Category: tv

Man, I really needed this. The original run of King of the Hill is one of my favorite TV series, and nothing else has really captured the same humor and heart in the 15 years since it ended. I’m happy to say that this new season does, in fact, feel like King of the Hill again, though it is a bit weird in some regards. Like, the kids are young adults now and live in a different city where they rarely interact with their parents. The time jump is particularly jarring, because Hank and Peggy have apparently been in Saudi Arabia for the past several years, to the point where Texas has suddenly become foreign to them on their return. So did they just abandon Bobby during that time? And how long would they have needed to be away for things to change that drastically? It’s very confusing. I don’t think the Saudi Arabia backstory was necessary or adds any real value to the story. They could have just done a natural time jump, and I don’t think anyone would have cared.

The voice acting situation also takes some getting used to. Because Brittany Murphy and Tom Petty both passed away, their characters did not return and might never return if this reboot continues. And Dale’s voice is rough, switching between Johnny Hardwick (who also died during production) and Toby Huss. They even re-cast Kahn with Ronny Chieng, but he does a pretty terrible job and is easily the worst voice actor on the show now. Everyone else slid right back into their roles without missing a beat. It’s strange to hear what we’ve come to know as Bobby’s 12-year old voice being a 21-year old man now, but his vocabulary and mannerisms at least reflect his new age. In fact, all of the dialogue has matured up, and it caught me off guard when someone would say the word “shit” or a (bleeped) F-word. This is a reboot that was supposed to age with its audience, though, so it makes sense. Some of these characters (like Hank and Peggy) not only look and sound older, but they’ve also grown and changed as people.

Character growth is something this show has always done well, so it’s nice to see that they’ve continued to grow during the time jump we didn’t see. It would have been easy to write Bobby as an adult slacker or failed comedian, but instead he runs a semi-successful restaurant. And it would have been easy to make Hank a stick in the mud again, but he is much more open-minded now. One of my favorite lines from this new season is when he shuts down the conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Kenya by saying, “There’s plenty of reasons not to vote for him without making stuff up.” I can’t think of a better line that encapsulates why this show has always worked the way it does. Sure, Hank is a traditional conservative, which makes him an easy target for jokes, but he also has pretty firm morals and wants to do the right thing, even when it’s uncomfortable or undeserved. It’s a sentimental mixture that I didn’t realize how much I missed until this show finally came back.

It’s unfortunate that Seth Rogen is the one who spearheaded this show, because with slightly better lead performances and slightly better writing, this could have been something really special. I’ve seen people compare The Studio to Curb Your Enthusiasm, but The Studio only wishes it were as good. Where Larry David might make one arguably justified social faux pas that derails the evening, The Studio’s Matt Remick continually digs himself into the biggest hole you’ve ever seen. It’s a bit of a turnoff just how incompetent he and his co-workers are. In one episode, Matt visits a movie set while they’re filming a very difficult long take, and he simply cannot stop making things worse. Like, how did this bumbling idiot become a studio executive in the first place if he doesn’t know how to behave?!

But, you know, maybe that’s the point. The Studio is trying to highlight that Hollywood is run by a bunch of morons with fragile egos. And that would be fine and all if the jokes were actually funny. But I simply didn’t laugh as much as I was supposed to. The first episode is about Matt being forced to make a Kool-Aid movie, which is a funny idea, and it’s certainly amusing how he tries to twist it into being a more prestigious film. But the acting from Rogen and co-star Ike Barinholtz is just too over-the-top and frantic. The Studio as a show wants to be prestigious itself but isn’t able to balance cringe comedy with good writing. In another episode, for instance, everyone at the studio is too afraid to tell Ron Howard that the ending of his movie sucks, but the way it plays out is corny and predictable and the wrong type of cringe.

I hate to be so negative about this show, though, because this is a great template, and hopefully it hits a better stride in future seasons. The Studio is as much a love letter to film as it is a satire of the industry, and that’s typically right up my alley. I love shows and movies that go meta. It is, in fact, fun to see so many Hollywood folks play alternate versions of themselves (a la Curb), and the cinematography and production value are impressive. That “long take” episode was also filmed as a long take, though they do occasionally cheat with a whip pan and even call this out in the onscreen story by saying, “Can’t you just do a whip pan and stitch the shots together?” So I do think this is a show worth checking out, especially if you have any knowledge or interest in the movie making process, but I also can’t help but notice all the ways it could have been much better.

Well, that was the worst season of The Boys by far. I know a lot of people are saying that, because they feel the show has become “too woke,” but The Boys has always been critical of right-wing propaganda. It’s just been far more on the nose and topical this season. And that’s not even why I think the season is bad. Season 4 is just… messy and meandering. Like, plot points and characters from the spin-off show, Gen V, are now integral parts of the main show, which makes the spin-off required viewing to fully understand what’s going on. And yeah, I watched Gen V and thought it was fine, but molding the two together just reeks of the Marvel shtick that this show thought it was lampooning.

This season also spends a lot of time on side stories that ultimately don’t go anywhere, and in some cases kind of came out of nowhere, too. You have Kimiko and Frenchie both dealing with people from their past, and then Hughie’s dad getting sick. The latter thread, Hughie’s dad, at least packs some emotional weight, but it’s undercut by gross-out gore as his dad accidentally kills several people in the hospital. I know you gotta expect a certain level of shock value from The Boys, but Season 4 has no restraint anymore. There’s even half an episode dedicated to sexually assaulting Hughie, which is played for laughs in the moment and then quickly forgotten by the next episode.

There are other poor character decisions this season, too. Annie spends much of the season hiding in an office and moping over what people on TV said about her. Each season continues to make Butcher less and less likeable, and here he finally goes full supervillain. It’s not entertaining to watch him hallucinate on his death bed for so many episodes. The new supe, Sage, is interesting, but in-universe, she is supposed to be the “smartest person in the world,” and it just highlights how bad the writing has gotten. The writers aren’t clever enough to show us how smart she is, so it boils down to her being snarky and manipulative and saying at the end, “Everything that happened? Yeah, I planned it that way.” Sorry, The Boys, but you gotta try harder than that.

As a kid, I was a huge fan of the original Goosebumps books, but 30 years later, I can only remember the plot to maybe 2-3 of them. So I don’t really care if a modern day TV show takes creative liberty with the IP. In fact, I actually liked the way this show was initially structured. Instead of being another anthology series, it had an overarching story where each episode brought in a gimmick from one of the books. The first episode featured a haunted camera a la Say Cheese and Die, the second episode had your classic Haunted Mask, etc. But these items were simply manifestations of the ghost that acted as the season’s villain. Well, I should say the villain for 80% of the season, because that ghost’s story is completely wrapped up in Episode 8.

That’s when the show lost me. There was already a bit too much teen drama for my liking, and then in Episode 9, they lay the drama on super thick as we follow our teen heroes on a Goosebumps-free road trip. I kept asking myself, “What’s the point of this? Didn’t the story conclude in the previous episode?” It isn’t until the end of Episode 9 when the true villain is revealed, which leaves only one episode left to resolve the new conflict. I really don’t understand why they chose to structure the season like this. If you’re gonna do the twist villain, at least do it halfway through the season so there’s time for the conflict to grow. Or do it at the very end to set up Season 2. What they did with this season is just nonsense and makes me think they’ve already expended any good ideas they had for this series.

This was a somewhat uneven, but overall great, season of Only Murders in the Building. It has a strong beginning and end but kinda drags for several episodes in the middle. I don’t recall Seasons 1 and 2 ever having such a slump, though Season 3 is still better than Season 2. The reason it drags is no mystery, either. Season 3 spends too much time on relationship and theater antics and not enough time on the murder. I get that a long-running show will want to flesh out its characters and give them more to do. It’s important to see how they’re trying to make a living outside of what the podcast brings in. But the investigation should never be the B plot, because that’s the glue. For much of this season, however, the podcast trio aren’t even working together. Oliver and Charles are so wrapped up in the play they’re putting on that Mabel has to do most of the heavy lifting on her own for a while.

To be fair, though, this is the season where Selena Gomez’s acting finally grew on me. She was a little wooden in Seasons 1 and 2, which might have been by design, but she loosens up a lot more in Season 3. It helps that she doesn’t have to act against Cara Delevingne anymore, an actress who has zero chemistry with anybody. They really overcompensated on the casting this time around. You get Meryl Streep, Paul Rudd, and Matthew Broderick as newcomers. No wonder Selena Gomez had to step up her game! There are no weak links in this show anymore; everyone is great. And I appreciate that, like Bunny in the previous season, they spent time humanizing the victim after so many episodes of bad-mouthing him. It’s a fun murder mystery that doesn’t glamorize the murder, and it’s character-driven enough that, even if the final reveal doesn’t impress you, at least you can still enjoy the ride to get there.

This season almost felt like a return to form. Some episodes were really good, some were pretty awful. I guess I’d rank it alongside Season 3 in terms of quality. It’s at least better than Season 4, which made all sorts of mistakes. Having Colin Robinson back in his normal body was, of course, very welcome. And I’m glad the show finally had the balls to go through with Guillermo becoming a vampire. Well… half-vampire. He was pretty much stuck in human/vampire limbo for the majority of the season, which might have been a cop-out, but it worked given his Van Helsing blood. And I liked that he immediately had a change of heart after going full vampire and wanted to give up his newfound powers. It was a good finale… and could/should have been a series finale. There’s nowhere to go but down in Season 6.

See, while Guillermo’s vampire storyline was entertaining, it often took a back seat to “wacky” shenanigans. The episodes that didn’t work really didn’t work and felt like the same gimmicky nonsense that other shows start relying on when they’ve run out of ideas. You have an episode where Colin Robinson runs for local office, an episode where the vampires teach a community college night class, and an episode where they have to fill in for the news anchors on the local news. It’s all so dumb, and you have to buy into the “these characters are great no matter what” mentality to find any of it funny. The other recurring themes with Nadja’s hex and The Guide’s pathetic attempts at weaseling her way into the group are equally unfunny and annoying. And yet I fear this is all we’re gonna get from this show now that Guillermo has decided he doesn’t want to be a vampire anymore.