THERE'S TOO MUCH TV - Roundup August 2022

“What are you watching?” is pretty much the automatic question I get when I tell people what I do for a living.

I don’t have time to do full conversations on everything I’m watching but here are some stray thoughts on everything I’ve watched in the last month. I’ve also been requested to include content warnings for shows that need them, so you can see those beneath each title!

Some mild spoilers for shows that are not in season 1. Ordered from my favorite-ish to my least favorite-ish.

Better Call Saul (Season 6 Part 2) — AMC
CW: Violence

Better Call Saul finished its run with one of the best TV finales you’ll ever see. In my book, it had long since surpassed its predecessor Breaking Bad, but this finale makes it indisputable in my mind. I was once asked if you could enjoy Better Call Saul without having seen Breaking Bad, and while I wasn’t sure at the time, now that the show has finished, I feel confident saying that it stands on its own. You simply don’t find TV this good that often.

Reservation Dogs (Season 2) — Hulu
CW: Graphic Violence and Sexual Content

Reservation Dogs isn’t likely to make you laugh out loud. Its sense of humor is quite dry and it doesn’t have a steady stream of jokes or bits. But whatever it lacks in humor, it more than makes up for with heart. I can’t think of a more earnest show on TV right now. It’s heavy, dealing with the everyday trauma that people living on a reservation have to deal with—alcoholism, death, poverty, and hopelessness—but it handles those issues with humanity. It never focuses on them, only on how they affect the show’s characters and their relationships.

What We Do in the Shadows (Season 4) — Hulu
CW: Lots of dirty jokes

I’m not sure when it happened exactly, but I get most excited and happy for new episodes of What We Do in the Shadows. It’s a show that I don’t feel as though I need to give 800% of my attention (like Better Call Saul), but it’s also the show that makes me laugh more than any other. It never fails, from the New Jersey Devil to Go Flip Yourself, What We Do in the Shadows has reached that point in a sitcom’s lifespan where it is operating at maximum efficiency. It knows what it is and what its strengths are, and that self-awareness makes the show funnier and just flat-out better.

House of the Dragon (Season 1) — HBO
CW: Graphic Violence, nudity, misogyny

Way back in the infancy of this channel (and before Game of Thrones went completely off the rails), I made a video about how the show was about the tension between believing in something bigger than yourself or making meaning for yourself. I was still pretty new to YouTube so it’s not a very good video, but once the show started to veer away from that and towards more conventional fantasy tropes, the show quickly fell apart. House of the Dragon, as a TV show, exists somewhere between those first 4 seasons and the final 2. It doesn’t subscribe to the original existentialist worldview, but it is much more focused on backroom politics than the end of Thrones. It does stay true to the show’s obsession with sexual violence against women, substituting gratuitous sex scenes for scenes of violent childbirth that absolutely did not have to be that long. The show is solid—not great, not terrible.

Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power (Season 1) — Amazon Prime
CW: Fantasy Violence

Where House of the Dragon is telling a very specific story from the historical timeline of A Song of Ice and Fire, Rings of Power is all vibes, baby. I don’t know what this show is about or where it’s going, but it looks every bit like the most expensive TV show ever made. In its best moments, it nails the tone of the Peter Jackson films (minus the music, unfortunately). While things could change, I imagine this show is going to be a “tune in once a week to hang out with elves and hobbits in Middle Earth” rather than an epic tale of good vs. evil. And I am a-ok with that.

For All Mankind (Season 3) — AppleTV+
CW: The vacuum of space

This show is bonkers. As the parallel timeline of the show grows ever closer to our present, so do the ideas and themes that the show is working with. While its world is rich with its own details and intricacies, it still feels quite connected to our own. It is a show truly confident in its own tone, knowing exactly what kind of stories it wants to tell and hiding them until the last possible moment.

Only Murders in the Building (Season 2) — Hulu

I have some friends who were a bit disappointed with the second season of Only Murders. They felt that the whodunit failed to live up to that of the first season, hiding details from the audience in ways that felt cheap. In other words, you couldn’t really solve the mystery yourself if you wanted to. I think that’s valid, but it’s also never what I appreciated most about the show. Selena Gomez, Steve Martin, and Martin Short are the unlikeliest of trios, and yet they just work. They balance each other very well, and getting to hang out with them together every week was all I was really looking for, and in that regard, the show delivered.