Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-01-11 (Saturday)

On 1/12/25 1:05 PM, anim8rfsk wrote:

Ian J. Ball <ijball@mac.invalid> wrote:
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I barely feel recovered enough to do one these, but here goes.
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What did you watch?

 ON CALL covered in its own thread.

I will get to this. But I will probably finish "The Rings of Power" S2 first.

SHIFTING GEARS on the Disney+/Hulu

Amazing! I also watched this yesterday, and I forgot to mention it!
Also, Fox is really f**king up their streaming strategy - as I predicted, Hulu has "Animal Control" again, but only season #3, no season #1 or #2: Fox is providing *no* real means to view previous seasons of this show outside of paying extra for it via Apple TV, etc. - I'm not going to play that game.

Unfortunately, this was just OK. Tim Allen seems tired and Kat Dennings
seems like she hasn’t done sitcoms before. It was very stagey and the laugh
track is intrusive and horrible. The supporting cast are all second rate.

I actually liked the dopey teen son - I think there's potentially promise with this one.
But I'm not sure why Seann William Scott and Darryl Chill Mitchell are there as they don't seem to have much to do.

But the main problem is the writing. Predictable and sloppy. and apparently
not in continuity with itself. When Kat first appears with the kids Tim
acts like he hasn’t seen her in 15 years and didn’t even know about them.
But later we find out they’ve been in touch all along.

I'm going to cut them slack, as it's a pilot.
My take:
This is very much a "Tim Allen" sitcom - it hits all of the usual notes: Allen is a cantankerous old conservative who fixes up(?) classic muscle cars; Dennings is a cantankerous younger... liberal(? - we get basically two hints on this, and not much else) soon-to-be divorced single mom without a job. They're "estranged", but she moves back home with her two kids - wackiness will ensue!!1!
However, the big difference? - This is the first Tim Allen sitcom without a wife. I'm not sure how that is going to work.
Otherwise, Dennings is basically playing some morphed version of Alexandra Krosney's/Amanda Fuller's daughter character in "Last Man Standing" (presumably, Dennings' character will fall somewhere in between those two extremes).
I found parts of this amusing, but it is probably the weakest (so far) of Allen's sitcoms.
As I said, I'm not sure why Seann William Scott and Darryl Chill Mitchell are there, as they aren't given much to do, and I'm not sure I see that changing.
Also, I missed Dennings' "Two Broke Girls" character here - on this show, her character is much more dour than her "Two Broke Girls" one, and I didn't care for it.
I did come to like Dennings' dopey teen son; the precious younger daughter is an American sitcom cliche that hasn't changed in decades.