TV Shows Watched: Bad Monkey: S1E8 (Apple Plus) with audio description, Where’s Wanda: S1E4 (Apple plus) with audio description, High Potential: S1E4 (Hulu) with audio description, American Sports Story: S1E6 (Hulu) with audio description, Teacup: S1E2 (Peacock) with audio description, Starting Five: S1E9 (Netflix) with audio description
Podcasts: The Gole Derby Podcast (Predicting SAG), Christian Harloff Show (Sony still wants to make Sinister Six), and The NPR Politics Podcast (Politics)
YouTube: None
Movies Watched: Van Helsing (Netflix) with audio description
So, today’s shoutout needs to go to Teacup. International Digital Center is doing this one. I’m intrigued by this show, in general, which is almost impossible to describe. There’s a family, and in the first episode something happens to the young boy, so they kind of retreat back to this farm, and the boy isn’t doing so hot. He’s also acting VERY weird. There’s a mysterious masked man with some rules, and a line around their property that they learn in the 2nd episode they **really* cannot cross.
It also has some gnarly gore. I’m always looking at a show like this to unsettle and unnerve through audio description, because having gone from sight to no sight, I can tell you I watch a lot of horror now I never would have watched before. I’m a chicken. I’ll own that. So, I need a track that makes me at least have pause, and this does that. i was a little hesitant the first time to talk about this, because I’m stilll not sold 100% that this was the best narrator choice in terms of tonality, I’m not saying every single horror film needs to be William Michael Redman either. But, knowing that IDC is working on The Penguin, and thinking about the tone and darkness that the narrator of MAX’s excellent drama is bringing to the table every week, I’m wondering if he wouldn’t have been an equally inspired choice here.
However! There is a but in here, and that is there’s this really strong relationship being highlighted right now between mother and son, and while the show seems very ensemble oriented, and ominous, with some really imaginative gore, there’s a chance this story could evolve into more of a Babadook/Come Play type of mother/son story, and in that regard, for those films, I would absolutely choose this narrator. So, two episodes in, I’m not entirely sure this is the wrong choice either. It is hard with a show to say, without having seen every episode, was this the right call?
going deeper into the rabbit hole, I don’t know at what point they pull the trigger on hiring a narrator. For example, did the person in charge of choosing the narrator watch all the episodes? We’re they made available to him to make that call, or do you get a logline, or even just the first episode, before you have to hire and start the process. I can see the gut instinct to be to head in this direction. But, it is possible James Wan goes a bit more in the direction of another horror movie, like Splinter, and the whole thing becomes body horror, and the mother/son dynamic really isn’t much of the show, and this is all about the Grotesquery of it all. In that case, a darker voice would be better.
These are the conversations I have with myself inside my head. It’s certainly, either way, not a distracting choice.