Well, no internet this morning means my routine is very different. But, a blog post is easy to upload, so I can continue to do that. A couple HD videos to my YouTube? We’ll see…
In TV news, CBS has officially ordered the Young Sheldon spinoff centered around Georgie to series. In related news, Disney’s Bob Iger mentioned that Disney has been quietly killing projects in development that it has lost faith in. I wonder if any of those are Star Wars or Marvel projects? I am a huge proponent of the fact that the superhero fatigue is fake, and you need to give your people time to develop a film that works. James Gunn delivered a fantastic final volume for the Guardians Of The Galaxy trilogy, and Sony’s Across The Spider-Verse showed no signs of an audience waning or being bored. It’s about not turning the superhero genre into a machine churning out scripts that didn’t work from the beginning.
In terms of shows yesterday, I got through the third episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender (Netflix). While I may have wanted more from the initial character descriptions, I am happy with how the action is described. And that is such a huge element. Lean in more if you can on the creative areas like costuming and set design, and help world building, since Netflix likely isn’t letting you talk about ethnic specificities of the characters.
Tracker (Paramount Plus) has some solid audio description. It fits into the window of doing a good job from the angle of a detective show, where we are trying to uncover clues, as well as a few well placed action sequences. However, the one thing about Tracker, is that it does seem to not find value in spending too much time describing the characters of the week, who aren’t regulars.
Death and Other Details (Hulu) just had too big of a cast from square one. not that the audio description is bad or good, but the structure here is just not conducive to easy audio description. I’m six episodes in, and there are characters I still feel like I don’t know, but I’m not really sure that is an audio description problem. I know the season just wrapped, and I’m a bit behind. I really do hope to see this continue with Mandy Patinkin and a new cast. His work here is really good.
Mr and Mrs Smith (Amazon) had an odd couples therapy episode, where I wasn’t really engaged in the show. By the end, I got what they were trying to do, I just think this episode didn’t work for me. The audio description, by Ingir Tutor was really well done. And speaking of…
She also did the audio description for The Equalizer (Paramount Plus), which does the same thing in having a description track, like Tracker, that is not as invested in the short term episode specific characters. Though, the plot this week, about finding out what really happened to a good guy who got in too deep felt a little Reacher Season 2 for me.
And finally, The New Look, which by Episode 5 seems to really be on track. This Apple Plus show started out as something I wasn’t sure I wanted to see again, but with each episode this show has gotten better, and its direction and plot is more and more clear. Seeing Coco having to face accusations of being a spy, while the rest of the fashion icons in France are trying to pull together a fashion show to save the soul of their country while having limited fabric was really oddly inspiring. I’d say, if you were like me, and you didn’t like the first episode, this definitely gets better.
