I keep thinking I’ll write another binge watching post… just as soon as I get to the last episode of whatever it is we have been watching lately, a situation that has dragged out the time between posts to about six months.  This is made more of an issue by all the services that believe that the only way to hang on to customers is to drip feed them content in single weekly doses.

I did make an exception for Andor, to which I dedicated a whole post back in May.

Then there is the part where I have to actually remember what we watched since the last post.  Maybe if I don’t remember right away I shouldn’t post about it?  I don’t know.  Luckily some of these channels let you see your watch history, which was a help.

Anyway, I finally sat down and wrote the post.  Here is what I could remember that we finished.

Murder investigation drama in Edinburgh where an English detective in Scotland deals with his own issues, other people’s issues, and the world in general while pursuing unsolved crimes pushed on him to get him out of other people’s hair.  Excellent, highly recommend, lots of broken people all trying to cope.

IT was good enough that I went and picked up the book that was the source material.  The book series is actually set in Denmark.  There are also movies, in Danish, based off of the series as well.  I suspect it was moved to the UK for the series to make it more comprehensible to a US audience and set in Scotland because I believe the English think anything done there is at least 10% more amusing, and putting a bemused Englishman in the middle of it might crank that up more.  Anyway, one of those shows we binged too quickly because we kept wanting to see what happened next.

A remake of the 1981 Alan Alda film… which, for some reason, 16 year old me saw in the theater and I still remember bits of it… as a television series  It has Tina Fey and Coleman Domingo and Steve Carell, the latter in his seemingly updated type cast role as the non-self aware jerk.  This, Morning Show, and The Mountainhead seem to be setting a pattern here.  I mean, I guess that sort of fit with The Office and maybe Anchorman, but he just seemed simply dumb in those.

Anyway, it is fine.  The story is updated some details, but is essentially the same at its core.  The cast is all good, and we get a brief Alan Alda appearance.  It all resolves as it did in the film… to the extent that I can recall… except for the fact that they have announced a season 2.  If they have some good ideas to carry it through another season, I guess that is okay.  But some things don’t need a second season.

Cranky ex-president George Mullen, played by Robert De Niro, bumbles through leading a special investigation of an unprecedented cyber attack on the US while struggling with ongoing senior moments that call into question his fitness to be in a position of responsibility.  But it turns out he was right in the end and just forgot to take his pills because we wouldn’t want this to become a parable about how the gerontocracy here in the US is often to blame for problems we’re facing.  No, it is the children who are wrong and old people are the real heroes, even when using extraordinary powers to jail critics of the administration.

Remember Silo?  You want Silo in reality?  This is how you get Silo in reality.  Bad things are happening, some billionaire has made a safe sanctuary under the mountains in Colorado and when the missiles start to fly the select few elites get a slot in the simulacrum of Americana that the billionaire has created.  That includes the President of the United states, who is then murdered and we have to figure that out.  As usual, laws and such are for other people when it comes to the rich.  Still, a good show that feeds out information in a slow drip that keeps you jumping to the next episode.

Wait, is this still going on?  There was kind of a big gap between seasons and I thought we were done.  It isn’t that I didn’t want more, I just recall in the book that things ended somewhat ambiguously as the story was all from diaries that had been transcribed from cassettes and was being examined long after the events, so it felt like they could just leave off where ever.

But no, they had to come back and send June on one last mission into Gilead to kill commanders.  This was boosted by casting Timothy Simons, probably best know for the character Jonah Ryan on Veep, as one of the senior commanders.  He gets type cast as the obnoxious guy you hate, which really works here.  And yes, he dies.

Also, Hulu is planning to follow on show based on the follow on novel, The Testaments, which is based on a redemption arc for Aunt Lydia, so they had to get her in there and show her break with Gilead.  Otherwise, it is mostly a wrap up for June so she can get started on her book about all of this.

Reacher – Season 3 – Amazon Prime Video

Enormous mountain of a man Jack Reacher, who couldn’t blend in with a crowd if he tried, goes under cover to track down a bad guy from his past whom he thought was dead.  Better than season 2, not quite as good as season 1, so if you’re down with the show so far, this will probably work for you.  They did actually have to find somebody bigger than him to play a bad guy just so they would have somebody he couldn’t just beat up with no effort.

The Wheel of Time – Season 3 – Amazon Prime Video

The heresy continues as Rand goes to the Aiel Wastes to become the Car’a’Carn, Egwene goes of to… well… lets just say the show embraces the Robert Jordan “let’s have as many parallel story line as possible” theme and we spend a lot of time jumping around.  I guess that was enough to lose the fans of the show while continuing to enrage fans of the books, so there will be no season 4 as the whole thing has been cancelled.  Spoiler: The teens from the Two Rivers win in the end and all fulfill their destiny.

The Sticky – Amazon Prime Video

Something of an attempt to tell the tale of the great Canadian maple syrup heist… which I actually knew was a thing before I saw the show… except there isn’t really much of a story except that somebody stole a bunch of syrup without anybody noticing because the inventory system was so rudimentary.  So they had to make some shit up to build up drama around the whole thing and pad it out to six episodes.  As with the real tale, in the end the thieves get dumb/lazy/greedy and deviate from their plan and the whole scheme gets found out.  Also the story doesn’t really have a resolution.  But the show at least has esteemed character actress Margo Martindale.  So there is that.

Yellowstone – Final Season – Peacock

What do you do when the main lead and big name in your series calls it quits before the second half of the final season?  Murder him in the script, never show his face, then come up with a cockamamie story line that makes sure to emphasize that cowboys breaking the law and murdering people is fine so long as they are doing it to outsiders.  I like the series, or the first couple of seasons, but I also recognize that the message is very much “all city folks are bad and we’re justified in doing anything we please to them” propaganda that aligns with the aims of the current administration.

Mobland – Paramount+

The show has Guy Ritchie as one of the directors so it is all as stylish and violent as any Guy Ritchie spectacle.  Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnon, Helen Mirren, Toby Jones, and Paddy Considine all lend gravitas to a story that is otherwise… once you dig past the style and violence… mostly just okay.

Not bad, mind you.  Just kind of mid with the crime family led by Brosnon and Mirren working an cross purposes and doing things against self interest and just being dumb for the sake of ego.  But that is likely realism as much as anything.

But you’re here for the style and the violence.  And Mobland has plenty of that, including a few nods to other works, including a prison scene shot that is a clear homage to 1969 classic The Italian Job.  So if that is your thing, Mobland awaits.