Good Job, Niffty! - Hazbin Hotel Season Two

Remind me what I said about Hazbin Hotel Season One... ah yes... "great fun from beginning to end". Also "one of the sweariest shows I've ever watched." And I found the characters (All of them, apparently.) "memorable and frequently endearing."

My conclusion? "Highly recommended, provided you don't shy at swearing, sex, religion or song and dance numbers."

All of which applies equally or possibly even more so to Season Two, with the exception of the "great fun from beginning to end" part. I loved the season as a whole but I found the opening couple of episodes overwhelming. Not always in a good way.

Another thing I said about Season One was that it was "a full-on assault to both eyes and ears" and that turned out to be doubly true of the opening of the second season. I'm not sure if I'm out of practice or if the show does actually ramp up the hysteria but I had some difficulty not just following the plot but also hearing what anyone was saying. 

That hasn't happened to me before. Not in a show like this, anyway. Maybe I'm going deaf. I don't think it's that, though. If it was, I'd be having trouble with other show. I'm not. Just this one.

There is some precedent. There was a moment, back in the deep swamplands of the mumblecore era, when I couldn't always make out what the unbearably naturalistic characters were slurring (Looking at you in particular, Garden State, although now I learn that's technically not a mumblecore movie because it actually has a plot. Could have fooled me.) I had to switch the subtitles on for some of those. 

I've rarely had any difficulty picking out the sense and substance in animation, though, even when people are screaming and yelling and explosions are going off all around.

When all that's happening and the dialog is set to music, though? Apparently that's too much for me now. Halfway through Season 2 Episode 1 I had to switch the subtitles on so I could figure out what they were singing about. 

That worked for the songs but then I found if I left the subtitles on after the singing stopped, the subtitles were too distracting. I've been happy to read subtitles for movies since I was a very young teenager. The BBC used to show subtitled foreign films all the time and then I went to university and spent three years watching movies in all kinds of languages (Okay, mostly French...). 

The thing is, nearly all of those films, being arthouse movies, were either visually slow-moving or static. Until Diva and Subway and Run, Lola, Run, anyway. (Although I've actually never seen Run, Lola, Run. I ought to do something about that sometime...) Having your eye constantly drawn to the bottom of the screen didn't generally lead to you missing much of the action. There was no action.

Hazbin Hotel is all action. The screen is a constant firework display of vividly colored (Red, mostly.) weird-looking characters caroming off each other, the walls or the ceilings. It's kinetic and chaotic and almost impossible to take in even when you're looking right into the heart of everything that's happening. When you're half watching the characters and half reading the subtitles, it's totally impossible.

Or it was for me, anyway, in those first two episodes. I had to compromise by toggling the subtitles on when the singing started and off again when it stopped and it was distracting to say the least. I never felt like I was fully engaged, let alone immersed.

And then with Episode Three that all just...stopped. I don't know why. I don't think the show got any less frenetic. I think maybe I just acclimatized to it. From then on, I loved Season Two every bit as much as Season One. More, probably.

Oh, just editing this in... SPOILERS from here on. 

The plot is really involving. It makes sense and you can follow it. Charlie's plan to offer Redemption to sinners in Hell paid off at the end of Season One, when Sir Pentious's selflessly sacrificed himself to save Cherri, an altruistic act that sent him straight to Heaven. The problem is no-one believes it happened and there's no way to prove it. Even Charlie doesn't know for sure that it's true.

Meanwhile TV Demon Vox is ramping up his campaign to become the #1 Sinner in Hell and turn himself into a god. Well, a demi-god, anyway. Alastor, the Radio Demon and Vox's nemesis, is sulking, plus there's something very dodgy about him anyway, even if no-one in the Hotel suspects.  

There are so many sub-plots and back-stories and secrets being hinted at but never explained. The whole thing is layered far beyond reason and good luck trying to unravel it. If ever a show was designed to be re-watched and slo-moed and picked over for hour after hour, it's this one.

None of which I've done or am likely to do, of course. I like not knowing what's going on. Or rather, I like to know something is going on, I just don't care if I ever find out what it is. 

On that level, Hazbin Hotel works wonderfully. It has a single, straightforward, linear adventure plot - Charlie wants to do a good thing, Vox wants to do a bad thing, their two things are in conflict. Which is going to win? Anyone can follow that, pick a side, and start cheering. (No-one would pick Vox's side. Would they? Please tell me you wouldn't...)

Beneath that, it's all a churning, roiling maelstrom of grudges, lies, secrets and despair. It is Hell, after all. You wouldn't expect anyone to be happy, would you?

Enter Niffty. Niffty's always happy. She doesn't do subtext. Niffty grins and cleans and stabs. She stabbed Adam to death in Season One, which I imagine got her a standing ovation all around the world, let alone in Hell. The absence of Adam in Season Two is in itself enough to make the entire show feel lighter. I really, really could not stand him.

Niffty is my favorite character in a show where I like almost everyone. In fact, now Adam is gone, I think I do like everyone. Even Lute, who makes it very hard to like her, sometimes. I can see her point, though. Even Abel, ditto and ditto. 

The show is a musical. It's sometimes easy to forget. I certainly never came out of any episode humming the tunes. Mostly I couldn't remember the melody lines ten seconds after the singing stopped. Amazon keep trying to push the Soundtrack CD/Stream before every episode but I can't imagine ever wanting to listen to any of it away from the context of the show.

That said, the songs are fine. They mostly work while they're happening. One or two I thought dragged on a bit but mostly they didn't outstay the limited welcome I was willing to give them.

The finale, though... Wow!

I loved the finale. I thought it was pretty much perfect. The pacing could hardly have been better, with the whole thing following the structure of a caper movie and doing it brilliantly. I was just starting to notice, more than halfway through, that there hadn't been any songs at all and then there they were, just in the right place, just at the right time.

It was a fully satisfying conclusion to a compelling and engrossing storyline. Every major character's arc concluded there or thereabouts as I'd hoped it would. Niffty's fight with Velvet was just sublime. Niffty has so many great lines in it, too. Check it out above. It works on its own as a short.

That whole scene comes freighted with so many resonances. It's like the animators from Looney Toons and Animaniacs and AAP and Ren and Stimpy all got together and decided to have a baby. Er... no... not that...

I hadn't really thought about it too much until now but Hazbin Hotel is a very Western animation. I'm so used now to just about anything that isn't Disney or Pixar being shorthanded as "anime" I don't pay it any attention but this is so firmly in line of descent from the tradition of Hollywood animators of the 30s onwards it's impossible to miss.

In fact, at its core, Hazbin Hotel is an updated, adult progression of the shows that proliferated on TV in the 90s and 'aughts, which themselves paid tribute to the Golden Age of cinema animation. It's louder, faster, redder and much, much, much swearier but it's wholly recognizable as part of that lineage. Maybe that's why I love it so much.

The final episode ends with all the loose ends knotted so tidily you might wonder where the lead-in for Season Three was going to come from. And then Charlie's phone rings...

There will be a Season Three. It's been renewed. And there'll be a Season Four, too. The deal has been signed for both. Actually, it was signed months ago. Amazon have a hit show and for once they seem to know it. 

Looking forward to next season already. 

 

Beginnings And Endings

Since I started using AI to make music, earlier in the year, my TV viewing, like my gaming, has taken a nose-dive. I was up to about a couple of hours a day, mostly last thing every night, but now I spend that time on my laptop, burning through Credits on Suno and stitching fragments together into songs in Audacity.

I'm still paying several subscriptions to streaming services all the same, though, so I feel obligated to make at least some use of all of them. We did pause Netflix for three months but I re-started it for Wednesday (And happily caught the finale of Upload around the same time.)

While I was looking through the schedules for more to watch, so as to get my money's-worth, I noticed the missing seasons of couple of shows I had been following a few months ago had miraculously appeared. 

One of them was Roswell: New Mexico, for which Netflix very annoyingly had held the license to Seasons 1 and 2 in the UK but not Seasons 3 and 4, which were exclusive to Sky over here a the time (If I remember right...). That was great but also too late because, when I finished the first two seasons, I didn't want to pay yet another sub so I used a VPN to watch them on Netflix USA.

Even more annoying was Young Sheldon, for which Netflix had the rights to stream six out of seven seasons in both the UK and the US but no rights to the final season for either. That was on some US station or service I forget now. All I do remember about it was that I couldn't watch it, even with a VPN.

Well, that agreement, whatever it was, must be over now because Netflix has the full run available to stream. I was finally able to catch up with the show. I'll tell you what I thought of it later.

Our other streaming service is Amazon Prime but that one pays for itself in shipping alone, particularly since Mrs. Bhagpuss buys at least one thing on Amazon pretty much every day. What with that and the games and music offers included in the bundle, I feel no urge to watch anything on Prime at all if I don't feel like it. 

The problem there is that I also have Apple+ through Prime as an add-on. It was very cheap for three months and I didn't really care if I was watching anything on Apple+ or not but now it's back up to full price it seems like I should at least watch something. Mrs Bhagpuss doesn't currently watch anything on the channel at all so it's up to me to pick up the slack. 

Luckily, there's no shortage of good stuff to choose from. I thought about starting several series about which I'd heard good things - Severance, Slow Horses, Foundation, The Studio - but in the end I decided on Ted Lasso. Main reason: the episodes were shorter. Secondary reason: I like sitcoms.

I have now watched all of Young Sheldon Season 7 and Ted Lasso Season 1. The end of one story, the start of another. Here's what I thought about them both.

Young Sheldon - Season 7

I was quite dubious about the whole concept of Young Sheldon to begin with. I've never been a huge fan of prequels (Is anyone?) and prequels built around main characters as children can come across as a bit desperate. Added to that, this is just one character from an ensemble show, one that relies almost entirely on the particular skills of the specific actor who played him, and it's a character often considered to be difficult and controversial. 

The prospects didn't look good but contrary to expectations it turned out to be a warm, comfortable, enjoyable watch. A lot less spiky and brittle than the show that spawned it, in fact.

Of course, it also had one other, major problem, something common to all long-running shows that revolve around a young child. Children grow up. 

In one respect, that worked in Young Sheldon's favor. Old Sheldon, if we can call him that, is a divisive figure in The Big Bang Theory. A lot of people have some very valid objections to the character in terms of the way it can appear to promote and perpetuate some stereotypically negative views of neuro-diversity. I personally feel the full character arc, taken across the entire run of the show, counters many of those objections, producing a nuanced and distinctly positive image of someone struggling with numerous challenges they find it hard to overcome.

Even if that's true, though, you'd need to have watched the entire 279 episodes to appreciate it. And no-one who thinks Sheldon is an offensive caricature is going to sit through 93 hours of a show that makes their skin crawl just to see if maybe it wasn't quite as bad as they thought it was after all. As the saying goes, that's an awful lot of Shawshank before you get to the Redemption.

I didn't think Young Sheldon had the same level of difficulty. In TBBT, there are five central characters and it's not hard to make an argument that all of them are potentially offensive in the way they're written and performed. Young Sheldon just has... young Sheldon. And he's kinda cute. 

All those mannerisms and affectations that seem so mannered and performative in an adult seem a lot softer and more relatable in a child. Kids, after all, do say and do the darnedest things, don't they? And it is undeniably satisfying, if you've watched a lot of TBBT, to see many of Sheldon's tropes and foibles from that show get their start in some specific event in this one, usually for an understandable and sympathetic reason.

All of that is in the show as a whole, though. What about the final season? 

Well, the most striking thing about it is that Sheldon isn't actually in it all that much. He's in every episode but he's rarely the central character and the main story arcs seldom revolve around him. He's almost a peripheral character at times, chipping in with a few side-stories or popping up to add some extra perspective to someone else's story.

Mostly, it's about his family, all of whom get some significant character development that changes or enhances what we knew about them. For example...

(This bit might get a bit spoilery from here on down...)

Meemaw really starts to show her age as she loses her home, her business and her freedom all in quick succession. Her veneer of invincibility begins to peel away and her indomitable spirit wilts a little. Missy shows a good deal of unexpected maturity and character growth as does Georgie, albeit each in very different ways. Sheldon's mother's religious beliefs start to move her closer to the mania seen in the adult show, while his father... dies.

That was a shock, even though if I'd been counting the passage of time I ought to have expected it. It happens right towards the end of the run, just when everything seems to be going pretty well for him and the family. 

I was not best pleased when it happened, not only because I liked the character as played by Lance Barber but because I had Young Sheldon firmly in my "Send me off to sleep in a good mood." slot and it seemed like it was going to finish with a couple of episodes where all the cast would be in mourning and filled with grief. Not what I want, right before I nod off.

In the end, though, the whole thing was handled very gently, not side-stepping the emotions but not losing the warmth and humor either. It was a particularly telling way to show some of Sheldon's emotional growth or lack of it, too, something I also thought was well-handled.

As a run, I'd call Young Sheldon a success. It lasted seven seasons, which is more than decent for a sitcom. It kept the whole cast together and it was consistently written and well-played throughout by an excellent ensemble cast. It was great to see Annie Potts and Ed Begley Jr. in meaty roles again, too. 

The underlying problem of child actors turning into adult actors was kept to a minimum by the unusual expedient of partially writing the lead character out of his own show. Missy and Georgie both seemed to age at a rate that allowed the audience barely to notice it happening but by Season 7, Iain Armitage, playing Sheldon, looked very odd indeed, like a much older child playing a much younger one.

The same mannerisms that had made him a cute-if-quirky kid turned him into a slightly disturbing adolescent, never changing his expression, keeping his hands stiffly by his sides and always wearing awkwardly formal clothes. That looks funny in an eight-year old but uncomfortable and unsettling in a teenager. It's not surprising they mostly wrote around him towards the end.

The ensemble cast was uniformly excellent. I liked everyone, which is ideal for a sitcom. I especially enjoyed Annie Potts as Meemaw and her double act with Craig T Nelson as her lover, Dale, was always a joy. The entire cast - and it's a big one counting all the regular supporting parts - was on top form throughout and possibly the highest praise I can offer is that, by the end of the final season, I think I liked every one of the characters more than I had at the start.

Actually, the highest praise I can offer is that I'd happily watch the whole run again. Which I almost certainly will.

Ted Lasso - Season 1 

I'd heard a little about this show. I'd heard it was heart-warming, upbeat and positive. I'd heard it was nice. I also knew it was about a sports coach and, of course, that it was an American sitcom. When I was looking for something to replace Young Sheldon, it seemed like another sweet slice of Americana to send me off to sleep smiling.

Yeah. About that...

It's not "nice", is it?  It's not all that sweet either. It's acerbic and sharp and occasionally even a little bitter. Ted Lasso (The character no the show.) is irony personified.

For one thing, he may be American and a sports coach but he's not in America and he's not coaching an American sport. Somehow, in all the things I'd read, I hadn't picked up on the "Sit" in the sitcom, which is that he's in London, coaching at a Premier League football club.

Or, rather, managing one, which I'm not sure they ever actually say. Everyone keeps calling him "Coach" but he's doing the job we usually call "Manager" over here and he has an actual coach standing next to him, who everyone also calls "Coach". 

The show is full of oddnesses like that. I'd say it does 98% of a great job of being as convincing about life in modern Britain as 98% of British sitcoms can manage but the 2% differences are wholly different in each case.

The writing doesn't actually lean that heavily into the one-language-two-cultures comedy you'd expect. There's plenty of that around the margins but it's never the point of the show. Ironically, that makes the moments when cultural infelicities do pop up all the more obvious. 

For example, there's some considerable business in several episodes about American sport not accepting a tie as a valid result. Which is fine. Except that we don't really use the expression "tie" all that much over here.

Ted always uses the word "tie" in Season 1. Every British or British-localized speaker he uses it to uses it back to him, frequently when no-one here would ever use the word in that way. We'd almost always say "draw", which is what we call a sports match where the scores end up tied.  We use tie as a verb routinely but rarely as a noun.  

In fact, just to make it even more confusing, a "tie" as a noun in a sporting comment usually means a fixture or a match. As in "a cup tie". But then, a draw can be a fixture, too, as in "We got Chelsea in the next round - that's a tough draw." 

I can see how it could be confusing but I'm not even that into sports and it's all just second-nature to me because I grew up here. When the word-choices don't ring true, it's distracting. And clearly I'm not the only one who noticed because, in the first episode of Season 2, when ties/draws become a big plot point, both words are used and a context for the different usage is established. It's just a shame they didn't think of that in Season 1.

All of which might seem like nit-picking but it's a real nit-picking kind of show. It's full of little bits of business about cultural differences and expectations and about how sports teams operate, all of which revolve around nuances of language and fine details of procedure or practice.

I found all that quite engaging. And enlightening.

For example, a while back, Wilhelm posted something on TAGN about bottled water and I left a comment in which I referred to drinking carbonated bottled water, to which Wilhelm pointed out that Americans generally wouldn't see much point in drinking fizzy water - they'd just drink soda if they wanted fizz. 

I did not know that. Despite having steeped myself in Americana, second-hand, through comics, books, TV, music and movies since I was a child, I had never come across the idea that sparkling water was un-American. And now here it is as a running gag in Ted Lasso, where he keeps being given glasses of water to drink and he takes a huge swig, expecting it to be plain, then spits it all over himself or someone else because it turns out to be sparkling. Who knew? 

There's plenty like that but the strength of the show isn't so much in the jokes as the characters. Or perhaps I should say the caricatures, which is what they seem like, at least in the first few episodes. It takes a good while before the nuances and subtleties begin to reveal themselves or, I ought to say, are revealed by the writers. 

And by the end of the season, I still wasn't sure just how much depth lay beneath most of the surfaces. The hints at anything more are so brief, so fleeting, it sometimes felt as though I was imagining them. Keeley is a bit older and smarter than she seems, Coach Beard has some quite peculiar-sounding sexual history, Jamie Tartt has an overbearing dad...

Even as I try to tally those glimpses of character, though, I realize how little is really there. Everything is suggestion, misdirection, sleight-of-hand. After ten episodes, how much do we really know about anyone? Not much more than you could write on an index card.

Except, maybe, for Ted. He has some depths and they are, largely, hidden. Not from the audience, who get to see him alone in his apartment at night, but from everyone around him.

To everyone else, he's relentlessly upbeat but it doesn't seem to have gotten him all that far. He coached one successful season of what I think must have been college football and then got head-hunted by a vengeful divorcee in the expectation his skills would not be transferable and he would be a disaster as the "coach" of a top-flight club in the English Premier League, whose prospects she hoped to damage so as to upset her (Unbearable.) ex.

Meanwhile, that very same relentlessly upbeat tendency is revealed as the proximate cause of Ted's own impending divorce. He's so fucking nice his wife can't stand to be around him any more.

Surprised by that swear-word I just threw in, seemingly so unnecessarily? That's the show. It does that All. The. Time. It's another thing I wasn't expecting. When someone tells you a sitcom is really nice and the main character is really nice and "nice" is the word you hear associated with it more than any other, you're probably expecting something along the lines of a live-action Wallace and Grommit. Not a swear-fest. Which is what you get.

It's a really sweary show. Everyone says "fuck" all the time. Except Ted. Who also says it but only when it matters. Unlike over-the-hill superstar Roy Kent, who has a series of running gags revolving around the F-word, which he uses at every opportunity and in front of anyone including, repeatedly and hilariously, his niece and a bunch of her eight-year old pals. The funniest thing about it is his complete unawareness that it's not entirely acceptable behavior. He ends up dropping a bunch of F-bombs in his first post-footballing career gig as a TV pundit, which predictably endears him to the audience, if not the presenters. (Although that's at the start of Season 2 so I shouldn't mention it here...)

I do like me some good, creative swearing, so it's a plus point as far as I'm concerned. And Roy's probably my favorite character, unless that's Keeley.

It's a good show, sweary or not. I'm not quite convinced it's a great show, the way it seems to have been pitched in some of the things I've read about it, but it's funny and the characters are likeable and it has that hard-to-resist sports narrative running in the background all the time, where even though it's all made up, you still want to know whether the team is going to win or not.

Just let's not talk about the actual footballing scenes. Has any show ever got those right? I doubt it. Some of them here have been quite painful to watch, and as I say I'm not even a sports fan.

I am a sitcom fan, though, and this is a good one. I'm on Season 2 now and I notice, looking ahead, that the episodes are longer throughout. I'm guessing that means more plot and deeper characterization rather than more jokes but I'll be happy, either way.

Sticking The Ending

We talk a lot around here about how poorly streaming services treat the properties they represent. How shows get dropped after one season if they haven't picked up traction. How multi-season arcs just fall right off that cliff they thought they were hanging onto, leaving everyone who cared high and dry and wondering what the hell happened. Shows with decent ratings get canned because something else might do better or come to a juddering halt because one of the leads did something the platform doesn't want to be associated with.

It's not like the old networks were more forgiving or responsible or artistically committed. If anything they were worse in all respects but they were also slower, steadier, less flighty. They did drop shows fast if they didn't pick up an audience but first they'd shunt them around the schedules a bit and maybe try a second season with a new theme tune and title sequence to see if there was any movement. And they always had the holy grail of syndication in the distance so there was some motivation to keep the momentum going, once they'd gotten the train rolling.

It was a real surprise to see news reports predicting "Wednesday could run for seven seasons". Not only is that very specific, it seems counter to any previous logic. Shows last as long as they hold an audience, keep their stars and someone crucial to the production process doesn't get a better offer.

And seven seasons of Wednesday, with the slight evidence of just two seasons to go on, wouldn't mean even seven years, which would itself be a long time in streaming culture. The show first arrived on Netflix in November 2022 and the second part of the second season has just aired, almost three years later. If they can't speed that up, completing seven seasons of Wednesday would take a couple of decades! The students of Nevermore Academy are going to look about as convincing as teenagers as the cast of Grease! by then.

But I'm not here today to talk about Wednesday. I haven't started on the second half of the new season yet. (By the way, as an aside, the post I did on the first half of the season was the least-read of all the posts I published during Blaugust, according to Blogger's page-view stats, which I find fairly reliable. By quite some margin, too. Given the supposed popularity of the show, that seemed surprising, until it occured to me maybe people didn't even click on it in fear of spoilers. If that was you, maybe go back and read it now?)

No, today's subject is a show that not only managed four seasons before it ended but which also came to a close in a dignified, coherent and satisfying fashion. It can be done, which makes me wonder a) why it isn't done more often and b) why it was done like that for this particular show.

At this point, if this were a podcast, I could come in with the big reveal. Unfortunately, that doesn't really work with a blog or at least not a heavily illustrated one like this. Everyone who cares knew what the show was as soon as they looked at the image at the top, although I did try to pick one that wasn't totally obvious.  

It's Upload, of course, the Amazon Prime show about a near-future digital afterlife, where anyone rich enough can have their brain scanned (And their head literally exploded.) so their memories and personality can be uploaded into an eternal spa weekend. I posted about the first season here and the second here, although neither season got a post of its own. 

I seem to have omitted to mention the third season entirely, all of which does tend to suggest I wasn't that engaged with the show. That would not be true. I really liked Upload. It was one of the first shows I got into, when I started watching TV (Well, streaming TV...) regularly again after a decade and a half of not watching anything at all (Thanks, Covid.) and that's perhaps why it made an impression that's lasted.

In production terms, Upload has done quite a bit better than Wednesday, in that it's only taken five years for four seasons to make it to the screen. Granted one of those seasons is really only half a season but still. 

In fact, no two seasons of Upload have the same number of episodes, which is odd. The first has the most with ten, the second has seven, the third eight and now just four in the final season. They also vary quite a bit in length, with most hovering around the half-hour mark you might expect for the sitcom the show was originally promoted as being but the final season stretching out past forty minutes each time. 

Although it's very much a comedy and it does rely heavily on a specific situation, Upload never was much of a sitcom. Struggling to describe the first season, I called it "partly a romcom with a lot of rather unsubtle social satire ladled on top but it's more a murder mystery". The mystery got solved but the drama just grew and grew until it turned into a world-wide conspiracy. The comedy stuck around and as for the romance... there was always a lot of romance, all the way to the very end. 

When it came to the second season, I expressed some concerns about "huge chunks of the premise, let alone the plot, not making any sense at all if thought about for more than a moment", something that never really changed. But as I also said, it didn't matter because the characters were engaging and so well-played they made me want to know what happened to them, whether it made any sense or not.

When Season Three came to an end I was unsure whether there would be a fourth. It did end on a cliffhanger but then don't they all? I'm not even sure why writers bother any more. It can't be much of a motivation for viewers, the way it used to be in the network days, when you knew if the story was still going, a show would be coming back because cancellations were always signalled way in advance and writers had time to re-write before the final episodes.

Everything is so fractured now, with so many streaming platforms, most of them requiring an opt-in, paid subscription, and with shows not infrequently swapping from one service to another, it really doesn't feel at all like the old days, when there was a kind of certainty, not to say inevitablity to it all. Around this time of year there'd be a whole big deal about the Fall Season shows. You'd see them trailed over and over on the stations you watched and you'd know what was coming whether you cared about it or not. 

Was that better? It could be stultifying, sure, but you knew where you were.

I didn't even notice that Upload was back until a few days after it had happened. None of the media outlets in my feeds mentioned it, Prime didn't plug it in the top attractions they were showing me and I certainly didn't get any emails about it. None of the streaming services seem to send out promotional emails the way most gaming companies do, even though several of them have my email address. 

I only noticed by chance that it was back, when I was scanning down Prime Video's horrifically jumbled and messy home page. It was somewhere down on about row five or six, off the bottom of the screen. Given they clearly have data to tell them I watched every episode of the previous seasons, you might have thought they'd want to let me know there was another but apparently they don't care.

So, was it any good? Well, let me see if I can answer that without spoilers... 

... maybe some spoilers in a general sense....

... I mean, even if I say it was satisfying or if it was disappointing, those are kinds of spoilers...

...so if you want to keep your own view absolutely pristine, now would be the time...  

And we're back. And no, I'm not going to drop any big reveals of the plot or the details but I am going to give away the emotional tenor of the ending. It was good. It felt satisfying. It had some light and shade and a little more nuance than perhaps I was expecting. 

In fact, I'd go so far as to say the production team and the writers have left themselves just enough wriggle room to carry the whole thing on at some unspecified time in the future, if the opportunity arises. It wouldn't be the first time a show with a planned ending turned out not to have ended after all.

Assuming that doesn't happen, though, I'd imagine most viewers will feel they can live with the way it finished. It's mostly a happy ending. Most of the characters you like get to walk off into the sunset with the love of their life (Not that all of those loves can actually walk...) The bad guys get what's coming to them, or some of them do, at least. I was very happy with the resolution of Ingrid's arc, she being my favorite character. I wouldn't have predicted it after Season One, either, so that's a gold star to the writers.

As for the plot, in keeping with the entire series, none of it really bears close examination. Or casual examination. Any examination at all, really. If I started picking holes, we'd be here 'til Christmas. But none of that matters. If you start with an unrealistic proposition, everything you build on that foundation is bound to fall apart if you lean on it. So don't lean on it is my advice. 

Just lean back and enjoy it. Let it wash over you and pick what sense out of it you can. It's stuffed full of topical references and tiny satires that spill out all over the plot for no good reason so why not just indulge yourself? 

I'll just mention one of those: the Millennial references. They stood out for me. I hadn't even tried to date the whole thng until then. It's in "the future" but if they'd ever said how far I'd missed it. This time, though, there were a couple of scenes with some very specific data points, namely that the central characters, all of whom seem to be in their thirties (Ingrid, specifically, is thirty-four in the final episode. Nathan, according to Wikipedia, was 27 when the series began.) have Millenials for parents. 

On the most commonly-used generational timeline, the last Millennials would have been born by 1996. The children of Millennials, for the most part, are Gen Alpha, for which as yet there is no agreed date-range but which is broadly seen as covering the 2010s to about now. Even the oldest Gen Alpha wouldn't be hitting thirty until around the middle of the century and most of them will get there after 2050.

Which doesn't seem that crazy. I'm so used to everything set in "the future" seeming to imagine decades of technological development telescoped into a few years that it seems strange to see extrapolations from current experiments being given something approximating a reasonable development arc. We could have self-driving cars, digital brain scans and sentient AI by the 2050s or 2060s. All of that is being worked on right now. I mean, we won't but it's not like saying we'll have terraformed Mars or perfected matter transmission by then.

So, that's Upload for you. A very enjoyable show, often funny, sometimes exciting, always heart-warming, never made a lot of sense. I did tear up a little, right at the end, even though the final scene had been telegraphed for most of the last episode. 

I'm sorry to see it end but I'm very happy to see it end so well. 

Only Murderbots In The Building

It's been a while since there was a proper TV post here and that's because I've barely watched anything since about Easter. I used to have a fairly reliable routine, where I'd finish up on the desktop in the late evening, do a few necessary chores, take Beryl for her last, short walk and then settle down in bed to watch shows on my Kindle Fire or my old laptop, the one that wasn't good for much else.. 

Sometimes I'd watch a movie or surf YouTube instead (Or as well.) but either way I'd be watching not doing. And then I got a new laptop and that was when things changed. For a while I experimented with gaming, either natively or through a streaming link to the big PC. Then I started doing bits and pieces, the sort of things I'd be doing if I was at my desk and before I knew it there wasn't much difference between sitting up and lying down.

The capper came when I started in on the music-making. For the last couple of months or more I've been writing and recording a new song nearly every day. Some take me a couple of hours, some more like eight or ten. The process always begins with me emailing myself the rough lyrics from the desktop and polishing them up on the laptop in bed, before recording a guide vocal and uploading it to Suno to get a feel of how it's going to work. 

Sometimes the very first version is so nearly there it hardly seems worth my time trying for anything better but mostly it's just the beginning of a lengthy editing session that runs long into the next day. Unsurprisingly, none of this leaves much time for watching TV but I have still been making some kind of effort to keep up with my ever-growing watchlist. 

Not a very good effort, it must be said. I paused Netflix at the start of June because neither Mrs Bhagpuss nor I was really watching anything there and as far as I can see nothing's turned up on the platform since that would change anything. Netflix lets you pause three months in a row so I have one more left but after that I'm not sure how it works. Cancel or pay up, I guess, although what the penalty for cancellation would be I don't know. Probably some kind of inducement to return if precedent is any guide.

Prime, obviously, is still up and running. It pays for itself in free postage, let alone free games, so that's not likely to change. Prime Video is a bonus, really. It wouldn't matter if I never watched it, like I almost never use Prime Music.  As it happens, though, Amazon sent me a great offer a couple of months back, Apple+  for three months at less than half-price, so I'm also subbed to that. 

The timing could have been better, for sure. There were a bunch of shows I was meaning to check out when I bought in but I haven't even looked at any of them. Even so, everything I have watched since then has been on the channel. 

"Everything", though, comes to precisely two shows, total. And after that long and entirely unecessary scene-setting, it's those two shows I'm going to review here because I have finally finished both of them. It took a couple of months but I did it! Go me!

Murderbot 

I didn't have much choice but to take my time with this one because Murderbot dropped a single episode every Friday for ten weeks. Just like the old days. I hear people complaining about this kind of scheduling all the time. It's obviously a way to keep people subbing for longer than they might otherwise do but I quite like it anyway. I wouldn't want every show to do it but it's fun to have one or two that drip-feed like this, so I have time to actually look forward to the next episode.

I certainly looked forward to Murderbot, albeit not for the plot, which progresses at a stately pace without much in the way of sidebars or filler, largely avoiding cliff-hangers and not creating a great deal of curiosity over what might happen next. It has more of a novelistic feel than is usual these days, when every show seems determined to plant a hook hard enough at the end of every episode to be sure of reeling you in for the next. It is an adaptation from a series of novels so I suppose that follows but then so are lots of shows and most don't show such restraint.

As far as the original novels by Martha Wells are concerned (Seven already in print with an eighth on the way.) I was aware of them from work but I'd never read one or really thougt of starting. I'm thinking of reading them now to the point that I'm probably going to add them to my "Things to buy me for Christmas" list. 

The TV show has been picked up for a second season and in retrospect it does feel like a set-up for an ongoing series, although I can't say it occurred to me while I was watching. The entire first season is just the first book, though, so the scope for a good, long run is clearly there.

The premise is very simple: a security robot (Cyborg, technically.) hacks its governor module and gains self-determination. Usually that would be license for a gorefest but not here. The SecBot, played with excellent restraint by Aleksander Skarsgard, given freedom to choose, pretty much chooses to be a slacker. All it wants to do is watch shows, particularly Sci-Fi and Science Fantasy shows, something that probably seemed a lot less meta in print than it does when you see it happen in an actual Sci-Fi show.

Of course, circumstances don't lead to a peaceful life of box-set bingeing for our reluctant hero, who has to keep its self-activation secret while carrying on with the job required of it both by the Megacorp that owns it and the customers to whom it's been leased. Equally predictably, that job very rapidly spins out of control causing hilarity to ensue, along with considerable bloodshed.

I guess you might expect a lot of blood in a show called Murderbot but this is a very post-modern take on the action genre. "Murderbot" turns out to be the name the central character secretly calls itself, partly ironically but also because it had digital flashbacks of actually murdering a considerable number of people, back when it was little more than an observer, trapped in its own armed and armored body.

That's emblematic of the ambiguous ground on which the whole enterprise rests. Neither the viewer, the cast nor Murderbot itself is ever wholly sure whose side its on, what its motives are or what its likely to do in any sudden-death situation, of which there are plenty.

That's a difficult balancing act to maintain indefinitely and the show doesn't always pull it off. It was clear to me quite early on that Murderbot was unlikely to murder anyone who wasn't a true and direct threat to it or its clients. I certainly didn't expect it to go on a killing spree and - spoiler - it doesn't. 

It does, however, do several things, some of them very violent, that I wasn't expecting, so the writers do ultimately carry the central conceit of dumping an unpredictable killing machine in the midst of a bunch of bleeding-heart liberal vegans (Let's be honest. They're fucking hippies.) just to see what might happen. 

The hippies provide an excellent collective of tropes, quirks, twitches and really annoying habits, individually infuriating enough that you'll probably find yourself wishing Murderbot would explode the heads of every one of them at some point or another and yet I ended up finding them all endearing in their own way. Collectively, they really are stronger than their often very annoying parts, so point made, I think..

The acting is as good as acting always is these days. Are there any shows any more where the acting is bad? I can't remember seeing any in years. Not like when I used to watch proper TV and it sometimes seemed like some of the cast must be reading their lines from notes scribbled on shirt-cuffs and scenery. And reading them badly, too.

Skarsgard himself is very good in what I imagine has to be a very difficult role, technically. He has to convey a whole range of complex emotions, frequently involving irony, while presenting as almost emotionless. He manages it very well with not much more than some eye movement, a slight variation in stance and the lightest of changes in intonation. He gets some leeway to express his true feelings in the internal monologue/voiceover passages but a lot of the time he's keeping it tamped way down and doing a great job with the limited emotional range the part allows.

Of the rest of the cast, the obvious standout is Noma Dumezweni as the expedition leader Ayda Mensah but I also liked David Dastmalchian as the troubled and very untrusting Gurathin and  Anna Konkle as Lebeebee, about whom I will say no more in case of spoilers. 

Murderbot is described by Apple as an action comedy and that seems about right. It is pretty funny at times and there's a fair amount of action. The special effects are solid and it's a good SciFi show of the kind that takes the audience's familiarity with the trappings and conventions of the genre as read. Don't expect much in the way of back-story or world-building.

And don't expect too much from the plot, either. I mean, there is one and it's fine but this is fundamentally a character piece not a thriller or a whodunnit. There are bad guys and good guys and the former do things to the latter and then there's a resolution where traffic goes the other way but almost all the baggage that usually attends all of that is mostly missing. 

And it doesn't matter. In fact, thinking about it now, I'm fairly sure it's a better show for leaving nearly all of that stuff out. If it tried to explain how everything works, socially and culturally or technologically, there'd be a lot less time for all the character interaction, which is the heart of the project. 

Particularly notable is the way the piece has such obvious political intent and yet makes so little play of it. The casting carries a lot of the weight and the many underplayed, under-emphasized conversations between characters takes on the rest. It's an odd approach in that it really isn't subtle and yet somehow it manages to give the impression it is.

 

The oddest thing, though, is that even with ten episodes in which not all that much happens, the one significant fault I'd lay on Murderbot is that it occasionally feels rushed. It's hard to explain how a show with such a dazed, ambling pace, a show in which nothing much changes most of the time, can still feel like it's flipping through the pages of the script like a flicker-book but that's how it struck me at times.

The most notable example is the season finale. It's very successful in terms of moving the plot  forward and tying up loose threads but it suffers noticeably from charging through the necessary stages of its wrap-up much too quickly. It could and probably should have been twice as long.

Still, it ends up just where it should and just where you'll probably hope it will (Something it has in common with that other show I've been watching.) so no real complaints from me. I'd much rather have a rushed ending that feels good than one that takes all the time it needs and still ends up feeling unsatisfying.

And as for that other show... well, I've gone on long enough for one post. It'll have to wait for next time.

Murderbot, I recommend. It's not a masterpiece by any measure but it's solid, well-crafted, well-acted and entertaining, as well as being quite funny quite often. It's a bit of a "quite..." show all round but I found it very satisfying nonetheless. 

You'll Believe A Dog Can... Run Really Fast?

It's going to be kind of a Grab Bag of TV and Movies today, I think. Hard to be sure. I'm making this up as I go along. Then again, what else do I ever do?

First up, Ted Danson's new Netflix hit show

A Man On The Inside

I straight up would never even have looked at this if it hadn't been for The Good Place. I'd always thought of Danson - assuming I ever thought about him at all, something I certainly wasn't in the habit of doing - largely as an amiable buffoon, someone who got lucky in the 'eighties and was coasting on that luck ever since. This, clearly, is complete nonsense.

Following his excellent comic turn in the afterlife sitcom, Ted appears here in another show from approximately the same team and turns in a subtle, nuanced and very moving performance, playing a recently-retired, recently-widowed professor, now so adrift from any kind of meaningful life he's been reduced to cutting out endless "interesting" articles from newspapers to send to his only daughter, a busy mother of three teenage boys, who has neither the time nor the inclination to read them.

That's how we see him as the series opens, anyway. From there, the extremely unlikely plot has him taking a job with a private detective agency to act as the titular man on the inside. The inside of a retirement home. 

Here's the thing about the plot: it's ludicrous but it's one hundred per cent internally consistent, which means it works. More impressive yet, even though I finished watching the show more than a week ago, I could very easily rehash the entire storyline here and now without having to look anything up. I can even remember the names of most of the characters. Given my memory these days, that's one heck of an endorsement.

The plot isn't the main reason to watch the show, of course. It's more of a sitcom than a mystery. Do we have a portmanteau name for those yet? We should. There are enough of them. Mystcom, maybe? Sittery? Someone workshop that for me...

The show has been very well received by both viewers and critics. About the only bad thing anyone seems to be able to find to say about it is that it may be very heartwarming but it's not that funny. I read a few comments like that before I watched the show for myself so it may be that I'd had my expectations lowered but it made me laugh. Quite a few times. 

As for the heartwarming part, it manages to walk that difficult line between sentimentality and genuine emotion with great facility. Danson himself is just about as good as you could imagine anyone being in the part, which isn't an easy one to play. It requires him to be sympathetic but also slightly annoying, amusing but also kind of sad. He also has to come across as basically competent while also being goofy and out of his depth.

Perhaps the toughest sell of all is his ability to get along with, well, everyone. You have to believe that both old and young people would find his character almost immediately appealing; that they'd want to spend time with him, listen to him, tell him stuff they might not tell anyone else. As an actor he's playing to the audience on the other side of the screen but his character is also playing to an audience on the inside, some of whom have no idea he's acting, some who suspect it and some who know. It requires a complex set of skills and Ted has them all.

Danson is the center and the star but as usual these days there's a whole ensemble of supporting roles, all of which are played well, some very well indeed. I particularly liked the three non-pensionable-age women who orbit around Ted in the roles of his actual daughter (Sometimes pretending to be his niece.) his employer (Sometimes pretending to be his daughter.)and the owner of the residential center where he pretends to have settled, who has the good fortune never to have to pretend to be anything other than the caring, empathic, over-worked professional she is.

It's an unusual show, especially for a hit, in that a lot of the roles are given to actors in their sixties, seventies and eighties. As someone in his mid-sixties, I imagine I'm supposed to find that an added attraction but actually I just found it a bit weird. I'm not entirely convinced old people in general like to watch other old people being old. I know I don't. They all do it very well, though.

The end of the final episode absolutely screams "Give us a a second season!" and I imagine there will be one, given the show's positive reception. One more will probably fly but it's very hard to see how the premise could be parlayed into a long-running series. I mean, just how many cases could there be that need a guy in his seventies, willing to act as a P.I.'s inside man to solve crimes? As many as make Netflix money, I guess.

I'd happily watch another eight episodes, anyway.

The Sticky

For reasons I already forget, I'm back watching Amazon Prime Video again after a months-long lay-off. It's good to leave the streaming services to lie fallow for a while. When you come back you find all kinds of new things have cropped up.

As soon as I came back I found this one being pushed at me in that unsubtle way Prime has, shoving its latest offerings to the front of the queue like a proud stage parent. I glance at the shills and mostly ignore them but this one caught my eye because of the peculiar title. The Sticky? Who the hell calls a show that?

The title, it transpires, refers to maple syrup. It's an odd name for a very odd show. It's a comedy crime romp (Cromedy? No, don't start that again.) inspired by an actual theft known as The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist.  The makers of the show are very concerned you know it's Not The True Story. Every episode starts with a disclaimer to that effect.

I'm not sure what they're worried about. Having watched all six episodes I feel safe in saying no-one could possibly mistake anything that happens here for reality. It's a black farce from start to finish. 

Every character, pretty much without exception, is a type and the playing, by and large, is directly to that type. Occasional hints of backstory or personality peep through the facade but mostly everyone sticks firmly to their assigned role, occasionally hamming it up like it's panto season.

That makes it sound shallower than it is. I thought it was pretty good fun all round even if it didn't have a lot of depth. 

I had been hoping it would be a Canadian version of the excellent Australian show Deadloch  and of all the shows I've seen, that is the one it most reminds me of, although it's nowhere near as funny or as dark. Still, the similarities are hard to miss. 

There's the abrasive, big city detective, sent to a small town to sort out a murder for a start. The extremely brief, barely acknowledged, sexual frisson between the incomer and the local cop even seemed as if it could be an intentional parody of the same relationship in Deadloch. Then there's the small-time power-broker, top of the local dung-heap, pushing their influence too far and getting their come-uppance. Plus there's swearing and casual violence and some solid one-liners but every show has those.

Mostly, though, The Sticky feels too odd to be derivitive, what with minor-key elements like one character being in a coma for the entire series and one of the supposedly most sympathetic characters running a mink farm. 

Peak weirdness arrives with the appearance of Jamie Lee Curtis's character, Bo Shea, a hit-person with a limp and a cane, who manages to be both terrifying and hilarious all at the same time. Her bravura turn in Episode 5 does a lot more than just steal the scene. It makes the show.

Curtis also co-produces, along with Jason Blum of Blumhouse and indeed the whole thing has the feel of a personal project, something someone with the power to make it happen thought would be fun to do. I imagine they were right. Jamie Lee certainly looks like she's having one hell of a good time as Bo. Luckily, it was fun to watch, too. I enjoyed it. I even laughed out loud a few times. 

Like A Man On The Inside, The Sticky ends with the clearest possible lead-in to a second series. I hope it gets one.

My Old Ass

From TV to movies. I've watched more movies this year than... well, in quite a while. Still, it hasn't been all that many - maybe half a dozen - but at least I feel like I'm getting into a rhythm. I'm optimistic for next year. I mean, one a month wouldn't be too much to shoot for, would it?

Two of the movies I watched in 2024 starred one of my top three current favorite actors, Aubrey Plaza. She's in the select group of people whose name on a cast list is all the information I require to add it to my watch-list.

In this case that could easily have led to disappointment and possibly anger. Not because there's anything intrinsically wrong with the movie. Just because Aubrey Plaza is hardly in it.

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration. She's probably present for about a third of the running time. The thing is, I have only ever seen My Old Ass referred to by the various movie and entertainment sites I follow as a movie "starring Aubrey Plaza", a claim that, not unreasonably, led me to believe she would be playing the lead. 

She is not. The lead is played by Maisy Stella and very well she plays it, too. Maisie is Elliot, just turned eighteen, in her last summer at home before leaving for college in the big city. Aubrey Plaza plays the same character at thirty-nine. 

Not to dwell too much on the plot, which once again has complete internal consistency and works perfectly even though objectively it makes literally no sense whatsoever, what happens is that Maisie takes a bunch of shrooms and hallucinates her older self, who proceeds to give her enigmatic advice about her future while bantering with her in a most amusing fashion.

When this happens, the film has already been running for a while. By the time the older Elliot (or her hallucinatory imago) disappear, maybe half an hour has passed and Aubrey Plaza been on screen for about ten minutes of it. 

It was at that point that I began wondering how they were going to keep her in the picture for the rest of the running time. It turns out it wasn't going to be a problem. They weren't.

For most of the rest of the movie, all we hear of Aubrey is her voice on Elliot's mobile phone which, through some form of metaphysical magic, she is able to use to talk to her older self from two decades in the past. Then even that stops and for quite a while there's no Aubrey at all until she makes a brief, visible and possibly physical return right at the end.

As I say, this could have led to my feeling somewhat cheated but fortunately Maisy Stella provides an entirely satisfactory substitute. The supporting cast, for once, is neither extensive nor particularly foregrounded, everyone pretty much sticking to their supporting roles and doing so solidly, without anyone being especially noticeable or memorable.

The exception, at least from my perspective, was Percy Hynes White as Chad, who stood out from the rest mainly because I did not like him at all for most of the time he was on screen. I did, eventually, come around to him but more through the writing than his performance, which I found quite annoying. You'e supposed to think he's a good guy, though, and I guess if you like goofy puppy-dog types, it tracks.

The script is by Megan Park, who also directed, doing a great job in both departments. This is a very high concept coming of age story and the absolute best thing about it is the way no-one ever attempts to explain how any of it is happening. The set-up verges on magical realism and the last thing you need with that is any kind of pseudo-scientific rationale.

At under ninety minutes, My Old Ass is short and bittersweet and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Even if I still do kind of feel like I was short-changed on the whole Aubrey Plaza deal.

Superman

Is it a movie? Is it a TV show? No, it's a Trailer!

I don't watch a lot of movies but I do watch a lot of trailers. They're a bit like demos for games, I think; sometimes the trailer's all you need.

That absolutely does not apply to the first trailer for the Superman movie, the one that's coming out next July, directed by James Gunn of Guardians of the Galaxy fame, now heir to the cursed throne of the DC Cinematic Universe. The link popped up in my NME feed yesterday, with the teaser headline "First ‘Superman’ trailer sees Krypto the Superdog make his live-action debut." 

I was more than a little curious to see the non-CGI Dog of Steel so I clicked through right away. And he's sooo cute! I mean, seriously! Krypto has been a lot of things since he first appeared in Adventure Comics #210 nearly seventy years ago but I don't believe "cute" has often been one of them. 

Most of that is down to his signature look. I've never been sure what breed he's meant to be - he looks like some kind of cross between a Staffie and a Labrador - but whatever it is, it doesn't scream cuddly ickle doggy. 

This time, instead of the smooth-haired look he's sported for all those decades, they've gone for a much rougher, tousled, almost-terrier appearance and I am so totally here for it! It's these small changes that sometimes make all the difference and even as a long-time fan, this make-over works for me.

It's not just Krypto, though. For a Superman fan, the whole trailer is just amazing. It hits exactly the right tone and sustains it for entire the 2.17 run time. I quite literally felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck watching this one and the moment it ended I watched it again, at which point I admit to tearing up a little.

If the YouTube comments are anything to go by, I was not alone in my immensely positive response. Superman has been made over so many times it's hard to believ upermae actor there could ever be a version that feels fresh but this promises to be the one. It's certainly going down well with actual DC comic fans, if not with those of former Superman actor Henry Cavill, which should at least make for good pre-release word of mouth.

Whether the finished movie will have any significant appeal beyond that demographic, I guess we'll just have to wait until next summer to find out but I hope so. DC - and super-hero movies in general - could do with a hit..

If there's one thing I really hope for this iteration, though, it's that it isn't just the damn origin story all over again. I appreciate the logic of the Groundhog Day approach: there's a new generation of movie-goers every decade and if the huge majority of the audience is going to be 12-24 every single time, you can't just assume everyone knows who your characters are...

But this Superman ffs! Everyone does know who he is. Just take the origin as read and move on.

Which is just what I'm going to do. Laters!

It's Not Over 'Til It's Over

There was a whole introduction here, where I explained I didn't have enough to say about the shows I've been watching to make a post and how I was going to have to stuff what I did have into a grab-bag alongside a bunch of other odds and ends to pad it out. Then I started writing and the TV part alone came to almost two thousand words, which seemed like it might be enough after all. So that's what this post is now.

And even then it's only two shows. I was going to cover three because I thought that's what I'd watched all the way through to the end but it turns out I hadn't after all because one of them hasn't actually finished yet. It still has three episodes to go. That's what happens when Prime decides to switch things up and drop three episodes at a time. I'm not used to the cadence. It throws me off.

Nine did seem like a curious number of episodes for a full season but the last one, which obviously I know now wasn't the last at all, really did feel like a season-ending cliffhanger to me. I took it that way quite happily. I was only mildly disturbed it seemed to end on such a downbeat note. I thought it was quite brave, if anything.

I'd still be thinking of it like that if I hadn't just now decided to fact-check, ahead of writing this post, just to make absolutely sure there weren't any more coming. Only to find out that, yes, there were. Three more as of last night, in fact.

I'll hold off on that one, then, until I've watched those. Looks like the story might end differently to how I'd imagined. Now there's time for a happy ending, although I kind of hope that's not where it's heading, which sounds a bit mean but art can be unkind. 

I suppose I also ought to say what show it is. It's Vox Machina.

Another show I definitely have finished and will not be watching any more of is Kaos. Not because I didn't enjoy it. I liked it quite a lot. Because it's already been dropped by Netflix, who seem to have the attention span of a six week old kitten these days. 

Kaos is a mildly surreal, slightly disconcerting take on Greek myth starring Jeff Goldblum and an excellent supporting cast, including David Thewlis, who I have to admit I thought had died years ago. Must be confusing him with someone else. 

The eight episode first season very clearly sets up a second that's never going to happen unless someone else picks it up, which seems unlikely. There seems to be no obvious explanation for the decision, either, except that it didn't meet whatever criteria for success Netflix set. 

It was fairly successful in terms of viewer numbers and critical reception was fairly good but middling success doesn't seem to cut it with the streaming services any more. They do all need plenty of filler but they can buy those shows in from around the world much more cheaply than it costs to make their own. Kaos looks like it would have been expensive and expensive needs to be a big hit, not just to chart.

It ws also a hardish show to place, which probably didn't help. It was funny and scary and supernatural and romantic. More like a very long movie than a TV show. It's main strength was the acting, which was top-notch throughout. Jeff Goldblum was predictably mesmerising, shifting from affable bonhomie to chilling anomie with a deeply disturbing facility. He wasn't particularly likeable, though, and neither were several others in the main cast. That can't have helped, either. 

I liked just about everyone in it, as characters, but I found several of them uncomfortable to spend time with. It was never a comfortable watch. Unsettling, I think, is the word for it.

As well as a fairly large central cast, there were a lot of minor but significant characters too, all of them well-played. I could have used a little more of some, not least Suzy Eddie Izzard as the Fate Lachesis (Lachy if you prefer.) If I had to pick a favorite, though, it would be Thewlis's Hades, so underplayed he was barely there. A masterclass in subtlety.

The writing was mostly good, particularly the dialog, much of which sparkled. The plot seemed a little wayward at times. I'm not sure how much sense it would make if I watched it again, paying more attention. It seemed to be caroming along on impetus some of the time. Nothing wrong with that, though.

Visually, Kaos was sumptuous but also very distracting, for me anyway. I spent a considerable amount of time in the early epiodes not paying full attention to the story (Which might explain some of my issues with the plotting.) because I was trying to figure out if the Theban palace scenes had actually been filmed at Plaza de Espana in the Parque de Maria Luisa in Sevilla, a location I know very well.

It was indeed shot there. It could hardly be anywhere else. The place is nothing if not distinctive. In fact, pretty much the entire series was shot in Spain, much of it in other places I've spent time, although I can't pretend I spotted any other specific locations.

It's always distracting to see places you know turn up in fictional shows, especially when they're being used as stand-ins for somewhere else. I ought to be used to it, living as I do in a city where film crews closing off the streets for something or other is a near-constant disruption to daily life but I tend not to watch the kinds of costume dramas they're working on. 

In this case, though, the main effect the familiar setting had on me was to make me want to go back to Sevilla. It's been a while. It was good to visit again, even vicariously. Another reason to regret the untimely curtailment of what was a very enjoyable show.

In absolutely no danger of being canned after one season is another new Netflix show I've just finished: Nobody Wants This. If ever a show was named with unintentional irony, this has to be it.

Everybody Wants This would be a more appropriate title. As I write, it's sitting at 95% critical, 85% audience on Rotten Tomatoes, five stars on IMDB and #3 on the Netflix global chart after more than a month. Season 2 has already been commissioned.

It absolutely deserves all that praise and success. It's as close to flawless as anyone could possibly expect a sitcom about an agnostic podcaster who falls in love with a rabbi ever to be. 

I mean, come on! Look at that set-up. It stinks, doesn't it? Would you watch it? I wouldn't and I'm a huge sitcom fan.

So why did I watch it? Same reason everyone else did, I imagine. Kristen Bell.

Kristen Bell is a name I trust. I've yet to see her in anything that wasn't good or where she wasn't the best thing in it. She's a superb comic actor with a great deal more range than just that, as if just that wouldn't be enough. 

I'm currently watching another of her successes, The Good Place, several years after everyone else. I would have watched it sooner but for two reasons: the premise creeps me out and I had somehow managed to remain oblivious to her presence in the show, which must have taken some doing seeing she's the lead. It was only when Netflix helpfully recommended it to me as the next show I might want to watch after Nobody Wants This finished that I realised Kristen Bell was in it at all.

NWT Season 1 is ten episodes long and every one is a gem. Many of them would almost work as short stand-alone playlets, which is how sitcoms used to be before they turned into soap operas with gags. One of these days I might write something on situation comedy as a genre, in which case this show is going to be a case study. Is it a sitcom? Is there actually a definable situation here?

I asked myself that question a few times as I watched the series. It seemed much more like that misbegotten, bastard genre we blushingly call dramedy at times, especially when the seasonal arc seemed to be heading straight to the altar (Or wherever it is Jewish wedding ceremonies take place.) I was stumped, trying to figure out how a show based on the opposites attract trope could be expected to run for the six-to-eight seasons a hit sitcom requires, if the opposites turned out to be so very congruent by the middle of Season 1.

Turns out the writers had an answer for that, one which I won't reveal for reasons of spoilage. It's hard to imagine anyone hasn't already watched the show because why the hell wouldn't you but then I just admitted I'm five years late on The Good Place so go figure. It's always too soon for spoilers.

NWT is yet another show where the sheer quality of the acting is overwhelming. I swear, the older I get, the better actors become, most especially on TV. It's across the board, pretty much, too, domestic and international, broadcast and streaming. 

If I look back at shows I loved in the sixties, seventies, eighties and even the nineties I feel I have to make allowances for the time they were made. Individual performances match current quality standards and so do certain shows but the mean average bears no comparison. Actors are just better now. A lot better, many of them.

Or maybe directors are or writers or showrunners, a job that didn't even exist back then... Who knows? Maybe don't look for explanations. Just take the win.

The entire cast of Nobody Wants This shines throughout. Kristen Bell is exemplary as ever but so is everyone else. Structurally, the show manages somehow to be a star vehicle, a two-hander and an ensemble piece all at the same time. Adam Brody, who gets almost as much screen time as Bell, is consistently funny as rabbi Noah Roklov but his brother, Sasha, played by Timothy Simons, is funnier still.

But they're all funny. It's one of those shows where no-one is ever the straight guy and yet it very much isn't one of those shows where every other line is a zinger and it feels like the writers' room is right there on screen. I mean, I love those shows but they're one step away from stand-up. This is one step away from straight drama. And it's a small step.

It would be pointless to call out all of the cast members I particularly enjoyed because I particularly enjoyed just about all of them. I will say, though, that I hope the sisters' agent, Ashley, played with deliciously irritable elan by the surely-not-her-real-name Sherry Cola, gets more to do in the second season.

Other than to go on and on about how great it is, I don't have much more to say about this one so I'll leave it there. If you haven't seen it, rectify that immediately.

So that's television done. It turns out three shows, one of which I didn't even write about, was enough for a post after all. Who'd have guessed? Anyone who's been here before, I imagine.

It feels like the post is still missing a big finish, though. We need a tune and what could be better or more apt than Blondshell doing Veronica Mars? 

Yes, it may well be the third or fourth time the same song has appeared here. What of it? It won't be the last, either, I'll promise you that.

There are plenty of live versions on YouTube, not all of them with the greatest sound and few that can  replicate the emotionally evocative guitar squall of the studio ending. This one, from an Icelandic radio broadcast, comes as close as any and Sabrina just kills it. Best enjoyed very loud.