What Did You Watch? 2024-12-21 (Saturday)

Yesterday, I should have been doing the grading of my final final exam(!), but I didn't get to that until yesterday night.
Instead, during Saturday day, I mostly took it easy, and just left football on, mostly the NFL games - I really didn't see much of the college playoff games yesterday. (Sidenote: It annoys me that the "first round" college playoff games aren't played with "named" bowl games.) In the evening, before grading, I finally started tackling "Cross", and then watched a Lifetime Christmas flick:
soaps: Y&R - Wed's(?) ep. Billy has had enough, and washes his hands of Jack after Jack refuses to participate with Billy's revenge scheme against The Mustache. Audra talks with Sally, and admits that her recent emotional outburst with the Winters was genuine, and Audra seems to be mellowing. It's Claire's first day at work with Nikki [hurl!].
football - In the Saturday morning game, Kansas City beat the Texans (no real surprise), though there were some injuries along the way, esp. a pretty bad one to a Texans player.
    In the afternoon game, which I payed more attention to, it took the Ravens a long time to outclass the hated Steelers, but later in the second half the Ravens did exactly that and shellacked the Steelers pretty good, 34-17. Unfortunately, the Steelers still lead the AFC North, but I have a feeling the Ravens will win it before all is said and done.
Cross (Prime) - First two episodes. I really wish they hadn't tried to "update" this to modern times (the first novel came out in 1993), because it leads to an awkward mix of enjoyable crime-conspiracy mystery elements with up-to-the-minute woke point-scoring. (Though I did appreciate the wink that the most anti-cop dude is a richie-rich (IOW, out of touch) African-American dude whom Cross almost punches out.)
    Early on, this did answer one question I had - Was this supposed to be in continuity with the Tyler Perry film? But the TV series quickly establishes that is covering some of the same ground of that film, so this series more like a "retelling".
    It took me until *after* watching the first two episodes to realize that Cross' partner, John Sampson, was portrayed by the same Isiah Mustafa as from "Shadowhunters"! Mustafa looks totally different here!
    Hmmm... In reading up on the book series, I think I have been majorly spoiled on Alona Tal's character! (Ha!!) And when did Tal get so cleavage-y?!! (She had a child in 2022, so maybe that's it?!...)
    Anyway, while I dislike the social commentary aspects of this, and kind of don't like how they are portraying Cross as kind of a *mess* right now, I am liking the crime-conspiracy mystery elements, so that's keeping me in.
A Carpenter Christmas Romance (Lifetime) - I only really watched this because it stars Sasha Pieterse (PLL, bitches!).
    Pieterse was always substantially younger than the rest of the PLL cast, even Janel Parrish (who just looks younger) - Pieterse isn't even 30 yet. As such, she still looks good. She's lost some weight from her peak (which was probably at the end of PLL), though is by no means skinny now.
    Anyway, this was the usual malarkey, though maybe a cut above the usual.
    Pieterse plays a somewhat prickly fantasy novelist who is hit by a P.R. crisis - she intends to kill off the main character in her fantasy series, and her fans find out and are in an uproar. So her sister(?)-manager sends her back home to hide out and finish the latest novel. There, of course, she runs across her high school crush(?)/boyfriend(?) (Mitchell Slaggert) (I didn't pay enough attention to this part to figure out which he was), who is now a carpenter/woodworking(?) artist.
    Complications and hott sex enuse!
    This didn't break any new ground, but it went down a little easier than most, and I liked that Pieterse's heroine was much more subdued than most of the female lead characters of these things.
What did you watch?