Watching Television Week 37 of 2018

As I began gathering the list of shows I watched last week I saw that the Emmys were on and while I had no intention of watching I did check in to see how the shows I’ve watched over the past year have done.

Of course Game of Thrones won a couple awards including Best Drama Series and Best Supporting Actor for Peter Dinklage, it’s just too bad it seems like the last episode of that show was years ago. Another big show that I really enjoyed won 3 awards – The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. Darren Criss was great in the series and took home the award and Ryan Murphy grabbed the director award for a limited series.

The big winner of the night though was Amazon’s Marvelous Mrs. Maisel which took home 5 of the comedy awards. I haven’t begun watching this show but it is on my list, and now it’s on my short list since apparently a lot of people think its good.

Matthew Rhys won Best Actor for a Drama series for The Americans and I think he definitely deserved it for a final season that was incredible, and Thandie Newton took the award for Best Actress in a Drama for Westworld.

In all, I’m pretty pleased to see that the shows I enjoy are being rewarded with awards. It makes me think I’m actually watching shows that, while they might not be the most popular, are well regarded.

Favorites from Week 37 of 2018

• Venture Brothers: season 7, episode 6 – The Bellicose Proxy
  This was a great episode that allowed the Monarch to kinda get back into the arching of Dr. Venture by mentoring Augustus St. Cloud. St. Cloud is going on his first arch and he’s been given Billy Quizboy and Pete White as nemeses. After getting his butt kicked by Billy’s mother, St. Cloud and Monarch eventually head to VenTech to take on Billy and of course Team Venture. As usual there’s a lot of development of the season’s story arc as Dr. Mrs. The Monarch tries to deal with The Peril Partnership and the pop culture references are hysterical – “Nobody refuses Dave Grohl! He got a Beatle to be in his band!”. This was definitely a fun watch.
• Better Call Saul: season 4, episode 6 – Pinata
  Ok, Saul hasn’t lost his touch and I think this was probably the best episode of the season thus far. Jimmy’s back in his nail salon, Kim’s blazing a trail as a lawyer and this time she’s gonna be a partner, and Ehrmantraut is using his mojo to get things set up for Gustavo’s warehouse. I enjoyed this episode and was happy to see things working well for everyone knowing that means there’s gonna be a fall soon.
• Breaking Bad: season 2 episode 10 – Over
  One thing that’s interesting is that I’m watching this show concurrently with Better Call Saul and they’re clearly set out of time from one another. IRL I know that BCS comes before Breaking Bad chronologically but the events I’m watching clearly are jumbled in time. And time is what Walter finds himself with in this episode. Now that his cancer is in remission he feels it’s time to give up the drug business and get legit. Then he spends most of the episode fixing up the house and I guess he contemplates how he’s gonna go back to the mundane chemistry teacher life now that the big events in his life are over. At the end of the episode though, when a competing cooker steps on his turf, he’s pulled back into the druglord life and defends his territory.

I tried to finally watch Sharknado and get it off my TiVo but after the first 10 minutes I figured my time would be better spent just deleting the show and moving on. There’s camp and then there’s Sharknado and it was just bad. If they come out with another one next year, I’ll probably give it a shot, but even during the 10 minutes I watched I kept expecting little robots to pop up on the bottom of the screen to make snarky comments.

TV – Watching Television Week 37 of 2018