TV Shows Watched: Wolf King: S1E1 and S1E2 (Netflix) with audio description, From: S1E9 (MGM Plus as a prime Channel Add On) with audio description, Happy Face: S1E1 (Paramount Plus) with audio description, Harley Quinn: S5E10 (MAX) with audio description, School Spirits: S2E8 (Paramount Plus) with audio description, The Leopard: S1E4 (Netflix) with audio description, Are You Smarter Than A Celebrity?: S1E17 (Amazon) with audio description, Matlock: S1E? (Paramount Plus) with audio description, and Elzabeth: S2E? (Paramount Plus) with audio description.
Best Episode: From-As the Sheriff and Sarah start to wonder if there’s possibly something worse out in the woods (I’m not really sure how that could be possible), another death in the town puts Donna at her breaking point. Meanwhile, digging for the source of electricity may not be a futile effort after all.
Runner Up: Happy Face- If you are the daughter of a serial killer, you’re going to do anything you can to hide that, and move on with your life. unfortunately, for our lead (Annaleigh Ashford), her dad was the Happy Face killer, and he’s claiming he still has one more body that he didn’t tell anyone about, and the only way he’ll talk, is if its to his properly estranged daughter who rightly wants nothing to do with him.
Best Audio Description: From- The show has a sci-fi/horror lean that just allows for a different depth of description. There was a character death, a very strange nightmare, and two of our characters were being flung around inside a tent by a really bright light? From… where?
Runner Up: Wolf King- this new animated entry from Netflix is a medieval fantasy with lion princes and wolf kings. There’s even some magic to boot. I was quite surprised at how much I enjoyed the show, that I ended up watching a second episode. It is rated TV-Y7, but it feels like it plays to a higher age. This doesn’t feel like a little kid show, but it does feel like something kids could watch, like Jurassic World: Chaos Theory. The audio description did a good job of translating the period, the magic, and the animal aspects.
Best Performances: Annaleigh Ashford (Happy Face), Elizabeth Saunders (From), Carrie Preston (Elzabeth)- These three ladies deserve a tie. I’m sure Ashford will find her way back here as I continue on with Happy Face, but she was really terrific in the pilot. My favorite scene was when she was using the burner phone. And, Donna on From has always been an excellent character, and she was really taking everything that happened recently into account after the latest death, and Preston is always fun on Elzabeth, but got a very different kind of case in the form of an old mob hit, which put her son suggestively in danger.
runner Up: The Ensemble Of School Spirits- That finale was nuts, and the show runners pulled out all the stops to try and resolve Season 2 in a way that made sense, but also create a reason for there to be a season 3. So now, Maddie needs to help Simon, and maybe Wally?
Best Moment Of Audio Description: I See The Light (From)- That tent sequence was weird, effective, and it was right at the end, so we don’t know the fate of those characters, or what the light was or means.
Runner Up: The Cliffhangers (School Spirits)- This final episode had all these little twists and turns along the way, from Janet and Mr. Martin ending up in the same room together, and Maddie making a run and a jump for her life, but they also left us some twists that don’t resolve, like where Simon is, and also what Wally saw.
Worst Of…- I wish Netflix was using a human voice on The Leopard. I’m so conflicted, because I don’t want to watch programs with TTS tracks, but if that is all they really offer, then we aren’t creating a metric that says blind people would be interested in shows that were not originally in English. So, today’s loser has to be The Leopard, because everything else was better, had audio description, and had human audio description.
