The TV thread

Finished "Masters of the Air," including the postscript that had interviews with the real pilots, narrated by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. I thought I might have wanted to watch the postscript before the series. Maybe.
Whole thing was pretty sobering, considering my Dad was in the Army over there and I have friends whose fathers were pilots in WWII.

 

I finished “Night Sky” last night. J.K. Simmons and Sissy Spacek have a portal to another world in their backyard, and a mysterious young man who is hunted by some of his compatriots shows up. Hilarity does not ensue.

It only got one season, and it left many threads unpulled. Good enough for a few nights, but it’s no great loss to be cancelled.

 

I was curious about McCoy's exit and the new DA so I came back to L&O for the past couple of episodes. Casting changes often help this show if they hit on the right people.
No such luck. This whole show is a massive trainwreck right now.
The acting is terrible, the writing has an obvious political agenda that they repeatedly beat you over the head with, and everything about it feels like bad community theater. Hugh Dancy is a poor man's Linus Roache. Odelya Halevi isn't just over her head as an actress, she's at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. The cops catch every break in the case through magic security cameras that capture everything, to the point you wonder how much of a surveillance state we're living in. Every case seems to involve some high-profile person that spins it up into a major headline case instead of just a rank-and-file New York murder case with an interesting twist. It's all so over the top it's ridiculous.

I wouldn't be surprised if they turn the new DA into a villain by doing an episode involving a Jan. 6 defendant who kills an AOC-type congresswoman, and the DA goes on an unhinged pro-Trump rant while wearing a MAGA hat and trying to grope Maroun in his office.

 

This looks like it could be fun. I love Kristen Wiig.

 

Or maybe not,

'Palm Royale' Review: Kristen Wiig, Apple TV Plus (tvline.com)

There are so many fabulous women wearing so many fabulous ‘60s outfits in Apple TV+’s Palm Royale, it’s like a Ryan Murphy fever dream. A cast that includes Kristen Wiig, Allison Janney, Laura Dern and Carol Burnett is undeniably tantalizing, but Palm Royale — debuting this Wednesday on the streamer; I’ve seen the first three episodes — never lives up to its stellar cast. Campy and overbaked, it manages to fall between the cracks of the dramedy genre: not funny enough to be a comedy and not compelling enough to be a drama. But the clothes do look great, though.

 

One look at that cast, and I'm going to have to see for myself.

 

Wiig picks interesting projects. Some of them probably looked better on paper. Even her misfires like Welcome To Me are worth the time.

 

New doc on the monstrous misdeeds of Nickelodeon kid show producers

 

I shit on Curb Your Enthusiasm early in the season but the season has gained momentum and the last two episodes have been really good.

This week’s made me laugh so much.

 

8 episodes may have been too much for The Gentlemen. Fun show but a little too many twists and turns for no reason, especially as they are setting up for season 2. That being said, the two leads were fantastic.

 

It's a terrible problem for this show when the cops are more interesting and better-acted characters than the prosecutors, as the latter carry the second half of the show and the conclusion.

 

Few things make me happier than Jerry Orbach in Law & Order reruns.