Post-Pandemic TV Roundup (part 1)

Around about the one-year anniversay of the pandemic, I published a pandemic TV roundup, which described all the televsion I’d been watching during the lockdown.  Well, not all of it: even two, longer-than-usual posts wouldn’t have been sufficient for that task.  But all the TV shows that I’d both started and finished in that year.  And I rated them all, from one to five stars (well, except that nothing got one star, because, if the show had really been that bad, I wouldn’t have finished it, so it wouldn’t have made the cut).  Now, I was able to do this detailed overview because I keep track of all the TV episodes I watch.  Originally, I started doing this because many streaming services were terrible at remembering where you left off, and I was tired of spending half an hour scanning through old episodes trying to remember how much I’d already watched.  So I just added it to my mega-spreadsheet where I keep track of my todo tasks.

Of course, just like the todo list itself, the bonus to this plan is that it serves as a diary: since I never delete data (a principle that one learns fairly early as a database programmer), everything I’ve ever done—and, now, everything I’ve ever watched—is recorded.  Well, not movies: I never bothered tracking them, because you watch them all in one sitting.  And a lot of “regular” viewing, such as The Daily Show, I don’t bother to track, because I always stay current on it, so there’s never any need to remember which episode I was on.  But, for episodic TV,¹ I’ve got a pretty solid record.

So, it occurred to me to do another roundup, only this time, since I’m now covering a period of over 3 years, I’m only going to talk about the best of the best, the stuff I’ve rated as 5 stars.  (I’ll do an honorable mention at the end for shows that came in at perhaps a 4.5.)  I’ll keep everything brief and spoiler-free; these are basically tiny recommendations as to the best stuff I’ve discovered in the past 3 years.  Some of it may predate that time, but it’s all stuff that I watched in that period and was blown away by.  And, as it turns out, there were enough shows on the list—even limiting it to 5 star shows—that I couldn’t squeeze them all into one post.  So this is part 1; part 2 will likely come next week.  Finally, the order is just chronological in terms of when I watched them, which is close enough to random that you really shouldn’t read anything into it.

Without further ado then: the roundup.

Dimension 20 “Pirates of Leviathan” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play)

One of the few seasons of D20 to be filmed entirely remotely during the pandemic, this still manages to be quite possibly the best season ever, and certainly up there in the top 10 (if not the top 5) medium-form actual play shows, period.²  This is like the all-star game for streaming D&D: Matt Mercer and Marisha Ray from Critical Role, B. Dave Walters from Idle Champions Presents and Invitation to Party, Aabria Iyengar from Worlds Beyond Number and Battle for Beyond, Krystina Arielle from Sirens of the Realms and Into the Mother Lands, and Carlos Luna from Rivals of Waterdeep and content producer for Roll20, all GM’ed by regular D20 game master Brennan Lee Mulligan, surely one of the best GMs in the space.  It’s a stunning season; highly recommended.

The Nevers (originally HBOMax, 1 season, Urban Fantasy)

Due to controversy over creator Joss Whedon, HBO cancelled this show after 1 season and then pulled it from their site, so you may not be able to find it anywhere.  But, if you ever get a chance, watch it: Whedon may be a toxic person to work with, but he puts together some magnificent content.  The story is not entirely resolved, but it’s sufficient that you won’t feel let down if you watch it all the way through.  There’s a twist that blindsided me in all the best ways, and the primarily female (primarily British) cast is just amazing.  Plus smaller roles from genre faves like Claudia Black (Farscape), Nick Frost (Spaced), and Pip Torrens (Preacher).

Dimension 20 “Magic & Misfits” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play)

The summer of 2021 was often referred to as “the Summer of Aabria,” because Aabria Iyengar was suddenly GMing for the top actual play shows: she did 8 episodes of a side story/prequel for Critical Role, 3 episodes of a where-are-they-now story for The Adventure Zone, and this season of D20, the first ever not GMed by Brennan Lee Mulligan (who instead sits in as a player).  This would not be the last time Aabria ran the dome at D20, but it is perhaps the best.  Including the entire cast of what would become Worlds Beyond Number (i.e. Lou Wilson and Erika Ishii were also present), plus the ever-engaging Danielle Radford, this off-kilter take on a Harry-Potter-like world manages to both celebrate and criticize that series all at the same time, with a surprisingly deft hand.  Brennan’s character of Evan Kelmp, the person pegged to become the Voldemort of the story, is perhaps the standout, as he rails against his fate in extremely amusing fashion.  It’s hard to beat “Pirates of Leviathan” for me, but this comes damned close.

Locke & Key (Netflix, 3 seasons, Urban Fantasy)

Based on a comic by the excellent (and prolific) Joe Hill, this fantasy centered on the 3 Locke children, who have recently lost their father and are forced to move back into their ancestral manor, features some magnificent acting, magnificent writing, and magnificent effects.  Plus recurring roles for genre faves such as Aaron Ashmore (Warehouse 13) and Kevin Durand (The Strain), and a story that is neither too rushed nor overstays its welcome ... just a gem.

Reacher (Amazon Prime, 2 seasons thus far, Action/Mystery)

I never understood why someone let Tom Cruise play Jack Reacher, a character who is a full 10 inches taller than the actor.  I’ve never read the books myself, but I do know that the character is supposed to be an imposing, almost hulking, figure.  Alan Ritchson is still 3 inches too short, technically speaking, but he much more embodies the energy of the character.  Season 1 was insanely good; season 2 only a very slight step down.  Looking forward to future seasons.

Legend of Vox Machina (Amazon Prime, 2 seasons thus far, Adult Animation)

The idea to turn Critical Role campaigns into animated series was a natural one, and, after a record-breaking Kickstarter, the first of these, based on C1 of CR, became a reality via Amazon Prime.  The original cast all record their own characters, naturally, while the numerous NPCs are cast with a dazzling array of vocal talent, from the core voice actor pool (such as Grey Griffin, Darin De Paul, and Kelly Hu) to big name genre stars such as David Tenant (Dr Who), Gina Torres (Firefly), Khary Payton (The Walking Dead), Stephanie Beatriz (Brooklyn 99), and Lance Reddick (Fringe).  This is absolultely not a kid’s cartoon (although perhaps not quite as adult as Castlevania³), and it has a bit of a rocky start (the first two episodes can’t quite seem to find their tone), but give it a chance and you’ll be hooked.

The G Word (Netflix, Documentary/Educational)

As I said in the last roundup, I don’t typically do documentaries.  But Adam Conover, formerly of College Humor and mastermind of Adam Ruins Everything, gets a pass because he can make any topic entertaining.  With little introductions from President Barack Obama, each episode Adam delves into a different aspect of our government (“our” presuming you live in the US), and often how it’s been corrupted by capitalistic efforts.  I’m not sure there’s anything else you could watch that will simultaneously make you laugh, make you learn, and piss you off quite like this will.

Archive 81 (Netflix, Horror)

Starring Mamoudou Athie, who I knew as the titular Jerome of the “Oh Jerome, No” segments of Cake,⁴ and weaving a twisty little tale of surreality and bizarrerie, this genuinely creepy split-timeline story centers on a data archivist hired to clean up some tapes documenting the mysterious end of a sinister cult.  Mind-bending, but in a very good way.

The Problem with Jon Stewart (Apple+, 2 seasons, Comedy/News)

Less of a news show (like The Daily Show), and more of a deep-dive into topics of current interest (like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver), the excellent return of the master of injecting humor into the often dark topics of our news cycle was cut short because Apple refused to let him discuss certain topics (like AI, where it had a significant monetary investment).  Still, the 20 episodes he managed to put out before being silenced covered some fantastic topics such as racism, climate change, gun control, and incarceration.  Educational, funny, and not to be missed.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, (Paramount Plus, 2 seasons thus far, Science Fiction)

I was legitimately surprised at how good this Star Trek prequel series was.  Featuring Christopher Pike, the original captain of the Enterprise (from the pilot of the original series), as protrayed by Anson Mount in his best turn since Hell on Wheels, this series collects an amazing array of both new and old faces in the Star Trek universe.  It’s primarily episodic (unlike, say, Discovery), and hits all the best Trekkie tropes: court case to defend an officer accused of something that is both unjust and undeniably true, diplomatic mission with impossible-to-please aliens, memory loss, reality warps, time travel, and weird Vulcan mating rituals.  If you love Trek, you’ll definitely love this.

Game Changer (Dropout, 6 seasons so far, Faux Game Show)

There are various forms of the faux quiz show: the Brits practically invented it, with news shows (e.g. Have I Got News For You), wordplay shows (My Word), improv shows (e.g. Whose Line Is It Anyway?), and trivia shows (e.g. QI).  Most of those format have made it to America (e.g. Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Says You!, Whose Line Is It Anyway?⁵), so it’s pretty rare to find something new in this space.  Game Changer is not an improv show, definitely not a news show, incoroporates some trivia and wordplay, but isn’t those either ... in point of fact, it’s a bit impossible to say WTF it really is, because it’s a different show every time.  The gimmick of the show is that the “contestants” (generally comedians from the College Humor/Dropout troupe) have no idea what the game is going to be at the outset and have to figure it out as they go along.  Some of these are utterly brilliant, others less so, and occasionally they run out of ideas and repeat a concept from an earlier show, which is a bit disappointing, but overall it’s a great show.  Season 1 is probably the best, but Season 5 has some of my all-time favorite episodes (although it also has 6 episodes doing perverted versions of The Bachelor and Survivor, which I didn’t really care for).  Addictive, and highly recommended.

Stranger Things (Netflix, 4 seasons so far, Urban Fantasy)

I probably don’t have to tell you how good this show is: the blockbuster series made Netflix a shit-ton of money and is generally credited (along with Critical Role) for the resurgence of D&D.  What really gets me is how the show consistently maintains quality across the seasons, adding more and more characters (and more and more great actors) and more complex storylines without ever getting predictable or tedious.  Few shows can match it.  The series finale will be next year, so I’ll likely go back and watch it all from the beginning again, which is a thing I only do for the very best shows.  This is one of them.

Umbrella Academy (Netflix, 3 seasons so far, Superhero Fantasy)

Like Stranger Things, this is an amazing Netflix show that I will undoubtedly rewatch in its entirety before the series finale season 4 later this year.  It’s absolutely a comic book show, though not really a show about superheroes (more a show with superheroes in it); it’s a show where any weird shit at all can happen ... and typically does.  The time travel aspects make it hard to follow sometimes, but it all slots together beautifully, even on repeat viewings, and the characters, outlandish as they are, are human in a way that is both poignant and relatable.  I suppose if you really hate comic book properties, you might not like it, but everyone else should absoutely watch it.

The Sandman (Netflix, 1 season so far, Dark Fantasy)

While Dream of the Endless—a.k.a. the Sandman—is technically a comic book property, it’s also a Neil Gaiman property, and that’s more the vibe here.  If you’re into the comics version, there are Easter eggs here a-plenty, but it will also absolutely grab your interest if you’re just a lover of fantasy stories.  Creating an immortal being who is also relatable to an audience, with all-too-human foibles, is a really difficult task, but the writers here (including Gaiman himself) and actor Tom Sturridge do an amazing job.  The cast is insanely good, including Gwendoline Christie (from Game of Thrones) as Lucifer and Kirby as Death, plus voicework from Patton Oswalt, and a smaller role for Stephen Fry.  Stunning visuals and a complex but satisfying storyline make it a must-watch.  Looking forward to season 2.

Pennyworth (Max, 3 seasons, Gritty British Crime Drama)

Yes, yes: techincally, this is another comic book show.  But it doesn’t really hit the proper absurdities of a comic book show till season 2, and, honestly, you should probably stop after season 1.  That first season, exploring the origin of Bruce Wayne’s butler, follows Alfred on his journey from a turn in the British army to the London underworld, à la Guy Ritchie.  I was amazed at how good they made it, and disappointed at how little they could keep it up.  Season 2 is watchable, but not great; season 3 I’ve never finished because it was just depressing how mundane it became.  I’ll probably get back to it someday though.

Mythic Quest (Apple+, 3 seasons so far, Workplace Comedy/Drama)

Many people adore It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  I am not one of them.  However, the team of Day, Ganz, and McElhenney scored a much bigger hit (to my taste) with this show about videogame developers.  McElhenney is great as the head guy who is both an enormous prick and also a lovable dork, but it’s really Charlotte Nicdao, a perennial on Aussie television but not much known in the US until now, that makes this show work for me.  Add in more amazing actors such as Danny Pudi and F. Murray Abraham, plus the ever-reliable Ashly Burch (voice actor from Borderlands and Horizon Zero Dawn as well as occasional guest on Critical Role), and it’s a home run.  I don’t think seasons 2 and 3 were quite as good as season 1, which has one incredible episode out of nowhere that actually made me cry like a baby, but they’re close.

Inside Man (Netflix, Crime Drama)

David Tenant and Stanley Tucci, British crime drama—I really shouldn’t need to say more than that to hook you.  But this also has a dogged crime journalist, a genius solving cases from behind bars, and Dylan Baker as a prison warden.  Plus an everything-that-can-go-wrong-will-go-wrong plot that could easily have been a comedy of errors, but here is played straight and becomes an inevitable tragedy.  Especially if you love things like Broadchurch,⁶ don’t miss this.

The Peripheral (Amazon Prime, 1 season, Science Fiction)

Chloë Grace Moretz had done 16 movies before I saw her in Kick-Ass, but that was the film that made me remember her name forever.  Especially after following it up with the mind-blowing Let Me In.  This series was a casualty of the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strike, which is as big a crime as the ones perpetrated on those unions in the first place.  The story isn’t entirely resolved, but I can’t tell you not to watch this season.  Excellent time travel, excellent scifi gadgets, excellent acting.

The Last of Us (Max, 1 season so far, Post-Apocalyptic Horror)

This is another one I likely don’t need to tell you how good it is.  Bella Ramsey, who has been great in everything I’ve seen her in, from Game of Thrones to The Worst Witch, is stellar here, and it’s tough to go wrong with Pedro Pascal, not to mention ancillary actors like Anna Torv (Fringe), Rutina Wesley (True Blood), and Nick Offerman in a single episode that punches you in the gut like an 800lb gorilla.  It’s scary, it’s gory, it’s creepy, and it’s impactful.  Not many series can do all that in one show.  This one does.

Dimension 20 “Neverafter” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play)

Yes, it’s a third entry for Dimension 20, and a second recommendation for Brennan Lee Mulligan as GM.  What can I say: they’ve been firing on all cylinders since the pandemic started.  This season, the D20 regulars (Lou Wilson, Emily Axford, Siobhan Thompson, Ally Beardsley, Zac Oyama, and Brian Murphy) each take on the personality of a different fairy tale character (Lou is Pinocchio, Emily is Little Red Riding Hood, etc).  And Brennan throws them into a dark, twisted version of the Brothers Grimm’s world (which is, to be fair, far more close in tone to the original stories than the Disneyfied versions we’ve become accustomed to), and the results are delicious, terrifying, and wondrous to behold.  Probably hit “Pirates” and “Misfits” first, but this should be a close third choice.

Next week: part two.

__________

1 Or streaming shows.  Can we just call it all “TV” please?  I watch it all on my television, even YouTube.  The fact that it isn’t being broadcast over the airwaves doesn’t make it not televison ... and, if it did, we wouldn’t have been watching TV ever since cable was invented.

2 For context, I consider short-form actual play to be the one-shots, or occasional two-shots, and long-form to be those ongoing campaigns that run anywhere from 50 to 100+ episodes.  So medium form is typically somewhere between 6 and 20 episodes, and is often the perfect place to start if you want to see if actual play is for you.

3 See part 1 of the pandemic roundup.

4 See part 2 of the pandemic roundup.

5 The trivia format doesn’t seem to have made it to us yet, aside from things like Funny You Should Ask, which is apparently a show on CBS that’s been running since 2017, though I confess I’ve never heard of it before writing this post.

6 See part 1 of the pandemic roundup.

To those who cannot remember the past ...

This week, I had the good fortune to attend an anniversary dinner for my work, where I enjoyed some lovely cuisine with 10 of the 11 other people who have also worked for our company for 10 years or more.  We ate, and drank, and talked, for several hours.

At some point the topic of the recent college student protests against their institutions’ ongoing financial support for the killing of innocent people in Palestine came up.  Now, I think there’s a very interesting discussion to be had about how it really shouldn’t be a controversial opinion to be anti-genocide, and it really shouldn’t be controversial to say that they have the right to protest—it’s literally one of their First Amendment rights, along with freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion.  But that wasn’t the discussion we had.  The discussion we had was how much of an idiot you have to be to think it’s a good idea to call the police to “break up” a protest on a college campus.  Even a completely clueless administrator (or rich donor, or Speaker of the House) with only a cursory understanding of history should understand that attempts to stop a protest via violence only makes it worse.  (Special dispensation for the Speaker, who doesn’t seem to know any history that isn’t found in the Bible.)  I would more likely believe that the suggestion to call the police on a campus protest came from an undercover instigator who was trying to make damn sure that the protests succeeded than credit the notion that some college president said, with complete lack of irony, “I know: we’ll call in the cops and the National Guard and that will definitely put this silly protest thing behind us.” I am not old enough to remember the violence at Kent State—I was in fact four years old at the time—but I know about it, and even I understand what a moronic idea that is.

The thing that I thought of after that discussion, too late to contribute it there, so that now I must share it here with you, is that it might also behoove people in positions of collegial power to try to think of a time when there were widespread college protests that we currently look back on and think, man, those college kids were totally wrong.  Would it be the Free Speech Movement in 1964? the civil rights protests against racial inequality in 1968? the antiwar protests of 1970? the anti-apartheid protests of 1985? the protests against school shootings in 2018? the Black Lives Matter protests of 2014 and again in 2020?  Which of these are people looking back on and saying “well, here’s an example of where the college kids really blew it, and I bet they’re embarrassed about it now!” Is there a single counterexample that I’ve missed? a single case where the protests were misguided? a single case where these people—and to call them “young people” is just pointlessly reductive—really should have been told to “stop the nonsense; stop wasting your parents’ money”?  I haven’t thought of one yet.  But perhaps I lack the imagination of those wiser than I.  (Although, I gotta tell you: at this point, I’ve managed to live long enough that most of the idiots spewing this sort of garbage are no longer older than I, so maybe I should start referring to them as the “young people.”)

Anyway, that’s just what I’ve been thinking about recently.  Thinking about, as Elizabeth Shackleford put it in the Chicago Tribune, college protests and the right side of history; thinking about the ACLU’s advice to college presidents.  Thinking about how stupid you have to be to want to escalate college protests, and how morally bankrupt you have to be to think you’re going to come out looking good trying to quash them.  Just little stuff like that; nothing too heavy.