📺 Three episodes in, the third season of Slow Horses is the best one yet, and also the best live-action series I’ve seen this year (with a nod to Only Murders…). Fun fact: that theme song which sounds awfully lot like it was sung by Mick Jagger was sung by — Mick Jagger!

📺 The Great British Baking Show has punched up its competitors' affability this year, to the detriment of skill. It was the right tradeoff!

Side note: I have a hard time squaring Britain’s supposed decline with this show. If only other countries could decay so gracefully.

And the best one hour of anything I’ve seen this year just came out on YouTube: Kurzgesagt’s 4.5 Billion Years in 1 Hour video. Good television isn’t dead, but is it television?

The funniest 10 minutes of TV I saw this year was made in 1953. What on Earth happened to American television? (ᔥThe Scholar’s Stage)

It was better than the average Netflix series — which isn’t saying much — but also has a better than average time travel story line, so definitely recommended. The premise, which you get from the promo, is that the same dead body shows up in the same London alley in four different time periods; the following few bullet points have mild spoilers, so, caveat lector:

• In the way it deals with travel through time it most directly resembles Predestination (2014), and if I were to directly compare the two I would say that Bodies makes the point that both of them are attempting to make in a much better way, and adds a few more points that are as important if not more so.
• And yet there is still a plot hole, and of course the plot hole — as in Predestination — has to do with biology. Either writers of science fiction can’t quite grasp how chaotic life is, or are hoping that the general public doesn’t so that they can prove their point.
• You may think, as the story takes its second-to-last turn, that it poo-pooed its own premise, and I had this sinking feeling that we were in Back to the Future land, but this was ultimately unfounded. Whew.
• We are much further away from World War 2 than WW2 was from the Victorian period, and it is one thing to read about progress and stagnation and yet another to see what a person born in the 1870s–1880s experienced in their lifetime.
• There is mercifully little of the future in this series, but what little of it there is serves as an excellent example of humans being better at creating the future than imagining it.
• There is a “Deutsch particle” in Bodies, and it ties with Hofstadter’s Spiderverse… mention as my favorite meta/physical Easter egg, which is, admittedly, a rather narrow category.
• I haven’t read the graphic novel the show was based on, but I much preferred its stylistic choices in how it showed its roots than those that Watchmen (2009) or The Sandman (2022) took. However, Watchmen (2019) is still five heads and ten shoulders above everything else.

📺🎶 The soundtrack of Only Murders in the Building continues to be our commuting go-to. All of the faux-musical numbers are now available, and listening to our 11-year-old sing along to the tongue-twisting Pickwick Triplets… is beyond delightful.

📺 Season 3 of Only Murders in the Building was their best one yet; I wrote as much last week. Meryl Streep deserves all the awards, Martin Short was at his best, even Paul Rudd was tolerable. The mystery itself was better set up than last year’s, which had too many last-minute revelations for my taste.

If there is one nit to pick it is this: ever since Game of Thrones started going all-out in the second to last episode, actual season finales of many shows have become anti-climactic. The Afterparty is a much bigger offender there, but Murders… do suffer from the same ailment, especially since the last few episodes before the finale itself were so over-the-top good.

📺 Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake has more swearing, gore, death, despair, and general dreariness than the original run. In a way, it grew up with its audience, replacing childhood magic with metaverse mythologizing. Still more delightful than most, just not for my 4-year-old.

📺 Next week is the season finale of Only Murders in the Building and I will have my one-paragraph review up then, but I’d like to note now that regardless of how they end up wrapping it up it has been the best season of TV in recent memory for the sheer joy of it. The soundtrack of all 3 seasons makes for great tunes while at work, and the two Season 3 show songs are now mandatory listening on our drive to school. So much better than The Afterparty, but then, I do prefer the East coast.

Update: It ended up being two paragraphs.

📺 Season 2 of The Afterparty was uneven, with a couple of cinematic marvels wedged between a wimpy start and an oddly rushed last episode which seems to have been chopped off at the last minute from the penultimate. The Wes Anderson and Alfred Hitchcock homages in particular were worth bearing the first 60 minutes of Aniq awkwardness.