What Else Have I Been Up To? TV, Part II

We started talking TV over here at Part I.

This here is Part II.

I also forgot to mention:

Fargo on FX, which I tuned in to out of morbid curiosity.  It seemed pretty ballsy to make a show that would have been compared to the astoundingly good feature film namesake, but I wound up feeling the show knocked it out of the park (even if the finale had some unsatisfactory moments).

And it gave us Allison Tolman, for which we should all be grateful.

Pretty sure she left her keys around here somewhere

The structure doesn't lend itself to a second season with the same characters (kind of like True Detective), but if it's a solid noir seasonal-anthology show they're presenting, it's one I'm happy to continue to watch.  Still, I'll miss Martin Freeman and Billy Bob Thornton in his best role in a decade.

We also watched Orphan Black, which had a strong first season, but by end of Season 2, the show had gone to that place so many sci-fi shows go to, where alliances are being made that seem to fly in the face of everything we know and the grasp of the show's scope moves beyond the reach of the creatives.  But it is absolutely fascinating to see actress Tatiana Maslany perform multiple different roles every episode.  She's the decathlete of acting.

Drunk History continues to entertain, educate and make you wonder why you weren't smart enough (or well connected enough) to pull that idea off.  Really, a terrific show that understands the best way to get into history is to relate it as a series of crazy stories.  And, that we're all better story tellers after our fifth drink of the evening.  Add in the sequences of drunk locals expounding upon the finer qualities of their home city, and you got yourself a good show.

American Horror Story is nowhere as good as people say it is and definitely not as good as it thinks it is.

I also caught a few episodes of Black Jesus, and that was pretty amazing.

I'll cop to watching Finding Bigfoot way too often in the past year, because I like watching yokels lost in the woods, especially being shepherded by an eye-rolling biologist.  And I'll cop to watching River Monsters.  The RiffTrax guys have been on NatGeo twice in the last year riffing NatGeo's own crummier programming.  It is positively surreal.

And, y'all, if you haven't seen it, I can't really find words to describe it, but The Spoils of Babylon is streaming on Netflix, and it is everything I could want in a TV program.



and each section is introduced by Eric Jonrosch, who is exactly how I will be in about 15 years or less.