Virus Isolation Report: TV Edition (part 2)

Welcome to the second half of our year’s worth of pandemic television.  For general information on what this is, consult part 1.

You know, the one thing I didn’t mention last week was how I’ve sorted these.  In order to figure out how much time I’ve put into watching all this content (and remember what I said last week: this ain’t even all of it!), I had to come up with rough guesstimates of how many hours each series took up.  Mostly that’s just saying, oh, this show’s episodes are about 45 minutes long (that’s an hour-long network show, minus the commercials), so multiply number of episodes by .75.  Or, this show’s episodes are mostly an hour long, even though some may be shorter or longer, so we’ll just call it episodes == hours.  Once I had hour totals for all the series, I thought it might be fun to just use that to sort them.  So the first half was everything with a total running time of under 8 hours.  Of course, 8 – 10 hours is a common run-time for today’s streaming content: 8 or 10 episodes of a roughly hour-long show with zero commercial breaks is almost a standard season for Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.  So there were quite a few in that range.  And then there were the show where I watched a whole shit-ton of seasons ...

Basically, what I’m telling you is: hold on to your butts.  Here’s where the numbers get really insane.  (Grand total at the end.)

American Gods S2 (Starz, ~8 hours) ★★

American Gods is the Great Masterpiece of Neil Gaiman, one of my pentagram of literary idols.¹  And American Gods S1 was incredible: one of the shows that proved that televsion shows based on books can both capture the essence of a great novel and offer something new—perhaps not, like True Blood, be better than the source material, but, like Game of Thrones or The Magicians (see below) or Good Omens or The Witcher (see below), bring something different, something valuable.  Then the showrunners got fired, and a bunch of cast members left, and S2 is not the same show.  It still has its moments, of course (I almost gave it 3 stars), but not enough of them, and it just doesn’t do a great job of recovering from the fallout of its troubled production.  Of course, after this season, the showrunners got fired and a bunch of cast members left.  I think I’m going to pass on watching S3.

Goliath S3 (Amazon Prime, ~8 hours) ★★★

The first season of this lawyer show (typically a genre I don’t care for, but the big names of Billy Bob Thornton and William Hurt sucked me in) was great: the mystery was convoluted but understandable, the villains were suitably evil without being unbelievable, and the show had a tendency to swing wildly from really funny to tensely action-packed to bizarrely surreal in an impressive manner that, surprisingly, worked.  The second season was not as good, I thought, but this third one is a half-step up.  Solidly between the first two in terms of quality, I’d say.  Worthwhile to watch the whole thing, if you haven’t yet check it out.

Jack Ryan S2 (Amazon Prime, ~8 hours) ★★★

Tom Clancy, like John Grisham, is one of those authors who writes novels with subject matter that I normally don’t care for.  But the books—and the characters—are so good that I enjoy them anyway.  This adaptation of ... well, I don’t think it’s any of Clancy’s novels in particular; it’s more of a reboot of the Jack Ryan character.  But it’s surprisingly good, and John Krasinski gives the character depth and likeability, which helps overcome the complexity of the plots, which can be ... challenging.  But, overall, pretty good.

Westworld S3 (HBO, ~8 hours) ★★★★

Okay, so the first season of Westworld is, obviously, brilliant.  Like, fucking amazing.  You pretty much have to watch it multiple times to understand what’s going on, and unlike some other shows that mess around with criss-crossing timelines (see also The Witcher, below), the confusion actually adds to the impact of the story.  Then came season 2, and I felt they were just trying to show off at that point.  While the storyling for Thandie Newton’s character was engaging, the rest of it I thought didn’t really benefit from the continued reliance on conflicting timelines: it just muddied things at that point.  Well, season 3 finally abandons that (mostly) and tells a more or less chronologically straight-forward story, but it’s still full of intricacies and subtleties that make it top notch.  The men in the show (Ed Harris, Jeffrey Wright, and, new for this season, Aaron Paul) are very good.  But it’s the women who really knock it out of the park.  The first season was all about Evan Rachel Wood, and S2 was all about Thandie Newton; well, S3 was, in my opinion, the place where Tessa Thompson got to shine the most.  But Wood and Newton are still great too.  Still not as good as S1, I think, but absolutely worth watching.

Lucifer S5 (Netflix, ~8 hours) ★★★

The story of Lucifer begins with Neil Gaiman, who is, as mentioned above (see American Gods), one of my literary idols.  Lucifer was originally a character in Gaiman’s Sandman, one of the most brilliant examples of graphic storytelling in our lifetime, and one of the two that everyone, regardless of how they feel about comics, really ought to have read.²  Then he had his own comic series, then his own television series, where he was brilliantly portrayed by Tom Ellis, then it got cancelled, because it was on Fox, and Fox cancels everything good.³  But then Netflix picked up what Fox dropped on the floor, and it limps on.  Mostly what’s wrong with show is nothing to do with the acting, which is great, or the characters, who are mostly great (I’ve honestly never been a fan of Chloe, despite the fact that she’s ostensibly the protagonist, even more so than Lucifer himself).  It’s just that this is a tough premise to keep on doing well after all this time, and forcing the two main characters to be “tragically” kept apart when all they want is to be together eventually gets both old and implausible.  Listen, showrunners: when two people finally get together, they can still have interesting lives ... promise!⁴  Anyhow, the show’s still good.  Just ... not as good.

Altered Carbon S2 (Netflix, ~8 hours) ★★★

Very close to a 4, S2 of Altered Carbon, subbing in Anthony Mackie (Falcon from the MCU) for S1’s Joel Kinnaman (more famous in his native Sweden, but seen in a few things in the US, such as House of Cards) continues its transhumanist story of Takeshi Kovacs (same character, new body) with almost as much flair and verve as the first season.  The fight scenes are just as good, and the standout character continues to be the AI Poe (played by Chris Conner, who apparently I don’t know from anything other than a few episodes of Bones), but I think the main plot of S2 tries too hard to be deep, whereas S1 stuck with the whodunnit and left the philosophical meanderings to the setting and the subplots.  I enjoyed it—and especially the addition of Simone Missick (the exquisite Misty Knight from Luke Cage et al)—but I think it’s step down from S1.  Not a big step, but a step nonetheless.

The Boys S2 (Amazon Prime, ~8 hours) ★★★★

Okay, wow.  The Boys is based on a comic by Garth Ennis, and he’s the guy who dreamed up Preacher, so that ought to tell you what you’re in for.  There is a lot of sex, a lot of “good” guys doing terrible things, and a metric shit-ton of blood and guts spattered all over the place.  Not to mention uncomfortable combinations of all the above.  The first season was a hard act to follow, but S2 does a pretty amazing job of it, going more in depth for some of the supporting characters and having some pretty interesting twists.  Just make sure you have a twisted sense of humor and a strong stomach.

The Witcher S1 rewatch (Netflix, ~8 hours) ★★★★

The Witcher, hotly anticipated and much talked about, almost lives up to its hype.  Honestly, I think season 2 really will be the amazing, epic story that season 1 tries to be.  This is the first thing I’ve really liked Henry Cavill in, and he is astoundingly good in it.  The state of the art for fantasy series has advanced significantly since I was a kid, and this one is gorgeous: the monsters are terrifying, the action is thrilling, and the sex is steamy.  My only complaint is that I’m not sure the nonlinear structure is really serving the story here.  I had to watch it twice to get the story straight, and, while it does all fit together in the end, it seems unnecessarily complex.  But still really good, and it makes me excited to see what season 2 has in store.

Narrative Telephone R1 (YouTube, ~8 hours) ★★★★★

This is one of the ideas that the Critical Role cast came up with to do before they figured out how to stream D&D during the pandemic, and it’s difficult to convey just how amazingly hilarious it is.  I already talked about exactly what it is, so I won’t belabor it, but just to reiterate: while most of the stories will be all the more entertaining to fans of their stream, you don’t have to play D&D (or know anything about it) to appreciate the humor here.  Can’t recommend it enough.

The Stand S1 (CBS All Access, ~8½ hours) ★★★★

The original mini-series of Stephen King’s second-biggest masterpiece⁵ was pretty decent, with Molly Ringwald and Gary Sinise as Fran and Stu.  There were some other inspired choices (I liked Laura San Giacomo as Nadine, and espeically Matt Frewer as the Trashcan Man), but overall it wasn’t epic.  This version ... I dunno, I think it almost achieves that.  James Marsden is no Gary Sinise, but Whoopi Goldberg is an amazing choice for Mother Abigail, Greg Kinnear made a surprisingly interesting Glen, and Jovan Adepo (whom you may remember as the younger version of Louis Gosset Jr from HBO’s Watchmen) is a much more intriguing Larry Underwood, who was so forgettable in the 90s series that even now when I looked him up I still couldn’t remember anything about his performance.  But it is perhaps Alexander Skarsgård who really sells this: playing the complex Eric from True Blood has given him an insight, I think, into playing murderous monsters.  Eric, of course, had redeeming qualities, which are all sanded off here, but he’s still sexy and seductive and very, very scary.  Plus the “smaller” parts are filled by amazing people such as Fiona Dourif,⁶ Ezra Miller, J.K. Simmons, and Heather Graham.  Despite being on CBS, it doesn’t really hold back too much on the violence, and I think that’s appropriate for this story.  Overall I was pretty impressed with this version.

Harley Quinn S1 – S2 (HBO, ~9 hours) ★★★★

Remember when I talked about Castlevania and how modern animation is moving toward a lot of sex and (even moreso) ultraviolence?  Well, Harley Quinn (originally on DC Universe) is a primo example.  It’s really weird how, despite being unutterably bloody, this show actually has a very positive message for young girls.  I suppose you’ll need a very special little girl to be able to enjoy something this raunchy and gory with her, but I happen to have one, and, let me tell you: I enjoyed watching this with her immensely.  Pretty much all the male characters are completely useless, and the women do all the interesting things.  Plus the voice acting is stunning: Kaley Cuoco (from The Big Bang Theory; see below) is the main character, but there’s also Lake Bell, Sanaa Lathan, Rachel Dratch, Kaley’s sister Briana, Alan Tudyk, Ron Funches, Tony Hale, J.B. Smoove ... I particularly enjoyed Christopher Meloni’s perpetually-besotted Commissioner Gordon.⁷  Highly recommended for those who enjoy bloody superhero shows (like, say, The Boys, just up above).

Cake S1 – S3 (Hulu, ~9½ hours) ★★★

I started watching Cake because it was the only way to see Dicktown (see last week), but I decided to watch the whole thing.  It’s sort of a modern take on MTV’s Liquid Television, which gave us Æon Flux.  There are super short animated bits, longer (but still fairly short) live-action segments, many of which are recurring, and really bizarre interludes that just sort of make your brain melt.  Like anything of this type, it’s a very mixed bag: some of Quarter Life Poetry is brilliant; Oh Jerome, No is actually kind of touching (eventually); Drifters is often fascinating; Troll: Therapy is often fun.  Then again, Two Pink Doors is just terrible, and Shark Lords is a bridge too far, even for me.  But, overall, I’m not sorry I experienced it.

Blindspot S5 (Hulu, ~10 hours) ★★

Okay, so the sunk cost fallacy really is true for TV shows.  I knew Blindspot was getting terribler as it went on, but I was committed to seeing it through to the end.  Not for the main characters: I like Jamie Alexander well enough, but Jane Doe is just an irksome character, and neither Kurt Weller nor his actor interest me at all.  But Ashley Johnson and Ennis Esmer are the real draw here, and I was happy to see some resolution for the super-sexy nerd whose dad is Bill Nye the Science Guy and the pansexual, so-incapable-of-taking-anything-seriously-that-he-legally-changed-his-name-to-an-Internet-domain guy ... you know, those classic tropes.  The best thing I can say about Blindspot S5?  Well, it’s finally over.

Nightflyers S1 (Netflix, ~10 hours) ★★

The idea of a scifi show based on a book by the same guy that wrote the series Game of Thrones is based on sounds better than it actually turns out to be.  There are a lot of interesting ideas here, but I just didn’t feel like any of them came together that well.  I enjoyed Gretchen Mol (from Boardwalk Empire) and Angus Sampson (from Shut Eye); Jodie Turner-Smith and Maya Eshet I was less familiar with, but found them interesting to watch as well.  I just don’t think the whole thing came together in the end, and it left me feeling a bit underwhelmed.

Hunters S1 (Amazon Prime, ~10 hours) ★★★

This is an amazing, if once again ultraviolent, series, featuring an insane cast: Al Pacino, Saul Rubinek, and Carol Kane have nearly 400 IMDB credits among the three of them, and Josh Radnor (from How I Met Your Mother) and Logan Lerman (from the Percy Jackson films) aren’t too shoddy either.  The story is a bit of a Jewish revenge fantasy, as the families of Holocaust survivors hunt down Nazis living in America.  It’s always satisfying to see Nazis get killed in bloody ways—see also Inglourious Basterds—but, unlike Tarantino’s take on it, this story is much more complex.  Unfortunately, it takes a hard left turn near the end that I’m not sure works completely (or at all).  Still good enough to recommend, however.

Helstrom S1 (Hulu, ~10 hours) ★★★

Many people love Disney+, but I will always hold a grudge against it, because its coming killed all the Marvel TV shows, many of which were fantastic and almost all of which were at least good.  It not only offed all the Netflix shows—Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and The Punisher—but it also took down several other properties: the magnificent Runaways on Hulu, the interesting Cloak & Dagger on Freeform, and possibly the psychedelic Legion on FX.⁸  And poor Helstom was practically stillborn: killed before it could ever air, stuck debuting with a cliffhanger that can never be resolved.  Still, this extremely unlikely Marvel property (Daimon Hellstrom is the sort-of-superhero Son of Satan, and his sister Satana is a borderline villain, not to mention the whole occult connection practically designed to have evangelicals up in arms) came off pretty decent.  It’s much more of a horror series than a superhero series, but the property is definitely comic-derived, and it embraces that anything-can-happen philosophy.  I enjoyed it, though I thought it could have been better.

Bosch S5 (Amazon Prime, ~10 hours) ★★★★

I discovered Michael Connelly after seeing him in a cameo on Castle.  His books about fictional police detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch are an interesting modern take on the hard-boiled detective genre.  So when Amazon Prime decided to do a series based on the books, I was in.  Titus Welliver makes an excellent Bosch, and the series manages to maintain its momentum even this far along.  Partially that’s due to a radically reimagined Chief Irving as portrayed by Lance Reddick, partially it’s due to the character arc acceleration of Maddie Bosch (wonderfully played by Madison Lintz), but I’m guessing mainly it’s just due to fantastic source material.

The Outsider S1 (HBO, ~10 hours) ★★★★★

I was hesitant to watch this one: while I love Stephen King stories, having one dressed up as a police procedural didn’t really seem like a good idea.  Sure, I love ’em both, but, as I’m sometimes fond of saying: I like both spaghetti and ice cream, too, but that doesn’t mean I want to eat them together.  So I put it off for far longer than I should—as it turns out, The Outsider is pretty awesome, and it kicks in fairly early (around episode 2 or so).  Ben Mendelsohn’s cop Ralph is ostensibly the protagonist, but that’s a bit like saying that Mikael Blomkvist is the protagonist of Stig Larsson’s Millenium trilogy.  Sure, he is in many ways the “main” character, but Lisbeth Salander is the real draw—there’s a reason why the English title for the first novel is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and not The Magazine Editor with the Slight Pudge Around the Middle.  Here, Cynthia Erivo plays the Lisbeth Salander character, and I would watch “The Adventures of Holly Gibney, P.I.” all day long.  Great show.

Happy! S2 (Netflix, ~10 hours) ★★★★

There’s a blog post brewing in me about some of the best comic book shows that have little to nothing to do with superheroes, and this show will be near the top of the list of examplars.  What makes a comic book story is not the presence of superheroes; it’s the fact that anything can happen.  In a comic, a preacher, a vampire, and an assassin on a roadtrip to find the missing God is perfectly plausible, as is a boozy, washed-out detective who solves all his problems with violence and is suddenly visited by the all-too-real manifestation of his estranged daughter’s imaginary friend, who is a flying blue unicorn.  That latter is the rough premise of Happy!, although I don’t do it justice with that bland synopsis.⁹  With former Law & Order star Christopher Meloni as the ex-cop and the always delightful Patton Oswalt as the not-so-imaginary Happy, this is another one heavy on the gore, not to mention the massive amounts of smoking, drinking, drugs, and sex.  But it’s a delightful insanity, and S2 is just as weird and whimsical and at the same time action-packed and bloody as S1, plus it’s still delivering on the emotional payoff of the father trying to maintain a connection with a daughter that’s growing up too fast.  You need a particular kink in your brain to enjoy it, but, assuming you’ve got that, you should not miss this one.

The Magicians S5 (Netflix, ~10 hours) ★★★★★

Chris Hardwick once described The Magicians as “Harry Potter for adults,” and that’s not too far off.  In fact, S1 of the show was too much just that: while you might have (rightfully) wondered what the hell kind of high school kids they had at Hogwarts who never even tried to sneak off and have sex, the kids at Brakebills went far beyond mere sex and drugs and rock-and-roll—it seemed like the writers wanted to do horrible things to every main character just for the sheer shock value.  But persevere: by season three, it starts to get amazing, becoming almost more like a scifi show than a fantasy one ... multiple timelines, parallel worlds, time paradoxes, dystopian futures, and small recurring guest roles for genre favorites such as Felicia Day, Jewel Staite, and Matt Frewer.  But, honestly, Margo (the only character to be significantly revamped from the novels, even to the point of a name change) is the reason to stick with it.  Strong, foul-mouthed, unabashed and unafraid, never hesitating to name herself “High King” or tell her companions to “ovary up,” Margo’s amazing journey provides the best character and the most laughs.  This, the show’s final season, does not disappoint.

Lovecraft Country S1 (HBO, ~10 hours) ★★★★★

It’s difficult to describe how awesome this is.  First of all, Lovecraft is such a racist author that it’s difficult to imagine a positive story set in his universe with black protagonists.  I was also a little nervous that the depictions of racsim—and never doubt that the actual horror in this series comes from the white people of the 1950s, not the monsters—would overwhelm the supernatural elements and make the whole thing more depressing than scary.  But I knew that Jordan Peele (here the executive producer) had skillfully woven these two things together before, with Get Out, with Us, and with his deft hand at resurrecting The Twilight Zone.  He’s good, showrunner Misha Green is also good, and this show not only tackles thorny issues of racism and sexism, but does so with complex characters that are never perfect but rarely completely despicable (okay, some of the white people come close), and a veritable shitload of awesome Lovecraftian effects, which kick off right in the first episode and don’t let up until the powerful and satisfying conclusion.  Loved every minute of it.

Umbrella Academy S2 (Netflix, ~10 hours) ★★★★★

I was completely unfamiliar with the comic this show was based on, which was apparently written by the lead singer of My Chemical Romance, of all people.  But it’s fucking brilliant—at least the show is, and I’ve heard that many fans of the comic found the adaptation satisfying.  It’s sort of about superheroes ... but also not really.  Some reviews will try to convince you that it’s all about family, which it is ... but that also sells it remarkably short.  It’s utter surreality, nonsense which makes perfect sense, all wrapped in a time travel story that will make your brain explode but also tracks perfectly when you go back and view it again.  I rewatched S1 almost immediately after watching it the first time through, and nearly did so again before starting S2.¹⁰  S2 builds on the insanity of S1, but also takes it in new directions, and also hops backwards a few decades for the majority of the story.  There’s also a rockstar cast including Ellen Page, Colm Feore, and Mary J. Blige—not to mention the people I only learned of from appearing here, such as the amazing performance of Robert Sheehan, and the nuanced complexity of Aidan Gallagher, playing an adult in a child’s body, something which few can pull off.¹¹  It’s also completely batshit crazy.  And also brilliant.

Legacies S2 (Netflix, ~12 hours) ★★★

Okay, it sometimes happens that a show is crap, and then the spin-off of that show is only partially crap, and then the spin-off of the spin-off is not actually that bad.  Probably not that often, but Legacies, which is a spin-off of the barely tolerable The Originals, which is a spin-off of the execrable Vampire Diaries, is the exception that proves the rule.  Or something like that.  Supernatural teen dramas of course pretty much originate with Buffy, but they’re gaining a lot of popularity right now (The Order and the live-action Winx Club remake spring immediately to mind without even trying) in our post-Harry-Potter-and-Twilight world.  This one is ... watchable.  It’s nothing to write home about, and there’s at least one character that makes you want to drive a spike through her eyeball (I’ll be shocked if it takes you more than one episode to identify which one), but it has its moments.

Jessica Jones S3 (Netflix, ~13 hours) ★★★

The Marvel Netflix shows were all pretty amazing, at least at first.  I even thought Iron Fist was pretty decent, despite all the criticisms.  In the end, what they were building towards (which in my opinion was the inevitable combination of Simone Missick and Jessica Henwick in a show about Knightwing Restorations, which I would have killed for) was another casualty of Disney+ (see also Helstrom, above).  Jessica Jones, who by happenstance is the only superhero from the Marvel Netflix shows that I wasn’t previously familiar with, was surprisingly good in its first season.  Season 2 was a little less good, and by season 3, which is the final season due to the invention of the aforementioned streamining service of The Mouse (for which I will never forgive it), is the least good of all.  Krysten Ritter is still amazing, Carrie-Anne Moss and Eka Darville have interesting character arcs, but I wasn’t happy with Rachel Taylor’s Trish Walker.  Not that Taylor does a bad job ... I blame the writers.  Or possibly double down on blaming Disney Plus—it’s possible that the writers could have pulled it all together given another season (though I doubt it).  But I think I have too much love for the comics version of Patsy Walker to appreciate what JJ S3 is doing here.

The Blacklist S7 (Netflix, ~14½ hours) ★★

Another sunk cost fallacy.  After watching 6 seasons of something, you kind of want to see it through, even if it has been going downhill for a while.  Don’t get me wrong: James Spader is still an excellent actor, and some of the other characters still manage to engage.  But Elizabeth Keen is like Chloe from Lucifer or Jane Doe from Blindspot: I know I’m supposed to like her the best, but I just ... don’t.  Some of these shows should really pull a Good Fight (see last week).  (Interestingly, The Blacklist actually tried this, with its spin-off Redemption.  However, the fix to a weak female protagonist is not to replace her with a male protagonist.  The Good Fight really did this well, since Diane is so much more interesting and complex than Alicia ever was.  Blindspot could take a page as well: I’d watch the adventures of Patterson all day long.¹²)  But I digress, mainly to avoid talking about how depressingly bad Blacklist has gotten.  The last episode of the season, which was unfinished because of the pandemic, was particularly painful to watch.  Showrunners, I’ve a hard truth for you: if the only way you can finish your show is to fill it in with CGI-generated visuals, either leave it unfinished, or actually pay the money for good animation.  The halfway step is not a good look.

Batwoman S1 (HBO, ~15 hours) ★★★

This started out so well.  I adore Ruby Rose in just about everything I’ve ever seen her in,¹³ and she does an amazing job here with a little-known DC property.  Of course, one of the great things about making shows about obscure superheroes is that you can reinvent them without worrying too much about pissing off their fanbase, which is typically very small (though sometimes vocal).  Batwoman here is presented a strong, independent, kick-ass gay woman ... who inexplicably is constantly seeking to get back together with her ex, who is possibly the worst character I’ve ever seen in one of these shows.  I don’t mean the actor does a bad job with her, nor that the character is poorly written: just that she’s a terrible, terrible person.  It’s difficult to like a show when one of the people we’re supposed to be rooting for does more terrible things than the insane super-villain antagoinst.  And the fact that we’re supposed to believe as awesome a character as Kate Kane is (she’s Ruby fucking Rose, for fuck’s sake!) is constantly crawling back to a person who dumped her, lied to her, betrayed her, and tried to get her sister arrested (if we’re being generous) or even killed (she knew perfectly well what was going to happen when she sold out Alice) ... it makes it tougher to love the main character too.  Anyhow, Ruby left after the end of S1, so I’m out too.

The Order S1 – S2 (Netflix, ~15 hours) ★★★

Another one of those supernatural teen dramas (see also Legacies, above), this one is ... also okay.  Is it better than Legacies?  Well, it’s lighter on the teen angst and high school clique drama, so that’s a plus.  It’s giving screen time to the always reliable Matt Frewer, not to mention True Blood’s Sam Trammell and Katharine Isabelle from Ginger Snaps, so it’s nice to see those folks again.  But the actual kids in the show, who should be carrying the plot, are ... I mean, they’re okay.  I don’t have any specific complaints, I suppose, and some individual scenes are very funny.  But overall, it’s just ... okay.

Roll in the Family “The Slumbering Forest” + Holiday Special (YouTube, ~15 hours) ★★★★

Brennan Lee Mulligan is an amazing Dungeon Master, and the kids playing D&D here (along with their parents) are pretty awesome.  Kahlan Walters and Luke Bradford are probably the stand-outs, but Lexi and Maddy are also very fun to watch.  B. Dave Walters is always a treasure, and the other two parents were just fine.  The adventure here is not overly complex, but not dumbed down either.  A fun watch for those who enjoy D&D, or just those who enjoy watching kids have fun with their imaginations.

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts S1 – S3 (Netflix, ~15 hours) ★★★★★

Every once in a while you find a “kid’s” show that has surprising depth and emotion.  This animated series on Netflix is about a “burrow girl” living in a future world whose home is destroyed and has to learn to live on the surface with mutated animals (all of whom are either talking or Godzilla-sized) and a world where everything wants to kill soft defenseless humans.  Yet, despite that dystopian description, Kipo is an amazingly fun ride that you can enjoy with your kids and still get sucked in yourself.  The animation is fantastic, the creatures and sets are whimsical and imaginative, the villains have complex motivations, and the ending is satisfying.  Plus lots of fun voices to try to recognize (like Sterling K. Brown and John Hodgman).

Young Justice S1 – S2 (HBO, ~17 hours) ★★★

I originally watched S1 of this show with my kids; S2 goes to a slightly weird place, and the show became harder to find, and we never finished the series.  So, when I discovered it on HBO Max, I thought I might give it another shot.  You have to really like superheroes and comics to fully enjoy this show, but, assuming that’s true, this is a pretty decent show.  It’s a reimagining of the Teen Titans, of which there have been many: two in the comics that I remember (and probably many that came along after I stopped reading), the Cartoon Network series, and the live-action series (see Titans, below).  This one is ... better, in some ways, and, at the very least, inventive.  There’s an angle on Robin that I haven’t seen before, a version of Aqualad with surprising depth, a younger, more earnest Zatanna, and some much-needed injections of diversity.  The plots are complex and interesting, but it really relies on you knowing (or being willing to look up) quite a few different heroes and villains from the comics to truly understand what’s going on most of the time.

Breakout Kings S1 – S2 (Hulu, ~17½ hours) ★★★

With the light that Black Lives Matter has shone upon cop shows this past year,¹⁴ I’m starting to sour on these types of shows.  But I found this one (nearly 10 years old at this point) while scrolling around, desperate for something to watch, and it had Malcolm Goodwin (four years before iZombie) and Jimmi Simpson (five years before Westworld, but actually concurrent with his recurring role on Psych, which I loved), so I figured, how bad could it be?  And it’s not bad.  The focus on the work-release prisoners, and the fact that they don’t devolve into criminal stereotypes, helps a lot, but there’s still several scenes where the cops on the show want to “bend the rules” or rough up a suspect, and you can’t help but cringe.  Still, not the worst such show in the world.

Titans S1 – S2 (HBO, ~18 hours) ★★★

I wanted to like this show ... I really did.  I has a number of interesting deviations from the standard Teen Titans retellings, including reimagining Starfire as a black woman, Hawk and Dove as boyfriend/girlfriend rather than brothers, and an older Robin, post-Batman and fairly disgusted with the whole superhero scene.  But a number of things keep it from reaching its full potential, in my opinion.  First and foremost, a radical shift in tone and plot from S1 to S2 is hard to reconcile; S1 is slow-paced, but that gives us time to learn the characters and what each can do.  S2 decides, fuck it: this is a superhero show, dammit! and takes off at a breakneck speed that can be wearing after a while.  I think budgetary constraints are problematic as well: Beast Boy, for instance, can turn into exactly two beasts, which really makes him far less effective than he should be.  My final analysis: good, but flawed.

Doom Patrol S1 – S2 (HBO, ~24 hours) ★★★★

While the Doom Patrol is a group of superheroes, Doom Patrol is not your typical superhero show ... or your typical any kind of show, for that matter.  Anchored by some magnificent performances by Timothy Dalton, Brenadan Fraser, and Matt Bomer, the real stand-out is the one character I wasn’t familiar with from reading the comics: Crazy Jane, as portrayed with amazing facility by Diane Guerrero.  Created by Grant Morrison (the same twisted mind for responsible for Happy!—see above), Jane came along a few years after I got out of comics.  She seems at first to be a cheap gimmick: she has multiple personalities, and each personality has a different superpower.  But there is surprising depth here, and that is only the beginning of the wonderful weirdness, which includes several alternate dimensions, a talking cockroach (voiced brilliantly by Curtis Armstrong), a sex demon, a chaos magician who uses a mystical cigarette to open portals and is in love with a ghostly floating horse head, and a non-binary sentient piece of urban landscape that can relocate itself at will.  What’s not to love?

Agents of SHIELD S6 – S7 (Netflix, ~26½ hours) ★★★

I used to watch this show religiously, but I somehow lost track of where it was airing during our journey from cable to satellite to full-on cordcutting.  Honestly, I didn’t find S5 to be living up to the high standards set by the first few seasons anyhow, so I wasn’t really missing it.  But, here I was with lots of time to kill, and there were only two more seasons and I could close it out for good ...  And, you know what? these last two seasons are better than the previous two combined.  Not as good as the first two or three, granted, but this is a very strong 3—almost a 4.  (Literally, as I was writing this, I kept looking at those 3 stars and thinking mabye I should change ’em ...)  If you enjoyed the first few seasons but aren’t sure if they could come back strong and finish on a satisfying note, put your mind at ease.  If you never enjoyed the show that much, though, this ain’t gonna turn that around.  But the timehopping in the final season gives them an opportunity to do a lot of creative things, storywise, and I was overall very satisfied with how it all came out.

Sense8 S1 + special + S2 + movie, rewatch (Netflix, ~26½ hours) ★★★★★

There’s something to be said for just giving up and watching something you already watched once, and enjoyed it so much you want to watch it all over again.  I wasn’t quite ambitious enough to do the whole interleaved Buffy and Angel thing again (maybe someday), but rewatching this brilliant, amazing, Netflixed-too-soon show that was a marriage of the creators of The Matrix and the creator of Babylon 5, a show that celebrated diversity, sexuality, and human connection over all else ... that decision was a no-brainer.  While the series conclusion feels rushed (because it totally was: the showrunners had to wrap up two or three seasons’ worth of storylines in one mega-long movie), the show overall is still radiant, and groundbreaking.  All the actors are great, and, while the recasting of Aml Ameen was unfortunate, they handled it well, I thought (Jela tells Capheus he’s “looking a little different these days,” to which Capheus replies: “new barbershop”).  The whole concept of this, as a show, shouldn’t work: 8 main characters—8 simultaneous protagonists!—is too much for an audience to keep up with: you’d either have to strip the characters down to make them completely flat, or else overwhelm the viewer with too much information about them.  The showrunners do neither, using an amazing, interwoven style of storytelling that lets one or two characters shine for an episode while the others’ stories simmer along in the background, waiting their turn to explode into action.  The most brilliant part of this scheme is that you don’t actually have to like all the protagonists to still love the show: personally I find Kala to be too mousy and Riley to be a bit bland, but the dynamism of Nomi and the controlled fury of Sun easily make up for it; Lito’s story is touching, Wolfgang’s dark and gritty, and Will and Capheus are interesting enough.  And the supporting characters!  Freema Agyeman as Amanita is utterly luminous, but Daniela, Felix, and Bug are all great too, and Whispers (Terence Mann, a long way from his Critters days) was the perfect villain.  This show is one of those great experiences that can be emotionally devastating one minute and then completely uplifitng the next.  Just an amazing, amazing show, and one of my favorites of the past decade or two.

Legends of Tomorrow S2 – S5 + crossover episodes (from Arrow, Flash, and Supergirl) (Netflix, ~58 hours) ★★★

I have a thing for obscure superheroes.  I never liked Superman, or Captain America, and Batman and Spider-Man were passing interests at best.  So it’s no surprise that, in the Arrowverse of shows (including Arrow, Flash, Supergirl, and Batwoman—see above), I gravitated right to the one starring the Atom, Firestorm, Hawgirl, and White Canary, as brought together by the super obscure Rip Hunter (Time Master), and throw in Captain Cold and Heatwave for a little Suicide Squad vibe.  Later seasons upped the ante by bringing in folks like Vixen, Steel, and the ever-awesome John Constantine.  This is just good, clean, dimension-hopping, traveling-through-time-to-fix-the-past, sending-monsters-back-to-Hell, superhero fun.  Although it probably wouldn’t play nearly as well for those not as immersed in comics as I once was.  Still, this show manages to be a whole lot of fun (surprisingly, a lot of that fun comes from Dominic Purcell’s gruff but layered portrayal of Heatwave, a very minor villain in DC continuity, but a superstar here), and I felt compelled to watch the whole run (I had watched S1 a while back, before the pandemic started), including biting the bullet and finding just those episodes of Arrow, Flash, and Supergirl that I had to watch to understand all the crossover events.  So it was a lot of content, and I still can’t bring myself to give it a 4 (though I’d say it’s a strong 3), but I don’t regret a minute of it.

The Big Bang Theory S1 – S12 (HBO, ~86½ hours) ★★★

For many years, I only knew of BBT, and so naturally I assumed Sheldon was the protagonist of the show.  Earning my scorn for being overly popular, I finally decided to give it a chance over the pandemic—what better time to binge nearly 100 hours of a 12-year sitcom?  Imagine my surprise to learn that Sheldon is not the protagonist (that would be Leonard); rather Sheldon is the comic relief.  Still, for all its easy jokes and poking fun at nerd culture, it satisfied my two criteria for a long-running comedy: give me characters I can care about, and make me laugh out loud at least once every show.  Oh, and: don’t piss me off.¹⁵  It’s not a great show, but it’s a good one, and I don’t regret the time investment, significant though it was.  I see a lot of my middle child in Sheldon, and a touch of myself in Leonard.  Plus now I adore Mayim Bialik.

So, that’s it!  All told, that’s 725 hours of viewing, if my math is right.  That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 12% of my waking hours, and, as I say: that’s not even considering the Critical Role (which is probably at least another 100 hours), or movies (it would only take 50 or so movies to be yet another hundred hours, and I’d be surprised if I didn’t hit that), shows that I started but never finished, a year’s worth of The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s Late Show ... I’m guessing 1,000 hours in front of the TV is a conservative estimate.  While you guys were fiddling with your sourdough and experimenting with new Zoom backgrounds, I was plowing through some great, and not-so-great, TV shows, mostly with an eye towards fantasy elements ... I freely admit I was hunting escapism with a savage intensity.  They weren’t all successes, but I’m not sorry to have watched very many of them.  They kept my mind off the state of the world, and that was, after all, the ultimate goal.  I think I achieved that much, at least.

I sincerely hope there’s never a need for another round-up like this.  It’s a little depressing to reckon up how much time I lost to what we used to call “the boob tube.” But, as I said at the beginning, we live in a golden age of television, and mindless pablum is slowly disappearing due to lack of oxygen.  Rich, complex, long-form storytelling is in, and I’ve always loved a good story.  There are a lot of shows here that I feel richer for having watched—and a few stinkers, granted—so I try not to beat myself up too much.  But, if I’m serving as a counterpoint to make you feel better about your own time management choices during the pandemic, I’m okay with that too.  We’ve all gotten through it in our own ways.

Here’s hoping that my use of the past perfect tense in that sentence is appropriate.

__________

1 For the record, the Great Masterpieces of the other four are It, Floating Dragon, Strangers, and Imajica.

2 The other being Watchmen.

3 Seriously, why do people even put their show on Fox any more?  They just know that, in a season or two, Fox is gonna cancel them, and then they’ll have a bunch of pissed off fans screaming at them.  Who really thinks that’s worth the hassle?

4 Examples of where this has worked (danger! spoilers ahead!): Farscape, Burn Notice, Chuck, Eureka, Bones.

5 First is, obviously, It.  See earlier footnote.

6 If you haven’t seen her yet in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, you really are doing yourself a disservice.

7 Between this and Happy! (see below), he may be in danger of getting typecast.

8 To be fair, the Legion folks claim they were never going to do more than 3 seasons.  But I’m not sure I buy it.

9 The former, of course, is the equally insane Preacher.

10 When S3 comes out, I may very well do a whole marathon.

11 The only other examples that spring to mind are Alicia Witt in Lynch’s Dune and Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire.

12 Though Critical Role fans would no doubt crucify me for even suggesting it.

13 Her brief run in Orange Is the New Black is great; her one episode of Dark Matter is even better.  For maximum Ruby Rose awesomeness, however, try The Meg or, even better, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, which may be one of the most satisfying franchise wrap-up movies of all time.  Sure, the Triple-X series is mindless popcorn fare, but it’s good at what it does, and Ruby Rose elevates it even further.

14 I touched on this briefly in last week’s review of Broadchurch.

15 Hear that, Friends?

Virus Isolation Report: TV Edition (part 1)

I had the brilliant idea of trying to figure out all the television I’d watched during this first year of the pandemic and then figure out how many hours that was and maybe write a short paragraph on each one.  I vastly underesimated the amount of effort (and content) this would be.  I’ve decided to break it into two halves, and it still ends up being two posts which are significantly longer than most of the ones I do here.  And, the really scary part is: this isn’t even all of it.  In order to put some kind of cap on it, I’ve decided to include only episodic shows where I watched one or more entire seasons (or series, for the British shows) during the pandemic.  This automatically eliminates:

• Shows that I started before the pandemic but completed during it, including a few where there was only a single episode I watched prior to the lockdown.¹
• Shows that I started during the pandemic but I haven’t finished watching them yet, including a few where I have only one more episode to go.²
• Shows that don’t slot neatly into seasons, such The Daily Show or The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
• Movies.  I’ve watched a lot of movies this year as well.
• Random YouTube videos, most of which don’t really fit the guideline of “episodic.” (On the other hand, where a series of YouTube vidoes did seem to fit that criterion, I threw ’em in.)
• Critical Role.  Divided into campaigns rather than seasons, a CR campaign is years long, so it naturally can’t be contained in something like this.  Still, that’s anywhere from 3 – 5 hours a week for the majority of the pandemic, so it accounts for a healthy chunk of viewing time.

And, still, this is a lot of hours ... I won’t come up with a grand total until next week, but I can already announce that it’s way more than I probably ought to be admitting to.  But there’s some great stuff in here—we live in a golden age of television, I think, after a lot of years (decades, really) of complete crap.  And also a bit of not-so-great stuff: hey, it was the pandemic.  There was a lot of time to fill.

I’ve also provided a simple rating system, from one to five stars.  But I have to warn you: this group skews mostly toward the upper end of that scale.  There are two big reasons for that:

• I’m not a harsh critic.  As long as I’m entertained, I’ll throw a show at least a 3, which for me means “a perfectly lovely way to kill a few hours.”
• This is a list of TV shows that I finished watching; if something was really bad, I never bothered to finish it.  There are literally zero 1-star reviews here (which I would characterize as “unwatchable”) and not that many 2-star reviews.  A 2 means either I only suffered through it because I felt I had some investment I needed to pay off, or maybe that it started out well but took an unexpected turn for the worse.

I should also warn you that, even before the pandemic, I was already starting a trend towards eschewing any show that felt too “real”; in the list below, you’ll find barely anything at all that doesn’t contain some sort of element of fantasy or sci-fi or horror, and absolutely no reality TV (nope, I didn’t watch Tiger King along with the rest of you).  But especially in the midst of a year-long virus isolation experiment, “reality” didn’t hold much appeal.  I need my entertainment to take me pretty far away at this point.

I’ve also included which season(s) I watched, where you can find it if you’re so inclined, and, as I mentioned, a brief paragraph on it.  These are almost entirely spoiler-free; I’m less interested in a synopsis than in extolling actors I like, talking about formats that worked well (or didn’t), or maybe touching on the cultural significance.  For the most part, I’m assuming you either already know the basic premise, or can look it up yourself.

Well, that’s more than enough intro.  Here’s the first half.

Inside the Episodes S1 [behind-the-scenes for The Witcher S1] (Amazon Prime, ~1 hour) ★★★

See my review of The Witcher next week.  This is almost required viewing, just so you can figure out what the fuck is going on.  It’s not super in-depth though.

Dicktown S1 rewatch (Hulu, ~2 hours) ★★★★

I love Judge John Hodgman, and I loved Going Deep with David Rees.  So why would I not want to watch an animated series where the two of them play thinly disguised versions of themselves who are teen detectives, except grown up, except still working for teenagers, in their hometown of Richardsville, North Carolina (hence the series name).  With some amazing voice acting (not just Hodgman and Rees, but Jean Grae, Kristen Schaal, Janet Varney, Paul F. Tompkins, etc etc), good animation, and interesting and funny plots, this little show turned out to be a real gem.  After watching it in its original form embedded in Cake (see below), my middle child and I watched it again separately.  Lots of fun.

Zomboat! S1 (Hulu, ~3 hours) ★★★★

Horror comedy is tricky to get right.  Too far in the one direction and you get a non-funny gory mess; too far in the other direction, and you get a goofy jumble that’s not even remotely scary.  There are a few movies that do a good job with it, but doing it in episodic form is even tougher.  Zomboat!, an ITV show starring Crazyhead’s Cara Theobold, hits all the right notes, and is a worthy successor to movies like Shaun of the Dead.

Two Weeks to Live S1 (HBO, ~3 hours) ★★★★

If you want to see a kick-ass battle scene between Game of Thrones’s Ayra Stark and Gotham’s Alfred Pennyworth, this is your show.  With a premise that might have easily devolved into goofiness, this show turns into something that is simultaneously funny, heartwarming, and action-packed.  Glad I stumbled on it.

Red Dwarf S5 re-rewatch (DVD, ~3 hours) ★★★★

As my #5 favorite Britcom, Red Dwarf is one of those shows I’ve watched again and again.  When my eldest was a teen, I sat down and went through the DVD box set with them, and now my middle child has reached the same age, and we’re slowly (ever so slowly) working our way through the set again.  As many times as I’ve seen it, it never gets old.  Like Monty Python, the Young Ones, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and Blackadder, it only grows better with age.

Castlevania S3 (Netflix, ~3½ hours) ★★★

Once upon a time, comics were for everyone, then, for a long time, they were just for kids.  Gradually, reactionary comics for adults started sneaking in, until eventually they took over.  A very similar situation exists for anime: in the old days, we had Akira and Vampire Hunter D; then it was all Pokémon and Voltron and Dragon Ball Z, with the occasional stand-out like Ninja Scroll.  But lately, anime has been getting more and more adult.  Castlevania is sort of the pinnacle of that: not only does it feature some pretty serious UK voice acting from the likes of Richard Armitage (of Spooks), Jaime Murray (of Hustle, Dexter, Warehouse 13, et al), Graham McTavish (of Preacher), and Bill Nighy (of Love Actually, two Pirates of the Caribbean movies, three Underworld movies, and about a million other things), it has explicit sex and ultraviolence up the wazoo.  It’s fairly fun, but not for the faint of heart.

Absurd! Planet S1 (Netflix, ~4 hours) ★★

I never would have made it through to the end of this bit of silliness if my youngest weren’t totally enamored with it.  As much as I love nature shows, this show has some serious tonal issues: it wants to be goofy enough to intrigue small kids, but for some reason it’s peppered with adult humor.  As a result, the adult watching vacillates between groaning and uncomfortable silence.  I did learn a few things, so I won’t call it a complete waste, but certainly not my favorite.

Woke S1 (Hulu, ~4 hours) ★★★

I almost gave this show a pass, as the subject matter was all too real this past year.  But I loved Lamorne Morris in New Girl, so I gave it a shot.  It’s a good show.  I’m glad I watched it.  But be forewarned: even with all the magic realism, light entertainment it ain’t.

Camp Cretaceous S1 (Netflix, ~4 hours) ★★★

This was a perfectly fine thing to watch with my kids.  Set in the same time period as the events of Jurassic World, this tells the story of 6 kids who get the opportunity to attend a special summer camp on Isla Nublar for various reasons—one wins a contest, one is the son of a wealthy donor to the park, one is the daughter of a major vendor, and so forth.  It’s a diverse group of kids in all senses, including their personalities, so it makes for an interesting storyline.  And, being animated, they can do quite a lot of dramatic dinosaur action.  You’ll spend a little bit of time yelling at the screen for them to stop doing dumb things, but overall it’s not bad.

The Hollow S2 (Netflix, ~4 hours) ★★★★

The first season of this show was fantastic: surreal, intriguing, impossible, and yet it all came together and made perfect sense in the end.  I don’t think this second season succeeds quite as well, but it’s close.  I think it’s really hard to do a follow-up for a movie or series that has a big reveal at the end, because, once you know the big reveal, there’s no mystery left.  But this does about as well as it could.  (Although I couldn’t help but feel like they rewrote some character history for convenience.)

Truth Seekers S1 (Amazon Prime, ~4 hours) ★★★★

One thing that I’ve learned over the years is that, no matter how dumb something looks, if Nick Frost is significantly involved in it, it’s going to be awesome.  Truth Seekers is no exception.  And, hey: we get to also throw in Susan Wokoma (from Crazyhead), Julian Barratt (from The Mighty Boosh), and Malcolm McDowell (from ... well, everything), plus of course Simon Pegg shows up every now and again.  The premise is completely stupid, and yet it works amazingly well, shows surprising depth, and ends up with a plot that’s complex in all the best ways.  Definitely check it out.

Inside the Boys S1 [behind-the-scenes for The Boys S2] (Amazon Prime, ~4½ hours) ★★★★

Assuming you liked The Boys (and that’s a big assumption; see my review for that below), you’ll probably dig this aftershow in the style of Talking Dead.  I’ve tried to watch a few of these, but few can hold up to Chris Hardwick.  However, Aisha Tyler is one of the few.  She’s articulate, trenchant, and exactly as irreverant as you need to be to discuss a show that gets off on gross-outs and blatant sexual references (and isn’t afraid to mix the two).  And the guests (most of whom are cast members or crew of the show) offer great insights.

History of Horror S2 (AMC+, ~4½ hours) ★★★

Mainly I watch this to see if there are any good horror movies that I’ve somehow missed, and often I find one or two in each episode.  I don’t know that I enjoyed this season as much as the first, but it’s perfectly fine for what it is.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine S7 (Hulu, ~4½ hours) ★★★★

This is another of those brainless sitcoms that I thought I was watching just to kill time and ended up getting completely hooked on.  While Andy Samberg should be the big draw, Terry Crews, Stephanie Beatriz, Chelsea Peretti, and Andre Braugher are just as good, if not better.  S7 continues the joyous run, albeit without Peretti, and on a new network.  B99 is one of those few shows that got cancelled and yet is still on the air, proving just how good it is.  So far the quality hasn’t dipped; we’ll see if they can keep it up.

Sherlock S4 (Netflix, ~4½ hours) ★★★★

I’ve loved this modern take on Sherlock Holmes, not only for Benedict Cumberbatch’s nigh-autistic take on Sherlock, but possibly even more so for Martin Freeman’s excellent Dr. Watson.  I didn’t love this last season as much as the previous ones, but that still leaves it ahead of a lot of other options out there.  Highly intelligent, fast-moving, keeps you guessing.  Not much else you can ask for in a mystery series.

Space Force S1 (Netflix, ~5 hours) ★★★★

Yet another show that I was convinced would be dumb beyond belief, but I gave it a chance because of the stellar cast and ended up being pleasantly surprised.  Steve Carell is always dependable, of course, though he can stray into embarassment humor territory (as in The Office).  Malkovich, on the other hand, one doesn’t think of as a comedic genius, but he’s geniuinely funny here, and the relationship between Carell’s stiff military man and Malkovich’s disdainful scientist intellectual is the primary driving dynamic.  Ben Schwartz does what Ben Schwartz does, playing the oily PR guy, Jimmy O. Yang turns in a great turn as a slightly nerdier scientist, and Lisa Kudrow turns up every now and again to do that quirky, unexpected performance thing that she does so well.  The premise is, sadly, not nearly as outlandish as it ought to be, but the timeliness enhances it; not sure it’ll be this funny if you wait too long to catch it.

Schitt’s Creek S6 (Netflix, ~5 hours) ★★★★

After I discovered Monty Python but before I discovered Kids in the Hall, I stumbled onto SCTV.  It was definitely one of my formative comedy experiences, so I’m always attracted to projects that feature two or more SCTV alumni.  That was my primary reason for originally checking out Schitt’s Creek (and Chris Elliott was just a bonus), but Dan Levy and Emily Hampshire turned out to be the real finds here.  Somehow this show manages to walk a fine line between throwing the characters into embarrassing situations so we can laugh at their mishaps (which I geneerally find to be cringeworthy instead of funny) and just trading on the acerbic wit and cluelessness of these tragically fish-out-of-water characters.  Layer onto that a solid and genuinely deep emotional core, and it’s hard not to love this show.  S6 was its finale, and I think they wrapped it up perfectly.

McMillion$ S1 (HBO, ~6 hours) ★★★

I don’t do documentaries.  But this one was so intriguing to me—that the McDonald’s Monopoly game, which I had grown up with like millions of other Americans, had been fundamentally rigged for decades without anyone (including the McDonald’s corporate folks!) knowing, and that the story never received much national attention because it broke right before 9/11.  That such a thing was even possible was fascinating to me, but I also wondered how the hell it could require 6 hours to tell that story.  Well, I’m still not sure all the hours were required, but they were at least entertaining, and it provided a great cross-section of the people involved, some of whom were shady as hell, some of whom were just dumb and clueless, and many of whom were somewhere in between.  Especially if you dig real-life drama, this is a particularly good one of those.

Ghosts S1 – S2 (HBO, ~6 hours) ★★★★

If you know of this group of British comedians, it’s probably from Horrible Histories, and you’re likely a homeschooling family like us (or perhaps you’re just British).  The Horrible Histories books and later the series are excellent for homeschool families, because they teach a great deal of history, and do it from a perspective that really engages young kids (primarily by grossing them out, which they seem to enjoy immensely).  The troupe of actors assembled for the show by the CBBC (which is basically the British version of PBS Kids) got along so well that they started doing other projects together, and Ghosts is the latest.  The ghosts in question live in a fine old British manor house, and the group thoughtfully includes at least one character from every historical period, all the way back to caveman Robin.  Each has an entertaining death story, most of which come out over the course of the first two series, but what anchors it and really sells it are the two non-ghost characters, a couple who inherit the mansion and at first believe it’s a dream come true, only to find out that it’s a bit of a crumbling mess, and having a bunch of ghosts always underfoot can be somewhat annoying.  It’s a great show, in classic Britcom style, but also really unique, and the cast gets to reuse a lot of their makeup and costumes from Horrible Histories, which is nice.

Broadchurch S1 (Netflix, ~6 hours) ★★★★

While I’m not a huge fan of realistic TV, I’ve always had a soft spot for police procedurals.  I watch a lot fewer of them these days (and even fewer after the Black Lives Matter movement raised awareness of how a lot of these shows are contributing to the problem by idolizing the police and even glorifying police violence), but I still check them out occasionally, and, if you’re gonna do police procedurals, the Brits do them best.  I originally heard of Broadchurch because of its magnificent score, which is some amazing ambient work by Ólafur Arnalds.³  But the always amazing David Tennant (see also Good Omens and S1 of Jessica Jones) was also a draw, and, what with the pandemic on, I figured, what the hell.  S1 is pretty magnificent, with Tennant’s stereotypical tortured detective turning out to be a bit less stereotypical than you thought going in.  I also loved David Bradley’s performance, but then after Harry Potter and Game of Thrones and The Strain, that wasn’t all that surprising.  The story has a heartbreaking component to it, which can make it difficult to watch, and it bogs down in S2 a bit, I thought,⁴ but S1 is nearly perfect, and provides a perfectly reasonable stopping point if you don’t wish to continue.  (In fact, I honestly wondered what the hell S2 could even be about after the S1 conclusion, but think of it like an episode of Law & Order: S1 is the law part, and S2 is the order part.  Although there’s apparently an S3, so who knows what that will be about.)

Night on Earth S1 (Netflix, ~6 hours) ★★★★

As I said, I don’t care for documentaries ... except for nature shows.  Anything involving animals is a no-brainer for me, and the kids will usually watch with me, allowing me the excuse that I’m engaging in homeschooling.  This new Netflix series has some amazing wildlife footage, and a valuable message about how humans are impacting the millions of other species on the planet.  Excellent show.

The Letter for the King S1 (Netflix, ~6 hours) ★★★★

As fantasy tales go, this is a pretty good one, although really it’s a weak 4 (or perhaps a strong 3).  But the characters are pretty interesting, led primarily by Amir Wilson (who also appears in His Dark Materials), and the world is pretty engaging.  I also enjoyed how the horse was one of the smartest characters in the bunch.  Moderately generic fantasy, but I enjoyed it.

Grace and Frankie S6 (Netflix, ~6½ hours) ★★★★

This Netflix show has a premise (two couples just entering retirement age are radically shaken up when the two husbands run off with each other, leaving the two wives to band together despite significant issues of rubbing each other the wrong way) which might have descended into the contrived or the cliché.  But, thanks to an amazing cast—Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Martin Sheen, Sam Waterston—and sharp writing, this half-hour comedy, at first seeming to have little substance, has turned into a show that consistently makes me laugh out loud at least once per episode, and many times more often than that.  With an interesting set of kids (including Baron Vaughn and June Diane Raphael) and suitors (including Ernie Hudson, Peter Gallagher, and Sam Elliott), it’s kept me entertained for six seasons and counting.

Carmen Sandiego S3 – S4 (Netflix, ~6½ hours) ★★★★

With a great voice cast, exciting plots, and a very understated educational bent, Netflix’s version of the geographically-inclined thief in the bright red coat is surprisingly good for both parents and kids.  This “thief” is more of a Robin Hood, except that instead of stealing from the rich to give to the poor, she’s stealing from the museums to keep away from the real criminals ... and then returning to the museums.  It’s a lot of fun, and these last two seasons wrap up the overarching plot in a satisfying and emotional way (despite the truncated S3, which was presumably due to the pandemic).  Recommended.

Spectrøs S1 (Netflix, ~7 hours) ★★★

You have to be okay with dubbing: not comically bad dubbing, but not really profesionally done either.  If you can get past that, this cultural mishmash of Brazilian history and Japanese ghost stories is actually pretty engaging, with mostly-interesting characters and a plot that will at least keep you entertained, though perhaps not provide too much mental challenge.  I watched it with the smallies; they also seemed to dig it.

American Horror Story 1984 (Hulu, ~7 hours) ★★★

As seasons of AHS go, this one is pretty good.  Not primo, like Murder House or Coven, but neither crap like Asylum or Roanoke.  A bit like Roanoke, it starts off in cliché territory (swapping cheesy paranormal docudrama for cheesy 80s slasher fest), then makes a series of left turns into unexpected territories.  I think 1984 succeeds where Roanoke fails, however, both in that the final destinations are more interesting, and also it doesn’t make us suffer through the uninteresting parts as long before it starts saying “gotcha!” So, you know ... better, but perhaps still not great.

The Good Fight S4 (CBS All Access, ~7 hours) ★★★

The Good Fight is not just a step above the show from which it was spun off; it’s a major improvement.  While I was watching it, I thought I liked Julianna Margulies just fine; now, however, I think I’m realizing that the worst part about The Good Wife was the good wife herself.  Stripped of that character, what remains—with almost entirely women in the major roles—is much more compelling.  Never afraid to address questions of politics, race, gender imbalance, family loyalty, cutthroat business, or deficiencies in our legal system, the first several seasons of The Good Fight are pretty amazing.  It’s losing a bit of steam lately, I’d say, but still holding my interest.  We’ll have to see where it goes from here.

Alice in Borderland S1 (Netflix, ~7 hours) ★★★

A good, solid 3, edging towards a 4, this Japanese show is decently dubbed and interestingly shot, with a weird premise that gives nothing away.  It’s enough like a standard dystopian, compete-for-your-life plot (à la Running Man or Hunger Games) that it’s familiar, but dissimilar enough that it still feels fresh.  The connection to Alice in Wonderland is mostly in the Japanese names (Alice becomes Arisu, the Cheshire Cat becomes Chishiya, and one character is named Usagi, which is apparently Japanese for “rabbit”), but, once that suggestion is planted firmly in your mind, you begin to see personality traits in common as well.  There are also some interesting gender role explorations.  It can get a little heavy-handed on the morality plays, though, which is the principal reason I don’t rate it higher.  Still, pretty entertaining.

Another Life S1 (Netflix, ~7½ hours) ★★★

Another entry in the proud tradition of claustrophobic sci-fi pioneered by Alien, this show was ... decent.  I enjoyed it while I was watching it, but I must confess it didn’t really stick with me all that much.  Not a waste of time, by any stretch, but nothing to write home about either.

American Horror Story Apocalypse (Netflix, ~7½ hours) ★★★★

As I mentioned above, the two best seasons of AHS are Murder House (the first one) and Coven (the third).  Apocalypse may well be its third best, as it not only takes a hard left into not-what-you-thought-it-was-going-to-be, but also wraps back around to both of those earlier, great seasons.  In fact, Apocalypse has such a great sense of closure that I’d almost rate it higher than at least one of the other two, except that the brilliance of those is what enables this in the first place.  If you’re a fan of fear (and blood), I strongly advise that you check this out, but only after you’ve watched Murder House and Coven first.

Dispatches from Elsewhere S1 (AMC+, ~7½ hours) ★★★★★

If you enjoy shows where you’re never completely sure what the fuck is going on—and even more so shows where the protatgonists themselves don’t know what the fuck is going on—then you’ll adore this one.  (And, contrariwise, if you don’t like such things, you’ll hate this.)  With an amazing cast that includes Jason Segel, Sally Field, André 3000, and an amazing trans actor named Eve Lindley, who I had not heard of before but was completely enchanted by, this show baffled me, thrilled me, blew my mind, made me think, made me laugh out loud, and even made me cry a few times.  And all with a layer of magic realism that sets it apart from the standard fare.  (By the way, when that layer is peeled back, don’t worry: there are more layers beneath.)

Next time, the conclusion of this exciting TV roundup.

__________

1 Like the final season of The Librarians.

2 Like the first season of Call Me Kat, the final episode of which has yet to air.

3 I was hunting tracks for Shadowfall Equinox, natch.

4 Which is why I haven’t finished it yet.

Isolation Report, Week #53

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

It’s been one year and two days since my personal pandemic began: I count it as having started on the Thursday when I got the message “don’t bother coming in to work; we’re sending everyone home for the foreseeable future.” That was March 12th of last year.  People all over have been “celebrating” this mark; Colbert has dubbed it his “quaranniversay.” At this time, perhaps it would be instructive to look back to our very first isolation report and see how well my thoughts have held up over the year.

• Numbers are flying around right now, and you don’t always know whether you can trust them, but by some estimates as many of 70% of the entire population (worldwide) will get it, and of those who contract it maybe 20% will have severe reactions and perhaps 2% will die.

This is a tough one.  First of all, most reported numbers don’t bother to distinguish between “getting it” and “severe reactions”; secondly, reported numbers likely don’t represent total cases; and finally, the death tolls have varied widely among different countries.  The first thing that should tell us is that how a country reacted to the pandemic really makes a huge difference.  The death tolls we’re seeing are really less about how fatal this disease is and how well equipped our healthcare systems were (or weren’t, in many cases).  But, taking the latest stats from Worldometer, worldwide infection rate has been about 1.5%, and death rate has been 0.03%.  On the other hand, the US infection rate has been closer to 9%, and the death rate more like 0.2%.  That’s a massive difference: only about a dozen countries are higher, and they’re all in Europe.  Many nations which are supposedly less “advanced” than us Western countries are beating the snot out of us in terms of responding to this virus.

So, overall, the rates didn’t live up to the boogeyman numbers that were being spouted, but then again, even at these rates it’s been pretty awful.  So let’s call that one a wash.

• But even on Monday when Christy tried to go to Costco, the toilet paper was all gone.  At this point we won’t even go out there any more: you have to wait in line to get in, apparently.

Oh, the naïvete.  Waiting in line to buy groceries is now just an everyday thing.

• Now, on the one hand, I find this somewhat silly.  It’s a cold, people.  ...  On the other hand, I do understand what the health care people are saying.  There are basically two scenarios here:  In the first one, everyone gets the virus all at once, the number of serious cases spikes insanely, and the health care system is overwhelmed.  With insufficient resources, some people could die not because the virus killed them, but because they couldn’t get the care they needed to weather the sickness.

This is an interesting one.  Was I too dismissive of the danger of overwhelming our healthcare system?  Perhaps.  On the other hand, going back to those breakdowns by country, the death tolls in places like India (~0.01%) and South Korea (~0.003%, a full order of magnitude less than the global numbers) seem to prove that, with the proper response, it really could have been comparable to any other cold or flu.  Even if those nations are radically underreporting to make themselves look better, they still come out way ahead of the US, where an intense lack of leadership, and an unwillingness to infringe on people’s “rights” even so far as to say people must wear masks caused the ultimate situation to be far worse than I ever imagined it would get.

On the other hand, is it possible that less draconian recommendations might have met with less resistance, and therefore would have been, in the end, more effective?  I think it’s possible, but it’s really hard to hypothesize.  We also have zero concept of how many lives were lost by ancillary causes: how many people committed suicide due to isolation? how many lost sleep, depressed their immune system, and ended up getting some completely different fatal disease?  These are unanswerable questions.  My final gut feeling is that if our leaders and health experts had been suggesting even looser restrictions, we probably would have ended up coming out even worse.  But, then again, if there had been looser restrictions, but those restrictions had been messaged with consistency and lived by example by the people actually in charge of the country?  That could have made a real difference.  But we had what we had, so speculation is pointless.

• I’m struck by what Trevor Noah said on The Daily Show one night this past week: COVID-19 has killed somewhere in the ballpark of 5,000 people in the past 3 months, worldwide.  In the U.S., just one country in the world, 3,000 people die in car accidents every day.

Okay, first thing to note is that either I misheard Trevor, or he himself was confused: 3,000 deaths per day is not what we have in the US; that’s closer to a worldwide figure (in fact, according to the WHO, it’s a bit low).  But I think my point was still valid, if a bit over-hyped, for all that—at the time.  So, let’s compare how good COVID turned out to be at killing us vs automobiles.  Worldwide, cars take out around 1.35 million of us per year.  COVID, over the course of the past year, has hit about 2.66 million.  COVID wins, beating out automobiles by about 2 to 1.  So I guess my point didn’t stand the test of time: we really should have been more worried about this virus than about going to work in the morning.  In the US, as always, it’s much worse: traffic deaths have been trending downwards from around 40k per year since 2007; COVID deaths broke half a million a month or so ago.  Overall, looking at the numbers, you were over 15x as likely to die from COVID in 2020 as you were to die in a car wreck in 2019.  So ... yeah.  I biffed that one, for sure.

• Colbert aired a single show with no audience (as did Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me), but that’s it (at least for Colbert; not sure if WWDTM will continue, albeit audience-less).  The Daily Show said at first they would continue to do shows sans audience, but they too gave it up late on Friday.  And here’s where I worry that we’re going too far.

But, dammit, I’m going to stand by this one.  Both Colbert and Noah (as well as many other folks like Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers) did come back, eventually, and I think it’s made all the difference.  That first month or so, without any trusted source for news of what was going on in the world, was what was really isolating for me.  Once those guys came back, the whole sorry sad situation got a lot more bearable.  Nowadays, while I really hope things get back to normal at some point, I’m doing okay.  This is survivable.  It’s not been to much to ask after all, I suppose.

• Because, at the end of the day (or more likely month, in this case), it will be difficult for us to quantify how many lives our choices have saved.  But I worry that the fundamental changes to our way of life will be all too apparent.

Okay, first let us all laugh at the dumb innocence of “more likely month” ... oh, how little I suspected that I would still be writing these crazy-ass isolation reports twelve months later.  Beyond that, I do think it’s impossible for us to quantify how many lives we saved by telling people to sing “Happy Birthday” while washing their hands, or not to touch their face (which I still maintain is essentially unachievable).  I think it’s impossible to quantify how many lives we saved by telling people to wear masks.  But, then again, it’s also impossible to guess how many lives we lost because of people refusing to do these things.  About the only thing I do feel confident in stating is that we could have done better ... because many other countries did.

I do still worry about the fundamental changes to our way of life.  Not in a “I refuse to do these things” sort of way, because I recognize that the things were, in the end, necessary, at least to some extent: those countries where they were more successful at containing the virus were often those places where they really did lock down the populace and force people to comply with the rules.  But more in a wistful, “I’m sad for what we lost” sort of way.  Will I be returning to the office at my company any time soon?  No.  My company no longer has an office: the lease expired over the course of the year, and it didn’t make sense to renew it.  So the working from home is the new normal.  Of course, I’m lucky: there are many businesses that will never recover.  Will we ever go to movie theaters as we once did?  What about museums?  Will in-person learning ever really be the standard way to do it again, or will it just be a fringe thing that only diehard students attempt?  Will we ever sit down in restaurants on a regular basis again, or will all food places just keep on delivering, because all the ones that don’t have fallen by the wayside?  I have no answers for these questions.  Perhaps we’ll know in the coming months.  Perhaps we will only truly understand the extent of the changes in the coming years.  I’ve no doubt that some history class somewhere will be studying this period in our lives as some sort of turning point ... I just don’t know exactly what we’re turning towards.

Well, that about wraps it up for my serious lookback on a year of isolation reports.  Next week, I’m going to attempt to look back on a lighter side, as I try to figure out—and report!—all the television I’ve watched over the past year.  Spoiler alert: it’s a lot.

A Spreadsheet Story

The main reason you won’t get a proper blog post this week is that it’s my middle child’s birthday weekend, and I’m at their beck and call.  But there’s another possibly vaguely (probably not really) interesting reason as well, so I thought I’d share it with you.

For most of my life, I’ve been one of those annoying OCD-but-disorganized people.  All my CDs had to be alphabetized just so, and the bills in my money clip had to be facing the same way, but all my workspaces were a horrible mess and I rarely had any firm concept of what I was supposed to be working on next.  A few years back I made a conscious decision to get myself organized: as we get older, it’s not so much that our brains lose the ability to juggle all those myriad of things we’re supposed to be remembering that we have to do, it’s more that we finally realize how terrible we were at it all along and that it’s only getting worse with age.  So I settled on a Method™ and ran with it.

The one I chose was Getting Things Done (sometimes referred to by its fans as GTD), and I learned a lot from it.  Which is not to say that I embraced it fully: the biggest issue I have with it is that David Allen, being about 20 years older than me (he’s actually about halfway between the ages of my mother and father), loves paper.  There’s lots of writing things on paper and filing paper and moving paper around.  I don’t do paper.  But of course the system can be adapted to computer software, and there are many GTD programs out there.  But part of the issue with being all OCD-y and a programmer is that I can’t adapt my way of working to someone else’s software: I gotta write my own.

So I created a massive Google Sheets spreadsheet with oodles of code macros (in Javascript, which I really don’t like to program in) and, whenever it does something I don’t like, I change it.  I can’t really say that it’s a proper implementation of GTD, but I’m sure that anyone familiar with GTD would recognize most of what’s going on in there.  I didn’t take GTD as a blueprint for exactly how to organize my shit, but I absorbed many of its lessons ... maybe that should be a whole blog post on its own.  But for now, I have to admit one thing.  A fuck up I made.

Back when I was originally designing my GTD-spreadsheet-monstrosity, I made a fateful decision.  When I complete a task, I don’t actually delete it ... I just mark it completed (by adding a date in the “Completed” column) and then it disappears from my “shit you need to do today” view.  But it’s still there.  Partially I did this because, as a programmer who mainly works with databases, I’ve had many years of conditioning that you never delete data because you always regret it later, and partially because I thought it would be cool to have a record of everything I’d accomplished (so now my todo list is also my diary).  Sounded perfectly rational at the time.

Now, I’m not going to go into all the details of how GTD works, but one of its main concepts is that you track everything. EVERYTHING.  This gives you a lot of confidence that you haven’t forgotten anything, because, you know ... you track everything.  I’m coming up on my 4-year anniversary of tracking everything in my spreadsheet and I’ve accumulated over 15 thousand items: tasks, longer blocks of time for projects, things I was waiting on other people to get back to me on, etc etc etc.  It works out to about 4 thousand a year, and I shouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually increasing over time and I’m soon to hit 5 grand.  Now, if you’re a big spreadsheet person (as many people are these days, in many different areas of business) you may have heard technogeeks tell you not to use a spreadsheet as a database.  Being a technogeek myself, I knew this perfectly well ... and I did it anyway.  I did it advisedly, for reasons of expediency.  Because I didn’t want to spend months trying to develop my own application from scratch, putitng me even further behind on getting organized.  The point was to get up and running quickly, which I did.  But now I’m paying the price.

This weekend, while sitting around waiting for my child to inform me of the next videogame I was drafted into playing or the next meal I was conscripted into obtaining, I had a brainstorm about how to make this system way more efficient.  It’s not a proper fix, but it would radically decrease the time I currently spend sitting around waiting for my spreadsheet to respond, so I figured I better do it.  I thought: this won’t be too hard to do.  Of course, it was harder than I thought—it’s always harder than you think—and I haven’t gotten things completely back to normal yet (and I stayed up way too late last night), but I made some really great strides, and I’m seeing an even bigger speed-up than I thought.  So I’m pretty pleased.  Even though I’ll probably be fucking with it for the next several weeks.

So that’s why I have no time to make a proper post.  Except mainly the birthday thing.  Next week will be better, I’m sure.

Isolation Report, Week #51

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, our family is heading into the March birthday season, that annual time when we have two birthday weekends of our own, not to mention one of the two birthday recipients’ best friends, who also has a birthday in there.  In happier times, we’ve sometimes combined hers with one of ours and had joint celebrations.  This year, of course, it will be a pandemic birthday.

And, what makes me sad, and angry, and frustrated, is that, being that we live in America and are talking about March birthdays, this will be the first crop of kids now experiencing their second pandemic birthday in a row.  That sucks for them.  It would suck for anyone, but in this case I’m talking about kids celebrating birthdays ranging from their 7th (our youngest child, last year) to their 15th (our middle child and their friend, this year).  I mean, I can’t imagine how hard it would suck to have your 16th birthday, or your 18th, or your 21st, in all this shit, and I know there are people going through that too—I don’t happen to know any, but just stastically there have to be.  But at those ages (yes, I would argue even at 16) you’re starting to develop some maturity.  You’re starting to understand that, while the world is often awash with possibilities, sometimes it just sucks, and you have to learn to start accepting that.  But 7 – 15 ... man, those are your peak years of innocence, I feel.  Those are the times when, unless you’ve had some hard luck or some hard circumstances, you shouldn’t really have to be aware that life sucks sometimes.  You shouldn’t even have to think about it sucking for other people, much less yourself.

But, this is the world we live in, so we make the best of it.  We do Zoom birthday parties, and hold online gaming events, and, if we’re lucky enough to have social bubbles, maybe do very small parties within those.  And we make sure we let our kids know that they are still loved, even if the world is kinda shitting on them right now.  And we keep telling them that this won’t be forever.

Hopefully, we’re not lying.

Tumbledown Flatland I

"I Have Water, I Have Rum"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

In response to a query from Elwood about what kind of music the bar usually has, a charater from The Blues Brothers famously replies “Oh, we got both kinds: we got country and western!” This is meant to be a joke.  The joke is supposed to be that “country and western” is really only one kind of music.  But, perhaps oddly, the real punch line, coming some 15 minutes later or so, is that the Blues Brothers band ends up just playing the theme from Rawhide over and over: a tune which is decidedly western ... but definitely not country.

Because, you see, country music and western music are actually entirely different.  Country music is from the eastern United States: it is mountain music from the Appalachians.  Westeran music is exactly what it says: music derived from the westward expansion.  Country is the music of coal miners (and their daughters); western is the music of cowboys.  But the most important difference between the two is that I hate country music: it’s one of only two kinds of music that I really can’t handle.¹  Western, on the other hand ...

When I was a kid, I had a few albums of my own; they were mostly Disney albums, such as Winnie the Pooh or The Aristocats or The Haunted Mansion.  But, for some weird reason, I also had a hand-me-down copy of this Lorne Green album, which included songs like “Bonanza” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Western music, to me, has always been about cowboys camping on the endless prairie, singing songs with a vaguely lonesome air, as the tumbleweeds go rolling by ...

The genesis of this mix was Chris Isaak’s soft western ballad “Blue Spanish Sky.” I first mentioned Isaak way back on Smokelit Flashback I—the very first entry in this series—and I referred to him as “as close to country as I get.” Truly, Isaak is alt-country at best, and this tune is a brilliant example of a modern take on the western genre.²  The guitar shows that influence of Mexican music which you don’t hear in country, and the verses are truly lonesome rather than lonely, which is the best description I can give for the proper difference between western and country, underscored even more so by the trumpet, which is not upbeat and brassy like you might hear on Salsatic Vibrato, but more sad and, well ... lonesome.³  Really, my only problem with this song is the bridge (it doens’t really have a chorus, just a single bridge before the trumpet breakdown), which I always felt changed the tenor of the song too much.  But, eventually, I came to accept it:⁴ it’s even more referent of the cowboys of the American West, with a touch of the yodeling cowpoke.  And the lyrics, of course, are pitch-perfect:

It’s a slow sad Spanish song;
I knew the words but I sang them wrong.
The one I love has left and gone
Without me ...

Surely there must be other songs out there that I liked in the present, I thought, that would remind me of pleasant times in the past listening to Lorne Green?

At the time, I was deep into True Blood, and its theme song, “Bad Things,” was too slinky and echoey for me to consider it properly country (though Jace Everett is certainly a country singer).  But when Everett isn’t supplying a country twang almost too much for me to bear, he drops into a sultry bass that gives you the shivers.  The electric guitar counterpointed with the steel guitar, combined with the Hammond organ, also gives it a decidedly uncountry feel.  I also thought of Firefly’s opening theme, which is almost country, but with just enough blues and western to rescue it.  Then I thought of the extremely oddball song “Dakota,” from Wire Train’s third album, the one which was such a departure from their early, almost-British-sounding jangle-pop.  And no song moreso than this one, which is lonely and haunted, starting out soft and then bursting forth, but still somehow downbeat.  And then I think I remembered “Underneath the Bunker,” by the absolute masters of jangle-pop, R.E.M.  It’s s bit more upbeat, but still has some of that Latin influence,⁵ and the weird, processed vocals which provide our volume title.  And then ... then I was sort of stuck for a long while.

This mix may have had the longest “stewing” time, from initial idea to being declared sufficiently done.  I’ve added songs here and there, as I found them: “Ghost of a Texas Ladies’ Man” by Concrete Blonde (a bit silly, but fun), or “the sadness of the witch” by Falling You (the rainstick really sells the western angle), or “Parking Lot” by emmet swimming (purely on the strength of the steel-guitar-adjacent stringwork by my friend Erik⁶), or “Ghost song” by hands upon black earth⁷ (more rainstick and other Native American percussion and chanting).  When I finally decided to pick up the ultra-classic Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, I discovered (or perhaps rediscovered) “Gold Dust Woman,” which seems to fit perfectly here.  When I discovered Myles Cochran,⁸ I was quite enamored of “Wait a While,” and I think it spent a bit of time as the potential mix opener.  But then I found “Big Sky” by the Reverend Horton Heat, normally known more for psychobilly, but actually spanning a pretty electic range of styles.⁹  Something about the guitar work in this instrumental really screams western at me, even though it’s almost certainly the fastest song on the volume.

Other not-too-surprising candidates include Meat Puppets, Iron & Wine, House of Freaks, and Mazzy Star.  In the case of the Seattle ostensibly-grunge band, “Roof with a Hole” is one of my favorites of theirs, and the lyrics (e.g. “the roof’s got a hole in it, and everything’s been ruined by the rain”) sell the lonesome vibe.  With the folk-adjacent Sam Beam vehicle, I think it’s the banjo that qualifies it.  The Richmond duo’s amazing album Monkey on a Chain Gang contains several tracks which could work here; after some thought, I went with “Long Black Train,” where Johnny Hott’s fantastic toms give the song a rolling beat that perfectly embodies its title.  Finally, there are many great choices from the Santa-Monica-based shoegazers, but their biggest hit “Fade into You” gives us some great steel guitar, tambourine, and a particularly lonesome vibe.

Tumbledown Flatland I
[ I Have Water, I Have Rum ]

“Big Sky” by Reverend Horton Heat, off Liquor in the Front
“Wait a while” by Myles Cochran, off Marginal Street
“Bad Things” by Jace Everett [Single]
“Gold Dust Woman” by Fleetwood Mac, off Rumours
“Good Times Gone” by Nickelback, off Silver Side Up
“Firefly: Main Title” by Sonny Rhodes [Single]
“Blue Spanish Sky” by Chris Isaak, off Heart Shaped World
“the sadness of the witch” by Falling You, off Touch
“Ghost song” by hands upon black earth, off hands upon black earth
“Passage Three” by Steve Roach, Michael Stearns & Ron Sunsinger, off Kiva
“Dakota” by Wire Train, off Wire Train ¹⁰
“Roof with a Hole” by Meat Puppets, off Too High to Die
“Long Black Train” by House of Freaks, off Monkey on a Chain Gang
“Parking Lot” by emmet swimming, off Arlington to Boston
“Ghost of a Texas Ladies' Man” by Concrete Blonde, off Walking in London
“Underneath the Bunker” by R.E.M., off Lifes Rich Pageant
“Teeth in the Grass” by Iron & Wine, off Our Endless Numbered Days
“Fade into You” by Mazzy Star, off So Tonight That I Might See
“Taqsim” by Stellamara, off Star of the Sea
“Feels Like the End of the World” by Firewater, off The Golden Hour
“Malagueña salerosa (La malagueña)” by Chingón, off Mexican Spaghetti Western

Total:  21 tracks,  78:18

How about the less likely choices?  Well, Nickelback shouldn’t be entirely unexpected: their alt-metal, “post-grunge,”¹¹ style is western-adjacent, and they hail from Alberta, which is Canada’s prairie country (directly north of Montana, in fact).  “Good Times Gone” contains a lot of bendy, echoey guitar work that fits in very nicely here, and Chad Kroeger’s vocals contain just enough twang to sell it without crossing into country territory.  Plus it just rocks.

Kiva, the album by 3 big names in ambient music (Steve Roach, Michael Stearns, and actual Native American Ron Sunsinger), consists of very long Native-American-inspired ambient pieces, separated by shorter bridges named “Passage One” through “Passage Four” (and concluding with “The Center”).  “Passage Three” is a piece that I really felt captured some of the feel of the wind on the wide, flat lands of the American West, and I thought it made a good transition into the whistling, wind-like opening strains of “Dakota.”

And then we have the closing stretch.  After “Fade into You” fades out, I thought that “Taqsim” from the normally Balkan-leaning Stellamara,¹², with its lonely stringed instrument (I believe it’s an oud), made a perfect bridge into Firewater’s “Feels Like the End of the World.” Firewater’s insanely good The Golden Hour was the result of Tod A. spending three years abroad, absorbing the musical styles of Turkey, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia.  The jangly guitars here and the overall melancholy air of the lyrics really cemented its place on this mix, despite being probably the furthest away from properly “western” music on this volume.

And that leads squarely into our closer, “Malagueña salerosa” by Robert Rodruiguez’s Chingón.  This song is one of the most well known mariachi ballads, and it demands that the lead singer (in this case, Alex Ruiz) hold a note for what seems like forever—literally, I can’t even hum the note for as long as Alex continuously sings it.  The lyrics, if translated, are suitably sad for a lonesome western: the singer speaks to a witty, charming woman from Málaga, Spain, noting her beautiful eyes and calling her stunning and bewitching, but then says “If you look down on me for being poor, I concede that you are right” and, in the final verse, pleads “I don’t offer you riches: I offer you my heart ... I offer you my heart in exchange for what I lack.” From Chingón’s excellent album Mexican Spaghetti Western (which, goshdarnit, has the theme right there on the tin), this song always epitomized to me the Latin influence on the western genre, and what depth of emotion it could bring to the music.

Next time, let’s go back to the 80s.  I kinda like it there.

__________

1 The other, as I’ve mentioned before, is opera.

2 As is “Kings of the Highway,” actually, which is the track of his that I used on Smokelit Flashback.

3 More like the sax breaks you might hear on Moonside by Riverlight.

4 Though not to love it, unfortunately.

5 I’m guessing habanera, specifically, though I am no expert on the Latin American musical styles.

6 You may recall that Erik of emmet swimming was the first employee of my software company.

7 Another Magnatune find; I first mentioned them back on Smokelit Flashback IV.

8 First mentioned back on Rose-Coloured Brainpan I.

9 To prove it, note that the good Reverend has appeared thus far on Moonside by Riverlight, Porchwell Firetime, Cantosphere Eversion, and even Yuletidal Pools.

10 Normally I prefer to link to a page where you can give someone money for the music.  However, this album doesn’t appear to be available anywhere in that way, at least in digital form.  If you’re into CDs, you can get it from Amazon, but I suspect I’m in a distinct minority on that score these days.

11 Still find that label meaningless, but it’s common.

12 First encountered on Shadowfall Equinox I but since seen on volumes III and IV of that mix, as well as on Apparently World.

Isolation Report, Week #49

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, it’s a been a few weeks since I checked in on the political front, and that means it’s been long enough that the Senate performed exactly as expected and acquitted Trump of inciting the riot that stormed the Capitol and resulted in several deaths.  The majority of the Republicans, of course, had made up their minds beforehand.  If this were an actual trial, such potential jurors would have been dismissed as prejudiced ... in fact, the roots of the word “prejudiced”—meaning to “pre-judge”—are specifically referring to this type of behavior.  There were apparently only seven Republicans who were brave enough to vote to convict someone of doing something they very obviously did (on video, even!), and two of them aren’t running for re-election.  Think about what that means: for 86% of Republicans (or at least 86% of Repulican senators) care more about getting re-elected than about being honest.  Even if you’re a Republican, that should concern you.  Even if you believe Trump that the election was stolen, you can see that he did the thing he’s being accused of, right?  Hell, even if you agree that storming the Capitol was the right thing to do, and even if you believe that the Deep State government has no right at all to hold him accountable for his actions, you still understand that he incited the riot ... right?  Hell, if you were at the riot, you believe that: the Senators were shown footage of rioters chanting “We were invited by the president of the United States!” So he did it.  There isn’t much debate about that.  Senators voting to acquit are lying.  Maybe we could dream up some motives for that lie other than wanting re-election, but sometimes (as William of Occam was wont to say) the simplest explanation is the right one.

To be fair, many Republicans are concerned about this.  So much so that many prominent Republicans met to discuss the possibility of forming a new party.  They eventually rejected that idea, though, because a third party would not be successful.  Which right there ought to tell you that we have a serious problem with our system.  “We have to stay with the crazy people because the system is designed to help them remain in power” is never the position you want to be in.  And, honestly, my problem with this whole plan is partially the Democrats.  Sure, I’m absolutely a progressive and more or less a liberal, but I am not a Democrat.  I don’t want the Democrats to have too much political power and control everything from here on out any more than the more conservative among you do.  Furthermore, the Democrats are half the reason that a third party is not viable.  For all that they tear at each other’s throats, when it comes to shutting out third parties, the Democrats and the Republicans are in lockstep.  And, ironically, they will now pay the price for that decision, because having the Republicans split in two would only help the Democrats.

Ah, but enough about politics.  How’s our pandemic going?  Well, not so great, honestly.  The Mother had to go to the emergency room for severe pain about 3 weeks ago; they completely ignored her advising them that it was probably her gallbladder and said maybe she had some strained muscles in her back, shot her full of a souped up version of ibuprofen and sent her home.  She got an appointment with her doctor, who told her it was probably her gallbladder but she needed an MRI to confirm.  She got the MRI, the results said it was her gallbladder, and shd had a followup appointment with her doctor next week.  But, before that could come around, she was back in the emergency room with even more extreme pain, and this time they had the brains to work out that, hey: maybe it’s her gallbladder.  So, this past Monday, after spending the weekend in the hospital, she had an emergency gallbladder removal.  She’s fine now, and home, and recovering, albeit somewhat slowly.

Now, you may remember we have this little thing called a pandemic going on right now—it’s sort of the basis for this blog post series, in fact.  What’s it like, having to go to the hospital in the middle of the pandemic, even if for a non-pandemic-related cause?  Well, the first thing is, I can’t tell you firsthand: the farthest I ever got into the hospital was the front desk, when I went to drop off some knitting and a cell phone charging plug.  In fact, even taking her to the emergency room meant driving her, dropping her off at the door, then waiting in the parking lot until they let her in.  Yep, that’s right: when you walk up to the emergency room (at least ours), a security guard comes out, asks you what you’re in for, then makes you wait outside while they figure out what to do with you.  Once they did let her in, all I could really do was go home and wait for news.  I didn’t see her again until they wheeled her out to go home.  (And of course that was days and days later, because I dropped her off on a Friday night, and when you need “emergency” surgery on a weekend, that means you wait until Monday.  But that’s probably a whole separate rant.)

But my secondhand report is, the hospital staff is haggard.  They’ve had to see a lot of death lately, and they’re probably being pushed to their limits ... if not beyond.  I could almost forgive the original idiot doctor who misdiagnosed her with “back pain,” except for the extra $400 it’s going to cost me (that’s what it’ll cost me, mind you: it’s going to cost the insurance company much more).  But we’re lucky enough to have a hospital very close to us, and second time was the charm and she got a good doctor, and excellent nursees, and overall we’re pretty happy.  And, even though she’s still in a lot of pain from the surgery itself, the lack of a gallbladder full of gallstones (which the surgeon described as “highly inflamed”) means that she feels a lot better than she did when she went in.  So we can’t complain.  Too much.

Hopefully we’ve exhausted our drama quotient for the year (both personally and politically), and the rest of 2021 will be completely boring.  At this point, I’m looking forward to that.