season 3

Here's another third season of a Netflix original that didn't live up to the high water mark it set last year; fortunately, GLOW was still very good! There are still just so many characters running around in this thing - I won't say too many, because they're all fantastic - but enough to leave you wanting more of everyone. (And hey, that's a good thing, right?) The women's wrestling production has moved from late night cable TV to a Las Vegas residence here in Season 3, and that means a lot of different things for a lot of different characters. Some take comfort in the steady work and sameness of the show they put on every single night; others feel caught in a dead end career-wise or creatively stifled. The show still excels at "episodes," by which I mean every year it seems like GLOW has a solid season with two or three very specific and very memorable episodes. (This year: the one where they all switch roles for a night, the one where they go camping in the dessert, and the Christmas special.) In short, it's a great show and I'd love to see it get renewed for a fourth season. Is there any higher praise than that? (Yes.)

Dear White People: Season 3

I should have seen this coming, and probably overrated Season 2 last year in the first place, but holy cow what a dropoff in quality. It's insane that a TV show primarily centered on black college kids would have nothing to say in 2019 in only its third season. Just five hours of watching former friends bicker with each other. Every character got either less likable or less interesting and there were no arcs or throughlines to follow whatsoever. I'm not sure if we'll see a fourth season of this thing, and worse, I'm not sure if I care!

Orange Is the New Black: Season 7

There've been lots of pieces already about the end of Orange is the New Black representing the end of an era - kind of specifically, the "early streaming" era. (Do you know what now stands as Netflix's oldest ongoing show? It's BoJack Horseman. Weird, right?) They've focused largely on things like how it's fun and even cute to look back at how people reacted to the early seasons of this thing, when binge-watching was a novel concept and some viewers were more comfortable consuming show one episode at a time over the course of several weeks, or how only on streaming was it possible to get this bold and experimental and sprawling with your storytelling. (I don't buy that part; I don't think the show would have been substantially different on Showtime or HBO.)

I want to offer a different take on the cultural relevance Orange is the New Black and I'll come right out and say that I think it's going to end up being one of the defining shows of the 2010s by comparing what this thing was when it started in 2013 and what it became by 2019.

When this thing started it was the story of an upper middle class white woman being sent to minimum security prison for drug trafficking. The inmates of color around her weren't presented initially as sympathetic people; they were presented as scary and potentially threatening to Piper Chapman, with one eventually beloved gay black character earning the unfortunate (and tough for certain segments of the fanbase to shed) nickname "Crazy Eyes" because of her totally friendly and benign tendency to stare excitedly at Piper. Think about where most of the drama stemmed form in Season 1. There was Piper's (white) ex-girlfriend Alex, there was Piper's big (white) rival Pennsatucky and there was Piper's (white, male) counselor explicitly forbidding Piper from engaging in any acts of homosexuality with Alex. We got some stories in the margins about Laverne Cox and her character's transition and the issues that was causing her both at home and in prison, and we got some faint whiffs of stories about racial injustice in the prison system and how white women and black women are sentenced differently for the same crimes, but this was first and foremost Piper's story about how hard it is to be a bisexual white woman in minimum security prison.

Fast forward seven years, and all of the show's most sympathetic characters are black women and undocumented immigrants set to be deported. Somewhere along the way the show stopped being about Piper's life, and she got pushed to the margins and all those characters on the margins had their stories start contributing to bigger picture themes like the rampant injustice inherent in for-profit prison systems and the deportation process. Racism in the early seasons was treated largely as a joke, like when the trashy white meth heads would spew hilarious 2013 stereotypes; by 2019 the show was done treating racism of any sort as a laughing matter.

The show was often messy, but it used its platform and popularity to tackle key issues of the decade from trans rights to Black Lives Matter to the ongoing family separation crisis. It is not hard to envision a strawman viewer whose views on these subjects were made more empathetic and humane in no small part because their favorite characters on a television show were suffering. Call me cynical, but when the deportation of an entirely fictional character can stir more outrage in someone than the weekly reports about people dying in ICE facilities, I mean, that's the power of television and storytelling, I guess, and kudos to Orange Is the New Black for using said power for good.

Also, kudos for bringing back so many old castmembers here in the final season. It might be fanservice, but it was done in the purest way. Just, "hey, let's check in on what this guy's been up to with one quick scene," and not, "it's time to bring this person back from the dead so she can beef with this other character because the actresses used to be on the same show and it'd be a fun wink" or whatever.

Oh, I had a Wire comparison I wanted to make but I couldn't find a place to shoehorn it in. Basically it was just that this show at its best was capable of portraying systemic injustice at every level of an institution like no show I've seen since The Wire. But also, this was all way too messy with far too many go-nowhere stories to really compare to the tightly plotted Shakespearean tragedy that was The Wire. Still a pretty good show, though!

The Last Czars: Season 1

I've been on a bit of a Russian history kick lately, so when this relatively unknown thing popped up on Netflix, I knew I'd check it out. No need to read reviews or anything; a quick look would be all I needed, and best case, it might be worth sticking around for six 45-minute episodes, hey, fine.

So the first episode began and I had one of the weirdest viewing experiences for fifteen minutes as I tried to figure out just what the hell I was watching.

Episode one begins, and there's a man in Germany in the 1920s going to a hospital where a delusional young woman is claiming to be Princess Anastasia of Russia, the lone survivor of the slaughter of the royal Romanov family in 1918 by Bolshevik forces during the Russian Revolution. Okay, sure - this is a famous old rumor and there were all kinds of false reports about Anastasia surviving the massacre. There's even a '90s non-Disney animated movie about it, so, this isn't the show making something up out of thin air - but already I'm finding it weird as hell that a show called "the last Czars" is going to take place from Anastasia's point of view.

Except, it doesn't. We suddenly flash back to Saint Petersburg in 1894 - seven years before Anastasia is born - and we witness the funeral of Alexander III, whose death at the age of 49 leaves the Russian Empire in the hands of a 26-year-old named Nicholas II. Okay, okay - this, now, this is the titular last Czar. Maybe the story's about him after all, but what was with that weird framing device? The scene isn't terrible, but all the dialogue is noticeably "intentional" rather than natural-sounding. The production value looks okay, not great, but what did I expect from a relatively unacknowledged Netflix original series?

Then a voice-over comes in, some fifteen minutes into the episode, narrating what's happening. Okay, wait, is this the man from the beginning of the episode who's sitting bedside with the Anastasia imposter? No, it's a different voice entirely. And suddenly we cut to... a talking head! And then another one. And another. Several historians just kind of describing the scene we just saw. And suddenly my understanding of this show changes again, and it's clear that what I am seeing is being presented as a documentary! But like, again, fifteen minutes into the episode.

And now there's some archival footage and there are some pictures from like, 1900, and I'm curious if the format is going to jump between dramatic reenactments of scenes and then historians describing things and adding context. And then we jump back to our actors, the new czar and his wife, and BAM, sex scene, full nudity, as they try to make an heir. Just straight up Game of Thrones-style gratuitous titties-and-moaning.

I mean this thing is just all fucking over the place - a documentary, with substantial acting and production value, framed as a mystery. It made for a very easy watch, but I can't help but wonder if it could have and would have been a much better show had it just stuck heavily to one lane instead of jumping back and forth across all three.

Here is what I think happened. I think this was originally intended as a straight up drama, and then perceived as being so fucking bad that it was completely cut up and re-edited with talking heads. If I continue down this line of almost baseless assumption, I think they had the "Anastasia imposter" framing in mind from the beginning, but made the Czar and his wife and Rasputin and their son the four most important characters. So Netflix, or whoever, said "fuck it, call it 'the Last Czars' and chop it up however you need to with talking heads filling in the gaps and explaining the bigger picture, and maybe we can salvage this thing," and then for some reason they still kept the Anastasia framing device anyway. I don't know!

Th funny thing is, I didn't hate this! I should have, and I can see what a mess it was, but whether my theory is true or not - and hey, maybe someone actually greenlit this thing with exactly this "half documentary, half mystery" pitch - it... kind of worked. It's one thing to read about or hear about or see old grainy black and white footage of the late Romanov family in the early 1900s, but to see them brought to life in a Downton Abbey-scale production with all the opulent rooms and clothes, I mean, that's something!

I dunno, man. Way too many words spent on this thing no one will remember a week from now. But it was an interesting case, that's all I'm saying. And sometimes a weird mess you can't look away from ends up making far more of an impact on you than a ho-hum series that does everything by the book.

Super Dungeon Bros

Meh. This is exactly the kind of low-effort co-op hack-and-slash shovelware that phones and tablets do better than video game consoles at this point, and that really don't need to exist at all! I couldn't care less that it's a roguelike - I'm only playing this thing once, who gives a shit if it changes every time? Clearly this game was designed to be played with four players, but bitch I am 31 years old and I don't have four controllers even if I have four friends!

I hope I didn't pay any money for this. I probably did! Fuck!

Gravity Rush

Holy shit, a video game? Yeah, here's my fourth beaten game of the year. I started this one way back when my paternity leave was ending in, oh, April, and then didn't touch it again for four solid months.

Gravity Rush is a title I'm almost positive I boguht back when I didn't have much of a PS4 library. You know how it goes. "Wow, I've got this brand new system and nothing to play on it! Time to buy any game at all with decent reviews." I believe this was a Vita port. It was a fun ten-hour platformer with a unique art style and an incoherent story. The central gimmick here is that you can manipulate the direction of gravity. Now if that sounds to you like a great gimmick for a puzzle game - yes, I agree. So imagine my surprise when this wasn't a puzzle game at all, but a straight-up beat-em-up that takes place in 3D.

Initial genre-based disappointment aside, this was actually a surprisingly fun game. It's just long enough not to wear out its welcome and the missions are just varied enough to keep the game from growing tedious. I spent way more time than I had to exploring the four-part city where the game takes place, but less thn I could have doing side quests.

Look, it was fine! If I were five years younger I'd be putting the sequel in my Amazon cart right now. Speaking of which, what's this? Hey, only $20? That ain't bad. I wonder how the reviews are...

No! No, I can't. I shouldn't. I won't. But this was fun, really.

Perpetual Grace, LTD: Season 1

The existence of this show has made it entirely possible for me to stomach Amazon's recent cancellation of Patriot, a two-season masterpiece that never got a chance to show off how brilliant and brutal and funny it was. Why? Because the creator of Patriot, along with honestly more than half of its castmembers are here now, making Perpetual Grace, LTD, on fucking Epix of all places. It's arguably even better than Patriot was and its first season was just flawless and oh fuck wait a minute how is this even-less-accessible, less-hyped show ever going to find the audience Patriot so desperately deserved and needed? Gah!

Let me pitch this delightfully weird and wonderful show, all-star cast and all.

It all starts with a plan. Just the easiest little plan. In New Mexico, somewhere near the border of old Mexico, a guy named Paul Allen Brown (Dewey Crowe from Justified) has a scheme to rob his wealthy con-artist parents (Ben Kingsley and Jacki Weaver). It involves sending them to Mexico to look for him - their missing son - while an interloper named James (Jimmi Simpson) steals Paul's identity and empties out his parents' bank accounts back home. Then Paul and James will split the money fifty-fifty. Couldn't be simpler.

This goes, as you might suspect, immediately and hilariously awry. What Paul fails to mention to James is that he's a person of interest in the murder of a little girl from Texas. So when "Paul" attempts to make a transaction, a Texas Ranger (Terry O'Quinn) gets an alert and heads straight to New Mexico to grill James-as-Paul about the murder. Also up James-as-Paul's ass is a convicted murderer (Chris Conrad) whose dying parents lost all of their money after being grifted by Ma and Pa Brown.

Part of the plan involves coercing an inept Mexican sheriff (Luis Guzman) to occupy Ma and Pa Brown while they're in Mexico looking for their son. Part of the plan involves bribing a Mexican coroner (Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite) to issue death certificates for Ma and Pa Brown. Yeah, well, Ma and Pa immediately figure out something's afoot, escape the sheriff, and murder a prison inmate who just so happens to be the son of a powerful cartel kingpin.

Lots of balls in the air - and this ignores some of the show's best characters like Glenn, a kid with head trauma who James-as-Paul quickly pulls into the ongoing scheme; Uncle Dave (Kurtwood Smith), a wrongfully-convicted kid diddler and the only guy in town who knows that James isn't actually Paul; and Donny, fresh out of British prison with a decades-old axe to grind against Pa Brown and heading straight for New Mexico to track him down.

But that's just the plot and its hiccups. The reason to tune in and watch Perpetual Grace, LTD has almost nothing to do with its story and almost everything to do with its tone, its vibes, and its quirks. Paul Allen Brown? Fucking loves magic tricks. The Mexican coroner? He wants to be the first Mexican man on the moon. Texas Ranger Terry O'Quinn? His name is Walker, and no, he's never once heard of that reference, because he doesn't watch TV shows. Sheriff Luis Guzman? He's an aspiring, terrible writer and his fat dumb sons don't respect him. Ma and Pa Brown? Cold-blooded criminals, but holy shit do they have the best love story you've ever seen.

The way this whole thing is shot? Fucking beautiful. The way it's paced? Extraordinary confidence; patient and deliberate, but never slow. The score and soundtrack? Just perfect.

Watch this show! Pirate it if you need to - hell, I did - but watch this show!

Halt and Catch Fire: Season 4

Ha! I watched the first 37 episodes of Halt and Catch Fire way back in January, then for whatever reason I left three just kinda hanging there in my Netflix account's "continue watching" section. There was - minor spoilers - a very major character death at the end of that 37th episode, so it's possible I needed some time to breathe after that moment and really let it sink in, but I think that's giving myself a little too much credit. More likely, some other show or shows came out when I had three episodes left and I just never found my way back to Halt and Catch Fire.

Until now! The three remaining episodes made for a slightly-too-long epilogue of sorts to the series I'd mostly binged seven months ago. After seeing these characters change companies and projects so often, I was a little unclear upon resuming the show exactly who was working where and grinding what axe against who, but the concluding action still landed for me in a satisfying way. Mostly.

The Boys: Season 1

All y'all know by know that comics and superheroes are very much not my shit, and that my interest in the genre is that of any vanilla movie-goer, any garden-variety thirtysomething white guy. Broadly speaking, I neither love nor hate the annual onslaught of new content, and I pick and choose my way through these various cinematic universes with specific, limited interest.

The Boys, then, did not seem like it was going to be for me. The advertising, the marketing - I mean, look at that poster art. Yuck! And yet here I sit after devouring eight episodes in less than a week, very excited for the second season.

The show's based on a comic book from 2008 or so, which kinda tracks; that's about the latest possible year someone could have called their creation "The Boys" without inducing all kinds of groans and winces. Unfortunate name aside, the "Boys" in question aren't superheroes. Rather, they're members of a covert operation tracking, limiting, and in some cases even murdering superheroes. I guess they're literal antiheroes! (Yeah, this whole thing just plays so much better ten years ago, I'm sorry.)

Turns out, the superheroes in the world of The Boys are exactly what uber-powerful people would end up being, which is to say a bunch of corrupt and egotistical assholes, some of them downright evil. The show's most fascinating character is Homelander, a Superman-Captain America hybrid who wears stars and stripes on his cape, but also, you know, shoots down planes full of innocent people (twice!) for nefarious reasons. So this ragtag crew, the titular Boys, largely motivated by individual desires for personal vengeance, are attempting to expose if not destroy them. In some ways, it's a nice little story about the little guys fighting back - and that's something that honestly plays better in 2019 than in 2008.

I appreciated how patiently this show builds the world in which it takes place. We're still meeting major characters halfway through the season and when it draws to a conclusion, it feels like it's all just getting started. I know the whole "the first season is really just an extended pilot" model of TV storytelling can be stale and irritating, but it's not like the season was all exposition, at all.

I dunno, give it a try!

Derry Girls: Season 1

The thing about six-episode seasons of television is it really shouldn't take me six months to finish them. I started Derry Girls way back at the beginning of the year based on some positive mentions in Best of 2018 lists. And you know, it was fine. Fine! Very specific. Very Nothern Irish, very '90s. Kind of poignant to see a show about a bunch of teenage girls at a Catholic school during the Troubles just, you know, living their lives, listening to Salt-N-Pepa and the Cranberries, dealing with all the regular bullshit kids deal with while car bombs are going off every few weeks.

Weirdly enough, the second season hits Netflix... tomorrow. And I had no idea that was the case when I finally got around to finishing up the first season tonight. No reason not to tune in, I guess! Let's see if I can finish Season 2 in one weekend instead of half a year.

Jane the Virgin: Season 5

I started watching this show a couple years ago because back when I was in grad school and didn't have a kid, I had just all kinds of time to kill, and I'd seen bits and pieces of it while my wife watched the first two seasons, and I'd enjoyed them, and enough of TV Twitter really liked the show for me to go, you know what, fuck it, I'm taking the plunge.

It's been good! It's a really good show with all kinds of heart. But this fifth and final season started to grate at me in a way none of the previous four had. Call it a case of wearing out its welcome, I don't know! Maybe it was the very small shark jump when (spoilers) Jane's dead husband turned out not to be dead after all, throwing her into a love triangle that just wasn't executed nearly as well as it could have been.

But yeah - if I end up doing some sort of Best of the Decade list (and I'm sure I will) then this show's probably, oh, top twenty? Maybe thirty? It was good! It was good. But I'm glad it's over.

Archer: Season 10

Better than Season 8's noir Chicago gimmick, worse than Season 9's Polynesian adventure. I'm just glad that this show's getting back to its roots next season for the first time since 2016. Scratch that - I'm glad the show is coming back at all! This had long been rumored to be the final season, and while I applaud Adam Reed going "fuck it" and rebooting the series every season for the last five years or so, these last three just haven't been the way this show should end.