Jane the Virgin: Season 2
I managed to catch up on this one just in time for Season 3. It's good! Not just good "for a CW show" or anything. No, this is just a fun quick-paced show that knows how to milk its telenovela tendencies just enough (secret twins! betrayals! love triangles, quadrangles, pentagons!) without betraying an earnest heart at its center. There's nothing wrong with feel-good television! I've got as big a cynical streak as anyone, but that doesn't mean I didn't love Friday Night Lights, dammit! Assuming I stick with this for a while, it'll be the first broadcast network hour-long show in my rotation since, shit, I dunno - yeah, probably Friday Night Lights. Was that a DirecTV exclusive in its final seasons? Then let's say Lost. But even Lost was built like a cable drama with only sixteen episodes a season starting in 2008. You know what? None of this matters. Jane the Virgin is easy, fun, and worth checking out on Netflix. I'm serious!
Bajillion Dollar Properties: Season 2
I just reviewed Season 1 like a month or two ago, right? This was more of the same, really. Paul F. Tompkins and six less-known but funny enough actors star in this Property Brothers spoof. It's certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but semi-improvised nonsense like this has always been good enough for me. There's really no reason anyone should sign up for Seeso based on what I've seen, but if you head there for the free one month trial, meh, this is worth a look see.
Documentary Now!: Season 2
Pardon the Season 1 poster - I couldn't find a newer one! As with the first season of Documentary Now! I thought this was a real mixed bag. Credit to Armisen, Hader, and Seth Meyers for digging deep and spoofing such a varied array of documentaries from the last hundred years; I'm not sure if I've seen a documentary film that was made before this century, let alone any of these classics getting lampooned. Of course, if you have to be familiar with the source material to find the spoof funny, then the spoof isn't really that funny, is it? I genuinely enjoy most of the Documentary Now! episodes even when I have no idea about what inspired them. If anything, I've been more apt to look into the originals thanks to Documentary Now! - not that I've seen any yet; I'm oh for eleven on that front. Anyway, yeah - a bit hit or miss, and it seems like the quality is very subjective, but there's some good stuff here for sure.
Atlanta: Season 1
Solid stuff. I'd been looking forward to Donald Glover's FX project ever since it was announced more than a year ago, and it lived up to my expectations. That said, didn't he call this Twin Peaks for rappers at some point? Because it wasn't that, at all, whatsoever, and if that's the show he actually thought he was making... what? At any rate, I liked this, and I think Marissa liked it even more. For me it was a little inconsistent. Still pretty good! But some episodes were a riot and others barely registered for me. Your mileage may vary.
Luke Cage: Season 1
I need to learn to ignore the Marvel hype. I mean, I knew I wouldn't love this nearly as much as everyone else seemed to love this, but I figured I'd at least like it, you know? And maybe I did like it. But I definitely didn't love it and I definitely thought it was - once again, Marvel - eight episodes' worth of story stretched out into thirteen hours. Ugh. There were aspects of Luke Cage I genuinely enjoyed, but taken as a whole this was one of the least consistently interesting seasons of television I've seen all year.
Better Things: Season 1
From the first time I saw ads for Pamela Adlon's Better Things I thought, hey, this looks like a more grounded Louie with a single mother instead of a single father. And that's pretty much what it was. Episodes consisted of loose vignettes that don't really connect to one another thematically or narratively. The show was rarely a laugh-out-loud type of funny, but it always seemed to maintain my interest. It was nothing spectacular, but it was good enough! I'll be back for Season 2.
Last Week Tonight: Season 3
I don't watch The Daily Show with any regularity and didn't do so back when Jon Stewart was hosting. Ditto The Colbert Report. And I never got into The Nightly Show or Samantha Bee's Full Frontal or Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell or anything else out there. But ever since its second season, Last Week Tonight has been appointment viewing for me. What seems to set this show apart from its many predecessors is its structure; the first ten minutes of every episode tend to be filled with the events of the previous week and all sorts of jokes about them (the election being particularly fruitful and brutal), but instead of spending the remainder of his show on interviews or debates or consulting with subject matter experts, Oliver and company (ha!) devote a solid twenty minute chunk every week to raising awareness about an issue in America today. These are always slanted to the left - although maybe after what happened in the Midwest on Election Day, Season 4 will cover more "poor white folk" issues - but at their best, they're pretty informative and eye-opening. For instance, I'd never really been overly concerned with the likes of voter ID laws until Oliver and his team spelled out with a mixture of anecdotes and data just how difficult it is for so many (inner city, generally poor) people to obtain the IDs they're forced to have in order to vote. Granted, some topics of the week were just total snoozers and others felt a little bit like he was preaching to the choir. In fact the whole show can feel like an echo chamber at times - the only people watching Oliver "eviscerate Trump" week after week are the ones who, you know, already weren't going to vote for Trump. And I'm sure it'd be cringe-iducing to go back and watch some episodes from early in the year when Oliver - like almost everyone else in the media and real life - dismissed Trump's support and momentum as some sort of terrible joke. But this isn't a show to be judged with hindsight, and week in and week out it's been a pleasure all year.
You're the Worst: Season 3
Here's a show that made quite a leap in its second season from "fun but disposable comedy" to "dark comedy willing to explore some serious mental health issues." Where can such a show go in Season 3? Why, even darker, of course. This year our central foursome faced down dead parents, chronic depression, severe PTSD, and a cuckolding fetish among other things. I think Season 3 was probably even better than Season 2, but it also arrived with such loftier expectations, so I was slightly less impressed by it. Does that make sense? Either way, it's become a great show after a mostly forgettable first season and I look forward to where things go from here. I mean, it can only get so much darker, right?
Stan Against Evil: Season 1
Oof. I came for the "how's John C. McGinley doing all these years after Scrubs anyway?" and stayed for the "eight half-hour episodes spread across four weeks, why not?" But this just wasn't any good. In fact, it was actually very bad. I've never seen a single minute of Ash vs Evil Dead, but Stan Against Evil feels like a very poor man's knockoff of Ash vs Evil Dead. The premise here is that a retiring sheriff in a small New England town has come face to face with a centuries-old witch's curse that seems to make him (and his daughter and the new sheriff) encounter all kinds of demons. It's overtly campy, and McGinley's sheriff is written as the broadest stereotype of "cranky old New Hampshire guy" you've ever seen. I just wasn't into it. I'm not even sure who would be.
An Idiot Abroad: Season 2
I'm not sure what made Karl Pilkington agree to put himself through this again (that's a lie - "it's a job, isn't it?" he says) but, sure enough, here are eight more episodes of him traveling around the world and being put through his own personal hell by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. The theme of this second season was Karl's "bucket list;" Ricky and Steve presented him with a list of a hundred "things to do before you die" and asked him to choose a handful of them. Very predictably, Karl opts not for adrenaline-pumping activities like skydiving and bungee jumping and instead sticks to things like "travel down Route 66" and "swim with dolphins." But even more predictably, Ricky and Steve throw enough curveballs at him to make for a decent season of television. "Travel down Route 66," for example, ends with Karl tied to the top of a two-seater airplane doing loop-de-loops somewhere over the Midwest. "Swim with dolphins" is replaced with "swim with sharks" almost immediately, with Stephen merchant opining that they're basically the same thing. Maybe my favorite moment of Season 2 came when Karl traveled to a "dwarf village" in China after a grueling week on the trans-Siberian railway. He's just so into it, loving the idea of a whole town full of happy little people, before an actor friend of Ricky's - also a little person - shames him on the phone from half a world away for getting a kick out of what's clearly a blatantly exploitative violation of human rights. It turns out the dwarf village is an amusement park - a zoo, almost - full of little people acting like the Lollipop Guild for the entertainment of others. The look on Karl's face as he realizes this - after arguing for its legitimacy since the people "have a king and everything" - is just an all time cringe moment in reality television. Anyway, I think Season 2 was just a hair worse than Season 1 if anything (diminishing returns?) but there's a third and final season of just four episodes that I'm sure I'll get around to soon enough.
Brain Games: Season 1
I found this little obscurity tucked away on Netflix. It's just three episodes long and it's a series of optical illusions and other brain-teasing games. I'm a sucker for this stuff - watching flashing lights start to slowly disappear as you alter your focus, for instance, or thinking that one line looks much longer than another line of equal length. This first season was from 2011 or 2012 but I have to imagine "the dress" would have made an appearance had it been from this year. I looked into it, and there are several more seasons, but only a few are on Netflix and I wonder how long the appeal would last anyway. I'm sure I'll be back for another season. Beyond that, who can say?
An Idiot Abroad: Season 3
Okay, turns out this was three episodes instead of four, and it turns out "soon enough" meant "immediately." The premise of the very-shortened third season - "The Short Way Round" - was that Karl had a traveling buddy in the three-and-a-half-foot tall actor Warwick Davis, another friend of Ricky Gervais'. (Ugh - that subtitle pun.) Together the pair recreated Marco Polo's journey in miniature, spending an episode each in Venice, India, and China. But we've already seen Karl in India! And we've seen him in China twice. Huge countries, sure, and worthy of more than one episode, but all the same, this third season felt a little needless and half-assed. One aspect in which the season did shine was that Warwick's generally more cheerful and upbeat attitude toward things only made Karl's grumpy dourness more pathetic. Watching Karl refuse to do things like bungie jumping got old long ago, but when Warwick ends up doing it, and Karl still won't - okay, yes, it's new all over again. Anyway, this concludes An Idiot Abroad. I'm sure Ricky and Karl could go ahead and make a fourth season whenever they wanted to, but I'm also not sure if either of them will ever feel the need to do so.
The schedule winds down immensely in December, and it'll be a great time to catch up on a few things I missed earlier this year so as to include them in my 2016 TV rankings. I know you're all so, so excited for those!
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