TV Shows Watched: Another renewal notice is Hulu’s Paradise, which is coming back for a second season.
TV Shows Watched: daredevil: Born Again- S1E4 (Disney Plus) with audio description, The Righteous Gemstones: S4E2 (MAX) with audio description, Your Friendly neighborhood Spider-Man: S1E10 (Disney plus) with audio description, The Walking Dead: dead city: S1E1 (Netflix) with audio description, The Wheel Of Time: S3E2 (Amazon) with audio description, The Daily show: Tuesday (Paramount Plus) no audio description, Suits: LA: S1E4 (Peacock) with audio description, and Running Point: S1E4 (Netflix) with audio description
Best Episode: The Righteous Gemstones- A tough call, but after the excellent season premiere, we got to see the gemstones we’ve come to know and love together again on their final journey. And nothing is more Gemstone than these knuckleheads supposedly preaching about God while cursing all over the place, and using jetpacks to enhance the performance. Plus, john Goodman nails the Eli performance every time.
Runner Up: Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man- I liked how the finale was this full circle moment, but also dropped a lot of clear plans for a second season by showing us what a bunch of characters are up to right at the end. I want this show to have appropriately diverse audio description, but I do really like this show otherwise.
Best Audio description- the Wheel Of Time- While it didn’t have quite the same level of badass action sequences as the premiere, this one clearly had the high level of difficulty, and is the overall winner for audio description. A ton of fantasy elements, things that have no real world counterparts, still plenty of action, and a broad ensemble to manage.
Runner Up: Your Friendly Neighborhood spider-Man- Between fighting and symbolism, the finale was excellent. there was this big fight to close out the season, but we also just simply saw some things that weren’t dropped in dialogue, though needed visual representation in the description, from Tombstone leaving his Letterman jacket behind, to the name tag on the person Aunt May visits, to Doc Ock’s drawing, and even an explanation of what was going on with Niko the last time we see her. Those are things we got in the audio description that aren’t verbalized at all, or only lightly referred to in dialog.
best Performance: Coleman Domingo (Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man) and John Goodman (The Righteous Gemstones)- I was impressed with enough performances to tie these two. Domingo’s performance is voice only, and he really showed up in the final episode as you could start to feel the villain inside Norman, even if it leaves him in this gray area at the end, where he isn’t definitively a bad guy. He’s a great actor who is clearly having a lot of fun in this role. Meanwhile, Goodman returning as Eli Gemstone, with this feeling of melancholy like he’s broken and can’t be fixed, leading up to Eli making a big move at the end of the episode, was a great trajectory for him. I love that the description we got after he went in for the kiss, was a second of regret, because he wasn’t sure he was reading the signals, then she kissed him back. John Goodman just doesn’t get romantic roles anymore, and he’s such a wonderful actor.
Runner Up: Jon Bernthal (Daredevil Born Again) and The gemstone Kids (The Righteous Gemstones)- Eli’s three kids all had these equally hilarious moments, from all three of them convincing their father to do the telethon, to flying jetpacks around. And, while that is not how I wanted to see Frank Castle reintroduced, I won’t take anything away from Bernthal, who acted the shit out of that scene.
Special Mention: If you are like me, and you’ve been wondering when suits LA would connect to Suits, this episode featured a guest appearance from Gabriel Macht as Harvey Spector. Just thought I’d give him a shoutout. Nothing amazing about the performance, but he does have lines.
Best Moment Of Audio description- A New Way To crowd surf (The Righteous Gemstones)- it’s such a small moment, but I love that they found the space to include Jesse having a hard time with his Jetpack, and coming too low so he ends up stepping on the heads of people in the crowd to try and get lifted off again.
Runner Up: Alien Attack (your Friendly neighborhood Spider-Man)- The big fight sequence against the alien was really well done, like every other fight scene on the show has been.
Special Runner Up: The Flashback (Walking dead: Dead city)- I’m a huge fan of the franchise, and I’ve already seen this season without audio description. With audio description, i learned that they flashed back and reminded us all why half the viewers watching the original Walking Dead quit watching, and showed us Negan braining Glenn again. It’s an example of something I missed the first time around, due to lack of audio description, because AMC Plus doesn’t support it.
Worst Of…- I didn’t really hate anything yesterday, but Daredevil: Born Again does not seem to be headed in the right direction. Matt is picking up Hector’s stuff, when a niece comes out of nowhere, because they didn’t want to give his wife more screentime? she just kinda drops a F-bomb and cries. Matt also, with very little context to the greater story, defends a guy accused of stealing caramel corn, and we get this excellent speech on the prison complex system, which at the end of the day seems to not be something Matt can do anything about. Was there a point to that, or are we just randomly putting messaging into episodes? Will episode 5 remind us that climate change is real? and then, we have Frank’s drunken return, which is more disappointing only because the show runners were hyping up this moment. They were really “wait until you see The punisher come back. I think everyone is going to be really excited.” Decisions like that are why we have a live action Snow White and Lilo and stitch in theatres this year, only two months apart from each other.
