Today should be an interesting day, as Hurricane Helene will bring me some kind of extreme weather. If I don’t have a small screen diary tomorrow, I’m not necessarily dead, i might just not have power. Or internet. You know, the things we now rely on to do things like this.
TV Shows Watched: American Sports Story: S1E3 (Hulu) with audio description, High Potential: S1E2 (Hulu) with audio description, Midnight Family: S1E1 (Apple plus) with audio description, Murder In A Small Town: S1E1 (Hulu) no audio description, Penelope: S1E1 (Netflix) with audio description, Women In Blue: S1E10 (Apple Plus) with audio description, and Matlock: S1E1 (Paramount Plus) with audio description.
Podcasts: Countdown With Keith Olbermann (politics)
YouTube: Breakfast All Day (Review: megalopolis)
Movies: None
A lot of new shows. Maybe it’s time for some quick hot takes?
American Sports Story- Ryan Murphy continues his apologetic take on Aaron Hernandez, finding every way possible to paint Aaron as a victim of circumstance. The third episode is something silly like “Pray The Gay Away”, and just leans more into Aaron being this misunderstood closeted football star. Monsters did sort of a similar thing. Ryan Murphy just needs to take a step back from true crime for a while. The audio description here doesn’t blow me away, but it does follow with some of the shows more mature content swings. I don’t want to say it is bad, but it feels like it isn’t excellence either. Adequate?
Murder In A Small Town intrigues me in that I’m not sure what the long term of this show is, since they solved the murder in the first episode. Is this small town about to become murder central? No audio description made it challenging to put details together, but the pilot was actually pretty easy to follow, as there was really only ever one suspect. An odd format, but I’m watching at least one more to figure out what this show is trying to do. it might be the safest procedural I’ve seen in a while.
Penelope is a show where I definitely need more than one episode. It reminds me a little of Reese Witherspoon’s film Wild, but with a younger girl, who has seemingly run away from home to live in a National Park.
Midnight Family is another international entry from Apple, which has really been throwing those out recently. From Eva Longoria’s bilingual Land Of Women, to Pachenko, Women in Blue, La Maison, and now this… Apple seems to be rapidly expanding their international reach. I wasn’t blown away by the pilot, but it gets huge originality points. It is apparently based on a documentary.
Women in Blue was a great series I hope Apple renews. The audio description was solid. The dubbing was OK, though I would prefer if we had Latinx voice talent for Latinx characters. But the story here is compelling, and the finale has so many brutal blows that remind you how hard women have fought for quality. Even outside this country.
High Potential finally had audio description. it was ViTech again, and they are going corn the basic package. There are gaps where there could be description, but they don’t use the time, which could really help immerse us more in the show. Pull us in. And, pull us in fast. Not speaking for all blind people, or saying this is the right thing to do, but I’ve always thought about this when I notice sequels with audio description and not the original… there’s something to that “hook em early’ way of doing things that works. If you can grab them in the beginning, and hold them, then you may find it easier to cut a corner later. But if you cut corners in the beginning, and lose your audience, you lose your product. I think a blind community is more likely to keep watching a show that started with banger audio description, and then maybe even petered out to no audio description, than put up with mediocre audio description up front. At least in the other format, it has given you a good foundation. It is why I talk to so many blind people who watch old movies and reruns, even without audio description. They use what they already know. So for a new show, it is really important to go all in as much as you can for as long as you can, to hook them. People complained about the final season of The Good Doctor’s audio description, but I bet blind fans who stuck with the show the whole way through still finished that show. Just a hunch.
And my final hot take, is that Matlock is the best reboot/remake ever. THAT is how you do it. I’m sure everyone was like “do we need this?”, but someone basically M. Night Shyamalan’d us, totally and completely bamboozling us, and this is not your grandparents Matlock. not. At. All.