Holy crap. We are a full month into 2025. Coming this week to your streamers are a few movie premieres, like Piece By piece (Peacock) and We Live In Time (MAX), as well as some returning favorites, including Invincible (Amazon), The Kardashians (Hulu), and NCIS Sydney (CBS/Paramount Plus), and some new shows like Celebrity Bear Hunt (Netflix), Clean Slate (Amazon), and Apple Cider Vinegar (Netflix). Which of those will you see rotate on here?
TV Shows Watched: the Night Agent: S2E9 (Netflix), The Traitors: S3E6 (Peacock) with audio description, Harley Quinn: S5E3 (MAX) with audio description, Dexter: Original Sin: S1E? (Paramount Plus) with audio description, Shifting Gears: S1E4 (Hulu) with audio description, and Are You Smarter Than A celebrity?: S1E12 (Amazon) with audio description.
Movies Watched: Utopia (Apple Store) with audio description, Maria (Netflix) with audio description
Best Episode: The Night Agent- Shit is getting real. Of course, I feel like the good guys will inevitably win, but I’m feeling the tension being held into the final episode and that’s a good thing.
Runner Up:- Harley Quinn- BANE!
Best performance: BANE! (Harley Quinn)- The Harley Quinn version of Bane is one of the rare things in life that makes me happy no matter the context. I want him to have a spinoff ONLy when they decide Harley Quinn and Kite Man have run their course, so Bane can live on. Props to James Adonian for voicing him, along with several other characters. I still remember when he traveled to Italy to learn how to make pasta.
Runner Up: Christian Slater (Dexter: original Sin)- One of the consistent bright spots in this prequel series, which isn’t bad, but it also isn’t Dexter.
Best Audio Description: Maria- After watching this a second time, I just wanted to shoutout IDC, Liz Gutman, and Jamie Lemcheck for their underrated work. I don’t think I caught as much nuance the first time around as I did the second time, but there are quite a lot of flashes through events Maria was at, different time periods, moments where she’s on screen with a younger version of herself. it is an easy to not notice, but deceptively terrific audio description track.
Runner Up (tie, kinda)- So, I want to signal out Dave Wallace specifically for continuing to really try and help make Shifting Gears funny. The writing is fine, but it is the extra mile he gives to the show that works. If we’re being honest, it isn’t where Tim Allen’s previous shows have been, but it also isn’t the worst new comedy of the new season. Luckily, my favorite (St Dennis Medical) already got a second season renewal. but, also, The Night Agent for its heavy action scenes.
Best Moment Of Audio Description: Saving The Day (The night Agent)- peter gets to come in and beat up some motherfuckers. And the audio description was great. I hope the stunt work looks great too, because the description was solid.
Runner Up: The Challenge (The Traitors)- When they arrive at the challenge, the statue, and everything around it is oddly described better than really anything else in the series. I’ve noticed this with some other episodes, that they are good at describing shit that is low priority, so I’d like to try a new strategy, and say “This thing you did right here. Do this, but do it when it matters.”
Worst Of…- The Traitors gets a reprieve for a week, as Utopia is one of those holy shit it was so bad I have to tell you about it immediately type of films. I’ll have a review at some point, but damn, that movie was terrible. The audio description was fine, though it never brought up any diversity.. if that even exists. The whole movie feels like it was written by an AI algorithm given the question: “Write a screenplay only sourcing soft core movies from Cinemax and Showtime in the 80’s and 90’s, but write it from the perspective of someone who thinks The Handmaid’s Tale would be awesome, mix it with Westworld, and have it speak to Incel’s.” That algorithm produced this film.
