Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-01-17 (Friday)

On 1/18/2025 9:16 AM, Ian J. Ball wrote:

I was supposed to do work yesterday. Instead, I did some chores and watched TV. (I guess I'll have to get some work done today!)
 I watched:
 soaps: DOOL - Wed's ep, I guess. This was mostly Philip-Xander drama, with Sarah getting Stephanie to agree to keep quiet about the fraudulent letter - can't wait until this ends Sarah's marriage when Xander finds out she's been lying to him!... EJ and FauxRafe come up with an completely ridiculous and implausible story that for some reason Jada buys - then EJ decides he wants FauxRafe to impersonate Rafe afterall... Leo is back to believing that Javi is the new Lady Whistleblower without bothering to ask Javi where he got the Rochester sweatshirt from.
    GH - Fri's ep. Willow relents and lets Carly and Sonny see Michael; then they all argue about what to do for Michael's burn treatment, with Carly pushing to send Michael to the clinic in Europe - in the end, they decide to wake Michael up and ask him... Chase and then Brook Lynn try to tell Tracy that she's playing with fire - sure enough, Drew gets Martin Gray to get the cops to arrest Tracy!! (Ha!)... After bickering with Brook Lynn, NuNuLulu talks with Maxie - Lulu wants to take an assistant job at Deception, but she'll be Brook Lynn's assistant and she hates Brook Lynn!!
 On Call (Prime) - Got through the first 4 episodes of this.
    This show is basically like "The Rookie", but with 0% of the humor of "The Rookie" - IOW, it's 100% serious.
    It stars 'A' (well, actually, like "A#3" if I've counted them correctly!), aka. "I used to be a PLL, but now I'm a PLL cop, bitches!!" Troian Bellisario - she's the training officer (more "Rookie" redux!!) to a new trainee (Brandon Larracuente, from "Bloodline" and "The Good Doctor"). These two are the only "cast" - everyone else is credited as recurring "guest" cast.
    While this is nominally a Dick Wolf production, it feels like Wold just his name on this, and Wolf has no creative input, because this show feels like the opposite of a Dick Wolf production - as BTR pointed out, this show seems very *anti*-woke, which is very un-Dick Wolf like.
    I do like how Eric LaSalle's character is kind of like the show's "bad angel" - his character is always pushing for a return to the "old ways", when they used to tune up perps as a matter of course (yes, please!). Bellisario's character is the "good angel", a by-the-book cop who may or may not have turned in some bad cops on the force (they haven't revealed if she did this by ep. #4).
    Anyway, this isn't bad. And I liked that they seem to have wrapped up the show's main storyarc by the end of ep. #4 (I assume there will be a new storyarc for ep's #5-8).
    I also like that this is merely a 30-minute show - feels like all of the "filler" of a show like "The Rookie" has been eliminated here.
    I will get to the last 4 ep's today. I will also take a look at the dedicated thread once I have gotten through all of the episodes...
 I then got to one recorded and one "live" Lifetime flick in the evening:
 Dressed to Kill (recorded off LMN on 01/12) - This was actually decent - the head assistant(?) (recent Lifetime staple Brianna Cohen) at a boutique fashion house is named the successor by the mean fashion head (Suzanne R. Neff) over the woman's even meaner daughter (Annie Sullivan, effective in the role because you just want to *slap* her!). Then the fashion head ends up dead! And the cops think Cohen's character did it!!
    The main problem here? - Despite them trying to throw red herrings at the audience, there is only one very obvious suspect (with a legitimate motive) here, and the movie goes with exactly *that* suspect at the end... So this is an OK thriller, but it really shouldn't keep you guessing.
 The Lies We Bury (LMN) - This was actually a pretty good thriller, because I had no idea where it was going.
    The film's opening is set in 1996, where a convenience store clerk is stalked and murdered by 3 masked perps (two men and a woman).
    In the present day, a young new lawyer (Kyla Nova) takes a job with an old small-town lawyer (Brian Childers) to stay in town with her widowed mom (Lindsay Hartley, who also directs and co-wrote the script which seems to based on a book) - the old lawyer has collected cold cases over the years, and the new lawyer becomes fascinated with the convenience store murder case from 1996, becoming convinced that the woman who confessed to the crime isn't the real killer.
    Of course, soon enough, everyone in town seems set upon shutting the new lawyer up and getting her off this case. Threats, chases, and wackiness ensues!
    This one kept me guessing, though perhaps it shouldn't - the casting of Dee Wallace [Stone] probably should have been the big hint!
  What did you watch?
 

I watched:
Severance (AppleTV+) "Hello, Ms. Cobel" - Season 2, episode 1, and only 3 years since the last season.  But I'm not going to harp on that. Season 2 picks up with Mark (Adam Scott) back at work and of course no idea how he got there or what happened after he and his coworkers successfully revolted at the end of last season.  His boss tells him he and the coworkers are now celebrities on the outside world, but that Mark's outside self begged to be let back in.  Of course, neither Mark nor the viewers have any way of knowing if any of this is true or not. And in fact from what we can it all appears to be nothing but lies, but Mark can't know/prove that.  At first Mark is told his other coworkers quit and he's given new coworkers, but after protesting the old workers are back.  This episode, by design, is impossible to follow.  Not because the plot is confusing, it's all very straightforward.  It's just Mark and viewers are constantly being told things that are almost certainly false, but there's no way to independently verify they are lies.  One of the most glaring examples is when Mark is told everyone else quit, yet they were back with no explanation how.  There was also a funny new orientation video for the employees that talked about all the new rights and rewards they won for themselves, but in reality was a whole lot of nothing.  I should also mention Mark has a new supervisor played by a young girl.  Child labor laws aside, now they are doing the process to children?
Sunset Boulevard (TCM) 1950 movie directed by Billy Wilder and starring William Holden as a down on his luck Hollywood screenwriter who while trying to evade having his car repossessed finds himself hiding out at the estate of a very rich former silent film star (Gloria Swanson).  The aging star has delusions of current fame and manipulates Holden into moving in with her to rewrite a screenplay she wrote.  Holden desperately needs the money and tolerates her nonsense.  The movie follows the two as they have their ups and downs, with very minor ups, and a huge down for both of them.  I never saw this movie before now. It was pretty good.  I did notice Holden's character in this movie was very similar to his character in "The Bridge on the River Kwai."  And while I only saw it once, and don't remember it all that well, wasn't Holden playing the same character in Stalag 17 too?  I'm not sure if he just plays himself in all his movies or he was directed to act that way.