Rumor has it I haven’t done one of these what have I been watching on TV posts in quite a while, so let’s do a bit of catching up here on this Friday evening, shall we?
Voltron – Legendary Defender (Netflix)
I think I was cautiously excited about this latest reboot of my beloved Voltron when I heard the news that Netflix was going to take a stab at it because quite frankly, I’ve watched bits and pieces of the one that ran on Nicktoons and I wasn’t impressed.
Legendary Defender, however, turned out to be a great re-imagining of this classic story while adding plenty of new flavor and a whole lot of fun, too. Hands down, Rhys Darby takes the cake with his hilarious role as Coran … it’s literally like how you would imagine Murray from Flight of the Conchords if he were promoted to be the advisor to the Voltron force, and it’s wonderful. I think in a lot of ways, his over the top comedy style helped make the show more watchable for me as an adult when admittedly if you look back on the old version I watched as a kid, I truly adored the lions and the assembly of Voltron, but pretty much everything else in between was very repetitive and boring…
Which was another surprising thing about Voltron: Legendary Defender because I was really impressed about how well thought out the storylines seemed to be throughout the season, and even leading into potential new seasons to come. One of the early Coran quotes that got a chuckle out of me went something like, “You need to be able to form Voltron over and over again – until you can do it in your sleep!” just because the old show was so formulaic … short story arc, meet robeast, fight it with the lions, form Voltron, end credits … whereas this version had a couple of episodes where I don’t think they even got around to forming Voltron because it didn’t fit with the larger story.
Anyhow, really good start and I look forward to seeing what they do next with season two. And if they manage to somehow sneak in the epic assembly anthem that we all associate with forming Voltron, then I’d dare say that the series will then be truly unstoppable! 😉
The Night Manager (BBC)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYXsYSvmilE
This was one that I admittedly stumbled upon quite by accident, but I didn’t want to get started on it knowing that the episode on the screen was like 3 of 6 and it seemed just intriguing enough to watch from the very beginning…
And good god, was I right! It was really neat to see both of these guys in two very different roles after having mainly known them from playing House and Loki … particularly, it was hard at first to picture Hugh Laurie as a villain, but man did he just have it seeping from him by the time all was said and done. It’s funny, too, because after the short clip mid-series that I saw, I actually thought that the plot was going a completely different direction, so it’s really important to start from the very beginning. But it was good, and it would’ve been really hard to watch this thing through one episode a week because we plowed through all six episodes in two nights.
Silicon Valley (HBO)
Silicon Valley has kind of been up and down for me because it’s almost like watching The Office when you work in an office where the jokes are funny, but you also think, “Oh my god, I just had to deal with something like that last week…” – like the conflicts between the sales and the engineering teams, or the company deciding that it’s more profitable for them to fire people than it is to actually drive their business forward…
Still, I do love the characters on the home team and they’ve always got some bizarre riff that makes it worth enduring all of the business failures along the way … I think half the fun alone comes from watching Gilfoyle and Dinesh go at each other all day. 🙂
Marvel’s Agent’s of SHIELD (ABC)
Admittedly we haven’t been watching this from the get-go, but more so decided to give it another shot and then quickly got sucked in after watched both Agent Carter and Jessica Jones. When I first heard of the concept long before ever watching an episode, I didn’t think I’d really care about all of the other SHIELD agents who aren’t superheroes, but Clark Gregg is pretty much made to play that character and it’s pretty impressive how he brings this new team together to drive a powerful storyline that does a surprising job of complimenting the events of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as they’re taking place, but without the need for the high budgets that would come from having somebody like Captain America or Iron Man make a guest appearance!
Lots of twists, though some (like Grant turning evil or Fitz’s trauma) I wasn’t really a fan of, but the story was engaging right through the whole SHIELD is Hydra debacle (that I really hated, BTW) and I hope that ABC doesn’t stuff it in the corner and instead sees fit to let them continue on with the story for more seasons to come.
Unlike Agent Carter, which got cancelled recently but I think we’re all still pulling for to get resurrected for another season… 😛