Well… how was your day yesterday?
TV Shows Watched: From: S1E3 (MGM Plus) with audio description, The Hunting Party: S1E1 (Peacock) with audio description, 911: S8E8 (Hulu) no audio description, Secret Level: S1E5 (Amazon) with audio description, and SNL: Martin Short (Peacock) with audio description.
Movies Watched: Boneyard (Tubi) no audio description, The Incredibles 2 (Disney Plus) with audio description
Best Episode: From- This show is still so much in my lane, it isn’t even funny. I’m so happy they put audio description on this thing, finally. This show should find so many more fans who are blind/low vision and love horror TV. I know you people are out there. Also, it just has a really great mystery to uncover, and is really slowly letting it out.
Runner Up: SNL- Martin Short is delightful, and the oodles of celebs who showed up to help him into the five timers club… made me wonder if the five timers club was just a bunch of white people. But, honestly, if that group did a movie together, it would be a stacked cast. I’m still hoping Tom Hanks does Only Murders In The Building. I think he’d be great for it.
Best Performance: Martin Short (SNL)- Well, yeah. I thought his energy and comic timing was spot on. From his full on exuberance in every moment, you forget he’s 74 years old. He feels like one of the kids on the cast. I hope I have his level of wit and energy. I love this man.
Runner Up: Harold Perrineau (From)- We watched as our lead Sheriff (Hey, Rick Grimes was a Sheriff too!) grapples with the reality of actually having to use this box they created for punishment, which they’ve never had to use before, knowing what it will mean. A man haunted with his own past decisions.
Best Audio Description: From- It’s not even close. There’s no runner up. 911 didn’t have audio description for some reason, and every other show I had problems with the audio description. the next closest would be Hunting Party, but we needed more in the character descriptions for series leads we may be with for ten years.
Best Moment Of Audio Description: From- We forgot to clean up. In a scene that is a spoiler only to those who didn’t watch the first five minutes of episode 1, the new family is gifted a place to live. Of course, something horrible just happened here… and no one cleaned anything. So, the description of the bloody remnants left behind was solid.
From- I also really liked the section at the end with the box, and how it described some of “the others”, including the little boy, and a woman in period garb.
Worst of…: SNL- While 911 had yet another episode missing audio description, which seems to be a recurring Hulu problem, I have to point to this weeks SNL. I feel like they are headed in the opposite direction. Like, the Cock isn’t listening. I’m being cock blocked, if you will. I’ve mentioned in the past that the audio description, which takes a minute to make it to the episodes, is not balanced correctly. the audio description obliterates your hearing. It is louder than the show, so if you try and set your volume (and don’t have some special balancing feature on your TV), you will notice your audio description is shouting at you. This becomes problematic especially during the cast introductions by Darrell Hammond, as I can’t hear what he’s saying. I get audio description of what random people look like, but most of the time I haven’t been able to pick out a name. This week, something wicked this way has come, as the audio description now is talking on top of the cast in several places, meaning you miss either the set up or punchline to a joke. I don’t know why this is, but I doubt this is reflective of the work the AD team did originally. I believe SNL has multiple tapings, so it can air live on the west coast in some form, and I wonder if maybe the streaming version isn’t cobbled together from the best runs of East/West coast skits, but one audio description track, and it just didn’t line up here? I don’t know, but what started out as a beautiful thing for a show like SNL to finally acknowledge that blind people exist, is turning into a headache on the Cock. Will Dave Chappelle’s episode get better or worse? predict now!