What TV Shows Are You Watching?

Television
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Catching up with some TV from the last month:

Break Point, the Netflix documentary about tennis in the style of Drive to Survive. It’s worth a watch!

They picked a good bunch of tennis players, both at the top of the game and some mid-ranked players, and got REALLY lucky with some of the drama that unfolded.

For example, everyone was following Serena Williams’ last ever tournament at the US Open, but Netflix was following the player who “ended her career”, in the words of Ajla Tomljanovic’s father (who is GREAT VALUE when he turns up for the later episodes). Who knew Tomljanovic would have such a big role in September when they started following her story in January?

Ons Jabeur at Wimbledon was another great episode, as was Francis Tiafoe at the US Open.

Nadal and Djokovic are mostly featured as FINAL BOSS TO BE DEFEATED by the other players, who invariably fall short at the majors, and Netflix doesn’t linger on the fact that Nadal was injured when beaten by Fritz at Indian Wells.

Meanwhile, it’s so obvious that Iga Swiatek is so far ahead of everyone else they followed. She’s literally the only one taking her job seriously. Why is Taylor Fritz travelling with his girlfriend? Why doesn’t Tomljanovic have someone other than her father booking hotel rooms?

While Francis Tiafoe is riding around in his party bus, Swiatek is having a peaceful moment in her hotel room building a lego Space Shuttle. She’s all business, with a super professional training team, including a full time psychologist. Which means her story and personality isn’t the most riveting, but she takes on the mantle of FINAL BOSS TO BE DEFEATED on the women’s side.

The last episode isn’t really worth watching, and weirdly introduces a new main character of Sabalenka. She’s a great player, but why not make an entire episode about her for this year’s Australian Open? That would make far more sense.

Also the last episode highlights how sad the crowds are at the women’s tour final compared to the men’s tour final. Netflix lays on huge fake crowd noise, which is plausible at grand slams, but less so in mostly-empty arenas in Texas in November. It’s a bit of a disappointing end to the season, and only partly because the wrong people won.

Finally, a few episodes are unfortunately a bit too Kyrgios-heavy at points, but it’s understandable due to him being featured on the show at all, and then the results he had last year.

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Ted Lasso season 3.

A good half of the season, but then last four episodes felt like the writers REALLY wanted you to GET READY TO SAY GOOD BYE to Ted Lasso when he leaves the team at the end of the (football) season, and the stories and comedy really suffer.

Then the final episode is almost completely insufferable due because they lean even harder into WE ARE SAYING GOOD BYE TO TED LASSO. Like, there’s a musical number and group hug and another montage and on and on and zzzzz…

And then, in a move I found totally misguided, the final episode brings back loads and loads of references to moments from waaaay back in the show, like the first episode of season one. Like, a joke about a manager wearing too-short shorts and his penis showing? I don’t have fond memories of that, and was mostly confused until I remembered it was a callback. Plastic army soldiers? Why did they make an appearance? Even the reappearance of the “Believe” sign. Wasn’t the point of the show that the players no longer need that sign to function as a team and individually as non-toxic men?

The writers seemed so in love with the characters and previous moments from (better) episodes, that they forgot to make a good show.

That said, I’m sure the show is successful enough that there will be more seasons of “AFC Richmond” or “The Richmond Way” next year, and I’ll happily watch the continuing adventures of Roy and Jamie, especially if there’s a AFC Richmond Women’s team and they have to coach them too.

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ZeroZeroZero is the sequel to Sicario we never got. Good, bleak.

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The first three episodes of Wheel of Time season 2 are on Prime. Initial nonspoiler thoughts:

  • The production value has ramped up significantly. They took two years between seasons 1 and 2 for some extra polish, and it shows.
  • They have deviated from the book plot fairly noticeably. If you are looking for a direct adaptation, this isn’t it. The bones of the series are all there, and they are clearly heading to the same place, but it’s sure to anger a lot of readers who want a chapter-by-chapter recreation. Characters are merged together, plotlines are shortened or expedited, and new plot points or stories are introduced to develop characters due to the original ways they were done in the book being unworkable on TV.
  • There are still elements of “We want to be Amazon’s Game of Thrones,” though they made it work in the context of telling the Wheel of Time story.

As a longtime dedicated reader who considered the Wheel of Time novels to be a formative work in my life, I am really enjoying this new season. It’s giving me the familiar world and characters, with some new scenes, stories, and twists that I didn’t see coming.

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The trailer for the Harley Quinn spinoff just dropped.

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Last year, I sang my praises for an amazing show on AMC+ called Pantheon. Unfortunately, despite the show’s second season being fully completed, AMC wrote the show off for tax purposes, leaving the fans rightfully angry.

Anyway, Amazon Prime has rescued the second season from obscurity.

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Taskmaster new series 16 is now put on YouTube with just a single day of delay.

All 15 previous series are also available on YouTube as well as certain international versions if you speak danish, swedish or norwegian. I hope they will eventually put New Zealand’s and Australia’s versions of the series on YouTube as well. I have seen the first (and so far only) season of AU but I’ve only seen series 3 and 4 of NZ.

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I just finished watching the Netflix One Piece adaptation and it is really good. The series has some deficiencies, but it captures most of what makes One Piece great.

In case you are living under a rock: One Piece is about a kid named Monkey D. Luffy who wants to become King of the Pirates by finding the titular legendary treasure left by the former holder of that title, Gold Roger. This is told in a long spaning manga series that has been running weekly since 1997 and is the best selling comic book of all time. The Netflix adaptation is covering the first part of the story, the East Blue Saga where Luffy makes his first exploits, gathers his initial crew and rises to notoriety.

I have to give kudos to particularly the casting which is excellent pretty much all-round. Especially the main five members are chosen very well and I like that they followed details such as casting people of an ethnically diverse background as series creator Eiichiro Oda himself described the Straw Hat Crew as such if they were from the real world.

I also like some strong choices in juggling story elements around. The main arcs are still there, but there is a secondary plot introducing Garp much earlier giving another point of view and strengthening the framework of the story.

Unfortunately, that also means that some parts of the story were eliminated, both to its advantage and detriment. For one, it means some story beats are snappier and the series doesn’t drag, and fights are resolved much faster. Unfortunately on the flipside this also results in some character motivations being lost, as it it somewhat unclear why Luffy would want Usopp to join his crew, or why Sanji would want to join the Straw Hats.

There are also hits and misses with the direction and effects work. E.g. they did very well with showing Luffy’s stretching power, but you can also see corners being cut e.g. when Arlong flips a wooden hut in a village. There are also repeated camera shots with very close close-ups of characters talking with each other, which I think are meant to emulate comic panels to that effect, but feel kind of weird in a TV show.

The show also did well with allowing some of the more cartoony elements of One Piece and managed to pull them off in live action to a good degree. I also really like that they realized Arlong’s band of fishmen pirates mostly with practical effects. However, they did make some noticeable cuts due to difficulty of pulling them off, most notably the character Hachi, and East Blue is still rather tame in how outlandish One Piece can get. A second season is already in the works and Oda, who had a large hand in the production, teased that they want the story to progress at least until Tony Chopper joins the crew, and I am unsure how they are going to pull off a shape-shifting reindeer-man. The next section of the story that makes sense is up to Alabaster island, a.k.a. the Baroque Works Saga, but getting there even with the pacing they showed here would probably take at least twice as many episodes as season 1 had.

Overall though I think it largely works and is definitely worth a watch.

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Season 2 of Invincible has started on Amazon Prime.

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Premieres February 22.

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Speaking of Netflix, I’m hype for 3 Body Problem, landing in March.

Not a lot of people have been saying that much about it in my awareness which I expected, but then the trailer has pulled some decent views, which is encouraging! This is difficult material to try and do justice while also appealing to a wide demographic.

And I like the look of things from the trailer. I can place essentially each scene from the trailer into the books or at least figure out where it ought to fit with the changes they will make. And so far so good! Considering some of the westernization of the setting/characters the series makes, I was originally quite hesitant about the idea. It’s so well known as a Chinese Sci-Fi story and many readers look at it as a sort of fresh look into a familiar topic from an unfamiliar cultural perspective. As the original author and the right holders in China all seem to have been well in favor of such an adaptation, I’m not going to get hung up on that aspect. The critical aspects that are directly tied to Chinese culture seem to still be left intact. And instead I think it’s best to view it as a really quite compelling sci-fi trilogy on its own grounds.

Not every Steven King adaptation needs to be set in Maine.

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I found the amazing Radiohead cover.

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Invincible season 2B starts March 14.

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I’ve recently gotten into watching Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee. This is a comedy gameshow which has a lot of DNA similar to Taskmaster and features a lot of the contestants from the New Zealand version of Taskmaster (The first two seasons of which are now on YouTube btw). It starts out as a traditional kind of Spelling Bee where the contestants are challenged to spell words correctly, but the middle rounds are more abstract, e.g. they get shown a picture and have to guess (and then spell) the intended word.

Most of the comedy comes from ribs that the contestants get when they make mistakes which is a lot of back-and-forth banter, pleading and jokes. My favorite part are the occasional homophone round which is always hilarious, particularly the hint sentences which always have multiple identically sounding words.

Originally the show was created by australian Comedian Guy Montgomery during the pandemic and played via webcam, but last year a full version was produced for television in New Zealand. I absolutely love the 60s retro set and costuming for the entire show.

Here is a 6 hour video with all 8 episodes of the TV version, though of course there is no guarantee how long it will remain available.

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I loved the manga and its anime adaptation. I’m interested in checking this out.

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Just watched the first episode of Fallout on Amazon Prime.
I think it’s pretty alright so far.

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Not what I expected to put on my Bingo card.

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YOOOoooooooooooooooooooooo, so here for that. Golden Axe was one of my main jams growing up.

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