Tag: 1

Wednesday (2022)

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: Eight 50-minute episodes
Synopsis: Teen drama about a dramatic teen
Recommendation rating: 1/5

What I like about it: good visuals and FX
What I don’t like about it: awful writing

Review:
Wednesday Addams is a teenaged girl who says exhaustingly edgy things to scare people away from her, an exasperating presence anchoring what is a deeply boring Riverdale-esque teen drama. Tim Burton makes it look pretty but 55-year-olds Miles Millar and Alfred Gough have no business writing Gen Z teens and their script is outdated, flat and just terrible.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence and gore

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022)

Where to find it: Disney+
Length: Nine 35-minute episodes
Synopsis: Hulk’s cousin gets powers, keeps being a lawyer
Recommendation rating: 1/5

What I like about it: Tatiana Maslany
What I don’t like about it: deeply annoying, uncanny valley CGI

Review:
The affected quirks of this show are so forced that they could inspire rage in a Buddhist monk. Our quirky lead pushes her way through the fourth-wall constantly, preaching to the choir with tired white feminism like a first-year women’s studies student. Occasionally she turns tall and green (still unbearably quirky!) and looks like a cutscene from L.A. Noire. Even by the standards of over-produced and churned-out Marvel timewasters, this is a bad one.

Content notes (may contain spoilers):

The Devil’s Hour (2022)

Where to find it: Amazon Prime
Length: Six 1-hour episodes
Synopsis: Dark thriller
Recommendation rating: 1/5

What I like about it: gave me something to shout at
What I don’t like about it: relentlessly and despicably cruel to neurodivergent children, renewed for two more seasons

Review:
The initial interest is supposed to come from the “creepy” and “weird” behaviour of a quiet kid who doesn’t express emotions in the expected way. His parents believe he has no feelings and openly refuse to love him for the first two episodes, changing their tune after he’s kidnapped. His mother takes him to psychiatrists and demands that they fix him. She repeatedly says “it’s not autism” with no further explanation, in the vain hope that it will protect the screenwriters from this deserved criticism. Like in The Babadook, I screamed all the way through at the character I was supposed to be sympathising with for the tragedy of choosing to have children and expecting them to be easy.

Aside from that, it’s a boring British crime procedural with bad supernatural horror elements and risibly hacky writing. Hated it.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, child sexual abuse

Wedding Season (2022)

Where to find it: Disney+
Length: Eight 30-minute episodes
Synopsis: Disney wasted their money, don’t waste your time
Recommendation rating: 1/5

What I like about it: serviceable pulpy murder mystery
What I don’t like about it: no likeable characters, bad plot, pacing and tone, just awful

Review:
Told in a confusing back-and-forth fashion, we see a romance between Stefan (a man with the screen presence of slightly-annoying wallpaper) and insufferably mysterious Katie, along with a murder investigation when Katie is suspected of killing a whole crime family. All of the above manages to take place at weddings. Providing extra comic relief are Stefan’s diverse friend group, who share a fury-inducing energy with early 2000s advertising. Nothing about it is worth seeing.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, sex, hanging

The Old Man (2022)

Where to find it: Disney+ (as many billboard advertisements inform me)
Length: Seven 1-hour episodes
Synopsis: Rogue CIA retiree has to answer for his past actions
Recommendation rating: 1/5

What I like about it: nothing
What I don’t like about it: slower than dial-up, terrible stodgy writing, phoned-in acting, total lack of characters, unforgivably bad action sequences for an action show

Review:
Jeff Bridges plays the titular old man, whose exploits in Afghanistan in the 80s have led to a festering grudge which finally brings assassins to his door in the 2020s. The commentary on U.S. foreign policy really runs no deeper than that. The vibe running through this show about an invulnerable state-sponsored super soldier is very similar to Homeland and 24, only without the pulpy drama and tension that pulled those along. This is just a dour, slow collection of people talking around subjects in a very unnatural way to try to build some mystery. I couldn’t finish it – which is rare for me, I watch some garbage! – and think it may be the worst TV show I’ve seen in a long time, especially for one so hyped.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence

Big Boys (2022)

Where to find it: All 4
Length: Six 25-minute episodes
Synopsis: Sheltered kid goes to uni, rooms with a sweet lad, later makes terrible sitcom
Recommendation rating: 1/5

What I like about it: has one good joke when the inexperienced lead drinks poppers, the non-Jack characters are alright
What I don’t like about it: the writer and the show are just awful

Review:
Creator/writer Jack Rooke adapts his deeply uninteresting life story into a sitcom that will set your teeth on edge. Rooke’s character is about to go to uni when his dad dies so he defers a year, then is thrown in a shed with another “mature student”, Danny. Danny is one of my favourite character types, an extroverted, masculine ‘bro’ or ‘lad’ type, stripped of any of the toxic traits that often accompany them in real life – a fantasy character Ted Lasso built a whole show around.

Unfortunately, the POV and narration is provided by Jack, an insufferable prick who seems all too much like what he presents himself as: a working-class kid who has gone to uni and now views himself as above his background. The script is peppered with cringeworthy references to working class culture; the following, while not a direct quote, is the kind of line you can expect: “I haven’t been so shocked since Derek was voted off X Factor, my mum dropped her Take-a-Break magazine and I spat out my McCain oven chips – only 50p from Farmfoods!” It’s a special kind of torture being in his presence, even through a TV screen.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): drugs, sex, depression

Lost Ollie (2022)

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: Four 50-minute episodes
Synopsis: A grimdark tragedy for children
Recommendation rating: 1/5

What I like about it: VFX, sometimes unintentionally funny
What I don’t like about it: deeply unpleasant

Review:
Who is this for? The target audience appears to be children, due to the animated elements and plot of a lost toy trying to reunite with his child, but it seems designed to end a childhood on sight. Ollie, voiced by Jonathan Groff with a bad Missourah accent, finds himself in a second-hand shop being roughly handled by the shopkeeper and longing for Billy, the boy who loved him. He meets other toys abandoned by their owners and they set out on an adventure, just like in Toy Story. Unlike Toy Story however, this story intersperses live-action footage of Billy’s mum dying of cancer and his alcoholic father trying to neglect him into growing up. Billy goes to hospitals, funerals and bars while Ollie and company hop freight trains and swap trauma stories, including the time one of the toys committed a violent murder. If this is children’s media then Richard Thompson’s The End of the Rainbow is a lullaby.

Maudlin, depressing and disgustingly unpleasant throughout, the tone may be consistent but it’s an ugly car crash that makes all other effort in this series pointless and the actors who choose to phone it in seem wise by comparison. ILM’s visual effects are the most impressive part; the animation is only passable but the lighting, blending with the live-action backgrounds, really is indistinguishable from magic.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): death, loss

The Staircase (2022)

Where to find it: NowTV
Length: 8 one-hour episodes
Synopsis: Man murders wife, HBO spend eight episodes pretending he didn’t
Recommendation rating: 1/5

What I like about it: Colin Firth is really good
What I don’t like about it: it’s several degrees beyond ‘grim’, boring

Review:
This ridiculous drama, based on a biased documentary based on a true crime, spends several ten-minute segments bloodily re-enacting improbable explanations of a real woman’s death in order to avoid addressing the probable explanation that he fucking did it. Boooooooo

Content notes (may contain spoilers): awful bloody violent death scenes

The Dead Zone (1983)

Where to find it: Any given cardboard box full of VHS tapes, Channel 5 on a Wednesday night
Length: 105 minutes
Synopsis: A man wakes up from a coma to find he has developed clairvoyance
Recommendation rating: 1/5

What I like about it: it filled some time, has one decent shot
What I don’t like about it: it didn’t succeed at anything it tried

Review:
This movie finished five minutes ago and I’m already forgetting about it

Content notes (may contain spoilers): death, violence, fire