What in the world is up with the color grading in the new Cape Fear show?
Did they get enough orange in there or what? And way too much saturation. It looks different than a lot of other shows, but certainly not good different.
TV Shows
Cold Calc
I tried to watch Bates Motel but that was a no-go for me. Though I love Vera Farmiga and she was excellent in it, her manner and affect reminded me too much of my own mother’s cold, calculating, manipulative nature. (Which, you know, figures, given what the show is about.)
So that’s a “no thanks.” I already lived that life. And I didn’t even have a creepy-cool old house to do it in.
Five Days at Memorial
I didn’t watch this show for years because I didn’t think I could handle it.
After more than two decades, I’m still angry about how we chose to treat our fellow Americans post-Katrina and about George W. Bush’s utter incompetence. However, even in the first episode it’s a good look at the lack of preparedness at all levels, and how none of the interlocked systems of our society really had any plan for a disaster of that nature.
And it’s very human. I recommend it, though it is fraught with recapitulation of the pain of a very bad time in American history.
Not So Cheerful
How in the world does Cheers have 11 seasons and 275 episodes? That’s insane.
I have no interest in even one episode.
Not Witch Season
I was watching this show Talamasca, but after the main character proved himself to be a huge dumbass episode after episode and the only interesting character — a witch named Kevis — got killed in the same ep in which she was introduced, I stopped watching it.
It’s not good and it’s extremely repetitive. It needed more of what Kevis brought and less of everything else.
Shannon Dot
Dot Campbell is one of the few characters from a TV show I think about fairly frequently. Shannon Berry is just so fucking good in that role in The Wilds; one of my favorite TV performances.
And I identified with Dot, of course. She’s someone always underestimated, invisible to her peers, but on top of things. Always watchful and always a bit apart. That’s me, basically.
Mia Healey also did a great job with Shelby Goodkind. The whole cast of the first season of that show was top notch, actually. They elevated the show beyond what it should have been.
But it’s only Dot that I think about sometimes. She seemed completely real to me.
Jam
Idiocracy was a documentary pic.twitter.com/D0DT1Us5LV
— MERICA MEMED (@Mericamemed) October 24, 2025
If you’re wondering why so many TV shows seem so much stupider lately, Jameela Jamil knows. And she’s right: it’s smartphones, social media, and Gen Z’s lack of attention span.
Mass Movement
Why do all my favorites have to get canceled? Midnight Mass was better than nearly all the other Mike Flanagan works. It was so textured and it had a frame story and was just so much fun.
And with The Peripheral being renewed and then canceled, I am truly verklempt. In that show I dearly love the scene where the protag Flynne gets annoyed that when she is not occupying it they keep her robot body in some ugly wooden crate. I don’t know what she was expecting with that.
Flynne was such a great character and one that I wish I’d gotten to see more of. However, I wouldn’t want some creepy empty body staring at me either, so I would’ve also stored her peripheral out of sight when not in use. But perhaps not in a wooden box.
To be more serious, Flynne feels it’s dehumanizing that her peripheral be stored in an ugly crate as the body she occupies is her for all intents and purposes. And that’s what makes it a great scene and setup: We can understand both her point of view and that of those who toss her empty vessel in a crate when she’s not “there.”
Two of my favorite shows, both nuked before their times.
Trypan Out
The most evil TV villain ever? Alien: Earth’s ‘demon sheep eye’ is a work of true genius.
That thing is pretty damn chilling. Though it’s physiologically utterly implausible, it works on screen. I also like how they incorporated a little physical comedy into its methods and interactions. That is rare in anything that tries to be as serious as Alien: Earth does.
Trypanohyncha ocellus is better than the boring xenomorph by far.
Shin Splint
I wish Ahsoka had been a better show, because Ivanna Sakhno as Shin Hati was fucking fantastic.
What a fierce piece of absolute crazy. Love it.
Wool
Only the Wuhan Institute of Virology rivals the lab in Alien: Earth for poor biosafety protocols. I don’t know what BSL the WIV was operating at in reality, but the Prodigy lab in Alien: Earth lately is operating at BSL negative eleventy-billion.
Nothing Remaherkable
I went to the Greg Gutfeld show a couple of years ago
The laughter is real but it’s directed by the warm up comedian, whose directions you’re asked to follow
I assume Bill Maher’s audience gets the same direction from a comedian standing in the aisle. Those directions probably… https://t.co/OSIsRQwJI6
— Catherine Johnson (@smarterparrot) August 20, 2025
All TV shows with a studio audience work this way. I’ve been to a couple of live filmings and that’s just how it’s done.
Plant
Sydney Chandler does such an amazing job in Alien: Earth of duplicating the mannerisms of a child in an adult’s body.
(The backstory is that she’s a terminally-ill kid transplanted into a synthetic body. Since synths don’t grow, they migrate her consciousness into the body of fully-adult-mimicking synthetic body.)
She gives my favorite performance I’ve seen lately. Sydney manages to perfectly reproduce the gawky impulsiveness and awkwardness of a ten-year-old without overdoing it or seeming like an adult pretending to be a kid. She just gives total “kid” aura. It’s quite amazing.
Like, damn girl, leave some talent of the rest of us.
Not Pittiful
The Pitt is a good show. It reminds me of the first few seasons of ER1. It’s repetitive but that’s something to like about it in this rare case.
And more impressively, more than 90% of the medical terminology and practices are correct (though more rushed than most in real life). It’s worth watching.
Storied
One of the reasons I love movies and TV shows and thinking about how they’re made — the immense care and craft that goes into them — is I spent so much of my life with others telling me how my story would go. What my limitations were and how I deserved nothing because I was weak and terrible. That’s the tale they had me signed up for against my wishes.
I like seeing how you can take control of the narrative, seize the diegesis and shape it to your own will. All the world’s a stage and all that. It’s a cliché but it’s also true.
Movies and TV shows taught me how I could direct my own story. And I did just that.