TV Shows Watched: Daredevil Born Again: S1E2 (Disney Plus) with audio description, Survivor: S48E2 (Paramount Plus) with audio description, Berlin ER: S1E3 (Apple plus) with audio description, Nine Bodies In A Mexican Morgue: S1E1 (MGM Plus) no audio description, Black Ops: S1E1 (Hulu) no audio description, The Masked Singer: S13E4 (Hulu) no audio description
Good news for fans of Running Point. The show secured a super fast second season pick up from Netflix.
Best Episode: Daredevil: Born Again- I didn’t really give it much competition, but the second episode started to push more into the season long arc of having a world run by a corrupt politician. The bad news for Fisk was the sandwich wasn’t even good. He went to all that trouble to make a point, and just ended up with a lackluster cheesesteak.
Runner Up: Berlin ER (Apple Plus)- This feels right. Considering half of the shows I checked out did not have audio description.
Best Audio Description: Daredevil: Born Again- Still some reliably well done action sequences. The sandwich scene was pivotal, and entirely a visual cue.
Runner Up: Survivor- The challenges are well described enough to make up for the lack of description in most of the contestants. I do appreciate the opening credits for the second episode, which remind us of who is on this show, but I also was a little like… who are these people? And I still have no idea what most of them look like, even a little bit. But, the challenges were really solid for a competition reality show.
Best Performance: Charlie Cox (Daredevil Born Again)- I think it is the first time I’ve had the same person in this spot two days in a row, but I was not thinking about throwing him major competition. Berlin ER is dubbed, the other shows have no audio description or are competition reality shows. So, since he was reliably fantastic the first time, Matt Murdoch takes this the second day as well as he fights for his client (quite literally).
Runner Up: Kumar De Los Reyes (Daredevil: Born Again)- The late actor, who passed in 2023 (reminding us all how long it took to get this show to Disney plus) is effective as hector, and when you connect the “in memory of” to this actor, that immediate realization that he won’t be able to continue this character beyond his initial filming makes his presence feel that much more special. He was an interesting addition, and I hope he’s in more episodes so at least we can appreciate him while we have him.
Best Moment Of Audio description: The Fights (Daredevil: Born Again)- Hector’s fight at the beginning of the episode was done well, as was Matt’s at the end of the episode.
Runner Up: The Prophetic Easter Egg (Daredevil Born Again)- Jon Bernthal is listed in the cast list for the show, so a visual reference to the iconic Punisher logo, in the form of a tattoo was appreciated. It hasn’t yet had all the dots connected, but just getting that little nod of what is likely to come, I thought was pretty cool.
Worst Of…- well, MGM Plus has what seems like a cool new twisty series with Eric McCormac in the lead role. Despite being a MGM/BBC co-production, and MGM Plus jumping into the audio description arena with shows like Earth Abides and From, they did not create audio description for this new show, which means it either isn’t important to their roster of programming, or they still don’t understand that you have to plug the audio description hole first by committing to debuting new shows with audio description while you make up ground by going through your back catalog. Same could be said for Hulu, which has Black Ops, a British crime comedy that also lacks audio description, but follows in a disturbingly long list of Hulu “Originals” which are just Hulu “Exclusives” misbranded, and come from an English speaking country outside of the US, that routinely fail to get audio description. This is nothing new for Hulu, who cancelled the import Extraordinary before ever even uploading the audio description track.
Special Achievement In “Took You Long Enough”- Disney. Yesterday, I noticed that Sugar Cane had been released to iTunes “with audio description”, which made me wonder if they had finally added the long existing track to Disney Plus. they have. After premiering at the beginning of December, and after this film has completed it Oscar journey, Sugar Cane now has audio description for those who have Disney Plus and have had access to the film for the past three months, and it is available on at least one video-on-demand platform for anyone who is interested, but doesn’t have the subscription. This is a new category, because rarely do things like this happen. In fact, and I shit you not, Disney **still* as of March 7th, 2025, uploaded the theatrical audio description tracks for EITHER of their 20th Century titles Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes or The First Omen. Still. So, when I say a small miracle happened with Sugar Cane, I mean it, because those two films have both been on the platform longer, actually made a substantial footprint at the domestic box office, and have audio description in existence that Disney paid for. And, not for nothing, but Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes has the exact same amount of Oscar nominations as Sugar Cane and inside Out 2. While someone at Disney may have finally done their job with respect to Sugar Cane, they have two long gestating failures of accessibility they don’t seem at all concerned about rectifying.
