SMILF: Season 2

Yeah, they canceled this one after too many reports of Frankie Shaw losing her actors' trust when performing and even discussing sex scenes. Not a good look! I liked this show more than I thought I would, once I finally got around to giving it a try, and it's one of the rare Boston-based comedic shows or movies out there that really felt like it took place in Boston and not from the "someone from New York or LA has spent a few days there and is otherwise relying on stereotypes like anyone under the age of 40 having the terrible accent" version of Boston you see everywhere.

(Side note - notice how in dramas and crime thrillers you still see Boston painted in the broadest strokes as this haven for Irish crimelords and yammering guidos? But then how in comedies every single person in Boston is a Celtics-loving numbskull in like, track pants? I mean, seriously, can we all cool it with Boston? This request is directed primarily at people from Boston! We are by and large culturally reprehensible - we don't need this spotlight on us!)

Silver lining, this show's cancellation saves it from what looked bound to be a disaster of a third season; the finale ends with Frankie Shaw's character being told by her American mother that she has an older sister in Ireland because said American mother went all the way to Ireland - in the 1970s or '80s, just so we're clear on the timing here - in order to give a baby up for adoption. That's exactly the kind of shit we don't need Boston-based TV shows pulling, is the Sons of Anarchy third season trip to Ireland. Yikes!

Dangerous World of Comedy: Season 1

Didn't find this docu-series nearly as entertaining or informative as I had hoped to, sadly. The premise is that Larry Charles is going all around the world to find people doing comedy in the shittiest and most dangerous places. (This includes the American South!) He's sort of exploring why a disabled and disfigured war veteran uses standup to cope with his injuries, or why people in Nigeria love rape jokes, or how Saudi Arabian women are doing political commentary with skits on YouTube. It all struck me as kind of structureless! I'm not sure I learned much, although I guess it was funny to see Larry Charles and pisspiggranddad get kicked out of Arlington National Cemetery mid-interview.

Miracle Workers: Season 1

This was objectively low stakes and stupid, a TBS show where Steve Buscemi plays God, in heaven, and several others like Daniel Radcliffe play the titular "miracle workers," essentially desk job employees in heaven who do the most tedious and mundane shit possible in order to answer the most tedious and mundane prayers. Like, the central joke of the whole premise is how ineffective and apathetic God is toward the people on earth - he wants to scrap earth entirely and build a shitty family restaurant! - and how much work and effort goes into making, say, a single leaf blow away.

I checked this out on a whim and it was just barely worth sticking around for - seven episodes, slow time of year (February?), so why not?

I can't imagine there'll be a second season of this thing, and I probably won't be back if there is. So, you know - don't bother watching!

Catastrophe: Season 4

Catastrophe was a good one - short, sweet, pretty consistently pretty funny. The worst thing about this show was its nearly ever-present banjo-and-yodeling theme song that seemed to pop up every time the scene changed. The entire series comes in at a hair under ten hours long if you're looking for a quick and delightful binge, and it also features a fair share of the (very, sadly) late Carrie Fisher. It's going to go down as one of those easily overlooked comedies of the late 2010s that feel like they're a dime a dozen, but still make for enjoyable watches! I dunno, that's all I got for a sales pitch. And Rob Delaney is also a great follow on Twitter.

Documentary Now!: Season 3

This one continues to be completely hit-or-miss for me, and its greatest strength (its versatility) seems to also be its greatest weakness, as any given week an episode could either slay me or completely miss me. The two-part season premier was a riff on Wild Wild Country, a rare example of the show spoofing a documentary I've actually seen, and it fell almost completely flat for me. But then out of nowhere there was my favorite episode of the show to date, a 1970s Broadway musical cast recording that I watched twice, containing all kinds of songs made up completely from whole cloth that I haven't gotten out of my head in two months!

The season's runner up was probably the finale, a documentary about the 2000s rebirth of a televised bowling league that had been a huge success in the 1980s but fell off drastically in the '90s thanks to, like, Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls or something.

What do you do with a show that, maybe ten percent of the time, has you in absolute stitches, but plays like nothing more than background noise in at least half of its episodes? I can't quit this thing!

You're the Worst: Season 5

Even after watching and generally enjoying five seasons I kind of hesitate to say I ever really found myself completely in sync with You're the Worst, a show whose tone was everywhere form irreverent to lewd to deeply dark and disturbing. Virtually every character on this thing was one-dimensional and deeply flawed, which is fine and it makes for good enough comedy and such, but it's tough to really know whether or not you're rooting for these people and their relationships, or whether their relentless self-sabotage is funny or tragic.

Anyway, this show, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Broad City all aired their final episodes within nine days of one another, but unlike with those two shows, I'm not sure anyone from You're the Worst has anywhere to go from here. That's too mean, probably - they'll all continue to get work, I'm sure - but where those two shows felt like career launching pads, this one feels more like a comfortable enough place where a bunch of not-destined-for-greatness people spent five solid years. I mean, I liked You're the Worst, but that's all! I liked it. (I might have loved the third season, unless I'm thinking of the second one.)

Oh, one final nit to pick - I think this show was too willing to use non-vanilla sex stuff for laughs and too unwilling to take any of it seriously. That's not the worst crime by any stretch, but it felt a little "hey are we laughing at or laughing with, here?" if that makes sense. Like, in the pilot, the moment Jimmy and Gretchen finally hit it off at the end of the episode comes on the reveal that he has a big old foot fetish - and I think that's revisited maybe once in the rest of the series. In Season 3, Lindsay quite literally turns her sad husband into a cuckold, male chastity cage and all, because he's a witless doofus who thinks it can save their marriage (and not, importantly, because it's a mutually held kink they have that is saving their marriage). Here in the final season Gretchen gets Jimmy to eat his own cum and to suck another man's dick after he cheats on her, and Lindsay has a two-episode arc where she turns into a lesbian just so the show can have a scene where she's eating her female boss's ass at work. It's just kind of weird, in an era where even network shows are comfortably and confidently introducing bisexual characters and polyamorous relationships (looking at you, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), to have this late night cable series getting kicks out of... not quite kink-shaming, but like, letting various sex acts and situations be entire punchlines in and of themselves. Maybe it's just a tonal inconsistency thing. Like, sex can be funny, but if you're going to be the show that tackles crippling PTSD and excruciating depression in a serious manner, maybe don't also be the show that treats off-center sex acts as inherently comical.

Broad City: Season 5

Oh speaking of final seasons of TV shows featuring creative thirty-ish women who have been funny online for a long time now and are primed for all kinds of success going forward, here's Broad City.

The final season of Broad City had its ups and downs, and the downs mostly seemed to come from what I guess I'll call the Workaholics syndrome, the idea that watching young twenty-somethings do idiotic shit and waste their weekends fucking off can be really funny, but that watching the same people being, uh, "hot messes" in their late twenties or thirties is downright sad. Like, "hey let's drop acid and then lug a couch around the city" is a hilariously twenty-three-year-old thing to do, sure, but maybe that's a thin premise for laughs when you're thirty-four. (Always Sunny was somehow able to pull this off, this idea of juvenile hijinks staying funny as its characters hit middle age, and I think it's because they lean all the way into how pathetic and shitty its characters are. I digress!)

Anyway, Broad City spent the latter half of its final season really digging into the co-dependence of Abbi and Ilana, which gave the season an actual arc and shape that none of the previous seasons really seemed to have. I will miss Abbi Jacobson and I will miss the show's depiction of New York as this endlessly weird but generally optimistic place where anything can happen and anyone can exist. (I will not miss Ilana Glazer, because she is a lot. And also because she's not going anywhere!)

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Season 4

Time for a rapid succession of TV posts!

Here's the final season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a show that had two and a half good seasons and then ran out of steam in the final season and a half. If I had time I'd do a whole "definitive ranking of the 150 songs in the show's history" or something but there are legitimately 50 or more good ones and there'd be a whole slew of ties out there and, yeah, the time that would take, oof. Suffice it to say the fourth season contained maybe three of said "fifty good ones," so, hey, maybe there's something to be said about quitting while you're ahead.

Anyway, creator and star Rachel Bloom only just turned 32 years old and she was big-ish on YouTube a good while before this four-season show even started. (Do you even vaguely remember that  kinda viral "Fuck me, Ray Bradbury" song from, oh holy shit, 2010? Yeah that was her.) My point is that I am very much looking forward to whatever the hell she does next.

Arrested Development: Season 5

It is a small shame that a show as widely loved and praised as Arrested Development ended up petering out with just the smallest amount of fanfare. The show's 2013 return was such an event, mixed reactions notwithstanding. Just five years later when it came back for half of a fifth season, even the biggest fans I knew seemed to be in no real rush to check in; and now, a year further on, that fifth season seems to have concluded with just a whimper.

All this makes sense; nothing gold can stay, and the same unique beats and charms and pacing style that made Arrested Development such a long-term slow-burn success in the mid-to-late 2000s almost seemed to be working against it this time around, especially exacerbated by that decision to release the fifth season in two parts nearly a year apart.

At any rate, this is most assuredly the show's final season. At least two of the actors have explicitly said they're done with the show, and Jif effrey Tambor's on-set controversy wasn't playing well last year, that super-weird interview with the entire cast seems to have opened up fissures everywhere. I mean, maybe a movie at this point? But why bother?

All that said, I enjoyed this fifth season very much; new Arrested Development is a pleasure and a delight even after all these years, and it's nice to see the show brought to some sort of conclusion - even if the third season finale worked perfectly already.

High Maintenance: Season 3

There's not a lot left to say about High Maintenance, the New York-as-hell show about all kinds of people doing all manner of things with their days and nights. It's an anthology series where every episode focuses on a different character or group of people - sometimes even switching focus halfway through an episode - and the only consistent character is a nameless weed dealer played by the show's creator.

I've got very mixed feelings about the show. I love that it exists, and I love that it's committed to this complete variety of perspective and point of view. One week will be about two unlikely roommates, one a nudist and the other a crazy old lady. Another week will be about an over-eager kid helping his mom out at her shift at a diner. But in a TV landscape where there's more and more and more to sample, it's almost like this show stretches itself too thin being as varied and inconsistent as it is. Like in a world where there are still "only," say, 200 shows out there, something this varied and meandering works a lot better than in a world where there are three times that many shows and where stories have been told about all manners of people doing all manners of things.

A consequence of all of this is that this show is almost completely forgettable on a week to week basis. I mentioned two plot points above, but there were nine episodes in Season 3 and I'm not sure I could get three more plot points. There was a scene where a paranoid doctor couldn't get a cat out of a tuba, so that's three. Lena Dunham showed up at one point, filming an episode of Girls, I think, and that already felt dated as hell! But even these memories I have - they're just scenes, they're not episodes; sketches, not stories.

All this is fine, and I think I'll keep watching High Maintenance - it's set on my DVR as a series recording, after all, and when I'm completely on the fence with respect to whether or not to keep going with this show, hey, it's a force of habit to watch stuff on my DVR rather than to delete it outright.