JG Judgementally Comments…

What’s The Show? Titans – Season One

What’s It All About, JG? – Supporting Superhero Characters: The TV Show. Robin off of Batman, Wonder Girl off of Wonder Woman, a different Robin off of Batman and Gar off of Doom Patrol team up with Rachel Roth – the personification of emo makeup – and Kory Anders/Starfire – the personification of shiny disco outfits – for weirdly schizophrenic adventures in… stuff. Quite a lot of stuff, in fact, as the Netflix series rambles about ten episodes, dropping into random character arcs, plots, background and exposition with little rhyme or reason. Ostensibly we’re following Rachel’s story, as she tries to wrestle with some kind of inner darkness – inventively portrayed as some kind of outer darkness, usually via the medium of mascara – and tries to figure out who she is and where she comes from.

What’s The Show? Russian Doll

What’s It All About, JG? Remember the movie Groundhog Day? I know, I know, everyone does – even if you’ve never seen it the film has become such a pervasive part of popular culture you know what’s being referred to even if you haven’t seen Bill Murray struggle through the same day near-endless times until he learns to be a better person. Well, Russian Doll is that, but not a movie and instead an eight-part series on Netflix starring Orange Is The New Black‘s Natasha Lyonne. She plays Nadia Vulvokov who experiences a time-loop at the party for her 36th birthday and gradually figures out what to do about it over the course of the eight episodes.  Kind of.  She’s joined by Alan Zaveri, who’s also stuck in the time loop, and we get to meet a mix of her New York friends, all of whom come from The Big Book Of Whacky NYC Characters. What could be causing the loop? How can she get out of it? Those questions, along with the detailed and intricate examination of Nadia’s personal life, are explored over the course of eight thirty-minute episodes.

What’s The Show? The second season of the revived Will & Grace

What’s It All About, JG? In line with the trend to see if just one more breath can be sucked from the desiccated corpse of 90’s nostalgia, Will & Grace  – a sitcom about a gay lawyer and his live-in friend, as if you need to be told – returned to our screens in a season that would be best described as “uneven”. It struggled in the early going, but, a few wobbles aside, more or less managed to return to the easy-going, knockabout atmosphere that made the original show so watchable. Since the revival was pretty successful we have this – an attempt to get a second breath out of the aforementioned corpse. So we still have the original cast – Eric McCormack, Debra Messing, Megan Mullally and Sean Hayes – returning once more and the same basic set-up the show’s always had. Can lightning strike twice?

What’s The Show? The Conners

What’s It All About, JG? First there was Garfield Without Garfield, a bleak look into the existential crisis of one poor man’s attempts to wrestle with life’s greatest (and smallest) conundrums. Then we have  Rosanne Without Roseanne, following in GWG‘s trailblazing footsteps! Yes, it seems that getting fired from your own show wasn’t enough to actually kill said show, so instead we have this, The Conners, which is literally Roseanne but without the title character who died on the way back to her home planet off-screen of an overdose. Everything else about the show is exactly the same – the same characters, situation, difficulties and so on, just without the matriarchal centre that held the show together up until this point (even the title music and font remain the same). That means that John Goodman’s Dan shifts rather more to the middle of the show, while also loosening things up a little so it feels more like a genuine ensemble piece rather than “Roseanne, oh and also everyone else”. That format worked well enough for Roseanne the show, but how well can the series survive without it’s primary creative force and principal character?

What’s The Show? The Gifted

What’s It All About, JG? The Struckers discover that their children have “special powers” of the type that ought to be immediately identifiable to anyone with a passing knowledge of pop culture over at least the last twenty years or so. They’re mutants of the X-Men variety, destined to be hunted by mutant-hating purists who want to “keep the human race from extinction” by persecuting said mutants, which means the family need to go on the run. They’re being hunted by Sentinel Services, a government-sanctioned (sort of) mutant control authority who absolutely totally aren’t just Nazi stand-ins, honest guv. So – family on the run, secret to hide.  There’s a line in the last Deadpool movie about how mutants are, “a dated metaphor for racism in the 60’s!” Mmm-hmm.