Better Things: Season 3

I'm not nearly as into this show as so many critics seem to be but also I am not an actress raising three daughters in Los Angeles, so, yeah. I do like the show though! The episodes just tend to be a little hit or miss for me. Will definitely tune in for future seasons.

God, I'm just phoning these posts in now, huh.

Superstore: Season 4

Superstore had another decent season and it ended with the show seemingly leaning directly into a political storyline in which the workers try to unionize and the corporate higher-ups responded by sending ICE in for a sting, resulting in the deportation of one of the main characters. Cool! Let's see where this goes next year.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Season 6

It's very cool that NBC saved this show and I enjoy watching it every week and I have nothing else to say about it at this time!

Catch-22: Season 1

Catch-22 is my favorite novel of all time, so when I heard George Clooney was directing a miniseries adaptation for Hulu I was excited but, you know, cautious. It's a book with such a specific, precise tone that really doesn't translate well to the screen, and they already tried to make it a movie way back in 1970 and it really wasn't so good. Granted, the whole thing's bound to work better in six hours than in four, but is George Clooney really the right man to bring Heller's weird mix of morbid war terror and absurd nonsense dialogue to the screen?

Turns out, yes! This was very good! It's a little heavier on the horrors of war, which is an advantage any any visual medium is going to have over the written word, but the cast does a pretty good job with the line readings and enough of the absurd humor is preserved for the whole thing to mostly tonally survive the transition from page to screen.

I was actually left a little disappointed by the ending - and granted, that's one of the book's flaws too - in part because I really think they could have stretched this thing to eight episodes form six. There are plenty of characters and subplots cut from the miniseries entirely that I think add plenty to the overwhelming sense of suffocating bureaucratic dread, like how one man in the squadron, clearly alive and walking around and talking to people, is declared dead because he was erroneously listed on a downed plane's manifest, or how the most powerful man on the base is the lowly private who runs the mail room because of his power to redact information in all the incoming and outgoing correspondence.

But yeah - top to bottom this was easily one of my favorite shows of the year so far. It's funny how that works, how at this point in time so many of my favorite shows end up being limited series, complete stories that start and end and never seem like they're just spinning their wheels, biding time, killing seasons. Anyway, give this show a shot! And maybe try the book. It's so good, you guys!

Barry: Season 2

Show's great, what more can I say? (Plenty, but, fuck it, who cares!)

Les Misérables: Season 1

It's a bold move to air all six episodes of anything at all in the exact same timeslot on the exact same nights as the final season of Game of Thrones, but I guess PBS isn't too worried about losing viewers to HBO. Here, of course, is a miniseries adaptation of Victor Hugo's famous novel, probably best known today in its streamlined Broadway musical form. Now, I love that musical shamelessly and without reservation, but I've also read and enjoyed the 1400-page book, which contains plenty of story elements and character beats that the musical understandably cuts out.

This adaptation very faithfully recreates the novel's story, and honestly, it's kind of a sprawling and incoherent mess! The book contains five volumes and, through them, tells the tragic stories of several different characters who cross paths; it is decidedly not one long tragedy about any one person or concept in particular, though! Fantine's tragedy is that of a blissful summer fling turning into single parenthood, destitute poverty and early death. Eponine's tragedy is one of unrequited love... and early death. Marius's tragedy is that he's been renounced by his wealthy family as a class traitor for siding with those who would fight for social justice. Javert's tragedy is, ultimately, his inability to reconcile a conflict between the letter of the law and an undeniable moral good; he resolves this by killing himself, all melodramatic-like. Then there's the overall tragedy of the failed June Rebellion, and of the living conditions of the wretched Paris slums. There are like three characters in this thing who get happy endings.

Anyway, all these things are very sad and all these stories are very touching, but a six-episode miniseries doesn't seem to give them all enough time to breathe. The musical very brilliantly ends with Valjean on his deathbed being sung to be the ghosts of Fantine (who we haven't seen since Act I) and Eponine (who he never even really met in the musical) in a motf we've heard throughout the musical, and that simple use of a callback is just goddamn beautiful and touching, just like it is when the musical ends with Valjean arriving at the gates of heaven to a modified version of the show's biggest number, "Do You Hear the People Sing?" I just fucking works, guys!

But here in the miniseries - and really, in the book - the tragedy and death remains unconnected and unremarked upon. Fantine just kind of dies and then ceases mattering to the story. The revolution fails and there's no "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables" number where Marius laments that all of his friends are dead for no reason.

So in the end, maybe six hours is still too short a time to devote to adapting Les Misérables for the screen or the stage. Maybe there's just no satisfying way to pull the disparate threads of the novel together unless you do it with bombastic songs, and maybe so much of the beauty of the musical really is of the musical so to speak.

And yeah, if I'm being critical, I'm not sure how much I liked Dominic West playing Jean Valjean. He did just fine with the role, don't get me wrong, but when you've made a television career out of being alcoholic trainwreck Jimmy McNulty and the generally unlikable guy Noah from The Affair, it's tough for me to buy into a wholesale character redemption story. I'm sorry!

Game of Thrones: Season 8

No need to beat a dead horse - and here's where I'd make a joke about the Dothraki horsemen having an apparently unlimited number of lives this season if I were beating a dead horse - but the final season of Game of Thrones was underwhelming, to say the least.

Criticism is all over the Internet, and I agree with, broadly, most of it, but it doesn't really matter, because entering its eighth and final season Game of Thrones was way past the point of being affected one way or another by criticism. The concept of the "water cooler show" was supposed to die when Netflix and streaming services really took over the television market, yet here we all are in 2019, able to talk about this one show with family members and friends and coworkers alike. A show with such mass appeal, and with late stage ambitions of being more or less a series of summer blockbuster movies - how do you even criticize that? Everyone's watching this thing, all of them for different reasons, and they all want different outcomes. You can be a white feminist shaking with rage over Daenerys's heel turn, you can be a Jon Snow homer who's pissed about his final status, you can ship Jaime and Brienne and be devastated by the way their relationship ended up, you can be one of those people who just wanted this show to be a medieval The Wire (guilty!) and lament that actions stopped having consequences on this show long ago. You can attack this show form any angle at all for any reason at all! That's the pop culture limelight, baby!

But as so often is the case when a show gets pretty bad pretty late in its run, I think Game of Thrones has been pretty bad for a while. Or at least I think it's a little too charitable to, say, Seasons 5-7 to say that this season was when the writing really fell apart.

A big part of the early seasons, and books, as the ever-expanding nature of the world and the characters and the conflicts. Kill Ned Stark? Ah, now the North is in full blown rebellion, declaring itself independent. The king is dead? Here comes a succession crisis, wherein his two brothers are fighting with each other and with their Lannister nephew. The show's conflicts and vengeance cycles were like a hydra - cut one character or plot off and three more appear. What's Dorne, in Season 4? It's a place we've heard about, and where this one badass guy called the Red Viper comes from. Once he's killed - fairly, legally, in trial by combat, let's add - what is Dorne in Season 5? It's a new location for the show, full of its own politics and characters and infighting and, you know, stories in general. Collapsing all of these sprawling narratives back into a satisfying conclusion was always going to be extremely challenging - there's a reason George R.R. Martin has written just two books (originally envisioned as one book) in the last nineteen years - but the show had plenty of time to plan how it was going to do so. But the approach Benioff and Weiss took was just to make everything a big and bombastic spectacle, obliterating entire families and plotlines in single explosions, leaving us with a final stage setting that just felt... empty? I dunno. This whole season just needed some time to breathe! We all laughed in Season 7 when Gendry and a raven somehow relay-raced a message some 700 miles in the span of like, an afternoon, but those kind of plot-hastenings barely even registered in Season 8, where in the span of two episodes (two!) the entirety of the war between the living and the dead was fought and the surviving members of said war both mourned their dead and then besieged King's Landing and lost several more people in the process of doing so.

Like I said, we don't need to beat a dead horse, and I feel like that's already what I've started doing here, so instead let's just go out on a positive note and recognize Game of Thrones for what it was: one of the best shows of the goddamn decade, all things considered! I mean really, that was such a cool thing, to have this high fantasy series the general public had never heard of, and to turn it into the biggest thing on television for close to ten years.

Veep: Season 7

So, while one HBO mainstay about a woman hellbent on acquiring the most powerful position in the world spirals downward and suffers from an accelerated pace and shortened episode order in its final season, another one ends on a strong note. Veep has become just flat out ridiculous over the course of its run, but then again so have American politics. Here's the episode summary of the series premiere from 2012:

Vice President Selina Meyer wants to make the implementation of a Clean Jobs Commission her main legacy, but problems occur when a Tweet from a staffer annoys the plastics industry; Selina makes an offensive joke at a fundraiser, and her Chief of Staff forgetfully signs her own name on a condolence card for the wife of a senator who just died.

Back in the midst of the Obama presidency, Veep found humor in the mundane monotony of everyday Washington politics and the way any small gaffe could turn into a 24-hour media focal point. Do you guys remember when things were like that? Compare that to the lightning-fast pace and "holy shit" fervor of the latter seasons of Veep, in which Jonah Ryan runs for president on an anti-vaccination and anti-Arabic numerals platform while proudly married to his "smokin' hot" half-sister, and in which Selina Meyer colludes with the Chinese and sells out her greatest achievement - a free Tibet - in order to win a crowded Democratic Primary, and in which her entire campaign team is ecstatic to hear about a mass shooting that left 27 people dead because it means some of Selina's recent bad press will get bumped out of the news cycle. I mean, the show this show became is just so much bigger and broader and dumber than the show it used to be, but then again American politics got so big and broad and dumb that there was nothing to do but lean into it, I guess.

At the end of the day this will have to go down as one of the best comedies of the 2010s, right? What a triumph. And what an ending!

God of War (2018)

I'm almost a year late here, but yeah, the 2018 remake of God of War was just fantastic. For as much as people raved about the original series on PS2 and then PS3, I never seemed to love it like they all did. In fact when I finally got around to God of War III a few years ago - hailed in its day, 2010, as an intstant contender for greatest game of its time - it just felt so stale and dated in terms of graphics, tone, and gameplay. The graphics part can't be helped, I know, but the fixed camera nature combined with repetitive hack-and-slash combat with QTEs didn't strike me with any "greatest game of its era" mentality and the cartoonish gore and big-tittied naked slave women felt decidedly antiquated even by 2016 for me.

How nice a surprise it was, then, that God of War is as much a tonal re-imagining as it is a reboot that changes the setting from Greek to Norse mythology. There really wasn't a lot of content to wring out of the very dry God of War stone in 2018, so why not go ahead and remake the game along the lines of an open-world third-person adventure game with RPG elements? And while you're at it, go ahead and give the game an excessive "hardened old widower learns to love again, thanks to a child" narrative treatment. This accomplishes a number of things - in addition to pulling heartstrings like, say, The Last of Us or later Uncharted titles, you make Kratos a reluctantly brutal father figure, wise and regretful but still completely capable of unleashing "Spartan rage" to protect his son. Suddenly the gore and brutality are toned down - they're there, for sure, but they're not there for cartoonish shock value, vestiges of old '80s and '90s arcade games accompanied by guitar riffs; they carry weight, they support the tone of the story, they could almost be described as "art!" There's also no minigame here where you just mash buttons to fuck the absolute hell out of some sex slave - a former easter egg staple of the old series. (Although for my money this game should have gone entirely in the other direction with a tender scene and a subtle vibration-assisted minigame in which you patiently and tenderly operate the analog sticks to please a forest goddess, if you catch my drift.)

Gameplay here is also miles beyond what it was in any of the first six games in the series; I died constantly at first, and really had to learn the blocking and parrying system instead of just spamming a "whip your chains around" button. There's armor-crafting. The whole thing's a treasure trove of collectibles and side quests. The NPCs are legitimate characters in their own right. There's just almost nothing not to love. I'll admit the ending snuck up on me a little bit, and so did the lack of postgame content - but the whole thing just makes me much more excited for God of War II or God of War: Ragnarok or whatever they come out with next.

I don't play a lot of games these days, so take this with all the salt you want, but this was seriously the best and most satisfying all around experience I've had with a video game in years. Play it if you haven't yet!

Our Planet: Season 1

I hate to sound like I have a "been there done that" attitude toward these stunning nature documentaries that take millions of dollars and literal years of footage to produce, but really, why isn't this just called Planet Earth III? It's got the exact same format and premise as both seasons of that show did, and its made by the same team and narrated by David Attenborough and everything. I get that Netflix probably wanted its own brand or whatever, or couldn't use BBC's, but when all you change is the title, who are you really fooling?

Anyway, as always, I dig these. I just seem to dig them less and less as I see more and more of them.

Bonding: Season 1

Seven episodes, fifteen minutes each - you can bang this thing out in less time than most feature films! Problem is, there's not a lot of meat on this particular bone. The show's hook is that a grad school student moonlighting as a dominatrix hires her gay best friend as her assistant. But the show's ostensible heart is that the pair of them, I dunno, challenge one another to become better, fuller people, or something? Like a co-dependence that turns into a... bond? Ah? That title, that double entendre, you get it, you see it.

This wasn't very good, and even the original (slight) premise is gone by the finale, the show devolving into what feels like the third act of a not-quite-rom-com where bickering friends end up with a stronger relationship than ever before. What bugs me though is that what's shaping up to be this neat little story ends instead on a complete action-suspense cliffhanger, the duo on the run from a  crime scene in which they've stabbed a violent client in self defense. It's not even clear to me that there'll be a second season, and I'm not sure I'd have watched one if there had been (although, come on, fifteen-minute episodes are hard to find fault with) and still somehow I'm annoyed that a story I wasn't even into didn't settle for the ending it had earned. Gah!

One Day at a Time: Season 3

So, Netflix canceled this show after three seasons. I could join the drumbeat of online clamoring for somebody to save the show and echo all the sentiment out there about how it's a unique family sitcom with such an emphasis on LGBTQ characters and Cuban-American characters and addiction and PTSD - and I probably should! - but viewers like me are kind of the exact reason this show got canceled in the first place; the third season came out in February, and instead of gobbling it up within a week like so many other shows on Netflix, I took my sweet time meandering through Season 3 and finished it somewhere in mid-April. I can't pretend to be all that upset it got canceled if I was letting virtually everything else in my queue take precedence, right?

That said, rumor has it CBS All Access wants to save the show by picking it up, but Netflix isn't letting them. If that's the case, I mean, come on. Bad, Netflix! Don't do that!

Pen15: Season 1

Oh baby it is time for another big old slapdash post dump. What we've got here is Pen15, a show on Hulu whose title is, of course, an exact reference to that old terrible middle school gag we all enjoyed a time or two way  back when.

This is a show created by two 30-year old women who play younger versions of themselves. It's set in seventh grade in the year 2000, and oh man does it it just fucking nail so, so many of the most cringeworthy fads and trends and mannerisms. Kudos to Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle not only for physically recreating and acting out some of their own most awkward memories - that's some hashtag bravery for you, folks - but also for recreating the whole time period so well. There's an entire episode devoted to spending half an hour on AIM that gave me just the worst second-hand embarrassment. Anyway, it's worth checking out and a second season has been confirmed.