Category: TV

I was beyond excited to learn that Niel Gaiman himself was bringing Good Omens to life on Amazon Prime, and he mostly succeeds. Still, it wasn’t a perfect interpretation. There are pacing issues, and there is a lot of stuff from the book that is in the show, but it isn’t given enough time to breath or land properly. It is worth watching, but it doesn’t quite live up to its source material.

If you have never read Good Omens, then you should. Immediately. Sure, that would make this summery paragraph useless, but it is better for you if you have read Good Omens and then waste a couple seconds reading a pointless paragraph then having not read Good Omens. It is a classic. A lot of people like to say ‘modern classic’, but I don’t want to qualify it. However, you will not be reading it in the next couple of minutes, so here we go. An angel, Aziraphale (Michael Sheen), and a demon, Crowley (David Tennant), have been on earth since the beginning, and they have grown to love the world and its inhabitants, so when it is time for the apocalypses to begin, they will team up to stop it.

Since one of the authors of Good Omens, Neil Gaiman, took it on himself to adapt his co-written book to screen, I feel like he tried to stay too true to the source material. It all feels crammed in without the space or care it needs. The show either needed to be longer to let everything happen more naturally, or Gaiman needed to get out the red pen and narrow the focus a bit. Which is what the BBC radio play did, and it was fantastic. Now, this series was never going to live up to the book. The book combines Terry Pratchett’s amazing humor and wit with Gaiman’s lyrical and fairytale like prose. It was an almost perfect chimera of the two authors’ strengths. The show on the other hand, tells the story, and is quite charming, but it can’t quite reproduce what made the book special.

What makes Good Omens truly worth watching are the leads. Sheen and Tennant are amazing. They have one of the best on screen friendships I have seen in quite some time, and any time they are together, the show starts to sing. However, any time they are not on screen the show gets a bit hoarse, so it is good they have so much screen time, and that is not to say the other actors are not capable, quite the contrary, but these two’s chemistry elevates everything.

Good Omens the TV series is good, but coming from a book that is superlative, and then a BBC radio show that was excellent, good doesn’t quite feel good enough. Especially right now when there is so much excellent TV to watch, so in the end, I still recommend Good Omens. It is worth watching for Tennant and Sheen alone, but honestly, you should read the book, and if you have done that, find a copy of the BBC radio play. Then finally watch this mini-series.

Chernobyl, HBO’s new miniseries, is one of the best pieces of horror media ever created. It is constantly showing you something awful, and while there is some body horror here and there, the horror on display in Chernobyl is the abuse of the power and the lies used to sustain that power. Abuse that was left unchecked and almost brought about a worldwide disaster.

If you are not up on your history, you may not know what happened at Chernobyl, but most people know the name. This show does a great job of getting most of the details across, and if nothing else, the feeling of what happened in the Ukraine. However, the showrunners do admit to changing a few things to make the show flow better, but because the creators want the full truth out there, they also released a podcast where they walkthrough everything that happened in fuller detail.

You will follow Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) as he fights to get the Soviet Union to do what needs to be done to get this disaster under control. The Soviet Union at the time was unwilling to admit any flaws, and as such they didn’t want to admit the Earth threating disaster was really that bad, which made Valery’s job very difficult. Of course once his job was complete, they want him to cover it all up. What is worse, is that all of this could have been avoided had someone just told the truth.

While melting nuclear rectors and decaying bodies sold the show, it is really the stellar cast that makes it work. Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgård are the able anchors of Chernobyl. They both can do so much acting without even talking. Thoughtful stares, tense looks, and all manor of facial expressions are expertly done. Emily Watson was a great addition to the cast, and even if her character was a composite of many different scientists, they make her an unwavering voice for the truth that this show desperately needs.

I get that not everyone has HBO or Sky, so Chernobyl may be hard to find for a while, but when it does hit other platforms, it is a must watch. If you do have HBO or the Sky Network, you should watch Chernobyl immediately. It reminds us why we need governments that are honest and don’t try to show us how infallible they are, but that truly do what is best for their citizens.

Season eight of Game of Thrones has been a wild ride. The spectacle has never been greater. It pushed what ‘TV’ can be to new heights, but at the same time it was in such a hurry to wrap everything up that all the character moments felt forced and out of place. I will not spoil who wins, but I don’t think it was the audience.

A lot of people have been saying the reason season eight wasn’t what they wanted was because David Benioff and D. B. Weiss no longer had any books to work off of. Just a bullet pointed list of what was going to happen in the books. My guess is that Benioff and Weiss didn’t really like all the spectacle and action. They liked all the dirty politics and intrigue, but with a zombie army and an impatient queen with dragons there wouldn’t be any time for that, so they just pushed through all craziness to the ending. For better or worse.

In the end season eight wasn’t the best of what Game of Thrones has offered, but it wasn’t near as bad as Twitter is saying it is. Even with this truncated and fast forwarded season, this show still gave us seasons three through six, which was some of the best television ever, and that is something to be thankful for. Maybe your player didn’t win the throne, but we still got dragon battles and a zombie army, which is pretty sweet.

As someone who has not seen seasons one or two of True Detective, I cannot say how season three stacks up, I can only say that it is filled with great performances and a lot of silence. It is the slowest of burns. It is worth it to stick it out to the end, but it is not in a hurry to get there.

In season three, two children go missing while on a bike ride, and small town detectives Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali) and Roland West (Deacon Frost Stephen Dorff) do their best to find them. Even though they do everything they can, this case will follow them for the rest of their lives.

From what I gather, True Detective season three is a little less strange than one and two, and it has the unique hook of taking place along at least three different timelines, but really the hook is that it has Mahershala Ali. His performance makes this show. Dorff and the rest of the cast do their best, and they are all good in their own right, but Ali makes it must watch TV.

I did enjoy that everything fit together really nice, there are no major plot holes, but the best part was the way season three played with the audience’s expectations. We know how these things are supposed to go, but how things worked out in True Detective season three was constantly surprising. Not in a cheap way, or just to pull something over on everyone, but as a reminder there is more than one way these things can shake out.

All that said, it is slow. Not that everything needs to be action packed, but sometimes if things take this long to burn the fire may have gone out. Though between the clever story and Ali’s fantastic performance, True Detective season three is still well worth watching. Just don’t fall asleep.