Tag Archives: 2018-19

Early thoughts on the 2021-2022 TV premieres

The PolyBlog
September 19 2021

COVID has decimated entire industries, and for awhile, it looked like TV was going to be one of them. Sports coverage was non-existent, series were on hold for filming, pilots were at a dead stop. But eventually they figured out how to film stuff anyway, and shows returned. Some shows worked the premise into the script; others chose to ignore it. Some had a lot of interaction between a few key players but didn’t mix “bubbles” within the show, some did a lot of distant talking across rooms.

But one big element for the new year is the semi-return of the premieres of new shows. Let’s see what’s out there.

Chicago Party Aunt…an animated show on Netflix about a drunk 40yo woman partying in Chicago. Wait, isn’t there a show about a 40yo pretending to be 20-something in New York? Pass but I predict it will make it to at least season 2.

NCIS: Hawaii premieres this week on CBS, another outing for the series that started way back with JAG a loooooong time ago. I generally like the premise of the different series, but I don’t watch all of them each week. One is enough for me. I’m happy to see what this one is like — a bit like Hawaii Five-O, I imagine, but I’m not sold on the main actress, Vanessa Lachey. The only thing besides the trailer that I’ve seen her in was a small part in the Fantastic Four, which isn’t making up for a terrible trailer. I’ll give it a maybe for watching, yet vote for likely renewal.

The Big Leap on CBS is a show about making a dance reality show where they select contestants to star in Swan Lake. I know, I wasn’t looking for a fictional reality show either. But it’s basically Glee, or maybe Fame, for adults. I am curious enough to see an episode or two, mostly because I like the woman playing the main character (a large black woman who thinks she’s too big to be the star), but it also has some others like Piper Perabo who I like. I am not a giant fan of Scott Foley, and as they up the angst factor, everything I hate about reality shows is likely to turn me off. Teri Polo plays a housewife who drinks too much and has no support from her family for her interest in being part of the show, and well, that’s the cringe factor for me. So yes to Ep 1, but I’m predicting no renewal if only as there is no place for it to go without dumping all the characters you love and recasting next year. I know, I know, it doesn’t stop reality shows from thriving. But I’m still saying 1 season and done.

Ordinary Joe on NBC has a This Is Us feel to it, crossed with the movie Sliding Doors. The basic premise is a guy named Joe who has to make a choice the night of his graduation as to what he’s going to do next and he has three choices in front of him…ask out a pretty girl he just met, go with his best gal pal to the beach as she has something important to tell him, or go for dinner with his parents and family. The story then branches and shows what would happen if he picks each of the three choices, with some of the characters and events crossing back and forth between the storylines. The story lives and dies by the main character, played by James Wolk, and he has an awesome presence. I’ll give it a go and I predict renewal.

The Wonder Years is back on ABC, and exciting news, he’s black! It likely makes no difference to the relatively vanilla storylines, but only time will tell. I see nothing compelling in the promo, the trailer or the cast. Pass and I predict non-renewal after the season.

The Foundation starts on Apple TV+, a sci-fi series ruled by a clone not happy about a mathematician predicting darker times ahead. I am in like Flynn, and if it was on regular TV, I’d say cancellation; on Apple, I’m predicting renewal to Season 2.

BMF stands for Black Mafia Family on Starz, and I ain’t even going to dignify it with a comment. Pass.

La Brea on NBC premieres next week, and I would love to make fun of it. I mean, after all, there’s a lot of material to work with…a tar pit that collapses into a sink hole in LA? That transports people into another dimension? Really? I have to say cancellation on that basis alone. It isn’t LOST, and it ain’t even Manifest. But here’s the thing. The main star is Natalie Zea. OMG. I loved her on Justified, she is just knock down gorgeous to watch doing anything. On Unicorn, he was getting a girlfriend, and I thought, “meh”, until I saw it was her. Then I was like, “Yes! She has presence!”. The fact that I loved her all the way back to Dirty Sexy Money is not relevant to the conversation, is it? Okay, maybe it is, but I’m also excited to see Eoin Macken who I used to really enjoy on Merlin (oddly, I just binged it again recently). I expect cancellation, but I’ll be watching anyway.

Maid is coming to Netflix, and maybe it needs a cleaning, but a mother/daughter fix that includes real-life mother/daughter actresses is not on my list. Throw in Andie MacDowell, and I’m looking for an exit. And yet the trailer focuses on the daughter, Margaret Qualley, and she has serious presence. If she ever shows up in something that is not so depressing (homeless single mother focusing on what to do now with no support system), I might watch. Pass.

CSI: Vegas is back on CBS and it’s easy to predict renewal and I won’t be watching. I don’t mind the show, but it’s not compelling to watch except in binge mode.

Ghosts on CBS is a comedy and I am brutal on comedies. Very rarely do I see one land that I want to watch. Rose McIver is the wife and Utkarsh Ambudkar is the husband who inherit a haunted house. Let the laughter ensue? Umm, I don’t know either one well enough to judge. Let’s cue the video tape trailer! Ohhhhh, it’s Beetlejuice. Well, there are worse premises. Rebecca Winsocky plays one of the ghosts, and I liked her in Picard, Bull, SWAT, and Castle, but she was more fun on The Mentalist. There’s a large cast of other ghosts, and presumably room for guest stars too, but hard to tell which ones will be relevant from week to week. Oh, did I mention that the wife can see them after she hits her head? Riiight. So there’s that. I’ll give it a go. But I’m expecting the show won’t get renewed, alas.

Dopesick on Hulu traces the history of Oxycontin. Yawn. Pass.

Queens on ABC is a musical drama about four has-been singers reuniting to get the band back together. Yawn. Pass, predict cancellation.

Invasion on Apple TV is about an alien invasion, but seems like it is more about how one woman copes, trying to keep her two kids and herself safe, since the father is useless. But I can’t be sure as the description going around looks like “family-during-crisis” while the trailer looks like “monsters-are-here”. Pass, predict cancellation.

Colin in Black and White on Netflix about Colin Kaepernick becoming an activist. Yawn. Pass.

Dexter: New Blood is back on Showtime and I’m going to predict renewal. But I haven’t binged all of the original, nor finished all of the books, so I’ll wait.

Best Shape of My Life on YouTube about Will Smith getting into shape. I love WS in shows, not so crazy about him in real life. I feel like he’s always “on”, i.e., “Will Smith playing Will Smith”. Pass.

Ragdoll on AMC has a detective trying to catch a serial killer who is sewing victims into one large doll. Yuck. Pass.

The Shrink Next Door on Apple TV deals with a patient who gives control of his life and bank account over to his shrink. A dark comedy, maybe; watchable? I don’t think so. Pass, and predict cancellation.

Yellowjackets on Showtime has a past-is-creepy feel to it. Four women on a soccer team as teens survived a plane crash and have to reconnect later in life as things start to get creepy. I don’t know HOW creepy, so not sure if I’ll watch it or not. Or if it’s worth renewing. But it has Christina Ricci which isn’t favorable for me; Melanie Lynskey who I haven’t seen in anything since 2007’s Drive with Nathan Fillion; Juliette Lewis who I haven’t seen since From Dusk Til Dawn; and Tawny Cypress who I have seen in tons of stuff (Heroes, Blue Bloods, Unforgettable, Supergirl, Blacklist and Bull) but have little sense if her inclusion is good or not. My impression was always “functional”. The trailer has a strong “what really happened” vibe, and I’ll give it a go. But I am going to predict cancellation.

Mayor of Kingstown on Paramount is about a powerful family in Michigan in the law business, and where right and wrong are not so important as power. I’ll give an episode a try, as it has Jeremy Renner and Kyle Chandler. I’m not thrilled however about Dianne West as her voice and delivery have become pretty grating over the years. I’ll predict renewal based on the trailer.

Hit Monkey on Hulu is an animated story about a macaque who helps a wounded assassin but is unable to save him. So he takes over the assassin’s revenge plot. WTH? Pass.

Cowboy Bebop might be a cult classic in anime for space bounty-hunters, but a live-action version? Again, WTH? It’s high-budget and on Netflix, so who knows. I’ll take a crack at Ep 1 and I’ll suggest renewal to S2.

The Wheel of Time is coming to Amazon, and I am in like Flynn for every last episode. Bring it on. I’ll even predict renewal.

Hawkeye on Disney is another Marvel outing, and I’ll be in for that too. The addition of an extra Hawkeye to train will be fun. I’ll predict renewal for it, given it’s built-in audience.

True Story on Netflix stars Kevin Hart playing a pseudo-character like himself, and well, pass.

The Witcher is back on Netflix and just in time for the Christmas season. Can’t wait.

Series premiere: Modern Love

The PolyBlog
November 29 2019

Amazon has a thing for anthology series about love and relationships, and last year’s went nowhere for me. Each segment was a 2 hour movie almost, very rich and vibrant but going nowhere. This year’s show is called Modern Love and I fear it suffers from the same fate. Like a collection of short stories that are more slice-of-life than full stories, the pilot was only 30 minutes long and has some interesting slice-of-life scenes, but hard to say what the real intent of the anthology will be.

In the first episode, the premise is a woman living the single life in New York while living in a rent-controlled building with a doorman. As a recap, the doorman serves as an initial gatekeeper, as well as a judge of her life choices, or at least, of her choices in men. One of the occasional lovers ends up getting her pregnant, and she doesn’t know what to do. The doorman acts as an almost surrogate father for her, with just a hint of personal interest in one scene (why is he discouraging her from dating others?), but outside of her romances, he is surprisingly unconditionally supportive. She decides to keep the baby, raise it on her own, but he helps with bringing in the crib, carrying bags, even showing up in the delivery room (or is it a vision?) to help her get through. In the end, she gets a job offer in LA, he convinces her to take it, and she comes back five years later to see him and introduce her now older family to him, including a new partner. The episode is entitled, “When the Doorman is your Main Man”.

It is short, it is funny in places, it is almost like watching a one-act play. And the two main leads interact well. It’s enjoyable. But if it wasn’t Amazon, would it even make it to air?

Anthologies are tricky business, because ultimately it doesn’t go anywhere, and if you miss an episode, doesn’t matter, because there’s no link between the segments. I don’t know if there is enough in this one to hook people, maybe it works on a binging basis.

I’m going to pass though. Cute, but not enough to hold me.

Series premiere: Watchmen

The PolyBlog
November 27 2019

I knew that the Watchmen as a comic book genre was on the weird side, and I saw a version of it a few years ago (oops, it was 2009 apparently). So I thought I had an inkling of what to expect…superheroes, kind of weird ones, outlawed, but kind of doing the vigilante thing. Okay, I can work with that.

Instead, the new series version goes heavy on the alternate history, police officers wearing masks, and race wars. Umm, okay. Considering I’m watching the latest season of Black Lightning during an occupation, it didn’t feel a whole lot different. Particularly when the lead female cop wears an outfit an awful lot like Blackbird’s.

And at the end of the episode, all I could think was, “What the hell is going on?”. Okay, I sort of get it. A race war in Tulsa in the 20s ignited a huge schism. Nixon is considered awesome. And the 7th Cavalry is a white supremacist organization that has “risen” again to challenge law and order. Except there isn’t anything shown that explains the law and order side or the white supremacist’s specific beef/trigger. The rallying cry other than race. There is almost NO backstory provided. Which is a huge problem to follow.

Don Johnson plays the head of the cops, and he’s pretty good. Spoiler alert though, he’s dead by the end of the episode. His daughter Angela is a go-get-em cop, wears a superhero outfit (FYI, she’s called Sister Night), and is played by Regina King. She also is awesome, and eminently watchable in most scenes, even if you can’t get a handle on her life — cop, superhero, mom, daughter. She has a huge list of roles on IMDB, most of which I haven’t seen, and I didn’t recognize her at all from Big Bang Theory. But she’s watchable.

The rest of the characters and actors? Relatively secondary. And no superheroes. I had no real idea what was going on, but sure, okay, let’s say the cops wear masks, they hunt a bad group, the bad group kills a cop, the cops retaliate in force, I kind of get all that. I’m okay with an alternate history, figure it out as we go, fine. But then there’s a scene with a Lord of the Manor who’s clearly nutters, dealing with loyal servants, celebrating an anniversary of something, and it HAS NO CONNECTION TO THE REST OF THE SHOW. It seemed like the start of a bad Monty Python skit.

I get that it is HBO. I get that renewal / continuing is a totally different business model. But I don’t know how many people beyond the hard-core fan types will stick around past Ep 1. I can’t even decide if I will watch, and I have a pretty high tolerance. I had the same problem with Doom Patrol and passed.

I did see some trailers for later in the series, and it seems a bit more normal in places. Not completely, but enough to give me a preview of something to follow.

Eeny meeny miny moe…Nope, I’m out too.

Series premiere: The Mandalorian

The PolyBlog
November 17 2019

Disney+ has its new Star Wars TV series called The Mandalorian taking place five years after Return of the Jedi. The Mandalorian, a renowned bounty hunter in the style of Boba and Jenga Fett, is working far away from the Galactic Core, and getting by collecting low-value bounties. It was a no-brainer to predict renewal.

I don’t normally give a full recap of the episode, but it is relatively necessary here to explain the plot. A new client offers a large sum to retrieve a 50-year-old package, and other than coordinates, they provide little else in the way of details. Upon arrival, the bounty hunter receives help from a local who wants the group of mercenaries who protect the package removed from the area. The mercenaries are many, he is just one, but the odds are evened out by another bounty hunter who shows up first — a droid with super fast gun reflexes. They end up working together, get to the package, and there are two surprises. The droid bounty hunter has been paid to kill the package, while he gets more money if it is brought back alive; equally, the package turns out to be a young creature of the same species as Yoda, a relative infant. The Mandalorian kills the droid, and the episode ends.

The show has been accurately described as almost a Western, and it has a very strong Western feel to it. Lone gunman rides into town, doesn’t say much, does his job, and rides out. And while that is a great premise, it is really hard to bond with the protagonist if all he does is look blankly at the audience. This is a problem for The Mandalorian because he doesn’t take off his helmet the entire time.

You might be thinking, “But there have been lots of characters with no face that have bonded with their audiences”, including androids and robots. True, yet in almost all cases, they give them other ways to communicate. Heck, even R2D2 had whistles to convey changes in emotions.

For me, it was a challenge in the episode. I like the plot, I like the action, but I find it really hard to care about the Mandalorian. Not that it matters, the show is already renewed for Season 2, and I have no doubt Disney will milk it for several seasons. I just hope there is more than a helmet to react to in the future.

Series premiere: Raising Dion

The PolyBlog
November 5 2019

I have a pretty high tolerance for suspending disbelief in various superhero shows. I don’t expect high quality writing, acting, etc. Sometimes I get that there isn’t even a plot other than villain of the week. Okay, they’re not all home runs. When I read about the new Netflix show called Raising Dion, about a mother with a son who develops powers, I thought it was worth a shot. Man, was I wrong.

Short version is that a family of three has a father who is a storm chaser, and who died chasing one. The details aren’t entirely clear about what happened, other than he drowned. He left behind a kid and mother/wife. The kid still hopes Dad will come back, Mom knows he’s gone, even if they never found the body. The son is trying to learn magic, and starts displaying telekinetic powers. But after he does some basic stuff, cyclones seem to come with it. He has trouble turning off the power. And, overall, Mom is struggling to deal. Then the ghost of Dad appears…whatever.

Here’s the problem. The kid is TERRIBLE. He’s played by Ja’Siah Young, and I’m sure he’ll improve, or okay in short bursts, but he’s in most scenes and he’s unwatchable. His mother, Alisha Wainwright, was okay on Shadowhunters, and basically okay here, but the show isn’t about her. Or the kid’s godfather, played by Jason Ritter.

I finished the first episode, and I was lucky to get that far. Meh.