The debut of September means that a lot of shows dropped and there’s not enough time for it. On the to-watch list? The Boys Season 2 (Amazon Prime), Kingdom (Netflix), Young Wallander (Netflix), and a couple I’m already forgetting, never mind a movie or two. I also added Ted Lasso (Apple TV+) and I’m hoping to background watch Buck Rogers (NBC) soon. I’m still working my way through Cougartown (Hulu) and loving every minute of it and I’m still conflicted about my rewatch of Whitney (NBC) but I haven’t seen it since its original broadcast and I love the majority of the cast.
This week proved to be pretty Netflix heavy when I wasn’t keeping up on my backlog of sitcoms. With a few shows finished up recently, I kicked the week off with the Love, Guaranteed movie. I’m a sucker for romcoms and just seeing people happy so these things get me if there’s a decent enough hook or actors I like. This one is pretty by the numbers and the trailer essentially tells you everything. But it has just enough charm to be a decent enough evening spent because I really like Rachael Leigh cook and hate how she was basically shuttered for years after the excellent Josie and the Pussycats film that everyone else finally came around on. We also get Damon Wayans Jr. here and I’ve enjoyed his work on both New Girl and Happy Endings a lot and rewatched both of recently. He’s really low-key here which is something you don’t see too often for him and it was a welcome change of pace.
The Netflix series Away wasn’t huge on my to-watch list but it was something I had a minor interest in because I enjoy your basic near-ish future space exploration shows. With a long wait until For All Mankind comes back, it was easy to roll into this as lighter fare with a lot of predictability and cliches. And it does that pretty well, which means there are chunks every other episode or so that I’m fast-fowarding through because it is way too predictable on every level. I like some of the Earth-based things and getting to know the backstories for the cast, but this is one of those projects where the journey is slowing us down from a lot more interesting destination, i.e. getting to Mars itself. There are interesting areas to explore here but they’re lightly touched upon but are at least getting a nod.
I was always going to be late to getting to this show because I watch it with my youngest daughter and she hasn’t been with me much this year due to the pandemic. With the third season of Dark arriving at the end of June and her back this past weekend with me, we were able to get through about half of it. It’s a thoroughly engaging series overall with what it does and how it unfolds, but we’re really jonesing for some answers as we get to the halfway mark. This is the final season so we know that we’re going to get some – and the creative behind this has two new shows coming to Netflix next year – that we’re sure we’re going to get something. I love properties like this that are challenging, even more so since I can’t pick up all the cultural elements to highlight different time periods easily the way I can with American history, and this scratches an itch that hasn’t been touched since the Primer film.
And just for good measure because every time I turn on the TV I watch it…
