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chuckroHulu has been streaming NBC comedies just after they air, which meant that I could actually watch these basically as they came out. It’s been a real change!
Perfect Harmony (TV Series, Season 1) - If you’re curious, the pilot is impressively compact and well-delivered, and I quite like Anna Camp. This is in some ways a successor to Glee, though there’s a lot to be said for doing it with adults (and it’s significantly less queer, but no one should be surprised by that when you’re talking about a church choir in Kentucky). It’s goofy, it’s funny, and it’s not particularly deep. Arthur has the same revelations a bunch of times and people’s relative intelligence tends to fluctuate, but all within standard sitcom parameters. I have no idea if they’ll get a second season (and worry that the episodes will get weaker if they do), but it’s also fine as an entertaining single season even if we never know Ginny’s long-term plans or if Arthur/Adams shippers will get their due.
The Good Place (TV Series, Season 4) - As we come full circle, the cockroaches try to come up with a way to save humanity from eternal torment. Not only do they succeed, but they manage to make everything work at a steady pace, and they also end the series on a solid, definitive and final note. It’s extremely rare that a series gets exactly the right amount of time and manages to stick the landing this well—most times, they either get cut off too early, get pushed into continuing past where they should have stopped, or just manage to mangle whatever they were building towards. This is a solid series that I suspect I’ll want to re-watch in full at some point in the future. (Random note: It occurred to me that the “no one has gotten to the Good Place in 500 years” thing must have been a later decision, because it inadvertently made Mindy St. Clair the best-scoring person in that timespan.)
Stranger Things (Netflix, Season 3) – Did El always talk in Hulkspeak? Because she spends the most episodes either making out with Mike, screaming, or speaking in Hulkspeak, and it seems like she should be more well-adjusted by now. Now that we’re in the third season and there are several adults who acknowledge that the supernatural is real and that the Mind Flayer and the Upside-Down are genuine concerns, the “several plots, no communication” thing makes much less sense. As soon as Will knowns something is wrong, he can tell his mom and get the chief of police behind him; but instead we get the kids doing their own thing while the adults follow a different thread etc etc. (And they try to excuse the separation, but the excuses are getting thin.) Credit, though, for setting up a lot of things that get used later on, including the fireworks and Susie. They clearly write each season with responses to previous seasons in mind: There are more female characters getting more screen time, there’s an explicitly gay character, and the Joyce/Hopper shippers…well, it sucks to be them. This has the feel of a series finale (since they probably weren’t sure what Netflix would do afterwards), as the gang breaks up, El’s powers are seemingly gone, Hopper is dead (unless, of course, he’s “the American” the Russians have), and life is moving on.
I watched the first two episodes of The Mandalorian via my brother-in-law’s Disney+ when we visited them, and I find that I agree wholeheartedly with the three-word review I had been given ahead of time: It’s a western. This is a story about a cowboy buckaroo out to make a living for himself and this weird kid he picked up in the wild frontiers, it just happens to be in space and have robots.
Perfect Harmony (TV Series, Season 1) - If you’re curious, the pilot is impressively compact and well-delivered, and I quite like Anna Camp. This is in some ways a successor to Glee, though there’s a lot to be said for doing it with adults (and it’s significantly less queer, but no one should be surprised by that when you’re talking about a church choir in Kentucky). It’s goofy, it’s funny, and it’s not particularly deep. Arthur has the same revelations a bunch of times and people’s relative intelligence tends to fluctuate, but all within standard sitcom parameters. I have no idea if they’ll get a second season (and worry that the episodes will get weaker if they do), but it’s also fine as an entertaining single season even if we never know Ginny’s long-term plans or if Arthur/Adams shippers will get their due.
The Good Place (TV Series, Season 4) - As we come full circle, the cockroaches try to come up with a way to save humanity from eternal torment. Not only do they succeed, but they manage to make everything work at a steady pace, and they also end the series on a solid, definitive and final note. It’s extremely rare that a series gets exactly the right amount of time and manages to stick the landing this well—most times, they either get cut off too early, get pushed into continuing past where they should have stopped, or just manage to mangle whatever they were building towards. This is a solid series that I suspect I’ll want to re-watch in full at some point in the future. (Random note: It occurred to me that the “no one has gotten to the Good Place in 500 years” thing must have been a later decision, because it inadvertently made Mindy St. Clair the best-scoring person in that timespan.)
Stranger Things (Netflix, Season 3) – Did El always talk in Hulkspeak? Because she spends the most episodes either making out with Mike, screaming, or speaking in Hulkspeak, and it seems like she should be more well-adjusted by now. Now that we’re in the third season and there are several adults who acknowledge that the supernatural is real and that the Mind Flayer and the Upside-Down are genuine concerns, the “several plots, no communication” thing makes much less sense. As soon as Will knowns something is wrong, he can tell his mom and get the chief of police behind him; but instead we get the kids doing their own thing while the adults follow a different thread etc etc. (And they try to excuse the separation, but the excuses are getting thin.) Credit, though, for setting up a lot of things that get used later on, including the fireworks and Susie. They clearly write each season with responses to previous seasons in mind: There are more female characters getting more screen time, there’s an explicitly gay character, and the Joyce/Hopper shippers…well, it sucks to be them. This has the feel of a series finale (since they probably weren’t sure what Netflix would do afterwards), as the gang breaks up, El’s powers are seemingly gone, Hopper is dead (unless, of course, he’s “the American” the Russians have), and life is moving on.
I watched the first two episodes of The Mandalorian via my brother-in-law’s Disney+ when we visited them, and I find that I agree wholeheartedly with the three-word review I had been given ahead of time: It’s a western. This is a story about a cowboy buckaroo out to make a living for himself and this weird kid he picked up in the wild frontiers, it just happens to be in space and have robots.
