The Detour: Season 2

I know I just finished strongly pushing for the first season of The Detour like a week or so ago, but the second season was even better, against all odds, and I think the third one could be great too! I'll back up. Season 1 took place over the course of a big family road trip down to Florida. Season 2 doesn't take place on a trip of any kind at all - format shake up! - and instead focuses on the Parker family settling into their new apartment and lives in New York City, following the events of the first season. A lot of newer comedies would struggle after losing the crutch of a semi-unique format. Not this one! I found it even funnier, if anything, than I did the first time around, and with a 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. Love it! Will miss it. But hey, there's plenty more TBS rebrand for me to get around to in the meantime.

Flight of the Conchords: Season 1

Took me long enough, but I finally got around to seeing the first season of Flight of the Conchords, the now-ten-years-old series about two New Zealanders trying to grow a fanbase in America for their band. The band is real, in real life, of course, but I didn't realize that it predated the HBO show by some five or ten years. I'd heard several of their songs before - many of which appear here - but never felt the need to dive on into the comedy series.

Now that I have, let me tell you - it's rough. Not bad, not unfunny, but very dated, stilted, like a show caught between trying to be an absurd comedy and a deadpan mockumentary. Bret McKenzie and Jermaine Clement are two comic-minded musicians, but they weren't really popping for me in this 2007 show. Part of that is, sure, probably New Zealand comedic sensibilities vs. the American and British ones I'm more accustomed to. But the breakout character here is easily Rhys Darby's Murray, a band manager, who provides the manic energy and general buffoonery that the two leads, as straight men, just don't give off.

Always fun, too, to see familiar faces in early roles. Aziz Ansari makes an appearance in one episode (and does just the worst job, uh, "acting") and looks every bit like the mid-2000s 24-year-old kid he was at the time. Eliza Coupe and June Raphael are here too, in another episode, both younger then than I am today. Will Forte pops in at one point too, reminding me that he spent like ten years as an SNL everyman and bit-player before he really made it as his own guy. And Kristen Schaal's got a recurring role here as the band's only American fan, because of course she would fill that exact role on this exact show.

I'm sure I'll be back for the second season at some point, but I just wasn't blown away by this. Should I have been? I know lots of my college friends liked this - is this one of those cases where there just wasn't as much out there pre-peak TV? I can see this being something original and wholly unique on TV in 2007, but the 2017 landscape is loaded with superior stuff. Is this just an example of one thing being innovative, then plenty of other things honing and perfecting and polishing the rough edges and bugs and kinks? I'm used to seeing that in video games and movies, but in TV not so much!

Drinking Buddies

Low stakes "relationships, amirite?" movie I found on Netflix while browsing and said, "yeah, sure, fuck it, I like this whole cast, look at these four, this oughta be something." Best case, I figured it'd be an enjoyable romp of a modern day rom-com. Worst case, an hour and a half of mumblecore bullshit, no worse than plenty else I'd seen.

And I'm reasonably happy to report that the needle ended up just to the right, positive side of splitting the difference. Jake Johnson and Olivia Wilde are coworkers at a brewery, each dating Anna Kendrick and Ron Livingston, respectively. (Imagine if it were the other way around? Now there's a movie!)

But yeah, this one pulled my attention back toward it from my laptop screen repeatedly, which is more than so many other movies I put on as mindless background noise end up doing. It's still no Sleeping with Other People, but Drinking Buddies was more than alright in my book. Call it a seven out of ten when I expected a five, dreaded a three or a four, and would have been happy with a six. Huzzah!

Basic Instinct

I'm a little torn on this one. On one hand, 1992, holy shit, this thing's 25 years old already, which makes it old enough to be an antique if it were a car, which it isn't, obviously, but I mean, hey, you get the point, I'm sure, this thing's a dang classic by now. On the other hand - a classic what? It's a neo-noir thriller with an iconic scene - you know the one, but in case you don't, it's SHARON STONE RE-CROSSING HER LEGS IN A SHORT DRESS AND FOR A SECOND THERE YOU CAN SEE HER VAGINA. I'm sure that was a big deal back in the early '90s but the scene (and the movie) feel very dated now. Like, yeah, a sexy woman flashing her cooch at a bunch of detectives could only play as parody or desperation this side of, I dunno, 2005? That scene aside, there's really nothing memorable here. Like, nothing is bad, and I appreciated the air and the ambiance of Basic Instinct, but what's clever here? What about this story is creative? What about these performances are memorable? It's just sex appeal - which, hey, I get it, and I even appreciate it, don't get me wrong, come on guys did you not just see me raving about The Handmaiden a few days ago?

Something about the late '80s and early '90s - the original Bush years I guess - always strikes me as sort of lost in time, harking back to a past that never was and looking toward a future that never would be. Cold War's pretty much over, computers and the Internet aren't really a thing yet, '80s cocaine rings and HIV scares are mostly gone, no one in the mainstream is paying any attention to people of color for better or worse, global conflict's at a minimum, or at least civil unrest is, Germany's reunited, Soviet era's over, China's gone capitalist - it's lsort of like, what are we even doing? Where are we even going? Better just maintain these '80s haircuts while softening up around the edges a little bit. Like, think about it, it's exactly the kind of environment where Bill Clinton could be embraced. "He's hip and young." Oh God, he was! He really was, back then, to them, to the people who saw Basic Instinct and either got enraged or engorged. I just think 1990-1993 was possibly the most boring four-year stretch in American history. (Grunge!) And that's not a bad thing! But it does mean you end up with movies like this one making an eternal impression on Hollywood all because of a couple dozen frames of vulva. "Game changer, am I right?" No wonder Generation X were all a bunch of burnouts - what the fuck did they have to look forward to?

The Detour: Season 1

Pardon the odd poster. Not sure what they're going for here, this looks like a dang horror thing. It isn't! It's a comedy. On TBS! Very funny. This family of four has normal faces, not upside down ones.

Anyway, I love the rebrand TBS has gone through over the last year or so. Angie Tribeca was a welcome surprise to kick off 2016, and then Search Party was just a delight in the fall, and I still haven't seen People of Earth (Sween - should I?) and somewhere along the way I lost track of what might be the best pure comedy I've seen in a while - The Detour, a Jason Jones and Samantha Bee creation about a family on a road trip from Syracuse to Florida.

Or at least it starts out that way. It ends up being - quickly becomes, really - a story about a giant corporate conspiracy and one recently fired man's quest to save his job by unraveling it all while lying to his family about the whole thing.

If that sounds trite or generic or "been there, done that," it's because it absolutely is and you absolutely have. But that's part of the charm here! 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. Sure, the dad's an oaf, the mom's a lush, the son's a hopeless idiot, the daughter's awkward and smart, and the road trip's made up of delay after pit stop, pit stop after delay - hence the title. This is, truly, like so much else that's come before it - the Vacation movies, The Simpsons, Family Guy, what have you. But it works! It's funny. It's a crowdpleaser, I'm sure.

Here's a minute-long clip from the pilot. It's a scene with a premise you've seen and heard a million times before ("the talk!") but I think it pretty adequately captures the pace and rhythm and comic sensibilities of the show. You be the judge! I'm on board for the second season, which is airing right now.

Oh yeah, the clip:

Enjoy!

Girls: Season 6

Oh, right, so Girls ended. Let's talk about that. Six seasons is a long time, but you know what's weird? Girls and Veep debuted only a week apart, and at the time Girls was the one getting all the attention, both positive and negative, whereas Veep was sort of just this quiet little political satire with a well-liked sitcom veteran as its star. Fast forward to now, and Girls just feels completely exhausted (and exhausting), but Veep has won all these Emmy awards and topped all these critical best lists, and it feels like it's as strong as ever, with the newest season serving as a soft reboot of sorts. But there'll be time for that later - Girls. Let's talk Girls.

What was Girls? Early on in its run, Girls was a show about four young women making their way in Brooklyn after college. The girls are all around my age, and the show started when I too was young and lost (though not that lost) and right away it just felt like something special. Back in 2012 there just weren't many shows made by people my age - millennials, yes, sure - and this was just a breath of fresh air.

A lot has changed, obviously. The show slowly grew insufferable, largely because most of its characters did, and it was this absolute magnet for controversy - the show's too white, Lena Dunham's too naked, Lena Dunham's too ugly, the show's too unrealistic, Lena Dunham's too political, none of the characters are likable - and at a certain point enough felt like enough. I never stopped watching Girls, and I never even really stopped liking it, but it absolutely dropped from being fun, new, and exciting to being just another show. (Actually, I can quantify this - thanks, year-end rankings! In 2012 I had Girls as the 4th best of 30 shows - pretty dang good! By Season 2 (2013) it was 15 of 38; by Season 3 (2014) it was 19 of 43; and by Season 4 (2015) it was 29 of 60 - still in the top half, but just barely. Season 5 was a nice bounce back year and, hey, wow, I had it at 11 of 80. Season 6... well, 2017 remains to be seen, as it's only a third over, but Girls will definitely return to "eh" status for me. And that's too bad!)

But yeah, backing up - what was Girls? Apparently it was a story about a bunch of terrible and selfish twenty-somethings learning to be slightly less terrible and selfish at 28 than they were at 22 - which, hey, credit to them, at least these characters displayed some growth, unlike those in Workaholics or Always Sunny, to pick on two old favorites. Problem is, the growth was never really lasting, and that didn't seem to be the point. Jessa could have a breakdown or Marnie could come to a big realization about herself or Shoshanna could start to take control of her own life, but then three or five or thirty episodes later they'd be right back in their old habits - less out of a specific relapse, it seemed, and more out of the writers just needing them to behave like they used to in order to advance a certain plot. Gah! Frustrating. And then at the end of it all, apparently the one thing that made Hannah grow up was... having a baby? What kind of weak-ass anti-feminist shit is that? Not that motherhood is anti-feminist in and of itself, or anything, but the way Girls operated for years, it just didn't seem like it was all building toward this idea of pregnancy and childbirth being this magical maturity-inducing life change for Hannah. It just seems like if 2012 Lena Dunham were told that her show would end with Hannah having a baby, she'd have all sorts of shit to say about that. Who knows?

Okay lastly here are the Girls main character power rankings from best to worst television characters.

1. Shoshanna

2. Elijah

3. Adam

4. Jessa

5. Ray

6. Hannah

7. Marnie

[huge gap]

8. Charlie

And here are the Girls power rankings based on which characters I'd most and least want to have in my social circle.

1. Ray

[huge gap]

2. Charlie (Seasons 1-2)

[small gap]

3. Elijah

4. Shoshanna

5. Marnie

6. Adam

7. Jessa

8. Hannah

9. Charlie (Season 5 cameo)

These were both very easy, although the middle of the second list is kind of up for debate and reordering.

Tig

Love Tig Notaro, love her story, love One Mississippi, but this documentary didn't really add all that much intrigue for me. Still a good starter course if you haven't seen One Mississippi, but I mean, remedy that first, maybe. I dunno.

Save the Date

Lizzy Caplan and Alison Brie, as sisters? Okay, yes, yeah, I'm into this, I am on board. What else?

Lizzy Caplan and Alison Brie, as sisters, in a mumblecore movie where the dramatic stakes involve, like, a wedding and a pregnancy? Eh. I don't need this. I am no longer fully on board.

Not bad, not great, an easy thing to fall asleep to. So it goes!

The Handmaiden

So, so, so good. Might be my favorite movie of 2016, and if it's not, well, it's second on the list. Ugh, I loved this. Park Chan-wook has been one of my favorites for years now, at least since I saw Oldboy, and you know what? This might be better than Oldboy was. But there's time for ranking and comparing and sorting later. For now, can I just gush some more?

I don't want to spoil a thing, as this one's best left completely vague, I think. But! It takes place in Japanese-occupied Korea and involves a complex but easily followed and understood scheme to defraud a wealthy Japanese heiress. And let's just say the moral of the story is that you should never deprive a wealthy Japanese gentleman of his rare porn collection.

Ugh, what a gorgeous movie. It's fucking excellent, and it's got some excellent fucking. (Ha!) And some violence. And enough twists and turns to make your head spin, except, no, really, you're in good hands here, the story's crystal clear and loads of fun. Have I mentioned that this is also a gorgeous movie? Like it's an immaculately shot and structured movie. Just stunning from start to finish.

Oof, damn, I loved this. It's on Amazon Prime! Check it out. Fair warning, it's two and a half hours long and subtitled. But seriously, guys. Seriously. So good.

Nirvanna the Band the Show: Season 1

Weirdest thing. I wrote an extremely lengthy, raving review about this show - definitely the funniest and one of the most original I've seen in years - and now it's gone! Fuck, we're talking like a five-paragraph rundown full of background info and highlights and recommendations to all of you - all of you! - to seek this out and watch it.

And now it's gone! Ugh. But like... it was here! Sween read it and everything. Any chance you've still got that browser window open, Sween?

Shit. Frustrating! But trust me - seek this out and see it, any way you can. Viceland.com might have you covered - it's how I saw the first three episodes before catching the final five on demand.

Mafia!

More late '90s comedy! What's not to love? This one's from Jim Abrahams of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker (Airplane, Police Squad, The Naked Gun) and it's exactly what you'd think it is. (The full title is Jane Austen's Mafia! because of course it would be.) This is a pretty standard riff on Goodfellas and The Godfather (and apparently Casino) but with plenty of then-topical references thrown in - Forrest Gump, The English Patient, Bill Clinton's sex scandal, you know how it is.

I like these dumb, stupid, dumb, dumb movies - or, more accurately, I like that they exist - but this one's sadly closer in quality to something like Scary Movie 3 than it is to Airplane. Oh well! Wasn't expecting much anyway.

Preaching to the Perverted

Thought I'd try a low-budget '90s sex comedy for kicks. Ho-lee shit was this one a bust. Think of every late '90s stereotype you can - the early age of chat rooms, constant pumping Euro-techno "club" music, leather on leather on leather, derpy sunglasses and mushroom cuts, shit being provocative for the sake of being provocative (à la Howard Stern and South Park), the Internet being a weird place for weird people (okay fine that one's a timeless truth). Yikes! Granted, this was shitty regardless of the extremely dated feel, but still! This movie lost me fairly early on, but as it grew more serious over the course of its runtime it grew less and less appealing, even as a background movie. Look, they can't all be winners!

Puzzle Challenge: Crosswords and More

One of Marissa's!

There was really no reason for this to ever exist, even back in 2008 or whenever it came out. It's a collection of crossword puzzles and word searches that you can navigate and solve using the Wii remote. (Shudder.) Marissa and I fired this up earlier tonight looking for a "co-op" game to play, and yeah, this did the trick. Of course, moving through the puzzles and typing were a nightmare - fucking Wii, of course they were - and I can't imagine there's literally anyone on the planet who has solved literally every puzzle in this game. (There were hundreds, and possibly a thousand.) What Marissa and I did in order to call this one "beaten" was one of every type of puzzle. Most were simple variations on crosswords, but there were also two word search varieties. (I believe they were "word search" and "mini word search.")

USA Today had a website back in 2008, I am certain. And it offered free crosswords every day, I am sure. So, twofold question, who the hell would buy something like this, and why did my wife?

Chewing Gum: Season 2

I talked briefly about the first season of this British export (Netflix import) at the beginning of March, with lukewarm praise. As so often is the case with comedies, I liked the second season betetr than the first; once I was used to the show's tone and rythm it became easier to appreciate exactly what it was trying to do. Credit to Michaela Coel - she's not only the creator and the star of the show, but her physical comedy - mostly just a willingness to "go there" in so many awkward and embarrassing situations - is its biggest strength. I compared this to Fleabag back in Season 1, and the comparison's only more firmly cemented in my mind after Season 2. So yeah - give this thing a shot! Six-episode seasons, you can bang them out in one sitting if you feel like it. And also try Fleabag over on Amazon Prime. I know none of you have seen it yet. Ya lumps.

Mirror's Edge

To be blunt, I really didn't care for this game. I know it earned a lot of criticism when it came out eight and a half years ago, but I'd never really read into the details beyond "shaky control scheme." Oof. It's not so much the control scheme that sucked - although it's a bit weird to use the shoulder buttons to jump and slide and pivot in a first-person parkour platform game, yes - as much as the clunkiness of the gameplay. In a game ostensibly built around speed and wall-climbing and jumping and rolling and, you know, just high-flying action in general, it's important to get your ledge-and-pole detection right. The number of times I went sailing into an abyss because I was off center by what felt like inches - my blood's boiling just thinking about it!

Also - this game was repetitive as hell and not very pretty. Its combat and gunplay were woefully bad, too - there were no melee weapons and the only guns you could find had to come from disarming enemies, which, hey, with your fists, not so easy. At least not as first - I did eventually get the hang of it. Oh, and of all things for a game to fuck up - the brightness was all kinds of fucked up here. Every time I was in a dark corridor - and that's where about a third of this game is spent - I had to pause, enter the menu, and tweak the brightness settings just so I could see where I was going. And then when I'd reemerge outside, the daylight was blinding, and I'd have to knock the brightness settings back down to their defaults. Maybe there was something uniquely fucked up with playing the digital download of the Xbox 360 game on an Xbox One or something. I dunno.

Oh, and the checkpoints. Goddamn. For a game with suck fussy edge detection and so many deaths, this could have really used more frequent checkpoints. It's nothing short of infuriating to play through the same segment of obstacles and ladders ten or fifteen times because this one pole-swing-and-jump is giving you problems. Ugh.

Bottom line, this could have been so much better with a few small tweaks. Sween says there were no guns in the recently released sequel. That's a start. I'm sure the brightness wasn't an issue either. But was it a repetitive bore with problematic edge detection? Sween, enlighten us!

Schitt's Creek: Season 3

Call it an instance of too much, too soon, but after a two-and-a-half season binge, I could barely muster the effort to see this one through. It's fine! It's very easy viewing, a well-to-do family stuck in a riches-to-rags situation, making do in some podunk town, holed up at a motel. O'Hara and Levy are great, but three seasons in, I'm struggling to find the heart here. The rich family is really no less terrible than they all were when the series began, which was only a moderate type of terrible to begin with, so it's not like they're learning or growing as people. And after teasing a "they might get their money back" arc in the first season, there's been nothing on that front. So here we are, with an often funny but always pointless show living out its days on an unknown cable channel. In an age where there's so much TV to watch, this feels like it can't possibly crack a top one hundred. So.

Top of the Lake: Season 1

Quick one - here's a miniseries form 2013 I always meant to get around to seeing, but never quite did, what with Peak TV and all. It's a crime drama set in New Zealand and starring Elisabeth Moss, who I think is just fantastic. I'd watch her play a character who does nothing but eat cereal for five minutes with something on her mind - imagine the scowls, the squints, the worried looks! Anyway, they;re bringing Top of the Lake back later this year for a second season, so yeah, fine, it was time for me to finally check out the first one.

I liked it, didn't love it. This is only seven episodes, but it's a slooooow seven episodes. Murder mystery, crime drama. Think The Killing - dark, grim, slow, female detective trying to figure out who harmed a teenage girl - but good. And more concerned with the "female" aspect of it all. Maybe kind of sort of in some way it's like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but revealing more would risk spoiling some things.

Nicole Kidman's slated to join the cast in Season 2, so yeah, I only expect this to get better. We'll see.

New Girl: Season 6

And with the conclusion of its sixth season, it's possible (doubtful, but possible) that New Girl is finished. If it is, cool - I approve of the way things went out. Not only are all the main characters in good places that could constitute happy endings, but the sixth season was a qualitative step up from the fifth, which itself was better than the fourth, I think. (Maybe? I dunno - the years all run together on these network sitcoms.)

Still, it's always interesting to me to look at the long-term trajectories of shows that last more than, oh, four seasons or so. Let's briefly revisit what New Girl was when it first showed up in 2011. It's easy to forget now that New Girl is a by-the-numbers hang-out comedy with a quality ensemble, but the show was originally intended to be, or at least pitched as, a vehicle for Zooey Deschanel to grace the world with her quirky, nerdy, off-center brand of cute-humor. Seriously, look at the ads and the posters for Season 1. Hell, revisit the pilot, in which Jess's three new male roommates struggle with what a weird mess she is. The show's very title reminds us that the entire premise was originally a TBS-worthy "three bros just being regular bros - until! - look who just moved in!" Observe:

The whole thing reeks of "manic pixie dream girl, but from the perspective of the manic pixie dream girl." Which is good, and gives depth and focus to the tropey type of female character that had become "a thing" in the decade prior, but still. Lo and behold, in the years that followed, "hipster" culture exploded into the millennial mainstream (to what extent, if any, this was because of Zooey Deschanel's Jessica Day character is an interesting question for another day) and "bro" culture took a well-deserved beating, reduced to an irony at best, and suddenly this notion that Zooey Deschanel was too unusual and quirky and "adorkable" for these three guys was completely shot - she was just another TV actor on a show with middling ratings. Rough!

But! Embrace the pivot! From Season 2 on - hell, probably even somewhere during Season 1 - the show stopped pushing itself as a Zooey Deschanel vehicle thanks to the emergence of Max Greenfield's Schmidt, Jake Johnson's Nick, and (eventually, though it took a few seasons to figure him out) Lamorne Morris's Winston. And thanks to those three, New Girl went form being a doomed and ill-conceived show with a dated premise to being a very enjoyable, very easy to watch hang-out comedy. You never hear it get compared to Friends - or at least I don't - but really, this is absolutely the closest any show has been to Friends since Friends. (Unless you think The Big Bang Theory is like Friends, but I don't think it's ensemble-driven enough to qualify. And don't come at me with How I Met Your Mother - that show was always structurally it's own thing.)

So yeah. It'd be unfair to say that New Girl was a surprise success or hit - Fox pushed the hell out of this thing in 2011, and frankly, it was never much of a hit - but it's definitely a show that figured out how to swim once it abandoned the anchor of its original premise. Props!

Lastly, I just want to point out that Zooey Deschanel is 37 years old. And she's not meant to be playing someone any younger - in the pilot, her character is explicitly 31. So this is a show that has always been about thirty-something roommates, and arguably Gen-X'ers at that. Weird, right? For comparison, Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry were 25 when Friends began. How long will it be before we see a sitcom with a 35-year-old still living with roommates and trying to "figure things out" in an unironic and not-sad manner?

The Affair: Season 3

First off, shout out to Sweeney and Keith for the Showtime assists that allowed me to see this season through. Man. I used to love this show. Used to think it was quietly brilliant, very well made, an exploration of marriage, of memory, of how easy it is to lie not just to those around you but to yourself. Before "alternative facts" became a horrifying laugh line, here they were, in The Affair, two sides of the same story with the truth likely lying somewhere in between them, but irrelevant anyway. After all, what's the truth worth when no one cares to know it? A tree falling in the woods, and so on.

Anyway. Maybe this show used to be brilliant. Maybe I always overrated it. But holy shit, this third season flew right off the rails and into a dumpster. Brilliant? Not in the least. Just messy, convoluted, meaningless, pointless. The show's no longer about an affair, a tryst, a bout of infidelity - instead in its third season it's apparently about Noah going insane. There's probably a way to do that and pull it off, but if so, it was beyond the scope of The Affair. Oof. I can't stress enough how quickly but fully this whole thing fell from grace for me. I miss when this was a he-said she-said romantic drama. I do not need for this to be Noah's paranoia, guilt, and insecurities getting the better of him while he panics in jail cells and hospital rooms. As some would say - "woof."

Manos: The Hands of Fate

Finally got around to checking out Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Netflix, and right off the bat I jumped into Manos, which many have dubbed the worst movie of all time. As far as I'm concerned, it absolutely is. There's all kinds of sad, depressing trivia about this thing. The best actor in it killed himself before the movie came out, leaving this as his only film credit. The only participants who were paid in any way were a little girl (with a tricycle) and a dog (with dog food). All the dialogue is dubbed in, and none of the shots last longer than thirty seconds because the whole thing was shot on a wind-up camera, leading to all kinds of discontinuities in what are clearly supposed to be single shots. The whole thing is a disaster, a perfect blend of bad acting, bad writing, poor quality, repetitive shots and music, just everything about it flat out sucks. I can't imagine trying to sit through this without the Mystery Science Theater 3000 banter.

Big Little Lies: Season 1

This was good. It was an HBO limited series that ran for the past seven Sunday nights and frankly it's the first drama of the year for me that I'd consider appointment viewing. There've been so many shows already this year that just seem to drag and falter as the weeks wear on, but Big Little Lies was entertaining and interesting week after week. A little soapy and ultimately predictable, sure, but there was something endlessly enjoyable about watching Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Adam Scott, Alexander Skaarsgard, Laura Dern, Zoe Kravitz, and the rest of them get all uptight and bitchy with each other in beautiful Monterey over everything from helicopter parenting to ex-spouse jealousy to domestic abuse to having your rapist's child. All of it while, oh yeah, there's a future murder investigation being teased that hangs over everything.

Real talk, do you know how much I liked this? I would even accept and embrace a second season of this show. that's how much I liked this. (Although I'm pretty sure the whole thing truly ended last night - not that you can count anything out these days. Still, this cast? Good luck reuniting it.)

It wasn't perfect, and it'll probably end up being a footnote at best when we start to look back at the decade of Peak TV in a couple of years, but it was such an easy watch - often funny, never dull - and that's just such a rarity for me at this point when it comes to these hour-long dramas.

Side note! Every December I end up ranking all the TV I watched in the preceding calendar year. And sometimes the biggest struggle is dealing with a recency bias in one direction or the other. It's very easy to finish watching something, to have a strong reaction to it, and then to let that reaction fade away and blend in with a more critical consensus over time. Things I really loved when I watched them can end up fading as I've got more and more to recall, while things I ended up disliking may be less abrasive after several months go by. So my long-winded idea here is, hey, it's early April, and most of the year's early premieres have finished their seasons by now - why not give a preliminary ranking of everything I've seen so far?

In the interest of sparing a lot of "pending" and "on track for" and such, I'll only consider the shows that have either finished their runs for the year (I mean, I can't rank the final season of Girls until I see how it all ends, right?) or that have run long enough and are episodic enough for the season finales not to matter very much (like, say, New Girl). Cool? Cool.

DRAMAS:

1. Big Little Lies - See above.

2. Sneaky Pete - Just a lot of fun. There's a chance I've overrated this, but I'm excited for the next season which is more than I can say for anything else on this list.

3. Victoria - Take it or leave it comfort food. Doesn't demand very much of my attention, pretty to look at and to listen to, strikes the right mix of mostly lighthearted fun with occasional melodrama. Which, holy cow, is good enough for the third-best drama of the year so far. Good thing the big guns are coming in April.

4. The Young Pope - Really 4A to the next show's 4B. Both were wacky and fun on a superficial level, both had individual scenes and moments I'll always remember, but both left me feeling like, ultimately, so what? That this was renewed for a second season shouldn't hurt it's case, but I think it kind of does. I mean what does the finale even mean, now?

5. Legion - Just wrote about this one, like, last week. Cool premise didn't do enough to offset my "but who cares?" reaction to the story, the characters, the world. Call it Westworld syndrome.

6. This Is Us - Tough to place this one. My head says "no, even lower," but my heart says "eh, this is fine." Fills a unique hole in the TV landscape - a big-hearted, fairly cheesy network drama with something for everyone - but is it a good show? It is decidedly not, IMO. Plus no matter how easy a watch it was, I still felt my attention wandering in the back half of Season 1, like, kind of a lot.

7. Humans - Speaking of wandering attention... Yeah, what I said about this one still holds - it could be more like Westworld, and Westworld could be more like it, and somewhere between them there's a great show. But it's not this show.

8. The Affair - Still haven't seen the finale, but I've heard it didn't do much to fix the messy second half of this third season. I think I used to like this show much more than the average person, and then it all kind of came crashing down for me here in 2017 in the span of a few episodes. At this point I have no idea what purpose it serves, what itch it scratches, what need it fills. I'm probably underrating it, and maybe seeing that finale will give me the chance to pop this back up the rankings a few notches. But I'm just in no rush to do so.

9. Sherlock - Never understood the hype for the first three seasons, and the fact that everyone hated this one allows me to bring out the knives with glee. What a mess!

COMEDIES:

1. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia - Huge comeback season from a show that had gone stagnant a while back for me. Of the ten episodes, only two or three felt disposable to me, and several were instant classics. That's a great season.

2. Review - Went out on top and nailed the finale, but at only three episodes I can't nudge it above the full season of Sunny. There's a quantitative threshold, at some point.

3. Man Seeking Woman - Hit or miss on the laughs, as usual, but bonus points for the high concept (as always) and what's likely the final season going out strong

4. The Good Place - Another high concept show that went out strong. Would be above Man Seeking Woman if not for only airing like four episodes this year. (We'll see when it returns - this fall or next winter?)

5. New Girl - Hit a real groove for a while there and returned to being one of the funniest shows I watch. Problem is, six seasons in, that well is running awfully dry. Let's hope for a good seventh season and call it a career, ah?

6. Love - Nothing hilarious here, but it's well-made Apatow-style slow-burn stuff.

7. Baskets - Covered this recently, but a disappointing second season was saved by a late surge in heart, sadness, etc.

8. Bob's Burgers - I'm enjoying this more than I have in recent years. Still occasionally entirely disposable, though.

9. Santa Clarita Diet - It's just too dumb to really love. Very easy watch, though.

10. Superstore - Sophomore year NBC comedy can't hit the highs of The Office or Parks and Rec at all, but it's in that vein, at least. Feel-good filler, nothing more.

11. Workaholics - Painfully bad for years now. And still, somehow, I'll miss it...

12. Schitt's Creek - Probably "deserves" to end up at 9 or 10 on this list, but a hard series binge brought me to the end of Season 3 running on fumes. Maybe the nine months between now and year's end will let this float a little better.

OTHER:

1. Last Week Tonight - Still easy to watch this every week, although it's gotten a bit one-note and depressing in the Age of Trump. Every week's the same - a pretty funny opening ten minutes followed by a deep dive that's anywhere from moderately interesting to mind-numbing.

2. Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party - The novelty's all gone, and sure enough, there's no other reason to watch.

How about all of you? Any great or even good TV I'm not watching that you are? Anything here you disagree with, and would suggest I might reconsider?

Hatoful Boyfriend

Two years ago I was tasked with beating this thing (along with Sween and Stevie - come on guys!) for losing in a gametimebro event. Well, good work, guys - truly, this was the dumbest game I've ever played. It takes place at a school for pigeons and other birds, and it consists of navigating just a handful of menus while sitting though a bunch of insane dialogue. To whatever extent there was a story here, I mean, I can't even say. This cost me five to ten dollars if I recall correctly. Oof. Why? But at least it only cost me about half an hour of my time. There's no reason for something like this to exist. Best part is that the game allows you, right at the beginning, to make it so the pigeon characters all look like people. Imagine purchasing this game and thinking "but I mean they have to look like people or else it's really weird."

Fuck it, here are a bunch of screenshots I took. Seeing is believing, right?

The OA: Season 1

This one dropped way back in mid-December, and Marissa and I never got around to adding it to our queue in the mad dash to finish off so much other TV in the calendar year. It's another weird one from Netflix, though probably not as weird as Legion was, about a blind Russian girl who returns to society after being kidnapped for seven years and subjected to all kinds of supernatural testing, only somewhere during the testing she regained her vision, and somewhere else during the testing she learned how to bring certain people back from the dead. I dunno, I didn't love this if you couldn't tell, but I think I liked it more than Legion or The Young Pope for that matter. It's been renewed for a second season already, which I'm actually okay with - the door was left open here a little better than it was in, say, Stranger Things. But yeah - here's yet another TV show that I've seen that you really don't need to. Plenty more to come, I'm sure.

No Longer at Ease

More than ten years ago I read and very much enjoyed Things Fall Apart, the Chinua Achebe novel about the tragedy of Okonkwo, a proud Nigerian man who winds up leading a one-man resistance of sorts when white men arrive to colonize his homeland. What I loved most about that book was the neutrality of its tone; it would have been so easy to depict the pre-colonial Nigerians as either a peaceful, prosperous people or a bunch of savages - and ditto the arriving white men - but Achebe toes that line carefully and allows his characters to be multi-faceted, to be good or evil or civilized regardless of their race. I was, like, seventeen, and very impressionable, and reading about how pre-colonial Nigerians were, you know, complicated, like all other regular-ass people in history - that was eye-opening.

Anyway, here's its sequel, a short read at less than 200 pages, No Longer at Ease, about one of Okonkwo's grandsons, who may or may not have besmirched his own honor by accepting a bribe or two. It... didn't have quite the same effect on me. Here's what I wrote over at goodreads:

Very difficult not to compare this to its own predecessor, Things Fall Apart, and for that it suffers. That book was about an obstinate man fiercely resisting but slowly realizing that his very way of life would be forever changed when white men came to his African village - a doozy of a conflict, a hell of a tragedy. This book, revolving one of that man's grandsons, derives most of its dramatic tension from the dilemma of whether or not an honorable and educated man would allow himself to accept a bribe. Like, whether or not he can resist becoming that dreaded stereotype of the corrupt and shady African government man is the tragic conflict facing Obi Okonkwo, which is a far cry from his grandfather's hopeless fight for his own culture. There's a thematic throughline here for sure, the grandfather's inevitable defeat leading indirectly to the society in which the grandson can have this fall from grace, and the story still works. It just doesn't thrive.

So lightning didn't strike twice. Damn. Chinua Achebe has a few more novels I may check out one day, but it took me ten years to get to this one and I didn't even like it very much, so, let's not hold our breath, alright?

The Discovery

Been waiting for this one to hit Netflix for a while now. Loved Charlie McDowell's The One I Love, and was excited for the concept of The Discovery from the minute I heard it. (The afterlife has been proven to exist. Now carry on living.) And this came so close to being so good! Alas, something's missing. Segel and Mara were very good, the early Charlie Kaufman vibes hit me just right, the story was captivating and thought-provoking, but in the end, it was all just something less than I hoped for. Would not watch ad infinitum.

But for real, check out The One I Love. It's also on Netflix, I think.

The Wolf Among Us

Hey now, it's my first Telltale game. (But then again, Life Is Strange was pretty much a Telltale game in every sense but the actual one, so.) I liked The Wolf Among Us, but didn't love it. Let's start with my complaints. First and foremost, I've gotta shake my head at the technical glitches and bugs going on here. Twice I had to quit the game and restart entirely thanks to freezes, which is such a bummer on a system like the Xbox One in a year like 2017. And mid-QTE loading times? Jesus. Come on. My other issues dealt with the pacing and the story here, which started out strong and finished that way too, but which definitely meandered a bit and took some odd detours in those middle three chapters. I suppose that's just kind of how these episodic games work - you need to close each chapter with a bang, which means a lot of bangs are going to be followed up with some more mundane activities.

But now let me talk about what worked. For starters, the general premise. I guess this was somewhat based on a preexisting graphic novel series called Fables, but it's about a bunch of public domain monsters and fairy tale characters living in modern day New York, most of them in human form. You play as the Big Bad Wolf, the sheriff of Fabletown, and it's time to investigate some homicides. You're crushing on your colleague Snow White, you're trying to stay away from the marital troubles plaguing your neighbors Beauty and Beast, and fucking Mr. Toad is such a goddamn thorn in your side. I enjoyed it, and thought it was clever. Usually in these "make your own decisions" types of games I try to be noble and ethical - at least more than half the time, I'd say. But here, fuck it - I was the Big Bad Wolf! If Grendel's pissing me off, I'll rip his goddamn arm off. If Georgie Porgie wants to get all mouthy with me, I'll smack him around a bit. And if I find the asshole going around killing whores, you better believe I'm not worried about bringing him in for a fair trial while he still lives and breathes. I thought the world was fully imagined and that the story was expansive, if a bit overlong and unable to all tie together in the end.

Anyway, Sween and Trev have already played this one, and guys, I've got questions. What'd you do? How'd your games end? I saw you each "died" once, thanks to Xbox stat tracking, whereas I did not. How did you die? I did not know it was possible to die in this game. Biff on a QTE? Go down the wrong dialogue path?