Unreal: Season 1
The gist behind Unreal is that it's a show about a reality show - a Bachelor-style elimination-based dating show. At the center of Unreal are two women, producers on the show, who are just the worst people in the world. But they're also very good at their jobs! Their jobs, of course, are to manipulate the female contestants on the reality show (and to a lesser extent, the male suitors) into having cat fights and opening up emotionally and just having entertaining breakdowns in general. A lot of critics really liked this, but it was just alright in my book. Once you get past the initial shock of "holy shit, is this really what it's like behind the scenes at The Bachelor?" there's not a ton more to it. It's fine! It's just not great. Marissa seems to disagree with me. She's probably right, but I can live with that.
Orange Is the New Black: Season 4
Lots of people seemed sort of down on Season 3, so when I heard that Season 4 was the best one yet, I figured I wouldn't hold my breath. But, yes, Season 4 was great. Then again, so were Seasons 1-3. Or at least Season 1 and Season 3. Recently a friend of mine asked if Orange Is the New Black was "a guy show," as in a show guys enjoyed. She caught me off guard - of course it is, right? - and after a season like this one I can't imagine otherwise.
Great Minds with Dan Harmon: Season 1
Forget where I even heard about this one but it's a YouTube series (made by the History Channel) wherein Dan Harmon and his buddy Spencer bring historical figures forward through time to the modern day. This was nothing special, but hey, it's got Harmon's humor all over it. And more than anything, I'm surprised the History Channel produced this thing! It's got language and nudity and such. Felt much more like Adult Swim. If you're curious, episodes are like ten minutes long.
HarmonQuest: Season 1
Hey, more Dan Harmon! What can I say? In a year without either Rick and Morty or Community I kind of missed the guy. (Now, I've had my fill.) This is a show in which Dan and his friends do a little D&D-like session in front of a live audience with a rotating fourth celebrity member. The best episode, hands down, was Aubrey Plaza's. Most were at least decent, but one or two were totally forgettable. Anyway, this is worth a quick binge. I saw it on Seeso, which offers a one-month free trial, which, oh yeah, shit, I need to go cancel that before I start getting billed.
BoJack Horseman: Season 3
It's pretty common these days for ostensible dramas to be pretty funny and lighthearted and for so-called comedies to delve into emotional gravitas and bum you out a little. But man, no show seems as capable of splitting the difference as BoJack Horseman, which explores existential depression while filling every episode with about a hundred jokes - and at the end of the day it's still a pretty sharp satire of Hollywod and show business. I loved this show last summer and I loved it again this time around. So good! So good!
Mr. Robot: Season 1
Hey, it's the Occupy Wall Street version of Fight Club with strong Dexter vibes! This was plenty good, but you probably already knew that.
Stranger Things: Season 1
Stranger Things is the type of show that's addicting and excellent while you're watching it, but that starts to fall apart pretty quickly when you pull at the seams of its plot. That's not meant to be an indictment - the show is an homage to Steven Spielberg and Stephen King and 1980s adventures in general, and it ends up being everything it could have wanted to be and more. I'm hoping for a second season, but I also want that second season to have nothing to do with this cast or setting whatsoever. Leave well enough alone, you know?
Shameless: Season 1
Shameless has always been on the far-back burner for me, a show I'd get around to at some point, time pending. But Keith got all caught up pretty recently and urged me to do so as well. Through one season, eh, I get the appeal, but I'm not sure this is one I'll stick with for another six seasons. It's an hour-long comedy about a poor-as-all-hell family headed by William H. Macy as a charming but undeniable fuck-up. Hour-long programming is tough for me to get into if it isn't, you know, pulling me in, and Shameless just didn't pull me in.
Unreal: Season 2
Yeah - caught up on Season 1 in time for Season 2 (just like with Mr. Robot) but it turns out I didn't really have to rush. Season 1 was better, and if you scroll up, you'll remember I didn't even love that one to begin with. This time around, we had a black bachelor! (I was rolling my eyes at how faux-forward that felt in 2016 before I looked it up and - no, The Bachelor has never had a black bachelor. In something like fifteen years.) Anyway the black bachelor gave the show an excuse to roll around in topical issues and debates like "is the Confederate flag inherently racist?" and Black Lives Matter (insofar as when black people get shot by police, the white showrunner might have a breakdown). This still had its moments, but I can't imagine I'm back for Season 3 unless there are some great early reviews. Something tells me there won't be...
Angie Tribeca: Season 2
Let's go back a few months and see what I had to say about Season 1, shall we? Ahem... "I liked this show, and I'll be back for Season 2. But, man - this is a TOUGH binge. The bread and butter here are ridiculously stupid puns, visual gags, and blatant trope lampshading. Watching one episode will make you shake your head and roll your eyes more than anything else out there." That's still accurate! I can't say for certain whether or not I'll be back for Season 3. That said, I love that such a spoof-laden goof of a show exists in 2016 and 2017. It's been too long!
Superstore: Season 1
"Good enough" at first and "pretty good" by season's end. It'll probably never be great, but them's the breaks for comedies on the broadcast networks these days. Read more about what I think over at gametimebro.com!
Take My Wife: Season 1
I came to Seeso for the HarmonQuest but stayed for... well, I didn't stay past the one month trial period. But here's Take My Wife, a show on the streaming service I found super easy to get into and get through. It stars real life couple Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher, playing only-very-slightly-fictionalized versions of themselves. They're comics! In Los Angeles. And women. And gay! Six quick episodes here. I liked what I saw. The show is actually more about the fact that they're women than it's about the fact that they're gay. which I thought was a nice touch. Between this and Lady Dynamite it's been a great year for new comedies made by and about female comedians.
Thingstarter: Season 1
This was just okay. If nothing else, it scratched my Nathan For You itch. The premise is that a fictional Kickstarter-esque company is committed to prototyping, testing, and pitching whatever dumb ideas America votes for. (This includes products like "Terra Firma," a mattress made out of dirt for the super-paleo market, and "AmIRacist," a social media app where users earn points by doing "not racist" things like dating minorities.) The season was only six episodes long, and even still the product pitches grew old fast. The best part was that the show, while scripted, solicited real life feedback on all these dumb products from subject matter experts and enthusiastic focus groups.
Superstore: Season 1
"Good enough" at first and "pretty good" by season's end. It'll probably never be great, but them's the breaks for comedies on the broadcast networks these days. Read more about what I think over at gametimebro.com!
Take My Wife: Season 1
I came to Seeso for the HarmonQuest but stayed for... well, I didn't stay past the one month trial period. But here's Take My Wife, a show on the streaming service I found super easy to get into and get through. It stars real life couple Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher, playing only-very-slightly-fictionalized versions of themselves. They're comics! In Los Angeles. And women. And gay! Six quick episodes here. I liked what I saw. The show is actually more about the fact that they're women than it's about the fact that they're gay. which I thought was a nice touch. Between this and Lady Dynamite it's been a great year for new comedies made by and about female comedians.
Thingstarter: Season 1
This was just okay. If nothing else, it scratched my Nathan For You itch. The premise is that a fictional Kickstarter-esque company is committed to prototyping, testing, and pitching whatever dumb ideas America votes for. (This includes products like "Terra Firma," a mattress made out of dirt for the super-paleo market, and "AmIRacist," a social media app where users earn points by doing "not racist" things like dating minorities.) The season was only six episodes long, and even still the product pitches grew old fast. The best part was that the show, while scripted, solicited real life feedback on all these dumb products from subject matter experts and enthusiastic focus groups.
Bajillion Dollar Properties: Season 1
Alright, last one from Seeso. This was a real estate reality show parody that I can only imagine owes some of its inspiration to the likes of Property Brothers. (I wouldn't know - haven't seen it.) Mostly it just felt like an excuse to gather a bunch of familiar comedians and have them say and do absurd shit to one another. I definitely got my share of laughs from this one, but man, talk about utterly stupid shows...
Another Period: Season 2
I actually had no intention of continuing this one beyond last year's effort, but in the real dead of summer with nothing else on, I mean, why not? This was stupid as hell, and if anything the second season was slighter and sillier than the first - it felt a lot like they couldn't get all the actors back in the same place at the same time. Oh well - who cares? This was still enjoyable more often than not, and I just may be back for Season 3 if it appears during a similarly dead portion of the TV calendar next year.
No idea how I feel about this one. I've never watched an entire anime before, and with Keith and Danielle getting into this one in addition to Stevie and Kevin, I figured this would be a fine place to start. (The 12-episode length didn't hurt its case.) I thought as far as anime goes, this was a good one. Then again I've got no real reference point. I'm also not sure how into anime I can really get. The older I get, the less patience I have for subtitles (which is a real shame - so many great foreign films, and now TV shows as well). As far as Erased goes, I thought it was a well-told story that dabbled with time travel and whether or not you can ever change the past. Nothing special, nothing unique, but still an enjoyable slog. Yes, a slog. This took me five months to finish! Alright, maybe I didn't like it all that much, considering.
The Night Of: Season 1
An excellent HBO limited series that came out of nowhere. Just eight episodes long. This one's about a Pakistani-American college kid who gets caught up in the wrong place (a murder scene!) at the wrong time (before, during, and after the murder!) and ends up in Rikers and on trial for first-degree murder. Whoa! His attorney is a two-bit ambulance chaser with crippling eczema and his prison friend is Omar. (From The Wire. Bodie plays a minor role too. My two favorites!) The pilot was, no joke, one of the best episodes of television I've ever seen. Gripping, tense, realistic, just brilliant. The seven episodes that followed were flawed but still overall pretty great. This feels about as good (and unrepeatable) as the first season of True Detective. Probably better. Check it out.
Damn, that's too much, man!
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