Back for another binge watching post, now with a new logo designed to antagonize those with any design sense.  Canva made me do it.  No AI design could be this bad!

Binge Watching Time

It has been a while since I did one of these posts and… well, it isn’t like we stopped watching TV, I just stopped posting about it so now I have to remember what we even watched.

I suppose if I forgot something then that says more about the show than anything I might write.

Also, there will be at least one spoiler from a past season revealed below.  It will be noted in the heading.  Proceed with caution.

Anyway, off we go.

The Testaments – Hulu

In 2019, even as The Handmaid’s Tale was doing well on Hulu, Margret Atwood published The Testaments, a sequel to the 1985 original, no doubt drive by her being exasperated by religious zealots in the US deciding that Gilead seemed like a pretty good model for their dystopian future plans.  The mistake here is thinking they can read.  Anyway, another warning… but also hope as the book follows Aunt Lydia who has decided to undo Gilead.

The show, features her as well, but the ten episodes of the first season almost feel like an origin story as well as an elaborate “previously on” catch-up as to where everybody left off, including how Aunt Lydia came out the other end of the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale alive.

Want to learn more about the social structure of Gilead?  Here is your chance.  Aching to see some mighty blows against the Christofascist patriarchy?  That is probably coming next season.  Until then it is all female subjugation and catching a smoke when nobody is looking.

Paradise Season 2 – Hulu

After the first season of life in a billionaire’s bunker where the president of the United States was murdered… that is not a spoiler… I think that happened in the first episode of season 1… we’re headed to Graceland.  Yes, that Graceland.  Where Elvis lived.  Seriously, it is a whole thing.

Xavier Collins, former secret service agent and son of an airline pilot, so of course he can fly a plane… flies a plane from the underground bunker that is Paradise to go find his wife.  And then his plane crashes, right around Memphis.  Everybody has to walk or drive after that, and all roads lead back to the bunker.

More of a The Walking Dead survival vibe… no zombies, but people were always the real problem in TWD… as the outside world turns out to have carried on while Sinatra was hunkered down in her bunker.

Rick and Morty Season 9 – Hulu

I am still watching Rick and Morty?  I guess so.  Trust me to be the last one to leave the party.

After seasons 7 and 8 focused in on Rick’s quest to come to terms with… well… himself and his choices and existence among an infinite series of parallel universes where all choices have played out and where the pointlessness of anything has been made manifest… we’re back to Interdimensional Cable… or something like that.

Basically, the season sees a return to episodic content focused on adventures that continue to test and expose what it means to be a family with some guy who… well, dealt with all the stuff in seasons 7 and 8.

Windows Bay – Apple TV

This got a lot of buzz for a bit, playing for a mix of comedy and horror in that very New England sort of way like they’re living in Barnabas Collins’ old place but haven’t quite figured out why all this strange stuff is happening.

The comedy was a bit flat… I was down with the Daddy’s Home and other board games in the hotel, but that couldn’t carry everything… while the horror was not all that scary.  And the actors were… fine.  Everybody was fine.  There was nothing wrong here.  It just didn’t do much for me.  Also, the fact that my wife called out every plot twist well in advance took a bit of the edge off.  This is the problem with getting old.  Until the memory loss really starts to kick in, we’re hard to fool.  Still, there are worse shows to spend your time with.

The Boroughs – Netflix

What do you do when all your favorite actors are too old to be cast as middle-age anymore?  Set a series in a retirement home!

This is also a bit of comedy horror combined, but most of it takes place in a made for the show cul de sac outside of Albuquerque that looks very much like the cul de sac used in Pluribus… which I guess was also sort of comedy horror, if we’re just going to pick up that theme… but is not in fact the same cul de sac.

Seriously, they look very similar, but when I checked, they were not the same.

Each show built their of little circle of houses outside of Albuquerque, which seems like a huge waste of resources, unless you’re the contractor who builds fake stage cul de sacs for television productions.

Yeah, so, nursing home in the middle of the desert, everything is a bit creepy and totally suspicious and there are monsters coming out of the ovens who have a weakness to… checks notes… the RF emissions from cathode ray tubes… old televisions.

Enter Sam, whose wife had bought them a house on the fabricated cul de sac for them to retire to, then she passed away and now he has to live there alone… and, also, his hobby is fixing old televisions.  Silly at times, but moves quickly and only lasts eight episodes.  I enjoyed it, though I might be influenced by a decades long crush on Geena Davis.

Little House on the Prairie – Netflix

We had to watch this one because my wife watched the Melissa Gilbert/Michael Landon series back in the 70s and early 80s.  They cranked out 9 seasons with 20+ one hour episodes in each, reaching 200 episodes total along with a few post-series specials.  It was kind of a big deal and threaded a careful line between total schmaltz and a rose-tinted view of reality.  It made people feel good and girls could project themselves onto the life of Laura Ingalls.

So of course somebody had to remake it.

Enter Netflix with an eight episode first season and… I don’t know.  I feel like network TV shows cranking out 20+ episodes a year didn’t always lead to the highest quality output, but it did allow for a few mediocre episodes to sneak in without spoiling the whole show I suppose, with each episode being part of a much larger canvas.

Anyway, it is probably more realistic than the original series, in no small part due to the portrayal of the father, who uproots his whole family and hauls them in a covered wagon to the wilds of Missouri where the railroad has promised settlers free land from the government.

There he alternately screws things up and then fixes the problems he caused.  Eventually the government buys the land from the Osage, the local tribe who lives there and isn’t all that happy at all these people just showing up, then tells the settlers that the land isn’t free.  Everybody is mad at the government, who hadn’t promised anybody anything, and at the end of eight episodes the Ingalls are back in the covered wagon looking for a new home muttering about the stab in the back and ready to vote Republican.  It is the genesis of modern conservative thought, the myth of self-reliance while depending on government subsidies.

The Agency Season 2 – Amazon Prime

Um… I put this one in the draft back when I started this post in early July and I have sort of lost the thread as to what happened at this point.  I mean, it was cool spy stuff and Michael Fassbender looks so cool and gets the job done and Saura Lightfoot-Leon kicks ass and somebody loses a leg in the process and it all ends with a big explosion and a cliff hangar that portends another season.  Oh, and the Earl of Grantham gets totally shot in the face.  That’ll show him.  So I seem to recall I enjoyed it without being able to bring back sufficient details to explain why.

Also, I don’t think I even wrote about season 1… so that was also a thing.  The problem is that the tag “The Agency” now covers several things including a “never actually happened” SOE action spy title that was cancelled 15 years ago.  Time flies.

Finally, this was on Paramount+, which shows you how much I’ve forgotten.

Hacks Season 5 – HBO Max

The victory lap season.  Or maybe the fan service season.  All cast conflicts that were in play get resolved, any final goals get wrapped up, and Deborah gets to play Madison Square Garden.  Everybody finds a new place and Jimmy drives around LA in a new BMW SUV.

Or was that just a commercial?  We had HBO with ads and they sometimes run those ads mid-show with cast members and if you’re looking at your phone and only half paying attention because there is no real payoff expected it might seem normal for Jimmy to be grabbing flowers and delivering a stuffed animal or something.  He’s a Hollywood agent.  They have to get stuff done.

On the one hand, it feels good for a series to get a farewell season.  On the other hand, if you’re final season is going to be very low stakes, maybe don’t milk it out for ten episodes?  Overall I enjoyed the series but this final season didn’t really move the needle.

The Boys Season 5 – Amazon Prime

Proving once again that satire of extremists is impossible, the final two seasons of the show saw the producers exasperation peak as they pulled out the stops point out that Homelander is the bad guy and not the patriotic icon that the nut cases seem to think he is.  He was always an insecure, weak willed, petty, bullying narcissist, but they really got out the fat, licorice scented, felt tipped marker to underline that point, with half a dozen exclamation points for emphasis when he decides he is God and his sycophants go right along with it.  Seriously, that happened.

Anyway, the Homelander situation gets resolved.  This was not the spoiler I warned you about, because you could probably figure that out in any case, it is the “how” that carries the ending.

Sugar Season 2 – Apple TV (Spoiler)

The first season of Sugar was trite until we got to mid season and then there was a big surprise reveal.  He’s an alien.  He’s learned about humanity mostly from movies.  He loves movies.  He’s here with a group and then they are discovered and they leave while he stays behind because… reasons.

So then we’re back to being a very trite, too cute by half detective noir set in LA where he drives around in the most obnoxiously attention getting 65 Corvette and I am just sick of this shit where random ass shows have characters driving around in classic cars the writer or director coveted when they were a kid.  Just stop.

It is like putting Philip Marlow in a Pierce Arrow or Same Spade in a hot rod.  I blame Magnum PI and that Ferrari 308 that Tom Selleck flitted about in.  Everybody doesn’t need to Jim Rockford rolling around in some innocuous mid-price Detroit iron, but you’re a lot less conspicuous in a beige Camry than a metallic blue Corvette.

Anyway, despite standing out like a sore thumb in the obvious car and being overdressed in his tailored suits, he does solve a pretty big crime.  And then his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic answering machine gets a message and maybe the alien thing isn’t completely off the table.

Dutton Ranch – Paramount+

Fresh from Yellowstone, Beth and Rip arrive in Texas, buy a new ranch, and proceed to get into trouble with the law, the neighbors, and a drug cartel.  I mean, problems follow the Dutton’s like stink on shit.  And, of course, there is the Taylor Sheridan philosophy throughout, which is that it is perfectly fine to murder people so long as they are from the city… or sold you a bad cow… or looked at your wife the wrong way… or if you just don’t like them.  The Dutton’s murdering people is always sanctioned by the script.

Like the final season of Yellowstone, Dutton Ranch largely suffers from the lack of gravitas that somebody like Kevin Costner brought to the early series… and I wouldn’t credit it, not being a huge Costner fan, but everybody in the show feels like they are in the B story and something more interesting is happening elsewhere.  Rip and Beth are too cartoonish without somebody there to anchor them.

Maybe they can do a cross-over with Landman and get Billy Bob Thorton in, because he’s the only one holding that show together in the second season.  Oh, crap, did I forget that Landman had a second season as well?  On it in a sec.

Landman Season 2 – Paramount+

As noted above, Billy Bob Thorton carries the show on his back for the whole second season as a bunch of people he is depending on just disappoint him over and over and you feel for him.  Worth it if you liked the first season… and I did like the first season… but if you didn’t there is nothing here to bring it back for you.

[Edit: Also, I apparently covered this already in a past binge watching post.  So when you hear me talk about blogging to help maintain a mental timeline, this is an example of why.  But see if what I said here matches what I said back then!]