Stan's TV Dump: September 2016

Fall's here, I'm back at school, and the TV beat goes on and on and on. Let's get on down to it.

Flowers: Season 1

Another Seeso binge, this just wasn't for me at all. I get what they're going for here - super-dramatic British despair played for laughs - but it never really clicked for me. Thankfully it was just six episodes.

Hard Knocks: Season 11

Every few years I watch Hard Knocks, and more often than not I'm reminded that there's no compelling reason to watch it. That Jets season with Rex Ryan notwithstanding, it turns out football coaches tend to be just cookie cutter as hell. Plus, fuck the Rams.

One Mississippi: Season 1

Yes, yes, yes. Loved this. I'd only vaguely been familiar with Tig Notaro before watching this "comedy" on Amazon Prime, but she:

• is gay
• is from Mississippi
• lost her mother unexpectedly
• had breast cancer
• had a double mastectomy without reconstructive surgery
• developed severe gastrointestinal problems after her cancer and surgery

And she jumps straight into all of this and more in this six-episode series. Truly a tear-jerker of a show and yet, somehow, undeniably funny and hopeful and uplifting. What got me most of all was the version of Mississippi depicted here - not the backwoods hellhole my elitist East Coast ass assumes it is, but a friendly, progressive, tolerant place to live on the Gulf Coast, with warm weather and good food. (Was this an exaggeration? Probably. But still!) So yeah, One Mississippi was great.

An Idiot Abroad: Season 1

Here's one I've been meaning to get around to for a while. Karl Pilkington is a friend and collaborator of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, and he's just fantastically dull. As a spinoff of sorts to a podcast segment in which Karl dismisses lots of world travel as pointless and not worth it, Ricky and Steve decided to send him to see the seven wonders of the modern world. See him cope with traffic in India! Watch him ride a camel in Egypt in total discomfort! Observe as he chokes down authentic Chinese food with fear in his eyes! It's total cringe comedy - so, Ricky Gervais has a field day with it as you may expect - but I can't pretend I didn't laugh at poor Carl a time or two. Look, he brings it on himself! He spent a week in Mexico and complained multiple times that he hadn't yet seen or eaten a Mexican jumping bean - go ahead and Google what a Mexican jumping bean is. There are two more seasons of An Idiot Abroad, and although I'm in no rush, I'm sure I'll get around to them eventually.

Vice Principals: Season 1

Lotta mixed feelings here. For something that was initially billed as "Danny McBride vs. Walton Goggins," this... wasn't. McBride was serviceable enough as a very McBride type of sad schlub - picture Kenny Powers without any fame or fortune - and Goggins was fantastic, but the narrative thread here wasn't my favorite. Two vice principals conspire to overthrow the new principal - a successful and headstrong black woman - in what at times feels like "angry white men: the show." I thought the nine episodes were really hit-or-miss, with one of the objectively dumbest scenes of the season (a druggy dual-hallucination outside a high school football game) sending me into absolute hysterics while a few entire episodes left me unenthused. From the get-go HBO said Vice Principals would last two and only two seasons, so perhaps this is just a story that's only been half told at this point. Time will tell!

Fleabag: Season 1

A six-episode quickie from Amazon Prime. British. Funny enough, but really nothing memorable. Sorry!

Big Brother: Season 18

This is my trashy summer comfort food. Big Brother always has a tough time sustaining itself for entire seasons. In a game comprised almost entirely of competitions, alliances, and backstabbing, you can almost always count on a few great moments a year where a villain is born or an underdog becomes a fan favorite. But you can also almost always count on a ton of dead time, when alliances really do stick together and maintain power, and entire month-long stretches can feel predictable. There's also the undeniable catch-22 of shitty people making for good television; you root for the assholes to get knocked out of the game, but once they're gone, you've lost your investment in who wins and who doesn't. Or, worse, a group of assholes runs the table, and you're left to root for the lesser of three assholes by game's end. And then, asshole or not, some people just plain don't "deserve" to win the game, you know? That's how I felt about the winner this year. She wasn't the least deserving winner, not by a long shot, but... damn was she boring this year.

Mr. Robot: Season 2

It wasn't all that long ago that I watched Season 1 of Mr. Robot, and in short hindsight, man, this show really jumped to new levels in Season 2. It was way more surreal, far more "blown open," and nothing felt impossible. For that, I commend it! For the way Season 2 unfolded, particularly in later episodes (compared to Season 1 which faltered and stagnated if anything), I praise it! But that ending... eh. That felt like a classic "just wait until next season" case of blue balls. Not like Walking Dead bad, but, you know, it just left me wanting more! Two seasons in, Mr. Robot is a pretty-good-not-great show in my book. Like, it may sneak into my top five list of dramas this year, but that's in a year without Fargo or The Leftovers. Look, we'll get to that in a few months.

Jane the Virgin: Season 1

When I heard the concept of this one a few years back, I laughed. (So did everyone!) A CW show about a religious virgin who accidentally gets artificially inseminated - that's a laugher! Turns out, this loving parody of telenovelas is one of the best surprises in recent years. It's good! And addicting. And legitimately fun to watch. There are tons of female-leaning shows Marissa will turn on while I'm in the room - Scandal, Grey's Anatomy, Hart of Dixie (R.I.P.) - but Jane the Virgin is the only one that made me say, alright, yeah, I need to start from the beginning here. And now I have, and so far, so good.

Bloodline: Season 1

I ignored this one last year, but Marissa finally convinced me that we should give it a go. In a word, it's good. In a more descriptive word, it's tense. Slow. Not bad - deliberate, really - just not an action-packed type of tense like Breaking Bad was. (But then, what's as good as Breaking Bad?) This one's about four siblings in the Florida Keys. The most memorable tagline of the series, delivered by Kyle Chandler more than once (and who doesn't love Kyle Chandler?) is "we're not bad people... but we did a bad thing." Without spoiling anything, Season 1 seems to be mostly about the bad thing these not-bad people did. Season 2, I'm guessing, is about the repercussions of that bad thing. I'm sure I'll know soon!

Transparent: Season 3
Definitely a great show, but three seasons in you don't need to hear that from me. It's often moving and even more often jarring - not so much for being the most LGBT-friendly show on television, but more so in how cringe-inducing this family can be. Selfish monsters, all five of them! I actually thought this was a slight step down from the first two seasons, but that still leaves it comfortably sitting in the upper echelon of television shows in 2016.

Happy October!