The month of October means that a lot of shows dropped and there’s not enough time for it. On the to-watch list? Criminal (Netflix), Kingdom (Netflix), Young Wallander (Netflix), and a couple I’m already forgetting, never mind a movie or two. I need to finish up my third season of Young Justice (DC Universe) so I can drop the service.
It took a bit for me to get to it but we got the last two episodes of Lovecraft Country done up as a double-header and it worked really well. We really enjoyed this series a lot and while I get some of the criticisms of it because of how the anthology was adapted into a series, there’s so much to enjoy here with such a great cast and solid writing. The whole thing came together well and brought that classic kind of storytelling out with the modern flair in all the right ways. I’m excited to see what a second season might entail but also where these actors end up over the next few years.
My second-screening for part of last week and most of this week is Buck Rogers, the two-season 1979 TV series. It was a guilty pleasure show growing up because you had so little science fiction and it certainly hasn’t aged well in a lot of ways. But it does play to what a lot of older SF does in highlighting social issues through a futuristic lens in order to get points across. But the show hits just the right level of campy for me – which is something that Gil Gerard didn’t care for while filming it. With him rewriting it and trying to get it a bit more serious, I’d love to see what a more straightforward edition would have been. It just could have used less of the whole womanizing thing that was part and parcel of so much 60s and 70s TV.
The final season of Cougar Town is something that I kind of burned through quicker than I intended but it turned into a “get it done” kind of thing. Not because it wasn’t fun or anything but just because I could see the end coming and wanted more. This season felt like they weren’t sure how to handle the romance side of things as well as the lack of Bobby outside of a couple of scenes and some remote stuff as he had gone to another show by that point. This is a show that I think could have gone another couple of seasons easy but I’m glad that I did get to see it even if it was a few years too late.
Cleaning out more of my Netflix queue, I got in the six-episode Traitors series that focuses on the post-WW2 era and some of what was going on in London at that point as some were keenly aware of the threats coming from the Soviet Union and what needed to be done while others couldn’t believe it. There’s a lot of romancing and other stuff to add to the drama of it all as well and it works nicely, but the spycraft has a neat feeling to it and has a lot of really great tense sequences.
And if there was a show that I was just delighted to binge the hell out of it was the final season of Schitt’s Creek as it arrived on Netflix recently. This season brings most of the storylines to a close but it’s just the absurdity of so much of it that made me laugh, the actors so solid in their roles and the way they were able to manage the whole thing. It’s a rough first season but everything after it is just pure gold and thoroughly enjoyable and quotable.
And just for good measure because every time I turn on the TV I watch it…
