Mario Tennis Aces

Some people absolutely love when Mario does sports. I'm largely content to stick to his bare-knuckle brawling and kart-racing, but in a moment of longing for a multiplayer Switch game - no, really, anything at all - I went ahead and bought the latest Mario Tennis game. I liked it! The single-player mode was brief and varied enough that it never grew stale the way I feared it might - this is, after all, a game in which you hit a ball with a racket over and over and over again - but still challenging and frustrating enough by the end to give me a real feeling of accomplishment and relief when I finally beat some of the later levels. And multiplayer-wise, I mean, it's video game tennis, you know the deal, what more do you want?

I imagine I'll revisit this sporadically over the coming months, dabbling in online play every now and again with friends and strangers alike. But I'm just not very good at it, posting an abysmal record so far of something like 5-20 against the world at large, and an even worse, I dunno, 2-13 against Sheridan.

Do you know what sucks about this game though? There are some extremely basic options just flat out missing. Options like "play a regular tennis match comprised of sets and games" and "select the court you wish to play on." What the hell, Nintendo? This is some extremely basic shit you're lacking. I mean in this day and age it's easy enough to patch those options in, surely, but how does a first party game like this launch without having "customization" options in place that existed back in like 1992?

Westworld: Season 2

This show doesn't deserve a lengthy write-up, but I have a few observations that I think summarize the show in general.

The first is that, after the first episode, Marissa and I disagreed about whether or not Jeffrey Wright was playing "Arnold" or "Bernard" in a certain scene in which he was talking to Dolores. This is because the show takes place at indiscriminate intervals along an unspecified timeline; if the scene took place thirty years ago, then Jeffrey Wright is Arnold, a human, because Bernard did not exist back then. And if it took place thirty years later, then Jeffrey Wright would of course be Bernard, a robot created in Arnold's image, because Arnold is dead now. Dolores is Evan Rachel Wood either way, and she is ageless, because she is also a robot, and God, do you see how stupid this is? Here we are, watching a TV show, trying to get into a TV show we never really loved last season, and instead of focusing on an interaction between two characters, we're unsure who the characters even are, and we're lost right out of the gate.

The show is a puzzle; you don't "watch" Westworld as much as you "play" it. Fine! That makes it a cool and unique experience, I guess, but the whole first season got blown to hell when the Internet "solved" the puzzle and consensus speculation turned out to be major spoilers. This happens with all big shows these days, from Mr. Robot to Game of Thrones, but the difference is that in those shows, the characters are more important than the puzzles. Mr. Robot started to lose track of this, and suffered greatly in its second season for it, but it was ultimately able to right the ship last season with some character-driven stories, rather than audience-misdirect-driven bait-and-switches.

Westworld isn't character-driven whatsoever; its characters don't even really exist in any permanent sense, both because the timeline jumps all over the place and because the majority of them are robots whose "personalities" are tinkered with and changed regularly as part of the narrative. Like at one point an angry robot literally turns another robot's violence knob up, and his sympathy knob down, like adjusting a create-a-character in a friggin' video game.

Which leads me to my second observation - the show just isn't very fun! You should be able to take a premise like "nobody is real and this is all just about futuristic robots trying to have emotions while they murder each other" and have so much fun with it! Think of those Boston Dynamics dog robots that can run extremely fast but take thirty seconds to get up after they fall over. Think of when two Twitter bots get into an infinite loop of replying to one another. A show this stupid ought to be much funnier, much more joyful, much more self-aware, with all kinds of gratuitous robo-quirks and bad ticks. And instead this is the most joyless and humorless show on television, where every single character is just in constant "total badass" mode.

And now, third observation, holy shit, the writing is fucking terrible here. I don't just mean that the show is poorly structured and badly paced, which it is; I mean that the dialogue here is just fucking awful. In every episode's "previously, on Westworld" recap, they play dialogue-free clips. Why? Because allof the dialogue is wet ass, and because none of the "previously on" segments could possibly cohere into a sensible narrative anyway.

I'm way past the point in my life where I'm happy to burn ten hours of my time on very bad TV shows. Whoever is watching and enjoying this shit - great! I'm glad it's entertaining to, well, anybody at all. But holy shit, I just do not see it. This is as uninteresting to me as watching two CPU-controlled teams play a game of Madden - and that's more or less what the premise is, when you think about it.

No more! No third season for me! Frankly I should have stuck to my druthers and never bothered with the second.

Little Women: Season 1

Yeah, I watched a three-hour Little Women miniseries. Honestly? This just feels like a story I should be familiar with by now, and when PBS Masterpiece Theater imports a British production of a 150-year-old American classic, baby, you gotta jump right on that!

This was fine. As far as "screen adaptations I've seen in the last year about a bunch of teenage girls living together during the Civil War" go, I'd prefer Sofia Coppola's take on The Beguiled. But, what can you do?

Anyway, I know how Little Women goes now. I'm Team Jo, obviously, but how could your heart not just break for poor Beth? Meg and Amy can go pound sand.

Prison School (Live-Action): Season 1

Ha! Y'all remember that dumb-as-hell anime I posted about? With the schoolgirls beating the absolute shit out of a bunch of dudes, but that I swear ended up being a compelling enough story on its own right? There's a thirteenth episode of the anime that isn't available on Hulu, and in my attempts to search the internet for it...

Well, two things. One is that, holy shit, as I probably should have expected - and maybe even did suspect, but still just wasn't prepared for - holy shit, there is so much Rule 34 Prison School porn on the Internet. I mean, maybe it's not even Rule 34 porn, maybe when you make a show that porn-adjacent, that fetish-filled, that male-gazey, maybe it's just straight up porn. Or like, fan porn. Or something. Fuck, I dunno, guys.

The other thing is that, hey - turns out there's this live-action adaptation, which came out the same year as the anime, and both of them are based on a manga series (or is it just a manga?), which just gives me all kinds of questions about Japanese content licensing and production schedules and whatnot. At any rate, this was free to watch, in full, on the Internet, except that it was nine episodes instead of twelve. Fine! Let's check it out, let's compare and contrast.

I'd be lying if I said I watched this whole thing; mostly I just jumped around and tried to compare the live action drama to the anime - was one of them better, was one of them sillier, funnier, was one of them more blatantly pornographic - you know, once you're this far down an obscure anime rabbithole, might as well keep going.

In short, the anime was better. I'm not saying it was better because it was more overtly pornographic, and therefore funnier, but I mean... take this scene, for example:

How do you do this thing - this absurd tombstone piledriver into a facesitting beat-em-up - in a live action show? You can't! There's just no way to do that, with real actors, even stunt actors, to plant an ass that firmly on a face from three feet up without crushing a human skull or bruising a pelvic bone. Never mind the crows flying in at the end!

One thing that translated remarkably well though? This running joke (based on someone's fetish, surely) about how when this one girl gets really nervous or tense she starts sweating profusely from her massive breasts:

I mean, the anime is more all up in your face with it, as animation tends to allow for, but the live action shot isn't exactly pulling any punches! It's just like, bam, big sweaty boobs, full frame. Shameless. Laugh, dammit!

Alright, enough posting superfluous pictures and gifs of - holy shit, how am I only just now realizing the depths of the depravity of this - fictional high school boobs. (It's cool, the live action actor is like 26 there, I just checked.) From what I saw, the live action series stuck incredibly closely to the anime series, without so much as a plot point told out of order, and with some scenes apparently recreated shot for shot. I suppose this makes sense in that both series were based off of an established manga, but damn, props to the Japanese for just fucking sticking to the source material without every adaptation trying to put its own unique twist on things.

Lastly, the live action show was cast and costumed so immaculately, to the point where the characters in it almost look more cartoonish than those in the anime or the oriinal manga, if that makes sense:

Combine that added vibrance with the fact that real people are more recognizably human than, you know, drawings, and I definitely found myself empathizing with and relating to all of the characters more in the live action show than in the anime. But the anime's still better; the live action show's pacing is just all over the place and it leaves out or otherwise rushes through a couple of key plot points that the anime gives more time to breathe.

Good God, this many words about a throwaway softcore hentai adaptation? Folks - this is why you should never watch anime.

Imposters: Season 2

And with this, the rise and fall of Imposters is complete. I began the first season on a complete whim, scrolling through my nearly endless "watchlist" on Netflix with my eyes closed until I stopped scrolling and pressed play on whatever came up. It was this scripted series from Bravo about a con-woman who seduces, marries, and then takes to the cleaners all sorts of men - and at least one woman! It barely felt worth watching, but the first season just kept growing on me, and by the time it ended, I realized, holy shit, I'm in on Season 2. And then Season 2 began a few months ago,  and I was into it, as it dug itself out of the various holes and meticulously scaled down the cliffs it'd been hanging from at the end of Season 1, and then just slowly but surely over the course of the season I grew less and less invested, and now I couldn't even tell you with any certainty how it all ended, only that it did. And hey - show's canceled! Thanks, Bravo, for pulling this particular plug for me. I'm sure I would have managed on my own, but who knows?

Anyway, you really don't need to watch this. It was better than it had any right to be, but it still wasn't very good. Only fine. And only for one season.

Archer: Season 9

Not a lot to dwell on here - nine seasons, holy shit! - but I just want to note that after Archer stumbled so very hard last season with the 1940s noir crime set up it felt like it was back in a big way here. I always had a lot of faith in this season ever since its theme was revealed last year - eyepatch-wearing seaplane captain Archer, big-ass hulking Pam as his best friend, Lana as a native island princess, Cyril as a Nazi (but like, a '30s Nazi, not a Nazi Nazi) - it all felt right, and more importantly, it felt fun. Archer has always been at its best when it's action packed and big and loud and bold, and when the characters' bickering over mundane shit like pop culture references or grammar mistakes is just so heavily juxtaposed against the danger of their circumstances. This season just built and built and built its way toward an Indiana Jones-like tomb raiding, and, yeah, I just really enjoyed it. Such a welcome relief after last season's weirdly dark and solemn misfire.

This season ended with a sneak peak of the next one - Archer's still in a coma, naturally, and we'll get a third straight surreal reboot, this time in outer space. Yep - space! A whole season in space. We'll see how that one goes. Creator Adam Reed is committed to leaving the show after its upcoming tenth season, but he's made no such statements about whether or not Archer will continue without him. I'm kind of torn! After last season I'd have said, yeah, the tank is empty on this one, let's let it die gracefully. But here and now, with the prospect of there being just eight more episodes of Archer left (before an inevitable reunion or comeback or whatever in like, five years, tops) - I dunno! I'm kind of willing to roll the dice and hope for an eleventh season, a twelfth, whatever. All good things must come to an end, and Archer has lasted longer than so many of them already, but, why not?

Prison School: Season 1

A thing I've long said I was going to do is, "watch more anime." The "more" here is almost superfluous - in the long annals of the blog, of the hundreds and hundreds of seasons of television I've posted, how much anime have you seen? - but "watch anime" sounds like a whole lifestyle change, so just roll with me on this one. I know there are dozens of very good anime series out there from the last twenty or thirty years, but rather than go back and jump into a classic I've been poking around on Hulu every few months to see if some unheralded anime I've never heard of could lure me in.

Well, friends, I am equally proud and embarrassed to say that when I saw the above poster lurking on the Hulu interface, I knew I'd found something special. Look at that title! Look at those five weirdos in the foreground! Look at those, well, two very imposing figures in the background. Consider the possibilities. Is this a school set within a prison? Like at a juvenile hall? Is this cannon-chested, gray-haired woman in the background some sort of domineering teacher? Or perhaps a warden or prison guard? Or both? Do these guys want to fuck her? Do these guys live in fear of her? This was obviously a series that had no problem at all pandering to perversions and proclivities, but was this playing into schoolboy fantasies, prison fantasies, or both? Like a stupid moth, the moment I stared directly into this bright light and never had a chance to look away. I pressed play on the first episode, and what I witnessed was even more "ugh, come on, Japan" than I could have imagined.

So, it's set at a high school. An all-girls high school that has just changed its policies to allow male students. (Of course!) And these five guys, on their first day of school, decide to go spy on the ladies' locker room. (Ugh, of course.) Except - Japan! - so it's not a locker room, its a literal giant bathing room where dozens of high school girls are just giggling, stark naked, having the time of their lives. (Of... of course... Sigh.) The boys get caught, and they get sentenced to - yes - one month in the in-school prison, where they're overseen by a series of female guards - led by the extremely top-heavy one seen above - who just constantly beat the absolute shit out of them (in that way only anime allows for, where a guy will be a crumpled heap of broken bones and bloody bruises and missing teeth on the pavement, then spring right up in the next shot like nothing happened).

There's... there's a lot going on here. And so far it's exceeding every wild speculation I'd considered. It's absurd male-gaze fetish fuel, but it's also got this comfortable and confident sense of humor. It's not hentai or even mildly softcore porn, thank God, but it's also unmistakably porn-adjacent, or T&A-aware, or whatever. I'm so unfamiliar with anime that I have no idea if this is straight and earnest, if this is wink-wink-nudge-nudge parody and satire, or if I'm wrong to even be trying to analyze it on that spectrum at all. But I know that I must keep watching.

Over the next few nights I take in all twelve episodes, and honestly, I'm very pleasantly surprised. The creepiest aspects of the show - the peeping, the overt dominatrix-style beatings - are all in the rear view after the first episode or two, and what follows is an absurd but overall fast-paced and mildly compelling high school comedy. The three or four prominent female characters actually quickly become prominent characters, probably more so than two or three of the five boys in fact, and I find myself honestly invested in following the plot from episode to episode. First the boys work out an elaborate escape plan, overcoming several hiccups along the way. They're caught, and the girls realize that if they can frame two more escape attempts, they can get the boys expelled. Then they work out an elaborate scheme of their own. It works. Then the boys know they've got one chance to appeal it, and show evidence they were framed. And collecting that evidence requires another elaborate and hiccup-filled plan, and it works, and lo and behold, they're free, and that's the end of the season.

So at the end of the day, was it worth it? Close to six hours of my life spent on this obscure show from across the planet that literally no one I knew or even followed on Twitter had ever mentioned? Eh, it scratched a nondescript itch I've had for a while, I'll put it that way. And now I no longer have any desire to "watch more anime." (But not because this was bad!)

God of War: Ascension

The new and rebooted God of War is earning all kinds of praise, and I absolutely can't wait to play it - which is why I spent ten hours of my weekend finally getting around to the last God of War game, a relatively lackluster adventure with a story I couldn't even begin to follow or comprehend. I mean, this game's so lazy with its own timeline that I was jumping back and forth between "present day" and "two weeks ago" while maintaining all my power-ups and items. Guys - shoddy level design!

It's been a year or two since I last played God of War, but one change I defintiely noticed was to the combat system here. It was just as QTE-laden as ever, but with an interesting new emphasis on grappling enemies form afar and whipping them around at one another. I liked it! What I didn't like, however, was the sheer volume of enemies. This wasn't a difficult game, save for one brutal gauntlet of enemies toward the very end, but holy crap was it a monotonous game. A giant elephant monster - cool! Hours later, three giant elephant monsters at once - holy shit, stop padding this thing!

It could just be that I'm getting dumber with age, but I also noticed a lot of puzzles in this game - more than one of which tripped me up and sent me for a walkthrough. (Though in my defense, at various points my game was just glitching out, not triggering, say, an opening door, for whatever reason. Lots of "restart form last checkpoint," I'm sorry to say. Again - sloppy!)

What's funny is, as always, hype and expectations. I wasn't as impressed by God of War III  as I'd expected to be, but then, of course it's hard for a game to live up to the loftiest of expectations. By contrast, the muted response to this game had me prepared for the worst, and therefore pleasantly surprised for the most part by the experience I had playing it. Like, no question, God of War III is the better game, but Ascension wasn't nearly as far behind as the critical consensus would have had me believe.

Anyway, cool. Now that the six Greek games lie behind me, the Norse reboot lies ahead. Can't wait! (So, expect a post in 2020.)

Killing Eve: Season 1

So here's Killing Eve, a show that was on absolutely nobody's radar when it began two or three months ago - just another BBC America drama - but a bona fide word-of-mouth-based sleeper hit, at least with critics and TV nerds. I mean, check out this ratings table:

Putting aside tat the ratings are abysmal in an overall sense - this is non-basic cable in 2018, guys - check out that slow and steady climb throughout the season. Do you realize what needs to happen for a serialized drama to gain viewers every week? It means that every week more and more people need to hear about it, try it out, and then binge the entirety of the series to date in order to catch up and be "live;" it only gets harder and harder to add viewers later and later in the season, and yet somehow Killing Eve made its largest gains of all on the finale. Wow!

Anyway, yes - that's Sandra Oh on the poster, famously unable to find work after Grey's Anatomy because even in the era of peak TV there just weren't any roles for forty-year-old Asian women. And the show is made by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a very funny and talented British woman whose Fleabag is absolutely worth checking out on Amazon. (Six episodes!) But the true breakout star of Killing Eve in my opinion has to be the other woman on the poster above, Jodie Comer, as the fascinating Russian assassin "Villanelle," just one of the creepiest and quirkiest and funniest performances I've ever seen (yes, all at once). She's a dangerously competent psychopath with no discernible baggage or damage that "makes" her the monster she is - just a charming young woman who genuinely enjoys killing people, really - and any time she was on the screen I couldn't look away.

You'd do well by yourself to give this one a shot. The less I say, the better. If you don't have BBC America, I believe the first season is coming to Hulu pretty soon. It might already even be there!

The Americans: Season 6

Say this for The Americans - it went out on its own terms. The sultry and sometimes agonizingly slow spy thriller didn't turn into Breaking Bad for its final run, pitting FBI agent Stan against his neighbors and best friends for a thrilling blood-soaked run of betrayal and emotions. Nor did it ultimately pit man against wife, mother against daughter, or daughter against brother, as seemed to be the case early on this year. Instead, sure enough, the Jennings marriage endured, and when their big secret came crashing down on them, it did so quickly and coldly and without much fanfare. There was a hell of a parking garage showdown, sure, but that was really all; Stan was never going to pull that trigger, and everyone in that parking garage knew it. Even Stan. Especially Stan, maybe.

That's not to say it wasn't an emotional finale. The phone call! The train scene! Ugh, God, poor Oleg! But when The Americans was given, tow years ago, another twenty-odd episodes to close out its run, I didn't think it'd be tying up so many of those ends in the final episode, instead of before it, the way a lesser show like Sons of Anarchy did, a body count just piling way the hell up and up and up, the show no longer fun to watch at all.

I'm not sure what I'm saying naymore, or if there's a point I'm trying to make. In the end, I loved The Americans, but never quite head-over-heels loved it, if that makes sense. It took six years to get to a place it likely could have made it in four, and I'm just not certain all that extra time was spent as efficiently as it could have been.

Is it just me, or does the end of this show feel like the end of a certain era of television? Seems like the six-year-spanning prestige drama is more or less dead now, no? Everything good now, all of the head-turning new stuff, is an anthology series or a half-hour or some different format entirely. Or at the very least, maybe the acclaimed antihero prestige drama is what's dead. Because what do we have left on that front? A bunch of shit on Showtime and like, Ozark?

I digress. The Americans was awesome and its finale did not disappoint. Even if its final season dragged and sagged in the middle, just a little, I mean, hey. That's what this show always was, baby!

Dear White People: Season 2

Really liked the first season, really liked this second one. But I gotta say, it feels like something important is missing from Dear White People. Probably it's just "more time with these characters and their stories;" the show has an impressive ensemble cast, and at only ten half-hour episodes per season it's easy for the series to give short shrift to nearly every character. Really though, these are deeply fascinating characters, each of them representing and embodying different components of the, uh, I guess I'll just say "black people in a white world" experience, and the show is so good in part because it doesn't spend enough time with any of them to make them feel old or stale, or to let their stories feel overbearing toward the overall narrative.

Actually, that's what the show is missing - narrative! Don't get me wrong - it's an enjoyable watch, and "too much plot" is never a good thing - but if you compare where the eight or ten main characters are at the beginning of the season to where they are at its end, I mean, they're really mostly in the exact same places. I couldn't even tell you how much chronological time the second season took up. Certainly not a full school year, and probably only a month or so. The big climax of the whole thing - the moment the whole season appears to build up to - is nothing more than a "wait and see where this goes in Season 3" reveal. Along the way, a vicious Internet troll is outed, a girl has an abortion, a guy does a lot of drugs one night, a girl's father dies. All of these events make for interesting episodes, but two seasons in I can't really say this show is going anywhere. And that's okay! It's about the ride, not the destination, and I really do appreciate this ride.

The Terror: Season 1

So much to say about this one - and the book on which it's based, which I just finished reading a month ago. Let's bring back the bullets, folks!

• I first heard about this show way the hell back in like, 2013. TV was different back then, mind you, and every new prestige drama carried a certain weight with it; it's not like ther ewere just a hundred new ones a year! I was immediately interested, to the point where I went ahead and bought the acclaimed book the show would be based on - a 750-page tome by Dan Simmons - sight unseen.
• Years passed. I tried to start the book once, in 2015 or so, but nothing in the first 50 pages grabbed me and I was already having trouble keeping track of different characters and their motivations. Not helping matters was the time-jumping nature of the narrative, starting in the middle of a crisis and interspersing flashback chapters. There was no word on the show, at all, either. What a bust!
• Then out of nowhere, late in 2017 or so, I heard that The Terror would in fact be coming to TV screens very soon after all. After the first two episodes of the show, I raced back to the book and read it as quickly and thoroughly as possible, and the difference was night and day. Where before I had no idea about the doomed Franklin expedition or why I should care about any of its members, here now I had character names and faces and accents to cling to, and it made all the difference in the world. It's not unlike Game of Thrones in that respect, I think, where I used a TV show as a jumping off point for a previously overwhelming book, then after racing through the book was excited to see how the TV show would continue to adapt it.
• The book was very good! And I think the show was too. I consumed them at the same time, so it's hard in a lot of ways for me to keep them straight, and it's possible I'm inadvertently allowing them to bolster or detract from one another in my head. But, again, I liked them both.
• The show definitely suffers form what I'd call Dunkirk syndrome, or perhaps Band of Brothers syndrome, where a fuckton of white men in similar uniforms are thrown at you all at once and it's impossible to keep them straight for a while. It gets easier to keep track of the various characters as the season progresses, especially as more and more of them die off, but it's still a big problem in the early going.
• Another thing I don't think the show did very well at all, relative to the book, was establish the timeframe and location of the conflict. These are arctic explorers in the far, far north. Summers have 24-hour daylight. Winters have 24-hour darkness. There's ice everywhere all of the time. That's bleak as hell - not to mention nearly impossible to make work as a TV show - so the show can be forgiven for cutting ahead by months at a time. I just wish each episode had begun with a date, or something. Possibly even also a location on a map, Game of Thrones opening credits-style. Oh well! Maybe this stuff doesn't matter as much to a lot of people.
• The show - like the book - could really be divided into three parts. There's the first part, where the sailors get frozen in and stuck, and need to winter in place, and come face to face with a giant monster, and begin to really understand their plight; there's the second part, where they spend an entire year snowed into the ice - no summer thaw here, folks - and rapidly lose morale in a dark ship eating rotten food and slowly succumbing to frostbite and disease and starvation; and there's the final part, where they make a far-too-late break for it, abandoning the ships and attempting to sledge-pull lifeboats a thousand fucking miles south toward the middle of Canada in hopes of rescue. For my money, the show was strongest in that first part and that last part. Really especially in that last part. Desperate, doomed men, marching to near certain death, going insane from lead poisoning, all while a monster stalks and hunts them on the ice - that's good, harrowing shit right there. Being cooped up in a dark ship for three straight episodes, eh, less so.
• All things considered, I really liked the show. It'll end up in my top ten on the year almost certainly, and now AMC is considering making it into an anthology series, with a new historical/horror story every season. I'd be very into that idea! But Season 1 would be a high bar to live up to.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Season 5

Man, that was a rough, what, thirty-six hours? Less? During which Brooklyn Nine-Nine was canceled, I mean. Has any show ever bene saved by another network as quickly as this one was?

Anyway, I've always liked this show, but it's absolutely aged well and gotten better with time. A few of my friends struggled to get into its first season - or outright never even tried - and I get that! Andy Samberg maybe wasn't the most tolerable actor to lead a smart and warm and happy little workplace comedy back in 2012 or whenever. But, again - again, folks - network comedies take time to sort themselves out. Remember how bad The Office was in its pilot? Remember how lackluster the entire first season of Parks and Recreation was?

Speaking of Parks and Rec, this show comes probably as close as anything in the last four years has to matching the overall vibe and feel and rhythm of that masterpiece. In fact, I can easily map distinct pieces of components of so many Parks and Recreation characters onto Brooklyn Nine-Nine counterparts. April's unflappability and extreme confidence are held by both Gina and Rosa here; Leslie's borderline-insufferable earnestness can be found in both Charles and Amy. Jake Peralta is like a combination of Leslie and Andy, sort of, while Terry's like if you took Tom Haverford but gave him Chris Traeger's enthusiasm for fitness instead of Tom's social media-obsessed entrepreneurial spirit. There are two Jerry/Gary/Larry characters in Hitchcock and Scully. And lastly - but certainly mostly - Captain Raymond Holt is essentially a gay, black version of Ron Swanson.

I'm glad NBC saved this one form the chopping block. It's never been my absolute favorite show on television, but where most shows feel stale or tired by their fifth year on the air, Brooklyn Nine-Nine feels like it has a ton left in the tank. That NBC gave it a 13-episode order for 2018-2019 rather than a full 22 feels more like an evolving industry standard and sign of the times than an actual bummer, and I look forward to seeing how well this show pairs with Superstore and The Good Place on Thursday nights. (That's got to be where NBC puts it, right? Also, shut up, yes I still care about when and where these shows air because I am a dinosaur with a cable package who still generally prefers to watch things on the night they air when feasible.)