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

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?