At the beginning of each year when people are asked about their resolutions for the new year, I always have the same smart ass resolution:
"I resolve to watch MORE television."
Well, I'll be damned if this year but I really worked hard on making that come true.
Here is a recap of just SOME of the MORE television I watched in 2021 starting with some series that frequently defied the usual conventions of TV shows.
- My wife Andrea and I caught up on the HBO Max series, The Flight Attendant starring Big Bang Theory alum Kaley Cuoco. This series walked a precarious tight rope between drama and comedy. The murder mystery that propels the season 1 narrative is a tangle of black comedy and horrific consequences and Cuoco just nails her role as flight attendant Cassie Bowden, an alcoholic with a fractured psyche.
- Only Murders In the Building is another series that Andrea and I watched where comedy and drama mingle with a murder mystery propelling three unlikely investigators played by Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez to join forces to solve a murder and launch a true crime podcast about that murder.
- Comedy and drama collide head on in Kevin Can F**k Himself which I watched with my daughter Randie. This is a series about a man child named Kevin who lives in a brightly lit sit com world (complete with laugh track) where everything is about him. But this world shifts to the grim palate of a drama when the focus shifts to his wife Allison who has had enough of Kevin's shit and spends season 1 trying to find a way to kill him. Kevin is, of course, oblivious to Allison's distress or her outright disdain for his shit.
- Randie and I also follow What We Do In the Shadows which completed it's 3rd season in 2021. While this mockumentary series about vampires just living their life in Staten Island is most assuredly a comedy, it is a show that defies expectations, taking dark and even sinister turns when you least expect it.
2021 was a big year for Star Trek TV.
- Andrea and I finally finished catching up on Star Trek: Discovery through season 3. (The currently running season 4, we'll catch up on early in 2022.)
- And we finished the 2nd season of Star Trek - Lower Decks. Both shows have improved markedly from their initial seasons.
- And we also sampled Star Trek Prodigy. While geared towards a younger audience, we both found Prodigy worth our attention with an interesting narrative and lavish animation.
Under the heading "All good things must end", Andrea and I caught the season finales of both Duck Tales and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Series finales are tough things to get right but both shows ended in epic fashion, changing the status quo but also maintaining enough of the structure to imagine that beloved characters will go on having adventures.
Under the heading "Even mediocre things must end", is Supergirl. This series has been hampered with needlessly complicated storylines that viewers do not give a single damn about. I will concede that the last half hour of the Supergirl finale episode did deliver. Unless you're a Kara/Lena shipper then no.
Elsewhere in the CW's DC super hero shows....
- 2021 saw the debut season of Superman & Lois. While I was not always on board with the whole teenage angst vibe of Clark and Lois's sons, Jonathan and Jordan, I will give the show credit for doing something unique with the Superman mythos: Clark and Lois with their two teenage sons move TO Smallville. I was a little put off that the new show made no reference to Kara or anyone from Supergirl. Maybe they were juat embarrassed by what was going on over there.
- Andrea and I followed Batwoman to it's 3rd season. We are still on board with Ryan Wilder as Batwoman and the idea of Mary Hamilton becoming Poison Ivy poses some very interesting ramifications for the series going forward. But the series has been beset with some muddled plotting and questionable choices.
- And Andrea and I watched the 2nd season of Stargirl. Eclipso was a seriously dark threat for Courtney and her JSA buddies, forcing everyone to confront dark secrets and their assumptions about life and who is good and what is evil.
Marvel does TV too and the series on Disney+ have been must see viewing.
- WandaVision challenged viewers with shifting formats and perspectives, defying any easy labels for what this show was.
- Falcon and the Winter Soldier tread a bit more familiar ground a buddy cop adventure but explored more depth as Sam Wilson is forced to confront the legacy Steve Rogers entrusted to him with the Captain America shield.
- Loki started off cool and bit wonky but devolved in the end into an expository mess.
- What If...? was an interesting experiment, an animated series presenting alternatives to what we've seen before in the MCU. The quality did vary a lot between episodes.
- Hawkeye may be possibly the best of the MCU series on Disney+? More on that in next week's Tuesday TV Touchbase
And there are comic book super heroes not published by DC or Marvel and Amazon had a really good animated series based on the Image series Invincible. It's the story of a young dude with super powers who just wants to be a super hero like dear old dad. Except dear old dad ain't who he thinks he is. Bright colors and clean animation belies that this is a very violent and bloody series.
And there are sci-fi series that are not about super heroes or Star Trek. 2021 gave us the 2nd season of Snowpiercer, the series about a frozen, nearly dead Earth. Mr. Wilford shows up with a second train to challenge Snowpiercer and Andre Layton's control after the revolution of season 1. Wilford is not quite as smart as he likes to think he is but he is sneaky and as sinister as needs to be to undermine Layton and take back Snowpiercer.
As if I did not have enough new TV to watch, I was busy catching up on TV series gone by.
- Gentleman Jack is the extraordinary tale of real life landowner and industrialist Anne Lister (and only quasi secret lesbian) who actively pursue marriage with another woman in 19th century England.
- The Orville is Seth McFarlane's parody of/love letter to Star Trek. Whatever it's supposed to be, it got better with it's 2nd season.
- I've made it through season 5 of Justified. It's hard to avoid spoilers about a series that ended in 2015 but I've got 1 more season to go to see if I'm right and Boyd Crowder will not get out of Harlan County alive. I think Timothy Olyphant's Raylan Givens will be OK since I've heard word his character may be part of any an upcoming new series based on the work of Elmore Leonard.
- And 2021 was the year I finally jumped in the deep end of the pool and began glomming episodes of Gilmore Girls and even making it through the sequel series, A Year in the Life. Rory's has not done well with her life, now she's pregnant and no, I'm not happy. '
Oh,I almost forgot Young Sheldon.
- Andrea and I are watching Young Sheldon. The show still has it's charms and can be very funny. But with Ian Armitage growing a foot taller over the summer, Young Sheldon is a bit less precocious now. And the storyline teasing the eventual downfall of George Cooper Sr just undermines every bad thing "Old" Sheldon said about him on Big Bang Theory. If George is going to have an affair with neighbor Brenda, it's because Mary pushed him there.
- 2021 kicked off the whole guest host circus on Jeopardy, an attention grabbing stunt that I can't help but think Alex Trebek would not have approved of. Then to have that circus end with producer Mike Richards picking himself for the job? Thank God, this prick got fired! The only good thing about the guest hosts was we discovered just how remarkable Mayam Bialik is at the job. I'm still for Ken Jennings getting this gig on the regular but damn, Mayam is really good too!
- Wheel of Fortune continues to chug along with Pat Sajak and Vanna White signed on through 2024. But I can't help thinking that their potential successors are already there. I could easily see announcer Jim Thornton taking on the host role with Maggie Sajak turning the letters. Meanwhile Andrea still wants to watch Celebrity Wheel of Fortune but with it's 2nd season, I think the bloom is off that rose, that whatever energy the producers were hoping to get from celebrities as contestants, this spin off series has kind of already settled into a bit of a rut.
"James Michael Tyler who played Gunther pops in a for a lame Zoom call."
This is why people shouldn't say shit if they don't know shit.
Turns out the reason Tyler was relegated to "a lame Zoom call" was because he was sick with cancer and later died this year.
So I feel really bad about that.
Anyway, that is some of the TV shows I watched in 2021.
Looking ahead to 2022, there's a lot more coming up with new episodes of Superman & Lois, Snowpiercer, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Outlander, The Orville, Killing Eve, The Boys, Batwoman, Young Sheldon, the revival of the original Law & Order and more.
More than enough to write up in future installments of the Tuesday TV Touchbase.
Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch a hell of a lot of TV over here.
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