TV News: I rarely get excited for a possible revival, but Sarah Michelle Gellar just stated that she would do a Buffy revival…. And since the show they were trying to do a few years back clearly never happened, we need to explore this. It would be so interesting to see who comes back, and what the show would be like without Joss Whedon behind it, but it has been so long since the show, that if you find a fan of Buffy, who understood why the show worked, I don’t see why not.
TV Shows Watched: Before: S1E9 (Apple Plus) with audio description, Dexter: Original Sin: S1E1 (Paramount Plus) with audio description, No Good Deed: S1E1 (Netflix) with audio description, Krapapolis: S2E8 (Hulu) no audio description, Cross: S1E6 (Amazon) with audio description, and Happy’s Place: S1E? (Peacock) with audio description.
Podcasts: None
YouTube: Perry Nimarovv (FYC: Best Actor) plus i needed to watch people review Vermiglio and Things Will Be Different after having seen them.
Movies Watched: September 5 (screener) with audio description, The Apprentice (screener) no audio description, We live In Time (screener) no audio description, Vermiglio (screener) no audio description, Things Will Be Different (screener) no audio description, and Nutcrackers (Hulu) with audio description
Best Episode Watched Yesterday: Before- While my runner up was really strong, before had the momentum of this being the penultimate episode, and I’m dying to know how this ends. I think this is one of my favorite shows of the year. Only one episode left.
Runner Up: No Good Deed- The new Netflix comedy edged out the new Dexter for the runner up spot. There’s a dark twist revealed in the premiere that made me even more interested for the possibilities. A really interesting pilot, and on a different day, I would have been happy to put this at the top, and Dexter as the runner-up.
Best Individual Performance- Billy Crystal (Before)- It should come as no surprise. He’s been amazing all season, and he continues that here.
Runner Up: Ray Romano (No Good Deed)- I love the ways Romano has really distanced himself from his initial character that made him famous in Everybody Loves Raymond, and while he shares this with lisa Kudrow, there’s more of a focus on “what did this man do?” In the pilot, while Lisa likely will take another episode.
Best Audio Description- Before- There’s still so many things that have no basis in reality in this show that I have to give kudos to this again. Even the tracking of the fly, which seems to inconsequential, is well done. This show would not work for a blind/low vision audience without audio description.
Runner Up: Dexter: Original Sin- I’ll give the edge here to Dexter, because of the complexities. There are more little moments in Original Sin that are visual cues, than perhaps No Good Deed, which really has to introduce you to a bunch of new faces. While No good Deed has a different set of monsters to tackle, I’m not sure the character descriptions were as strong, which is what it needed to do, whereas Dexter was building on already familiar characters, and instead was focusing on that dark passenger element.
Best Moment Of Audio Description: Before: Again, the fly. It is in both rooms. It seems silly to track the movement of a fly, but somehow it feels so integral to this show.
Runner Up: No Good Deed: Mainly because of its incredible importance to the show, I’m singling out the scene with Lisa Kudrow in her son’s bedroom. There’s a lamp there that might mean something, and a strong visual cue and reaction that really helped anchor the pilot, as well as put a big question mark on what’s to come.
Special recognition: September 5- I received a screener with audio description, which is amazing, and that movie needs the audio description to track the intense real life events that transpired in this film, and a large ensemble putting it all together. The film was great, and so was the description. They made some choices, like not all the character descriptions work or even exist, but some people are just playing well known people, so they just go with “Peter Jennings”, assuming people know what that looks like. I could go either way on these choices, but the quick editing and fast pace, make it hard to really give us a depth of who these people are at any given point in time. It is only 95 minutes. It is very fast.
Worst Episode: I mean, this one is tough. I haven’t been a fan of Cross, despite being a fan of the character. Happy’s Place has weak writing. I also saw a bunch of movies without audio description, and I hated Nutcrackers. To keep in the spirit, I guess I’ll peg an actual episode, and go with Happy’s Place.
Worst Performance: Another tough one. Most of this comes down to writing. Reba is working as best as she can with some terrible scripts. Aldis Hodge is doing the best he can with a poorly written Alex Cross. Honestly, Ben Stiller, who has showed emotional range before, is giving one of his worst performances in Nutcrackers. So, I’ll peg Stiller for this. Technically, it is rated TV-14, and not PG-13, so it kinda qualifies as TV.
Worst Audio Description: I won’t even peg Krapapolis here, because Vermiglio is 100% in a language I don’t speak. But, as a really close second, even though it is in English, Things Will Be Different has a MAJOR plot point I really needed audio description for. Vermiglio was certainly the most pointless endeavor, but I feel like I watched a completely different film with Things Will Be Different. So, the English language film wins this award over the film not at all in English.
