This NYT article makes some good points, but without a good conclusion. Many TV shows are good, but not great. It is suggested that actors who were in great shows are used to make new, uninspired shows.
In February, Glover and Erskine returned in the action thriller “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” on Amazon Prime Video. It’s … fine? A takeoff on the 2005 film, it updates the story of a married duo of spies by imagining the espionage business as gig work.
If you’ve played Fallout, then you are already watching this show, and know that it pays off.
Fallout is a TV show based on a game series with 9 editions. I haven’t played the game, but didn’t have any trouble figuring out what’s going on. Fallout takes place in a post-apocalyptic alternative universe that is similar to ours until the 1950’s, when computer chips weren’t invented. The technology and culture advance, but with a retro feel. The show, like the game, is satirical. It can be plenty violent, but in a quirky way.
The plot isn’t complicated. The show focuses on the three main characters as they work their way through the post-apocalyptic world to get what they want. Lucy is good and attractive, Ghoul is corrupt and mutated, and Maximus a regular guy who wants to be heroic.
Fallout looks and sounds great. Much effort went into making it seem like a plausible 1950’s world with technological advances. It seems like a show that I will be rewatching.
One aspect of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters that hurt the show is that the young characters aren’t appealing. They aren’t attractive, charismatic or clever. One Asian girl, Cate, is petulant, whiny and aloof. I wasn’t familiar with the actress, Anna Sawai, so couldn’t tell if it was the writing or the actress.
When watching Shogun, I didn’t realize it was the same actress. The character, Toda, is alluring, strong and sympathetic even though she is rarely talking or even doing much. For Sawai to do so much, so subtly, she should get an Emmy.
The writers and director for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, clearly want us to not like or be sympathetic to the young characters. I don’t know why. That could have been a good show.
Shogun, on ABC and Hulu, is one of those rare TV shows that gets my full attention when I watch. It’s along the lines of Game of Thrones, but without the dragon fantasy. Palace intrigue shows suffer if everyone is too grim and earnest, and the line between good and evil is too clear. That’s what Shogun and Game of Thrones gets right.
While cleaning up the hard drive, I was checking out the TV show, Once Upon a Time, to see if it was worth burning to a disk.
The premise is a bunch of characters from the Enchanted Forest live in a little town in Maine called Storybrooke. Initially, none of them know they are from the Enchanted Forest, but they figure it out as the story progresses.
All the supporting female characters are hot brunettes with heaving bosoms. All the supporting male characters look kind of like Keanu Reeves. It’s kind of hard to tell them apart.
It’s the main characters where they missed the boat. The actor in the blue sweater isn’t even supposed to be a guy. That’s Snow White. She has little charisma and isn’t a handsome woman. Her worst feature is her protruding ears. Why she’d sport this hair cut is anyone’s guess. The male antagonist is a weaselly fellow with greasy hair.
There is a 10 year old boy who is the center of attention. He is an unbearable little prick. I blame the director.
I started watching the TV show, Reacher, a couple of months ago, and really enjoyed it. On social media, it gets criticized quite often. That’s fine, not everyone likes the same shows, but the review in The Atlantic is illuminating. Sophisticated people don’t like Reacher.
Amazon’s Reacher, the second season of which wraps up this week, is among the most-watched shows in the country.
I like it, and so do a lot of other people. It’s got an 8.1 rating on IMDB.
It’s as if our collective imaginative power source, its fuses blown, has switched over to some kind of small, noisy backup generator. Enough with nuance, enough with finesse.
You get it? The popularity of Reacher is indicative of a malfunction in America. How could a show that doesn’t address contemporary issues, politics or anything controversial, be such a threat to the deep-thinkers?
Reacher is pure masculinity, so the opposite of a Progressive. Reacher has a strict moral code that he lives by. He doesn’t force anyone to live like him. He doesn’t talk about it, he just does it. He is not a victim or a victimizer. Everything he is, is the opposite of Progressives and the political elite.
It helps that the casting, directing and writing are well-done.
Alone is a survival show different from all the rest. The difference is that the participants are completely alone. There is not a group of camera men and producers just off screen. Participants are dropped off in a harsh wilderness environment with limited equipment. Someone could die, but nobody has yet. The participants are spread out, five or ten miles from any other participant. Each has a few cameras to film themselves and a radio to call in when they are ready to quit. The last person remaining wins a big money prize.
Alone is a great show to have on in the background because there isn’t a plot, but each participant is doing something interesting. After watching several seasons, there is dependable sequence to the seasons.
First episode: Participants get dropped off. A tarp is thrown over a tree for an expedient shelter, then each person does a little recon of their area. They spend the night terrified of getting eaten by the local apex predators. Each person talks about how prepared they are for this experience, but by the end of the episode, one or two have dropped out.
The next few episodes: Participants build a shelter, set snares, gather plants and mushrooms and start fishing.
Episodes after that: Some people get really hungry, somebody gets injured, a few try hunting. It starts getting really cold. A few more people drop out. People who stay are making musical instruments or patio furniture to keep busy.
The last few episodes, there are three or four people toughing it out. Somebody accidentally burns down their hut, some else is delirious from starvation. One by one, they drop out until the last person wins.
To keep the seasons from getting repetitive, the producers vary the situation. The first few seasons are on the Western Canadian coast, so the terrain is mountainous and miserable, fishing is the best approach and water may be scarce. In Mongolia, water is available and it’s flat, so fishing can work along with snares for small animals. In central Canada, big game hunting is feasible. Moose, bear and musk ox are hunted.
Another way to mix it up is to vary the participants. One season, they choose people who didn’t win from previous seasons. In another, they use teams of two, rather than individual participants. Loneliness is a big issue, so that could have helped, but it didn’t change things much.
Alone is not a show to watch with your full attention, but in the background, it works great. I’d give it 8 out of 10. It’s showing on Hulu, Netflix and the History Channel.
Is there anyone who would like the TV show Archer, who hasn’t watched it?
People who consider The Simpsons and Family Guy as edgy animated shows, then they may never have found Archer on FX. The series finale just aired, but it’s streaming on ABC, FXNow and Hulu. There were a couple of slow seasons in the middle, but Archer is nearly a perfect show. 9.5/10.
Adam Reed was searching for inspiration. He’d just sold his stake in the production company he co-founded, 70/30 Productions — responsible for his animated series Sealab 2021 and Frisky Dingo…
Both of those animated TV shows are very funny. Sealab 2021 is an absurd adaptation of the 1972 show Sealab 2020. Frisky Dingo is about an alien who came to Earth to destroy us, but virtually nothing happens that like you’d expect.
Archer, centered on a profoundly narcissistic, idiotic, and effortlessly suave spy, Sterling Archer (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin), who does espionage for the International Secret Intelligence Service (ISIS, more on that name later), his mother Malory’s (the late Jessica Walter) spy agency.
The main character, Sterling Archer, is what a Brit might imagine as an American James Bond. Archer is handsome, talented, upper class and a total smart-arse. H. Jon Benjamin also voices Bob from Bob’s Burgers. They did a crossover episode at the start of season 4.
“I was trying to write Archer as the biggest bastard I possibly could,” explains Reed. “Working on the pilot, I was reading all these Flashman books, and Harry Flashman is the worst guy in the world, but you still kind of root for him.”
I have listened to the Flashman books. The first novel was published in 1969, but the premise of the series is that the books are the collected papers of Harry Flashman, a military man from the 1800’s. Harry Flashman is a coward and a womanizer who stumbles into several historical events and comes out seeming like a hero. The language is unbelievably racist and sexist. In spite of that, Flashman is likeable because he amusing and honest with himself. Sterling Archer is much like that. He is witty and a talented spy, but he is an absolute jerk.
With Jessica Walter and Judy Greer, were you inspired to cast them in this by their characters in Arrested Development? Because the characters they play hew close to the ones in that show.
They do very much. Certainly, at the beginning, I had pitched it as “Arrested Development meets James Bond.” I didn’t want to stray too far from that at first, and then we found ourselves in new and strange territory with those characters. The main reason — if not the only reason — that Judy had agreed to be on the show was that Jessica had already said yes. We shamelessly splashed [Jessica’s] name to all the VO agents.
Arrested Development is another TV show worth watching. All of these shows are funny and bizarre.
Archer Vice was probably the most divisive season of the show because it was such a departure from previous seasons. Looking back on that, how do you feel?
[They were] infuriated! I think that also coincided with the whole ISIS thing. Part of it was, I was feeling a little burned out. I thought Archer would be on for four seasons, so when they said, “Hey, let’s do another season!” I was like, “Oh, shit.” I talked to my agent about it and he was like, “That’s a terrible idea,” and I talked to FX about it and they were like, “That’s a terrible idea.” One of the first rules of TV is: if something’s working, don’t fix it. But I just thought it would be really fun.
Season 5 is when the show wasn’t it’s best. For a couple of seasons after that, the Archer characters were in a completely different setting. Those aren’t great seasons, but better than most shows on TV.
The interview is worth reading if you are a fan of Archer, and if you aren’t, then give it a try. One or two episodes is enough. There is continuity, so it’s best to start at the beginning.
