Category: TV Shows

Sing Us A Song You’re The Piano Man

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

So as I’ve mentioned before, our current go-to show is Halt and Catch Fire, which is largely a dramatic program (although the drama is punctuated by some very funny moments). However, we also like to keep something a little lighter—variously referred to as “fluff”, “dessert”, and/or “a marzipan confection”—as an antidote to all the heaviness. One recent auditionee was the longrunning sitcom Community, which I’d heard of but never watched. It came up a lot in discussions/reviews of Mad Men due to sharing an actress, Alison Brie, with that show, as well as with another show that I watched but was never able to get my wife interested in, despite its being set in the 80s and featuring lots of 80s music:

Wife: “Hey, isn’t that Pete’s wife? Wasn’t she in that weird wrestling thing you used to like?”

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More Odds & Ends From This & That

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

So this week I’ve got a few more bits and pieces of things we’ve watched that don’t individually rise to the level of a “Not a Review“, but that, taken together, add up to a post.* This includes a television show and a couple of movies, including one which, astonishingly, my wife not only asked about**, but which she stayed up for in its entirety***.

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Apparently I’ve Been Watching “Doctor Who” For Too Long

~ James Viscosi ~ 4 Comments

So recently, the regular-season programming* for Jodie Whittaker’s final run as The Doctor aired on the AMC+ streaming service**. My understanding is that she will appear in a few more specials, but otherwise, this is the end for the first female Doctor, and she went out with a bang with a series called “Flux”, a six-part story about (you guessed it!) the potential destruction of the universe. Another day, another apocalypse.

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Inaudible the Agency

~ James Viscosi ~ 3 Comments

So as I’ve mentioned once or twice, for a while now we’ve been watching Mad Men* streaming on AMC+. I haven’t done a “Not a Review” of it, mainly because it never puts my wife to sleep, barring extenuating circumstances, such as starting an episode right before bedtime (and even then she still might stay awake for it). This puts it right up there with Breaking Bad** and The Queen’s Gambit*** on the short list of “Shows That Never Put My Wife To Sleep”, but also leaves me with not much to write about it, since I, of course, don’t do actual reviews myself, on account of I like everything. Except August Rush.

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We’re Making Good Words Go Bad

~ James Viscosi ~ 3 Comments

So as I’ve mentioned a number of times, we got in the habit years ago of watching television and movies with the subtitles turned on, because when Dennis the Vizsla got to be a Little Old Man Dog he would, on occasion, decide it was Time To Go To Bed, and when he decided that, he would stand in the living room loudly proclaiming it. (His brother Tucker, on the other hand, when he was a Little Old Man Dog, would just hie himself off to bed and burrow under the covers on his own. Tucker liked to take the initiative that way.)

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Technical Support, Mandalorian-Style

~ James Viscosi ~ 4 Comments

So a while back I mentioned that, a year or two after everybody else, I had started watching The Mandalorian on Disney+, and that I had hoped my wife would like it, since she had, unexpectedly, been a fan of the late, lamented, sabotaged-by-Fox Firefly, not to mention the film Pitch Black; so there’s a precedent for her enjoying the Space Western* genre. Sadly, she tuned out The Mandalorian almost immediately, other than her recently-noted strong objection to the characterization of the Frog Lady as a “Frog”. But then there was this scene, at the beginning of a recent episode, after the Mandalorian’s has sustained major damage, requiring Baby Yoda** to be dispatched into, let’s call it a Jefferies Tube, so that the Mandalorian*** can talk him through a minor wiring repair. How does that go? About as well as you would think.

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What Does The Frog Say?

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

Does it say “Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding”? No, that’s what the fox says, apparently. The frog mostly says things that nobody can understand. But at least the subtitles are there to clarify things, so we can definitively answer this question. What does the frog say when she meets the Mandalorian? She speaks frog.

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A Review of the Not A Review of “WandaVision”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

So a few weeks ago I mentioned that my wife had been watching the Disney+ superhero series WandaVision with me. Sadly, this only lasted for the first three-and-a-half episodes; in episode four, the action shifted to what was going on outside of the retro, sometimes black-and-white world of Westview, starting off with … Oh, wait, hang on. For those who haven’t seen Infinity War and Endgame or, for that matter, all of WandaVision:

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Not A Review Of “The Mandalorian” and “WandaVision”

~ James Viscosi ~ 5 Comments

So recently, mainly as a result of a series of mixups about changing out hardware, we became aware that our local cable company had altered their pricing bundles:

Meaning that it was now possible to cancel the cable portion without having the price of the Internet and land line* portions jacked up so high that the price was basically the same as if we hadn’t canceled cable. Given that we don’t actually watch very much cable—many of the shows I used to watch, such as Into the Badlands and Preacher, have been canceled or died of natural causes, while others, such as Doctor Who, Resident Alien, and Battlebots, are on hiatus—we decided to go ahead and cut that particular cord, thus freeing up close to $200 a month. (Yes, I know, everyone else did this five or ten years ago.)

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