Category: Reviews of Television Shows

Mech Cadets: Created by Aaron Lam, Eileen Shim. With Brandon Soo Hoo, Aparna Brielle, Victoria Grace, Josh Sundquist. An underdog teen joins a group of young Cadets who’ve been chosen to bond with Robo Mechs from space and defend Earth against alien invaders. A delightful mix of Iron Giant, Starship Troopers, and Pacific Rim, I fully enjoyed the comic series and enjoyed this adaptation just as much. The scope is slightly scaled down, but it’s all the better for that, with a clearer focus on the singular character and the limited world view that he possesses. We get hints of...

A group of enslaved teenagers steal a derelict Starfleet vessel to escape and explore the galaxy. This is about as good as Trek gets, with a cast of characters that are extremely diversified and non-human and a cast of actors that give it their all. I’m somewhat miffed that we’re once again doing time travel shenanigans, but this is time travel done right. Buy On Amazon!

Star Trek: Discovery: Created by Bryan Fuller, Alex Kurtzman. With Sonequa Martin-Green, Anthony Rapp, Doug Jones, Mary Wiseman. Ten years before Kirk, Spock, and the Enterprise, the USS Discovery discovers new worlds and lifeforms as one Starfleet officer learns to understand all things alien. I know I said I wasn’t going to watch this season as it came out, but the seasons are so short and the show is so ephemeral that I stayed with it until the bitter end. The show never changed it’s course and stayed true to concepts of emotional self discovery that so many Trek fans...

Scavengers Reign: Created by Joe Bennett, Charles Huettner. With Sunita Mani, Wunmi Mosaku, Bob Stephenson, Alia Shawkat. The crew of a damaged deep space freighter strands on a beautiful but dangerous planet. The second of two shows that were recommended to me that I missed on their initial airing, this is the less grounded but just as interesting of the two, with the crew of a marooned ship finding their way through a fantastically alien environment with creatures that absolutely blew my mind in nearly every episode. Buy On Amazon!

Pantheon: Created by Craig Silverstein. With Katie Chang, Paul Dano, Aaron Eckhart, Rosemarie DeWitt. A young woman starts to get messages from an unknown number that claims to be her deceased father. Trying to uncover the truth, she stumbles upon a larger conspiracy involving the singularity. One of two shows that I missed completely when they first aired, this is the more grounded one with a look into the possibilities of uploading consciousness into near future technology and the ethical, political, and spiritual consequences of the entire situation. The story doesn’t make many missteps and moves quickly from easily understood...

The Mandalorian: Created by Jon Favreau. With Pedro Pascal, Chris Bartlett, Katee Sackhoff, Carl Weathers. The travels of a lone bounty hunter in the outer reaches of the galaxy, far from the authority of the New Republic. I bought this on Steelbook months and months ago and it’s sat on a pile until a couple weeks ago when I watched all of season one and two, then book of boba fett, then rested on the 7th day. The special features on the season one set spoil huge story elements for season two, and honestly the special features aren’t really all...

Extraordinary: Created by Emma Moran. With Máiréad Tyers, Sofia Oxenham, Bilal Hasna, Luke Rollason. Jen is a self-aware young woman who lives in a world where everybody except her has a superpower. I had no clue this was up for a second season, so I was pleasantly surprised to see it show up and see that it’s more of the same great stuff we got in the first season. Buy On Amazon!

Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Created by Guillermo del Toro. With Lize Johnston, Kevin Keppy, Tim Blake Nelson, F. Murray Abraham. Bizarre nightmares unfold in eight tales of terror in a visually stunning, spine-tingling horror collection curated by Guillermo del Toro. Considered by many as one of the best curators of horror and suspense, Guillermo del Toro didn’t write all these stories, I think he only penned one of them, but they all feel like they’re right up his alley. Every story is fantastic in it’s own way and most of them are so good that I would recommend...

Knuckles: With Adam Pally, Idris Elba, Stockard Channing, Edi Patterson. Knuckles the Echidna teaches deputy Wade Whipple the techniques of the Echidna warrior. The first two episodes of this “streaming event” are pretty ok but after that point the series drifts off into some pretty mediocre content with storylines involving a vaguely racist Jewish dinner, a missing father dealt with in the most cringeworthy possible way, and a bowling competition as announced by “The Ocho”, which was the same concept from the movie “Dodgeball”. There’s not much to like after the first 2 episodes are done and much more could...

Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Created by Jennifer Corbett, Dave Filoni. With Dee Bradley Baker, Michelle Ang, Noshir Dalal, Ben Diskin. The “Bad Batch” of elite and experimental clones make their way through an ever-changing galaxy. The final episode aired today and while it was a bittersweet ending, this series has had one hell of a journey from it’s humble beginnings of just following some genetic oddities from Batch 99 to seeing how they’ve effected the wider galaxy and the burgeoning rebellion against the Empire. There’s a neat ‘flash forward’ at the end that lays the groundwork for some future...

Archer: Created by Adam Reed. With H. Jon Benjamin, Judy Greer, Amber Nash, Chris Parnell. Covert black ops and espionage take a back seat to zany personalities and relationships between secret agents and drones. I gave up on this show when they started straying from the spy agency concept and it was all dream state illusions that had no impact or made any sense within the world that they had previously created and I completely missed it when they brought it all back to the basic formula that worked so well. I’ve finally caught up with the series and I’m...

Warrior Nun: Created by Simon Barry. With Alba Baptista, Kristina Tonteri-Young, Lorena Andrea, Tristán Ulloa. After waking up in a morgue, an orphaned teen discovers she now possesses superpowers as the chosen Halo Bearer for a secret sect of demon-hunting nuns. Sadly I believe this is the end for the warrior nuns, as I do not believe Netflix is going to continue it past this season. The story (mostly) wraps up all the dangling threads from the first season and all the characters given their moment to shine. I’m a fan of the world they’ve built here and I adore...

Fallout: Created by Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Graham Wagner. With Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Walton Goggins, Moises Arias. In a future, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles brought about by nuclear decimation, citizens must live in underground bunkers to protect themselves from radiation, mutants and bandits. About as perfect of a video game adaptation that could be possibly made, I think it helps that the universe lends itself to unique settings and characters for each vault that opens on it’s own schedule, so while they were able to accurately capture the humor and visual style of the games, they were also free to create their...

11 Minutes: With Jonathan Smith, Dee Jay Silver, Kelly Pollard, Jason Aldean. Through emotional first-hand accounts and never-before-seen archival footage, this documentary immerses viewers inside the largest mass shooting in our country’s history, at what was supposed to be a festival celebrating country music. This is both one of the most difficult documentaries to watch, but also one of the most maddening, with all the real terror of the night hidden and censored, only the hallways scenes at the hospital were really showing the full depths of the insanity, the rest of it feels like a sanitized and nearly bloodless...

3 Body Problem: Created by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, Alexander Woo. With Jovan Adepo, Liam Cunningham, Eiza González, Jess Hong. A fateful decision made in 1960s China reverberates in the present, where a group of scientists partner with a detective to confront an existential planetary threat. A fun hard science fiction series that doesn’t stay very jovial for very long and gets right into the hard truths portion fast enough to turn off those that don’t enjoy such things but kept my attention the entire time. I’ve heard so much about the book that I was expecting something much more...

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: With Anna Sawai, Kiersey Clemons, Ren Watabe, Joe Tippett. Set after the battle between Godzilla and the Titans, revealing that monsters are real, follows one family’s journey to uncover its buried secrets and a legacy linking them to Monarch. I somehow neglected to mention that I watched “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters”, so here it is, my review: This is a perfectly fine series that wasn’t necessary and spent way too much time on the people instead of the monsters or their legacies. In fact, the “legacy of monsters” here might be a reference to some of...

Halo: Created by Steven Kane, Kyle Killen. With Pablo Schreiber, Shabana Azmi, Natasha Culzac, Olive Gray. With the galaxy on the brink of destruction, Master Chief John-117 leads his team of Spartans against the alien threat known as the Covenant. The general consensus is that season one of the show was pretty rough and nearly every art of it was either straight up bad or could have been done better. Season two sanded off some of those rough edges and nipped some of the more strange or silly plot elements that weren’t working, but it still has worlds to go...

Shadow and Bone: Created by Eric Heisserer. With Jessie Mei Li, Archie Renaux, Freddy Carter, Amita Suman. Dark forces conspire against orphan mapmaker Alina Starkov when she unleashes an extraordinary power that could change the fate of her war-torn world. As with the first season, this series works best when it’s not worried about the B-story and whatever shenanigans they’re up to in a completely different part of the world from the A-story, usually with less interesting characters and much less interesting story elements. Everyone is very pretty with amazing costumes and utterly fantastic special effects that made me drop...

Avatar: The Last Airbender: Created by Albert Kim. With Gordon Cormier, Kiawentiio, Ian Ousley, Dallas Liu. A young boy known as the Avatar must master the four elemental powers to save the world, and fight against an enemy bent on stopping him. Jamming 20 episodes worth of animated content into 8 episodes of live action television is a daunting task, but one that was successfully achieved with this latest adaptation of the The Last Airbender. The costumes are perfect, the story is tight, and the air bisons fly in a fantastic and believable fashion. The casting for this is so...

Ted: Created by Seth MacFarlane. With Seth MacFarlane, Max Burkholder, Alanna Ubach, Scott Grimes. It’s 1993, and Ted the bear’s moment of fame has passed. He’s living back home with his best friend, John Bennett, and his family. While Ted may be a lousy influence on John, he’s a loyal pal who will go out on a limb for friendship. A prequel to the two movies, but due to the magic of streaming, is still just as raunchy and debased as the films were. Since the second movie was released in 2015 we’ve had three seasons of The Orville by...

Superman & Lois: Created by Todd Helbing, Greg Berlanti. With Tyler Hoechlin, Elizabeth Tulloch, Alex Garfin, Erik Valdez. The world’s most famous superhero and comic books’ most famous journalist face the pressures and complexities that come with balancing work, justice, and parenthood in today’s society. In an ongoing effort to catch up on my television watchin’ from my time in school, Season 3 of “Superman & Lois” was a frustrating slog to get through, There’s no fault to be had in any of the performances, Tyler Hoechlin is still a great Superman, Elizabeth Tullock is about a perfect Lois Lane...

Reacher: Created by Nick Santora. With Alan Ritchson, Maria Sten, Malcolm Goodwin, Willa Fitzgerald. Itinerant former military policeman Jack Reacher solves crimes and metes out his own brand of street justice. Another great season, speaking to the burgeoning American minimalism movement, the increased need for manufactured or found families, and the lengths we should go to believe in others. Also, violence. Lots and lots of violence. Buy On Amazon!

Star Trek Continues: With Vic Mignogna, Todd Haberkorn, Christopher Doohan, Grant Imahara. The further adventures of the crew of the USS Enterprise. It only took me a couple years, but I finally made it through all 11 episodes of this, the best fan fiction in Star Trek that I’ve ever seen. There’s some surprisingly good science fiction here with plots that range from silly adventures to poignant stories of the human condition.. They’re all for free on youtube, so if you’re a Trek fan and want more TOS in your life, this is the best place to hit that sweet...

Echo: With Alaqua Cox, Chaske Spencer, Tantoo Cardinal, Graham Greene. Maya Lopez must face her past, reconnect with her Native American roots and embrace the meaning of family and community if she ever hopes to move forward. The latest and greatest from the MCU, this time it’s the sorta villain from the “Hawkeye” show that gets to launch the new “Marvel Spotlight” sub brand from MCU content and only time will tell what that branding actually means. The first series is a good one with just 5 episodes with a total run time of about 4 hours, which is fantastic...

War of the Worlds: Created by Howard Overman. With Léa Drucker, Gabriel Byrne, Bayo Gbadamosi, Ty Tennant. Set in contemporary France, this Anglo-French reimagining of H. G. Wells’ classic in the style of Walking Dead follows pockets of survivors forced to team up after an apocalyptic extra-terrestrial strike. While it had a satisfying ending, I really struggled to get through this final season, as I found the science and the story to be labored past the point of believability. Black holes in the Earth’s atmosphere, alternate realities, space stations, and robot dogs were all just set pieces in a story...

Gotham Knights: Created by Natalie Abrams, Chad Fiveash, James Patrick Stoteraux. With Oscar Morgan, Olivia Rose Keegan, Navia Ziraili Robinson, Fallon Smythe. Bruce Wayne is murdered and his adopted son forges an alliance with the children of Batman’s enemies. As the city becomes more dangerous, these mismatched fugitives will become its next generation of saviors, known as the Gotham Knights. Only lasted a single season on the tail end of the CW comic book infatuation in early 2023, “Gotham Knights” does what so many other Batman related properties have done, which is to immediately remove the caped crusader from the...

What If…?: With Jeffrey Wright, Terri Douglas, Matthew Wood, Robin Atkin Downes. Exploring pivotal moments from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and turning them on their head, leading the audience into uncharted territory. This is some of the best content from Marvel in the last few years, from the great music, to the fantastic action, to stories and new characters that are both captivating and have a strong future in the franchise. It’s a shame that the the best stuff is animated, but at least we’re getting great stuff still. Buy On Amazon!

Upload: Created by Greg Daniels. With Robbie Amell, Andy Allo, Allegra Edwards, Zainab Johnson. A man is able to choose his own afterlife after his untimely death by having his consciousness uploaded into a virtual world. As he gets used to his new life and befriends his angel (real world handler), questions about his death arise. Continues it’s pattern of being a sophisticated show that’s not taking it’s core concept serious enough for my tastes, but has just enough wit and humor to keep me coming back for more. Buy On Amazon!

Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Created by Carlton Cuse, Graham Roland. With John Krasinski, Wendell Pierce, Michael Kelly, Abbie Cornish. Up-and-coming CIA analyst, Jack Ryan, is thrust into dangerous field assignments. A delightfully small stakes but still entertaining season with great action, great acting, and a definite eating. It’s a shame they still haven’t figured out how to make their fake weapon shots look like more realistic, but that’s the current movie climate we find ourselves in. A solid series that’s easily bingable. Buy On Amazon!

The Wheel of Time: Created by Rafe Judkins. With Rosamund Pike, Daniel Henney, Zoë Robins, Madeleine Madden. Set in a high fantasy world where magic exists, but only some can access it, a woman named Moiraine crosses paths with five young men and women. This sparks a dangerous, world-spanning journey. Based on the book series by Robert Jordan. The first season was good enough to get me to watch the second and the second is just good enough to get me to watch the third, which feels like a backhanded compliment, but I honestly found the show has way too...

Beacon 23: Created by Zak Penn. With Lena Headey, Stephan James, Wade Bogert-O’Brien, Natasha Mumba. A man living in the 23rd Century works at a remote “lighthouse” in space that serves as a beacon to help passing ships. I had no clue that MGM had their own streaming service and I don’t think I knew that Lena Headey was doing a hard science fiction series until about a week before it started. It’s a well done short season with one or two sets, but with multiple groups of actors, I don’t think there was a single episode where it was...

Faraway Downs: With Shea Adams, Eddie Baroo, Ray Barrett, Tony Barry. An aristocrat, Sarah has a cattle station in Australia. Following death of her husband, a barons plots to take her land but she joins forces with cattle drover Jackman to protect her station. it’s been a bit since I’ve seen the original movie, but this episodic version of the story is different in great ways, like how each episode has a real focus, but worse in others, like that new theme song that you get to listen to several times over. It’s worth checking out, especially if you already...

The Continental: From the World of John Wick: Created by Greg Coolidge, Shawn Simmons, Kirk Ward. With Mel Gibson, Colin Woodell, Mishel Prada, Hubert Point-Du Jour. Set in 1970s New York City, The Continental explores the origin of the iconic hotel-for-assassins centerpiece of the John Wick universe seen through the eyes and action of a young Winston Scott. Overladen with CGI sets, CGI action, and CGI weapons, this series is set in an uninteresting time period and featured characters that I just didn’t find interesting at all. I know that the Wick franchise relies heavily on CGI elements, particularly the...

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off: With Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Satya Bhabha, Kieran Culkin. A 20-something Toronto indie rocker’s adventures in getting and keeping jobs, avoiding being kicked out of his apartment, and surviving encounters with the seven evil exes of the new girl in town on whom he has a crush. A sorta sequel / parallel story to the 2010 live active film, features the same cast but this time it’s all animated to great effect. There’s some well done misdirection and welcome modifications to the story you think you’re getting, with animation that’s rough around all the right...

In the early 21st century, mankind has colonized the oceans. The United Earth Oceans Organization enlists Captain Nathan Bridger and the submarine seaQuest DSV to keep the peace and explore the last frontier on Earth. Seaquest was an action adventure / fantasy science fiction / military science fiction series that ran from 1993 – 1996 for three seasons, all of which were as different from each other as they could be and still be part of a serialize television show. The first two seasons featured Roy Scheider of “Jaws” fame as the captain of the titular submarine, the beautiful Stacy...

Loki: Created by Michael Waldron. With Tom Hiddleston, Sophia Di Martino, Owen Wilson, Wunmi Mosaku. The mercurial villain Loki resumes his role as the God of Mischief in a new series that takes place after the events of “Avengers: Endgame.” Now that there’s over 12 hours of dedicated Loki content, I think we can fully say that he’s on the same level as Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America. After the final episode of Season Two, I think I can say that they’ve captured the lightning in the bottle that I so enjoyed from Endgame and while this isn’t technically...

Star Trek: Prodigy: Created by Dan Hageman, Kevin Hageman. With Rylee Alazraqui, Dee Bradley Baker, Brett Gray, Angus Imrie. A group of enslaved teenagers steal a derelict Starfleet vessel to escape and explore the galaxy. The second half the first season was released a while ago on BR but I’m just now getting around to watching it on disc instead of streaming and there’s not much difference between the two. This second half is a better watch than the first half with some amazing spaceship content that blew me away the first time I watched it and it held up...

Gen V: Created by Evan Goldberg, Eric Kripke, Craig Rosenberg. With Jaz Sinclair, Chance Perdomo, Lizze Broadway, Maddie Phillips. From the world of “The Boys” comes “Gen V,” which explores the first generation of superheroes to know that their super powers are from Compound V. These heroes put their physical and moral boundaries to the test competing for the school’s top ranking. If there was any doubt that they were going to be able to keep up the quality from the transition from “The Boys” to “Gen V”, let me assure you, this is among the best content in that...

Ms. Marvel: Created by Bisha K. Ali. With Iman Vellani, Matt Lintz, Zenobia Shroff, Yasmeen Fletcher. Kamala, a superhero fan with an imagination–particularly when it comes to Captain Marvel–feels like she doesn’t fit in at school and sometimes even at home, that is until she gets superpowers like the heroes she admires. Doing a quick rewatch to remind me how much I loved the character, the actor, and just about everything about this show. i think I like it even more this second time around and I really liked it the first time. Now it’s on to Secret Wars, maybe...

Babylon 5: Created by J. Michael Straczynski. With Mira Furlan, Richard Biggs, Stephen Furst, Andreas Katsulas. In the mid 23rd century, the Earth Alliance space station Babylon 5, located in neutral territory, is a major focal point for political intrigue, racial tensions and various wars over the course of five years. With a new movie out (“The Road Home”) I figured I’d check out my purchased copy of B5 on Vudu, but then I remembered that they refused to upgrade it to HD when I had purchased it just days before the HD version dropped, so instead I ended up...

Foundation: Created by Josh Friedman, David S. Goyer. With Jared Harris, Lou Llobell, Leah Harvey, Terrence Mann. A complex saga of humans scattered on planets throughout the galaxy all living under the rule of the Galactic Empire. There’s some really amazing space stuff happening in this second season and they’ve worked their way around the obvious issues of adapting a book series set over the span of thousands of years to the realities of doing a long form television show with actors that need to be contracted for more than just a couple episodes. They’ve luckily avoided the weird shift...

Jen is a self-aware young woman who lives in a world where everybody except her has a superpower. So much different than what I thought I was in for, but in a fun and good way. The show has a high enough budget and whimsical enough premise that the lack of super heroics in a series about people with super powers isn’t at all noticeable. In fact, like all good shows, this is more about the personal journey than it is about the power set of the main characters. Buy On Amazon!

American college football coach Ted Lasso heads to London to manage AFC Richmond, a struggling English Premier League football team. This is the third and final season and honestly I’m not sure if my heart would have been able to handle any more than the 12 episodes we got. The series already had a reputation for being emotionally raw and they went all in for the ending of the show with topics ranging from anxiety to depression to thruples to racist fans to bigots on and off the field to just being plain old homesick and needing a change of...

A look at the formative years of superstar Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson as he grows up through life. This was ultimately the final season of the show, but what a great season it was. The story set in the future was pretty mediocre, but the stuff in the past was fantastic. I’ll always be grateful to the show for introducing me to both Stacey Leilua and Joseph Lee Anderson who played The Rock’s parents. Buy On Amazon!

Follows a motor-mouthed outsider offered a chance at a better life, but only if he can successfully deliver a mysterious package across a post-apocalyptic wasteland. While it’s much better than it has any right to be, it’s still a streaming only series based on a series of games that had a plot of “cars with guns shoot at each other in an arena”, so any amount of plot in the TV show is going to outshine the barebones premise of the classic games, of which I remember more for their ads than the gameplay. I honestly don’t even know if...

Men and women live in a giant silo underground with several regulations which they believe are in place to protect them from the toxic and ruined world on the surface. Based on a book series of the same name, the basic premise of a group of people living underground being lied to by the people in power is familiar enough (City of Ember, Logan’s Run) that the only real question I have is what will they find when they eventually get out of the vault? In this case it wasn’t something that I really expected but fell in line with...

After her husband leaves her, young mother of two Miriam “Midge” Maisel discovers that she has a talent for stand-up comedy. Could this be her calling? I think this series could have gone for another 5 years and still be one of the best comedies on television, but it’s nice to see them go out on an exceptionally high note. This final season wrapped up a bucket load of emotional loose ends and opened up another bucket load worth, but we had 5 good seasons that all stand on their own and make for an enjoyable and eminently watchable series....

Fury and Talos try to stop the Skrulls who have infiltrated the highest spheres of the Marvel Universe. “A six hour mini series that should have been a two hour movie” is how I’m seeing it described on the blogosphere and I agree, there’s way too much padding, too little story, and some of the action beats just didn’t make sense to me. There’s also some really open questions about who was a skrull and when they were switched out, questions that were not answered by the end of the series and will likely never be touched on by the...

Doctors and nurses at the intensive care unit of a New Orleans hospital struggle with treating patients during Hurricane Katrina when the facility is without power for 5 days. This is a series that spends 5 episodes outlining how absolutely terrible and dire the situation was at a hospital with no power, no food, no water, no real security, and no plan to get patients out locally and no real support from their corporate offices, then turns around and spends another 3 episodes vilifying a single doctor for the decisions that she may or may not have made during the...