Sunday. The day I start watching new shows for my rotation. I jumped in on Tracker (Paramount Plus), which has excellent audio description. The same narrator (Andrew Thatcher?) who did Lawman is doing Tracker. It sounds great, he sounds great, and I really fell instantly in love with Justin Hartley’s show about a man who finds missing people. There’s some kind of mystery in this show that will play out over the course of the season, but this was really good stuff. Great call to have it launch after the Super Bowl.
One Day (Netflix) is fine, if you like shows about young people starting a relationship. That’s what this seems to be. I feel like I’ve seen better shows do this recently, like Apple Plus’s Still Up, but the audio description is from a company I’m not familiar with. While I’m not willing to champion this AD as great, it hasn’t given me a reason to complain yet. It is just an easier to describe show, as it is incredibly modern and slice of life.
Choir (Disney Plus) avoids talking about race in the audio description, and honestly really can’t do anything with its description of people very well. It seems to want to generalize this real life story for some reason, when the whole point is representation. This is about the Detroit youth Choir that appeared on America’s Got Talent in 2019, and got the Golden Buzzer from Terry Crews. I don’t know if the choir is 100% black, but predominantly so. It’s odd to not be able to talk about that in a show where the choir director is very aware of making sure these kids know they represent their culture, community, and ancestry as they set forth to succeed in the world. This is a great show, and aside from the lack of character description, Roundabout did a track that is a little better than they usually do.
And finally, Life and Beth (Hulu) started its second season. I’m back, because i love Amy Schumer. But this John character her Beth is falling for is so odd. I just can’t get into it. Where are your shoes? Come on now. The audio description here seems to be as solid as Season 1. Although, Beth makes a reference to how they are in a trash alley at one point that I would have preferred audio description for, and there’s a dead cat thrown onto a lawn that I swear was a bag. How did she know it was a dead cat? Were we shown it ever? These questions I have about what is missing are hard to answer since I can’t always see what is missing.
