I wrote that last binge watching post in August in part because I could see a bulge of shows finishing up for us shortly and felt like I had to clear the decks or just give up on a bunch of titles.

Binge Watching Time – Not AI, I messed this up on my own

Anyway, this is what has passed through our screen since last time around.

I Will Find You – Netflix

We are back with Harlan Coben, the mystery writer whose books I’ve never read with another Netflix adaptation.  This one stands out because it takes place in the US.  As I noted in a previous post, he is a US author and all his books take place in the US, but all the Netflix adaptations so far have been set in the UK.

So a law professor jailed for killing is son in a fit of uncontrolled night terrors, and is convinced it is true because people keep telling him it happened, but then evidence shows up hinting that his son might still be alive.  Kick off a completely convoluted sequence of events including ludicrous prison/jail breaks, police cover ups, an empty grave, a father/daughter FBI team, a billionaire’s charity that is supposed to be helping children, and a lot of police procedural issues, and wind up at the expected Harlan Coben ending.  I mean, we’re at least half a dozen shows based on his novels at this point, you know how he likes to end them right?

Silo Season 3 – Apple TV

Former sheriff Juliette is back from the outside and is now mayor because… the AI wants to keep her under control and feed her drugs to make her forget.  The AI manifests itself as a screen in the IT director’s office and it tells the Silo what to do and can, at need, kill everybody in the silo by releasing poison gas.  So the season within the silo is mostly about stopping that.

But half of the season takes place in the before times where we learn how/why the silos were built by the world’s richest man to save humanity from the nano technology being unleashed on the world by unfettered Wall Street greed.  So the whole background story is told in a convoluted way.  Also, we learn the truth about the AI.

But mostly the season sets up the dramatic fourth and final season where the conflict between those in the silo and those controlling the silo is resolved or something.  One hates dismiss ten episodes as nothing more than a bridge to get to the final outcome… but welcome to the middle chapters I guess.

Lucky – Apple TV

A limited series.  Seven episodes and it is done.

(Unless it does really well and then somebody will find a way to revive it and we’ll get Lucky – Aftermath or Lucky Origins.)

Anyway, Anna Taylor-Joy and her husband are in Vegas with a bunch of money they obviously just stole… and then she wakes up the next morning and the money and her hubby are gone and we’re off on a roller coaster of escape scenes, character introductions, back story, and flash backs to growing up with her dad, played by Timothy Olyphant.  Avoids getting tied down in the details of how the money was stolen, so less convoluted mechanics and more personal relationships, though I am still rolling my eyes at a couple of details that came up.

Fun, worth the time, and interesting to see Annette Benning back again in her new role of being cast as a crime family matriarch.

Star City – Apple TV

For All Mankind did so well that they decided to roll up Star City, which is the exact same story, but told from the Soviet perspective… though the Soviets have their own convoluted view of whole space race and what it really means.

It is kind of neat, getting the Soviet perspective and all that.  Also, we get to see the KGB take people out and shoot them when they are not sufficiently on board with the program or might reveal embarrassing mistakes made by the party.  That used to be a thing that we claimed separated us from the Soviets, but not so much these days if you watch Lioness, which I cover below.

The whole thing isn’t telling a new story so far as I can tell, just a different angle on the same story, which feels more like fan service than anything.  But fan service done right pays well.  This is how we go… what… three Downton Abby movies?  I wasn’t as into it, but For All Mankind also wasn’t really my thing either… at least not after the second season or so.

Reacher Season 4 – Amazon Prime

I have to remind myself that, having read a few of the books from the series, that the series is much less convoluted than the books.  Still, the show cannot discard all of that.  So Reacher shows up, witnesses a death that gets him hooked into a plot to do… something… where he sleeps with one of the main characters… always a plot point in the books so far as I can tell… then gets chased by a gang, foreign agents, government agents, random ass hired thuds, and the minions of the puppet master who is pulling all the strings, while just being huge and punching the crap out of people.  He is often wearing clothes he just stole.

Overall, Reacher himself is practically an MMORPG player character.  He shows up somewhere, gets a quest, kills people, steals shit, gets wounded and then gets back up like he drank a healing potion, and basically does whatever he wants and somehow solves the riddle and turns in the quest.  He doesn’t even have a home.  He is literally a murder hobo.

For some reason that makes the whole series even more amusing.

The Capture – 3 Seasons – Peacock

This one is kind of interesting in that the seasons were filmed a few years apart.  The whole thing revolves around the government, and specifically the security services, manipulating digital evidence to “put the bad guys away,” by creating, or recreating, scenes that they were sure happened, but didn’t record.

The first season, from 2019, has a somewhat limited view of what can be done.  The second season, post-Covid, ups the stakes on deep fakes.  And by the third season we’re full on into AI territory and some seriously convoluted motivations.  A decent watch, but depressing in its outlook that due process is compromised and, in the end, the heads of all the various factions in the conflict all belong to the same club and are dedicated to maintaining the status quo no matter their public positions.

Lioness Season 3 – Paramount+

Let’s take The Capture and ramp up government overreach by about a thousand percent.  Season one was okay, but I didn’t even bother covering it here.  Season two was a snooze that we didn’t finish.  But season three… this is where Taylor Sheridan ramps up on the special ops competence porn where the CIA is operating with in the US entirely unlawfully and murdering people, throwing people in black sites, and chest beating about how they keep the sheep safe, sounding a lot more like a pack of wolves themselves than any sort of defender of the flock.  They murder people and just shrug when it turns out they were wrong.  They are completely self-possessed with the righteousness of their actions and scorn the idea that law or morality should constrain them.

And I could take that.  There is an interesting underlying story, with enough hints and change ups to keep you engaged.  But the competence thing took a serious blow when the show made clear this was not some alternate, spec ops West Wing reality, but in the current administration timeline.  This is selling a huge lie, and it makes a lot of the messaging clear.  They repeatedly discount the news media as self-serving liars, but then cut to a follow on scene about how they are going to feed the media lies and hide facts… and even murder somebody who just knows too much and might reveal secrets that would embarrass the party..  Add in rehabilitating the Russians, scorning Ukraine, and demonizing the Iranians and it looks a lot like government sponsored propaganda.

So just the kind of show that people who complain about politics in entertainment like.

The Gentleman Season 2 – Netflix

The strange thing about this show, for me at least, is that it is flagged on Netflix simply as a “comedy.”  And, while there are humorous and witty aspects to the show, it is also a violent gangster drama where people get beat up or murdered on the regular.  This is no more funny and no less violent than Mobland, so I am not sure how you justify that as the sole category for the show.

Anyway, the whole thing picks up from the first season with the drug operations expanding to Italy, which brings in the Italian mafia and a bunch of complications and conflicts and people are murdered, somebody is fed to a tiger, there is a stylish wedding, and a whole convoluted sub-plot around legalizing cannabis in the UK, which is all very silly… silly, but not exactly comedy… but the casting is good enough that you don’t really care.  A good Ray Winstone role, who turns out is a bit younger than I thought.

So there we go.  I feel like this post really overused the word “convoluted,” but I wonder if that was just me in need of a thesaurus to find a few more synonyms, or if we’ve just reached a point in action focused shows where we’re so trained on how plots get resolved that writers have decided that they just have to step outside the lines of likely scenarios in order to keep us engaged.