Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day! I don’t think I watched anything yesterday that fits with today. Maybe I’ll try to do that on the day of, but then I’ll be mentioning it the next day. It’s like having a Newsweek subscription nowadays, when everything has already been discussed. The Critics Choice awards last night were pretty predictable. I did see one site refer to Emma Stone’s win as a “shocker”. Really? Yes, Lily won the Globe… but so did Emma. They were just finally in the same category. Interestingly, the same “journalist” had nothing to say about the “shocker” of Paul Giamatti beating Cillian Murphy. Weird.
But, I did start watching The Brothers Son (Netflix), which thankfully has audio description, which I thought was pretty solid. The narrator here is Emily hooks, and even though I wasn’t immediately in love with the show, it is a huge step up from the recent TV work for Michelle Yeoh (anyone remember that awful Witcher spinoff?). A leader of a triad is bummed off, so his badass son has to protect the rest of his family, including his improv acting brother, while trying to figure out who is trying to kill his family. It has non-English, a lot of violence, and many reasons you need the audio description. The description in the pilot never left me hanging, and found cute ways of shaping the story, including describing certain motorcycle masks, or the work characters do inside a kitchen.
Criminal Record (Apple Plus) feels like exactly the kind of show where you know where the ending is but you still want to be on this journey. I thought the pilot was well shot, well paced, and well acted. It is not revolutionary, and I think I could tell you how this ends right now, but it was just so well crafted I didn’t mind the generic feel to the plot. Compared to Fool Me Once, which I have no idea where a Harlan Cobin story is headed, I prefer this. The audio description, being British, was predictably fine. It’s a crime mystery, so get invested if it’s your thing.
Of course I started The Traitors (Peacock), and the narration here is lackluster. Yeah, there’s some effort, but not much. 21 barely famous people compete, and every time they talk to the camera, their name isn’t given. However, if they’re just walking around looking at something, or performing a task in the challenge, that’s how we build knowledge of who these people are. Aside from two people who have VERY distinct accents, I’ve got 19 people I’m trying to match a voice to a name. They dropped 3 episodes at once, and I don’t binge, so I will always be a little behind. I’m already aware of the twist that hasn’t been revealed, because the internet is what it is. I’m not thrilled with the narrator’s voice, as it borders on sounding artificial, but I’d be happier with it if they could tell me who the hell is talking. No one watches enough reality TV to have memorized these 21 voices, especially as some aren’t from reality shows, and are just famous, or famous adjacent. Marcus Jordan.
The last show I watched had no audio description, so it gets a mention as the initial response. Grimmsburg (Hulu) lacks accessibility, and this is a quirky enough show with some horror elements and off kilter humor that could have used the audio description to establish its characters. The Great North is populated with people living in Alaska, and doesn’t have talking animals, or fantasy creatures, which is why I suppose I struggle less with that. But FOX’s newest entries, Krapopolis and Grimmsburg both have fantasy elements about them that require audio description for the jokes to truly work. instead of it potentially being a blind person’s favorite new show, likely they will tune into something more familiar.
