Stranger Things: Season 3

Definitely better than the second season, but at least that season was operating under the umbrella of Season 1's wild and unprecedented success; this one's just a second straight helping of "I mean, what's the actual point of this weird mishmash of '80s nostalgia and kid-friendly horror shit?" Don't get me wrong - this is still fun, plenty light-hearted, impossible to take seriously, really not unlike plenty of blockbuster film franchises in that regard. But in just eight episodes, all of the following shit happened, and plenty else:

• Four of the kids discovered and infiltrated a secret Soviet base beneath their town's brand new mall
• The local bad boy heartthrob lifeguard who all the town moms want to fuck got body-snatched and cloned by a monster and then did the same thing to his coworker and her family... and then died
• Winona Ryder was perplexed by like, magnets, and then she and her ex met and befriended a Russian scientist they called Smirnoff
• Said ex was not just a jealy ex but also a jealy father figures who caused a tween breakup
• The very small older sister and her photographer boyfriend worked at a newspaper and discovered some exploding rats and a crazy woman and then all of their bosses turned out to be, uh, I want to say zombie-like bad guys
• The nerdy kid who kept getting kidnapped by demons in the first two seasons was just sort of chilling in our dimension this time around getting sad that his friends had outgrown D&D

I think all of these elements work on their own, to various extents, but the amalgamation of everything just left me entirely confused and brainsore. These characters aren't people, they're just '80s tropes come to life! And these stories aren't stories, they're just a grab bag of '80s action and horror movie plots.

At least the very ill-advised Eleven-has-punky-goth-friends arc from Season 2 seems dead as hell.

Oh and Hopper is totally alive, right?

Bless This Mess: Season 1

Six-episode sitcom seasons are so, so easy to check out. This is their blessing. But they're also hard to check out of - for me, at least - and this is their curse. Pilot didn't grab me? Eh, it's a pilot. Second episode sucks too? Okay fine but we can at least give this thing a full hour. Still nothing redeeming after three? Eh, look, I don't hate this. It's not hurting anyone, just hanging out there in the background.

And that's how I came to watch, in its entirety, the first season of Bless This Mess without ever so much as finding anything about it particularly appealing. Hey, there are worse ways to waste two and a half hours!

Big Little Lies: Season 2

If there's a saving grace for the second season of Big Little Lies, it's that it as soon as most people realized, "wait, what the hell, this is all so messy and pointless," it was already over. A report came out a few weeks ago suggesting that the season had been compromised by a creator taking creative control back from the director by employing like seven full-time editors to hack said director's vision to bits, and that goes a long way toward explaining why all of these episodes were like, forty-five minutes long at most. Still, I wonder just how much actual plot could have possibly ended up on the cutting room floor!

Last season was presented as a bit of a pulpy murder mystery with a Greek chorus of regular people in town being interviewed about a fateful night on which one of the main characters was murdered. It was plenty dumb, but it was aware of how dumb it was, aware of how the entire appeal of such a scandal rested on "the rich ladies in town all had petty grudges against each other," and it threw in precocious kids and worthless, absent husband-fathers and all kinds of real estate porn and made it all just, I dunno, work.

This season, in addition to elevating Laura Dern and Zoe Kravitz from secondary characters to main characters and cutting episode lengths, they went ahead and threw Meryl fucking Streep into the mix. And hey, why not! I get it, and I get the appeal, and I bought in on the second season hook, line, and sinker. But God, what a mess!

For starters, while last season was about three (generously, five) women whose stories began to intertwine and come together, this season was about those same five women each just kind of doing their own thing. Reese Witherspoon was angry about her kid not going to college, then sad about her marriage falling apart. That was it. That was her arc. Shailene Woodley just kind of slowly fell for a coworker at the aquarium. That was it! That was her arc! Laura Dern really stepped it up and became arguably the second-biggest character this season, and still her arc was just that her husband did all kinds of white collar crime and as such she lost all of her wealth, and she was pissed at him. The cathartic conclusion to her arc was smashing all his shit with a baseball bat and screaming at him. I mean, hey, that's a fantastic use of Laura Dern! But it's also such a small, simple story.

The central thrust - the only thrust, really - this season was Meryl Streep's attempt to take custody of her grandchildren away from their mother, Nicole Kidman. But even that felt weirdly flat and hollow! The whole season just came across as both unfinished and pared down from that unfinished state. Like, "ah, okay, we're building toward something, and we're doing it pretty quickly, and - oh, oh, it's over now? Hmm."

And that leaves the show in the worst kind of position at the end of its second season - wide open, narratively, for a third season, but with no compelling reason to continue to exist.

The Expanse: Season 1

Time for just a little more housekeeping! I started the first season of Syfy's The Expanse just about a year ago. It's been said that this show should have been to science fiction what Game of Thrones was to high fantasy - a sprawling, beloved book series adapted into a massive show full of twists and turns and intrigue. That's a nice idea and all, but Syfy ain't HBO and asteroid belt miners aren't, you know, dragons.

Like so much else out there, this came across mostly good-not-great to me. There was a slow start for sure, but the season picked up speed and intrigue as it barrelled toward its climax. Apparently the whole first season doesn't even span the first book in the aforementioned series, and there are nine books in the series. Damn! This show could last for a very long time, right? Wrong! Syfy canceled it after three seasons... only for Amazon to pick it back up! Nothing ever really gets canceled anymore you guys.

Togh to say whether or not I'll keep going here. It was too slow a burn for me to really get into until halfway through the season, but I've heard the series really picks up steam in Season 2. Maybe I'll just read the books!

The Amazing Race: Season 31

Not the best season I've ever seen, but far from the worst. It seemed like in this season each leg was an almost independent race - all the teams were on the same international flights each time with little to no advantage gained by being one of the first teams to arrive in the previous leg. I only ever tune into this show anymore when it contains gimmick casting, like former Big Brother contestants or D-list celebrities and former athletes. And surely CBS knows this, which is why there've been so many  recent seasons with gimmick casting. Boo, I guess? Look I dunno. Thirty seasons in there's not a lot of the world left to cover by this show. Go to North Korea next time or something, sheesh.

Flight of the Conchords: Season 2

Hey, time for some very old housekeeping. I've been working on Flight of the Conchords in its very brief two-season entirety for, God, probably a few years now! There are only twenty-two episodes of this show, just eleven hours - why has it taken me this long to get through it?

[Looks left, looks right, leans in real close.]

It's taken this long because the show, ah, hmm, shit. How do I say this? The show just isn't that good! I know that's not a popular opinion - hell I'm unhappy I've got that opinion - but at no point in two seasons did the show grab me and make me think, "alright, sure, let's marathon through this stuff, this is a riot!" I'm not sure why! Are the songs too weird? Does the show look too cheap? Are the jokes just not quite funny enough? It's amazing how old this already feels, just ten years later.

At any rate, that's curtains for Flight of the Conchords. Glad to be done, honestly! One more show crossed off the old backlog.