I find my viewing currently is 95 percent television. I’m mostly watching at night, when my work is done for the day, and my daughter and I watch something for an hour or two and she is interested in comedies and anime. This makes for a nice change of pace from art films and dramas that I’ve been watching for the last decade, so I find I’m enjoying the time more, although many of the TV shows are of a lower quality, but higher laugh ratio. That works for my life right now.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Surprising how often this show makes me laugh, even with the same jokes. The comedic actors are top-rate and the shifts in character are fun if never believable. After six? Seven? Seasons, I could keep watching it. But how much do I actually remember? Not much...
3.5/5
Rick and Morty Seasons 1-3
I can’t believe how addictive this series is. Rick is possibly the most obnoxious tv character I’ve ever seen and Morty is whiny and starts out without much of a backbone. Uggh, awful characters. But I am drawn in by the spin of science fiction tropes that take each idea and extends it as far as they can, and not only for the sake of comedy. I’m hoping Morty’s sister and mom get to do more of the action, because as characters they are way more interesting, but you gotta appreciate any show where the main protagonist is so narcissistic that there is a universe just populated with him.
4/5
Food Wars Seasons 1-3
How did I get caught in this? I don’t know, but I am firmly addicted. It’s a cheap anime about kids in a cooking school. It ends up being somewhere between Hell’s Kitchen and Harry Potter. And then there’s “food-gasms”, where the taster of a particularly exquisite dish spontaneously loses all his/her clothes and speaks in rapturous tones about the glories of the food. Part of what is amazing is the detail of such a wide variety of world dishes and cooking styles. It amazes me how each of the 20? Students focused on have their own cooking style which relates to their background and personality. And then some sort of Voldemort pops up.... I don’t know how this mess works, but it does.
‘4/5
Veronica Mars, Season 1
In other news, I just discovered a few months ago that Kristen Bell and Kristen Stewart are different people. I know, they look and act nothing alike, but I just thought this one actress had a wide array of abilities. Anyway, the first season of VM is an attempt to do private detective Buffy, but not as funny. It mostly works, although it needs a tighter soap opera story and more complex backgrounds. I have to say, the solution at the end of the first season surprised me, it was a good whodunnit, if too long.
3.5/5