The Bear (Seasons 1-2): Second season surpassed the first. The bottleneck episodes, “Fishes” and “Forks,” were probably my two favorite single episodes of a show last year.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Seasons 1-8): Just what I needed. Not quite Parks or The Office, but a solid sitcom from start to finish.
Better Call Saul (Seasons 5-7): Stuck the landing. For my money, better than Breaking Bad, but also surprisingly wrapped up the entire saga perfectly.
Curb Your Enthusiasm (Season 12): Of course Larry would invent the “Spite Finale.” A hilarious remake of the Seinfeld ending that everyone hated. And the title? “No Lessons Learned.” Bravo.
Dave (Seasons 1-3): I think ‘Lil Dicky is a immensely talented MC, but I like his show much more than his music.
Party Down (Season 3): Solid revival. Not quite as funny as the first two seasons, but this cast is too solid to fail.
Rick and Morty (Seasons 6-7): My last review still stands: “Like most nerdy things, the fan base kinda ruins it, but this show is too funny and too in my wheelhouse not to love. And quite often, it is just as deep as they say it is.”
Saturday Night Live (Seasons 48): More meh moments than classics, but not as bad as they say and sometimes flat-out hilarious. I liked every bit of last week’s episode with Gosling.
South Park (Seasons 24-26): Not at its peak, but still the most cutting satire on television.
Succession (Seasons 1-4): A masterclass in writing and acting.
Ted Lasso (Season 3): Nothin’ wrong with comfort television.
Since Hulu launched a “top 15” list of their most popular shows and films, I decided to counter with the fifteen things currently on Hulu I’d recommend:
Better Things: Before The Bear or Ted Lasso, other shows had made me laugh more, but few have made me smile, cry or feel as much as this one.
Bottle Rocket: Wes Anderson’s underrated debut. Flawed, but but perhaps his funniest?
Brigsby Bear: Amusing, endearing little picture about a lot of things. I went into this fresh and think that has to be the best way to watch this so no spoilers, but if you wanna talk about Brigsby Bear I can be found at Brigsbyfan2.
Closer: Not sure what it says about me that this is one of my favorite films, but it is.
Damsels in Distress: Whit Stillman and Greta Gerwig should have made more pictures together.
Eight Days a Week: Probably the most contrarian thing about me is that I prefer The Beatles’ first half to their second.
Raising Arizona: “I tried to stand up and fly straight, but it wasn’t easy with that sumbitch Reagan in the White House.”
Spin Me Round: A dark comedy Suspiria. Saw this at Cinequest last year and everyone was in stitches, one of the hardest laughing audiences I’ve ever been in.
Better Things (Season 5): Easily my favorite show on television at the moment. Absolutely gutted that it is over, even though it left on a high note. I could check in on this family from time to time forever. Always look on the bright side of life, indeed.
Bob’s Burgers (Seasons 10-12): Consistently funny. No pun intended, but comfort food.
Boy Meets World (Seasons 1-7): Still and forever unabashedly love this show.
Bunheads (Season 1): Easy to see why it was cancelled, but I found it enjoyable. Once it gets past its absurd initial premise, it seemed like it was gradually just turning into a Stars Hallow spin-off: Emily is more or less running Miss Patty’s; Sean Gunn’s character becomes more Kirk-like; we also see, among others, Gypsy, Digger, Paris, and Zack in an eyepatch.
Curb Your Enthusiasm (Seasons 10-11): Amusing, but could have ended after season seven.
Jeopardy: Love to watch this before bed. There have been some incredible stand-out players as of late. I’ve also watched some random old episodes on Pluto.TV. ’80s Jeopardy is amazing.
Kim’s Convenience (Season 5): It’s a shame this show didn’t get to properly end. I still recommend the show as a whole. It’s funny, lighthearted and charming, and sometimes that is all a show needs to be.
The Mandalorian / The Book of Boba Fett (Seasons 1-2; Season 1): As a whole, my favorite Star Wars thing since the original Star Wars things. Boba Fett dragged, though. Almost think this should have been re-edited as one show.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Season 4): As funny as ever, still love the Lenny Bruce bits, and I am liking the B/C plots more (spin-off about Village Voice in the ’60s starring Chris, please), but it’s still the Midge and Susie show, as it should be.
Only Murders in the Building (Seasons 1-2): I love Martin Short and Steve Martin (and Selena Gomez!), but didn’t hold my interest. There could have been a 90-minute version of this that I likely would have thoroughly enjoyed.
Pen15 (Season 2): Maya and Anna are so committed to this. I really loved how the second half of season two branched out with Maya’s (real life) mother. They did something really special here. And for those that don’t know, Taylor Nichols, who Anna’s father, was in The Dinner Parting.
Rick and Morty (Seasons 1-5): Like most nerdy things, the fan base kinda ruins it, but this show is too funny and too in my wheelhouse not to love. And quite often, it is just as deep as they say it is.
The Righteous Gemstones (Seasons 1-2): Blasphemous dark comedy. I appreciate that they mock religious hypocrisy over religion, period.
Riverdale (Seasons 5-6): Not ashamed to say that I am an Archie Comics fan, but this show should have lost me long ago. Twin Peaks it ain’t.
Saturday Night Live (Seasons 46-47): The show is really embracing the weird. This is the most I’ve liked Sunday Afternoon Not Live in a long time (first few episodes of the new season have been clunkers but I am still holding out hope. The Jack Harlow episode had some great moments).
Single Drunk Female (Season 1): Felt very much like I was watching an ABC Family show about alcoholism. Loved the lead, though, and that they have a trans character that’s actually playing a role, and not just an identity, if that makes sense.
Stranger Things (Season 4): Had its moments, of course, but I am ready to be over this.
Squid Game (Season 1): Didn’t dislike it, but how Netflix manage these phenomenons out of thin air, I don’t think I will ever be able to comprehend.
Ted Lasso (Seasons 1-2): Ted and Roy Kent represent the yin and yang of who I want to be as a person.
Welcome to Wrexham (Season 1): So I like heartwarming shows about soccer, sue me.
Winning Time (Season 1): For how much this show had going for it (the actors, the premise), it too felt very incomplete to me.
Atlanta (Seasons 1-2): I applaud the ambition, but it didn’t always grab me. Could have been funnier, or at least shown more heart. Stanfield was great, as always, but was most impressed by Brian Tyree Henry’s nuanced performance.
Better Things (Season 4): The small moments have always been the best part of this show. There are so many moments I can relate to, but those I don’t, like a scene when a new husband sings “Martha” to their partner, or when a child recreates a classic Hollywood slapstick routine; those are the ones that make want to live in this world. Other shows make me laugh more, but no other makes me smile, cry or feel as much as Better Things.
#BlackAF (Season 1): I haven’t seen any of Kenya Barris’ other work so I can’t speak to it, but I thought this was funny, honest, insightful, and entirely too long. Read: Redundant. There’s a great movie in there somewhere. Love Rashida Jones, obviously.
Castle Rock (Season 2): I love Stephen King so much (probably too much) that I was intrigued from the start and then… wasn’t. I’ll give it to her though, as bad as this got, Lizzy Caplan was frickin’ committed.
Fleabag (Seasons 1-2): First season seemed kinda obvious. Sincerely don’t know how it could be described as groundbreaking. But I did laugh, a lot. Really liked the direction the second took. Hannah Jane Parkinson says it all a lot better than I can.
High Fidelity (Season 1): Since too many of my friends related a bit too much to Rob Gordon, I appreciated the female role reversal. Mighta been interesting to see future seasons not bound by source material.
Kim’s Convenience (Seasons 1-4): Just delightful. There isn’t a lot of social commentary, but sometimes that is O.K. It seems real. As a straight sitcom, it’s the best one I’ve seen in awhile. It’s that funny.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Seasons 1-3): Very seldom (if ever?) do I care about the B/C stories, but boy am I in love with Midge and Susie. And the stand-up is solid, something I rarely, rarely say about stand-up within shows or film.
Schitt’s Creek (Seasons 1-6): The plot makes little sense, but it’s so funny and has so much heart it doesn’t matter. I bought the final season on Amazon because I couldn’t wait to finish. The finale was a mess, but I was too, a blubbering mess, after watching the documentary at the end. The cast reading the letter from the mothers of thousands of LGBTQ+ kids fucking wrecked me.
The Sopranos (Seasons 1-6): The great rewatch. The greatest rewatch.
Twilight Zone; (Season 1): Thought I was going to love this. At least like it more than I did. The cast is often great (which somehow makes things worse), and some of the plots are interesting, but the episodes usually fail to stick the landings. “The Blue Scorpion” was solid. “A Traveler” seemed the closest to the original series. “Not All Men” and “Replay” were intense and scary. Could have done without the rest, especially the Black Mirror parody, “The Wunderkind.”
The Wonder Years (Seasons 1-6): The great rewatch. The greatest rewatch.
Apparently I am most like Lady Sybil Crawley from Downton Abby. I’ve never seen it, admittedly. Is this accurate? From a bio on a Wiki I found:
Sybil was described by Mrs. Hughes as “the sweetest spirit under this roof.” Sweet tempered, caring, and politically ambitious, Sybil was liked by everyone, despite her differences in beliefs and interests.
Last night ‘s episode had some fun moments. Really related to the bit in Matt Damon’s monologue about staying up late with his dad to watch the show as a child. And somehow related to the Weezer sketch even more. #TeamLeslie
Also, say what you will about Miley (I have), but I enjoyed her performance and singing it alongside Sean Ono Lennon kinda got to me.
I don’t know why I am writing about SNL. I must have mono.
Well, actually, we’ve been out a couple of times. I’m really rather taken with her. She has a very playful side. She took me miniature golfing last night.
Martin
Oh, sure, when she takes you, it’s playful. When I take you, it ends up as a short story in the high school literary magazine.
Frasier
“Through the Clown’s Mouth Darkly” took second in the all-city fiction contest that year.
As an outsider that is still obsessed with good food (read: I have an unrefined palette), it’s speaking my language. Bourdain is my hero, but he’s far more who I want to be than who I am.
David Chang and his new Netflix series, “Ugly Delicious,” can most easily be defined by what they’re not. Mr. Chang is not a fastidious French kitchen god, a high-energy American showman or an Anthony Bourdain-like poetic observer. “Ugly Delicious” is not a stand-and-stir cooking show or a pack-your-bags travelogue.
Its eight episodes take on topics as conventional as pizza, barbecue, fried chicken and Chinese cooking. The cameras pan over jars of artisanal tomato sauce and capture the squirting juices of xiao long bao. Ritualistic pronouncements of deliciousness abound, often punctuated with a certain four-letter word, and the occasional non-culinary star — Aziz Ansari, Jimmy Kimmel — drops by to both lend and borrow celebrity wattage.
What Mr. Chang and the food writer Peter Meehan, his co-star and fellow executive producer, are attempting is something more ambitious, though: an extended television essay, in the form of free-associative, globe-trotting conversations about food and culture.
In the first episode Chang says he hates “being told I can’t like something.”
But I think the conversation deserves more than a troll/PR stuntresponse. I wonder if Al Jean or Matt Groening understand that part of the problem with Apu is that his name is used as an insult. My best friend is Indian. I’ve seen it firsthand.
Having their response come from Lisa is a complete disservice to one of the best role models in modern fiction. I would probably stop watching the show if I hadn’t inadvertently already done that around season nine.
