TV Shows Watched: Disclaimer: S1E3 (Apple Plus) with audio description, Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage: S1E1 (Paramount Plus) with audio description, Rivals: S1E1 (Hulu) no audio description, Grotesquery: S1E7 (Hulu) with audio description, the Old Man: S1E? (Hulu) with audio description, NCIS: Origins- S1E2 (Paramount Plus) with audio description, Young Sheldon: S3E13 (MAX) with audio description, The Masked Singer: S12E4 (Hulu) no audio description, SNL: S50E2 (Peacock) with audio description, and Emily In Paris: S4E9 (Netflix) with audio description.
Podcasts: Next Best picture (Interview: Anna Kendrick), Matter Of Opinion (Politics)
YouTube: Oscar Expert (October Acting Predictions), Breakfast All Day (Review: Smile 2), Movies and Munchies (Review: Woman of The Hour)
Movies Watched: Brothers (Amazon) with audio description, Woman of The Hour (Netflix) with audio description
I have a few thoughts. Some are audio description related, some are just show related.
Rivals- So, since Hulu has decided to pervasively provide English language content from the UK and Australia without audio description, and brand them as originals, I’ve decided these shows can properly fuck off. I didn’t finish Rivals. I watched about ten minutes of the show, which had a lot of sex right off the bat. I am not a prude, but I do consider it a lack of talent when a show or movie starts with fucking. It’s no longer as provocative as the director thinks, yet I have every feeling that’s why they are choosing to do it. Hulu most recently tried entrapping blind people with The LAst Days Of The Space Age, an Australian drama with no audio description, and I’m tired of it.
Grotesquery- It must be acknowledged that an already insane TV show went to the next level. Fuck everything else Ryan Murphy is doing this year, this is the best thing he’s making. Talk about a plot twist.
Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage- I’m only going to do another episode to see if Georgie’s parents are regulars, or just there for the pilot. This show desperately needs a multi-cam veteran like Annie Potts, because it felt really stunted asking single-cam actors to translate those characters into a multi-cam format. This didn’t work for me, but all things considered, this had pretty decent audio description for a sitcom. It just really isn’t funny, a fact they highlight by explaining what a laugh track is.
NCIS Origins- Full disclosure, I never expected to watch this long term. I just watched the first two because it was presented back to back like a two hour pilot. I wanted to check out the quality of the audio description, which I thought was pretty good. I enjoy most of the stuff Media Access Group does for CBS, which is a much stronger pairing than ABC has with ViTech. Story wise, I would have made different choices. While I’m not a fan of NCIS as a franchise, I thought the decision for Gibbs to ditch his family in the first two episodes was a far less interesting choice than letting it run over the course of the first season. Watching an inexperienced Gibbs grow is far more compelling, and watching him transform into the man series fans know and love would be, again, far more compelling than starting him off as a wunderkind who ditches his family right off the bat. Yes, he has a reason, but I maintain the stronger choice would have been to let his family stay for at least the first season.
The Masked Singer: I was pretty happy about having some strong vibes about who those people were in Group A, despite a lack of audio description. This group, I heard Andy Richter’s voice, but i had such a hard problem connecting him to Dick Van Dyke. I kept thinking he must have been an older actor than Richter. No idea right now who anyone else is.
And finally, some SNL audio description has passed through to Peacock from season 50. I’m really happy this is here, and I believe the first two episodes have it. This was the episode hosted by Nate Bargatzi and Coldplay, and Nate had so many moments where I was dying with laughter. he’s one of my favorite standup comedians right now. Like, Top 3. As far as the audio description goes, I think the best example for why we needed the audio description was the mile high burger sketch, which featured a lot of physical/prop comedy, as one of the cast members was trying to devour an impossibly large burger. What I’ll say in critique from my perspective is that the audio description balance was much louder than the show, which only was a problem in a few spots. Notably, the opening cast where the names are read. I think the fix for this would be, as the description of each person is given, if you said the full name, basically like how the announcer is doing it, then it would feel more symbiotic, like the cast is being introduced and we’re told what they are doing and what they look like. I’m not sure if the balance is quite like this during a live viewing, but I couldn’t really hear the announcer. I’m a regular SNL viewer, for basically my whole life, so really all I need are descriptions of the newer cast anyway, but trying to think about other people, and those who may never have even seen someone like Kenyan Thompson before, despite his historic tenure on the show. I was actually even impressed by the note that Coldplay had a player piano on stage with them. I was so intrigued as to how they incorporated that into their music, versus just having a regular piano or keyboardist. A player piano is far more retro, historical even, and I’m not sure anyone else is using one.
