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.

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.

Author John Green provided the source material for Hulu’s Looking for Alaska, a story about a kid going to boarding school, falling in love and dealing with loss. It’s not clear who will be “lost”, but since it looks more like a mini-series than a series, I didn’t predict renewal or cancellation. It likely will be the narrator who is lost, so mini-series makes sense.

Charlie Plummer plays the main character, Miles aka Pudge, and generally speaking, he’s a wallflower to whom nothing ever happens. His father went to a boarding academy (which seems way more like a summer camp), and he wants to go too to experience SOMETHING (not for nothing, he had no friends at his regular school anyway). Plummer is okay, but the character is mostly a blank slate. I haven’t seeen Plummer before, but wide-eyed innocence is fine. In fact, the whole show feels a lot like Almost Famous, same outsider-looking-in vibe.

Except instead of Penny Lane, we have wild child Alaska Young, played by Kristine Froseth. Alone, no family seems to be in the picture back home, drinking, smoking, has some college-age boyfriend somewhere. But Miles is wowed by her. Yet for all the adoration, I didn’t see it. She seemed kind of average to me. There were no huge Penny Lane / bigger than life moments, and while she’s okay, I didn’t really see the wow factor.

Other citizens of the academy include Denny Love as Miles’ roommate, and Jay Lee as the cool kid who knows all the dirt on everyone. They were okay, but I didn’t care about either one until near the end of the episode.

There’s a sub-story about who ratted out two kids who were going to have sex for the first time, and if it wasn’t Alaska ratting them out, I’d be shocked. Everybody assumes it was the new kid (Miles) or his roommate, but that’s just a plot device to ramp up some tension with some other kids. Yawn.

I care not one whit about the show. I am however tempted to consider picking up the book and giving it a go.