The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Bosch: Legacy, season 3

TV #19 of 2025:

Bosch: Legacy, season 3

Bosch isn’t exactly a great TV show, but it goes out about as solidly competent a mid-tier crime drama as ever. Technically, of course, this isn’t even Bosch but its successor program Bosch: Legacy, although the distinction between the two has never been as clear-cut as I’d like. It’s not quite the end for the long-running Amazon Prime franchise, either — the final episode functions as a backdoor pilot by introducing the character of Renée Ballard, who has her own spinoff launching this summer. The trailers have confirmed that Harry Bosch will make at least a cameo appearance in that, though the two characters probably won’t collaborate as closely as they do in the relevant Michael Connelly novels.

Here and now it’s a sendoff for Harry and his supporting team, assuming they won’t pop up on Ballard as well. The season starts with the former detective under investigation for arranging the murder of a certain inmate, and he’s operated in legal gray areas for so long that it’s an open question whether he did it or not. That’s by far the most interesting story of the year, but it’s bolstered by the typical assortment of subplots, this time drawn in part from the books The Black Ice and Desert Star (concerning the Mexican drug trade and the mysterious disappearance of an entire family, respectively). In terms of new material for the screen, we also get Maddie investigating a string of armed robberies that winds up having a personal connection with her partner, and Honey Chandler running for District Attorney and then dealing with the subsequent fallout after the election.

In the end, Harry catches his perps as usual, even teaming up with Renée to solve a cold case that’s lingered under his skin since sometime on the original series. It’s a feel-good conclusion for the main hero, but no one else in the cast gets much in the way of any such resolution. In fact, there are a few threads that I imagine will seem unsatisfyingly open if they don’t get picked up in the next title, in particular Chandler looking into the matter of a corrupt city councilman. But overall, this is as reasonable a place as any to leave everyone, I guess. It’s just a shame they couldn’t get the rights for a proper crossover with Netflix’s Lincoln Laywer, whose lead is Bosch’s half-brother in the books.

[Content warning for gun violence, drug abuse, violence against children, suicide, and gore.]

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 2 > 3 > 1

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/lesserjoke
–Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

Movie Review: Babylon 5: Thirdspace (1998)

Movie #3 of 2025:

Babylon 5: Thirdspace (1998)

This TV movie aired during the middle of Babylon 5‘s fifth/final season, but I’ve chosen to watch it where it apparently falls in continuity, which is immediately after episode 4×8 “The Illusion of Truth.” I’m satisfied with that decision, but in all honesty, this is such a standalone story that it probably could be taken up anytime following the end of the Vorlon/Shadow War. It’s so self-contained, in fact, that I think it would work even for franchise newcomers, so long as they don’t mind a few minor spoilers that would be conveyed in passing.

And overall, I like it! I’ve had mixed feelings about the effectiveness of the main series (and the original TV film pilot The Gathering), but this feels like the production firing on all cylinders for what’s basically a feature-length episode. The regular cast isn’t all present, but the absences are generally unremarkable, especially since individual characters do often sit out for a week here and there regardless. I saw other reviews complaining that the climax is just a big action spectacle — in contrast to the more cerebral character-driven drama of the show, I guess — but sometimes, that’s what you need to get the job done. It’s no worse than what the TNG movies did with Picard, really.

As for the plot, it’s a lot of fun. This is a mode of sci-fi horror that I tend to enjoy, where some strange alien artifact is encountered that starts driving everybody crazy. In this case, it’s an ancient device which seems intended to access the alternate dimension of the title, a theoretical realm that could allow even faster travel than hyperspace (the already discovered “secondspace” alongside our own normal reality). Unfortunately, it turns out that that area is populated by an inscrutable but hostile intelligence that soon sends out its malign influence onto the people of the Babylon 5 station, with telepaths like Lyta proving the first to fall susceptible.

If you know the subgenre or have seen examples like Event Horizon, the beats that follow shouldn’t be too surprising. Everyone gets a bit manic, and the heroes struggle to hold onto their sanity amid the ensuing mayhem and sabotage before ultimately finding a way to shut the door on the Lovecraftian nightmare. But it’s all well-deployed, with the right amount left to our imaginations rather than attempted with the available budget. Will it be funny when these events are never mentioned again in episode 4×9 and beyond? Perhaps a little, yeah. But that’s the nature of the beast with quasi-serialized television anyway.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Matlock, season 1

TV #18 of 2025:

Matlock, season 1

Look, was there any pressing need for a modern reboot of Matlock, that 80s/90s procedural about the elderly lawyer perpetually underestimated for his age and folksy ways? Of course not. But if you’re a CBS executive who’s going to greenlight that project anyway, you could do worse than making it a gender-swapped version starring Kathy Bates and turning it over to showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman, creator of Jane the Virgin. In her hands, the premise gains an additional twist revealed at the end of its first episode: the protagonist is not just an old attorney coming out of retirement at a new law firm, but — spoiler alert! — a woman on a mission to uncover a specific act of malfeasance from decades ago that she holds responsible for a death in the family. Her employers used to represent an opioid manufacturer, you see, and someone on the team apparently hid evidence that would have taken the products off the market well before her daughter ever got addicted and overdosed.

It’s a somber background, but what ensues is a fun cat-and-mouse game as Matty snoops around the office building looking for clues and trying not to get caught in the steadily-mounting lies surrounding her cover identity. That aspect plays nicely against the episodic case-of-the-week plot structure, adding a serialized momentum to enliven those proceedings that might otherwise feel a bit pat. (To its detriment, the show does engage in a lot of audience hand-holding in terms of its big dramatic reveals and explanatory flashbacks. It’s the one element I hope gets workshopped and scaled down going forward.)

By the time the credits roll on the finale, our heroine has identified her culprit(s), but the question of how to use what she knows and what the future will look like after all the secrets have come to light is still pretty far from certain. Good thing the series has already been renewed for season 2!

★★★★☆

Book Review: Till Human Voices Wake Us by Victoria Goddard

Book #68 of 2025:

Till Human Voices Wake Us by Victoria Goddard

Published back in 2014, this was author Victoria Goddard’s debut novel — and unfortunately, it shows. There are a few neat ideas with interesting implications for the writer’s wider Nine Worlds saga, like how the empire of Astandalas originally fell, but it’s an odd piece overall that only hints at her eventual talents. I do think existing fans should seek it out at some point, but I know that if I had started my journey through her work here, I likely would have never continued any further.

It’s part of the basic premise and so not a spoiler, but the biggest revelation is that the setting of Ysthar, one of the titular linked realms in this fictional universe, is actually contemporary Earth. The worldbuilding here is pretty bare-bones, resembling Sandman or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen at best and a generic urban fantasy at worst, as the fantastical elements are restrained and unnoticed by all regular people. Although there are magical folks like the main characters, they’re a very small community whose membership mostly entails a preternaturally extended lifespan. Thus the protagonist’s friends include William Shakespeare and Scheherazade under modern pseudonyms, while he himself is later revealed to have been the mythical Orpheus. (He’s also an internationally famous movie star and the son of adventurers in the infamous Red Company, whose exploits are detailed elsewhere.)

A lot of these items represent impulses that Goddard has thankfully tempered as she’s matured in her writing, and they’re harder to swallow in the rough form herein. Too much is left oblique, especially concerning the centuries-long contest that the hero is locked into with his mortal foe Circe. We don’t really get a good sense of the game or its rules, which means we likewise don’t have the proper context for when those get broken. It sure feels as though the ramifications should be dire, but like many things about this story, that’s presented vaguely and ultimately kept unexplained. Meanwhile, in lieu of any thoughtfully-constructed cultural diversity, we’re given heavy Christian overtones in a divine messenger named Gabriel and an arch-enemy of God who used to be an angel called the Morning Star before he fell.

The emotional aspect is handled better. Raphael is a clear prototype of a sort of figure Goddard writes frequently: the soul suffering its traumas in lonely silence, yearning for the catharsis that estranged relations could provide but unable to muster the courage to ask them for it. Nobody in the mage’s life even knows that he’s secretly the grand Lord of Ysthar, responsible for keeping the world’s magic on track, and he’s withdrawn into himself so gradually that by the time they recognize it, no one seems able to bridge the divide. The surprise arrival of his long-lost brother helps kickstart a process to eventually fix that, and the back half of the text (after an anticlimactic apparent end to the deadly peril midway through) is all about him slowly learning to voice his problems and let them go.

It’s nice for the most part, and if you’re a reader who coasts on vibes, I imagine you might appreciate it more than I have. But having seen a similar atmosphere applied to a stronger plot framework and more distinctive / coherent fantasy trappings in works like The Hands of The Emperor, this title is a definite second fiddle.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Abbott Elementary, season 4

TV #17 of 2025:

Abbott Elementary, season 4

As most sitcoms tend to do over time, this series has by now settled into a comfortable rhythm as a hangout watch. Viewers can tune in for a dose of the familiar characters and their banter, but not have to worry too much about any larger plot issues that will disrupt the status quo. The biggest change in this iteration is that the previous finale finally brought its central ‘will they / won’t they’ characters together, and this year quickly signals that although they’ll have their healthy share of disagreements, the program isn’t especially interested in any major drama that would break them up again. Like Jim and Pam (or Leslie and Ben, or Santiago and Peralta, etc.), Janine and Gregory feel instead like a permanent coupling that the usual episodic structure has to shift only slightly to accommodate. If this show runs for long enough, we’ll presumably see a marriage and kids in their future.

Other alterations are even more minor, like Melissa adopting a pet guinea pig, while the big running subplot is the construction of a golf course nearby, leading to some off-the-books donations of fancy new materials from its wealthy donors to placate their teacher neighbors (and subsequent hot water when the school district finds out about the so-called bribes). It’s fine, but fairly low stakes — even when Ava is ousted from her principal position, there’s no real sense that she won’t be right back there in a few episodes, fun as it is to see Gregory as her interim replacement. It’s like those times when Michael Scott stopped being the manager on The Office, but with even less follow-through.

These are nitpicks, to be clear. This is still a funny half-hour that I enjoy watching from week to week! The commitment to showcasing a majority-Black cast and an inner-city Philly location remains commendable, and the writers manage the tricky tonal match here of a crossover with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is a pretty different beast. I’d even say this season is a step up from the one before, which aimed for a more complicated split time arrangement with Janine at the district that it ultimately struggled to pull off. Nevertheless, it does seem as though the shine has come off Abbott at this point.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee

Book #67 of 2025:

Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee

I loved Pachinko, but for some reason it took me a long time to circle back around to check out this earlier volume, author Min Jin Lee’s debut. As it turns out, I like this one even better; there’s the same great grasp of character in a slightly sprawling cast, but a more constrained time period, following the core protagonist throughout her twenties rather than a whole family across multiple generations. Thus we see the heroine graduate college and somewhat aimlessly enter the workforce, juggling heartache and other personal drama alongside her uncertainty about a future profession.

The plot shape is more of a bildungsroman than anything else, though the novel drifts as it goes along to cover not just Casey, but some of her friends and close relations too. Most of these viewpoint figures are first- or second-generation Korean Americans like the writer, and all carry a unique perspective, particularly with regard to how their race and gender identities intersect with expected notions of upward mobility and familial obligation.

Still, there’s not much of a story here, only a string of infidelities, job losses, and similar such small tragedies of an ordinary life. The shopaholic young woman at the center can be frustrating for her steadily-mounting debt from living so far above her means, but it’s a well-drawn flaw that introduces some nice tensions and conflicts, especially as juxtaposed opposite the rich folk of the title — those who take and take when they already have everything, leaving less behind for the people truly in need. Against that backdrop, the working-class characters struggle to get by and earn a modicum of grace, and it’s all rather beautifully wrought. Although I do think the work would have benefited from a firmer structure and more of a conclusion at the end, I’ve really enjoyed my time with this ensemble.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, racism, and rape.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: The Bear, season 3

TV #16 of 2025:

The Bear, season 3

In an odd way, The Bear the TV series seems to be following the same arc as The Bear the titular gentrified restaurant, growing increasingly artsy and experimental as it goes along. How else to account for the first episode of this latest season, which is basically one long stream-of-consciousness montage with barely any dialogue? Much like the pretentious fine dining that it depicts, it’s a product that is simultaneously impressively constructed and, for me at least, somewhat unappetizing to actually consume. I don’t think I’d like to eat at an establishment like The Bear in person. I certainly don’t want to watch shows that are so avant-garde on my television.

Sometimes, the more exploratory approach pays off. Two of the ten installments this year are excellent — “Napkins” about Tina’s professional backstory and “Ice Chips” about Natalie’s experience in the hospital with her mother — and although neither is quite on the level of last season‘s epic family showdown “Fishes,” they gain a similar power by digging into the central characters so deeply. Too often, however, we have protagonists who are stuck in the holding pattern of a toxic work environment, amid an episodic structure that regularly denies us any sense of conventional plot rhythm or satisfying resolution. The finale even turns the program over to almost a dozen real-life celebrity chefs for extended cameos, while giving its nominal hero Carmy no significant scenes with either Richie or Sydney, whose interpersonal conflicts are instead left simmering.

Also, it must be said: way too many Faks. Their affable quirks can be hilarious in small doses, but the balance is off here and John Cena is staggeringly miscast as yet another member of that clan. Less of them all going forward, please.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Daredevil: Born Again, season 1

TV #15 of 2025:

Daredevil: Born Again, season 1

Even for Marvel, this is a wildly uneven show, although the tonal clashes make sense when you know a little about the production process behind it. As a sequel to the Daredevil series that originally ran on Netflix from 2015 to 2018, this revival brings back stars Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio, who had already reprised their respective characters of the blind vigilante and his enemy Wilson Fisk in a handful of other MCU properties in the meantime. However, the studio was apparently dissatisfied with the early look of this new program, and took the rare step during the pause brought on by the 2023 Hollywood labor strikes to overhaul its creative direction. The showrunners were fired and replaced, but — crucially — the decision was made to retain most of the material that had already been filmed. The result is that the first two episodes and the finale of this season were conceived and shot later, while the six entries in between were merely tweaked with a few additional scenes or edits to ensure surface continuity.

It’s a Frankensteined product with a lot of the seams showing, though oddly in line with the ‘Born Again’ title (which as I understand it was the name of a completely unrelated storyline from the DD comics). The middle segments are somewhat lighter in tone and structured more like a legal procedural — which to be fair is a genre that I enjoy! But the effort is stuck in this unfortunate position where it’s too close to what viewers remember of the older show to be taken wholly as its own thing, yet too different to satisfy on that front either. The change to the supporting cast is part of the problem, but it isn’t the new faces alone; it’s that the new characters and their relationships with Matt Murdock aren’t explored to any significant depth, while the people who share a known history with him are largely reduced to cameo appearances.

It does still work, more or less. This isn’t a bad show! It’s just missing that quintessential element for consistent greatness. The bookends from the newer team are a definite pivot in the right direction, and since a second season entirely under their control has already been greenlit, I expect it to improve on what they’ve started here. Kingpin as the mayor of New York City is also a solid plot, with unexpected resonance to Donald Trump’s own return to power, as is the real-life phenomenon of police officers co-opting the Punisher image for their own brand of corrupt ‘thin blue line’ machismo. Those items, the overall darker turn, and the deeper character dynamics are exactly what I’m hoping to see more of going forward.

[Content warning for gun violence, police violence, torture, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

Book Review: Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister

Book #66 of 2025:

Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister

Two-out-of-five stars might seem a bit harsh for this novel, which is mostly more like a three-star read up until the end. Unfortunately, that closing section is saddled with a sequence of twists that are so inane, they wind up tanking the whole enterprise for me. I won’t spoil them here, except to say that no, that isn’t a reasonable thing a person would do to send a message to someone, nor is it a secret that could remotely be deciphered and understood in the manner described. It’s very Dan Brown, and I mean that in the most derogatory way possible.

The earlier book is already shaky, to be clear. The initial premise is interesting enough: a woman learns that her husband, a seemingly happy family man, has taken hostages in a police standoff at a warehouse across town. While she scrambles for answers and wonders if she ever truly knew him, he shoots two of the captives and vanishes. We then skip forward seven years, with the mystery continuing to hang over both her and the now-disgraced negotiator who failed to prevent the violence.

That could be a strong hook for a story about the secrets we keep from even our intimate partners, or how a lack of closure surrounding the trauma of betrayal can haunt someone, but it’s pretty obvious right away that there will be some explanation behind Luke’s actions to justify and exonerate him. Because of the time jump, however, he’s still the guy who abandoned his wife and nine-month-old daughter with no contact for the better part of a decade, and the narrative has no interest in exploring or holding him accountable for that. Even if he’s entirely blameless for the original crimes, his running itself is a terrible flaw that demands a reckoning but gets basically shrugged off instead.

I kept reading to see how it all would resolve, and if the conclusion had delivered more satisfyingly, I probably would have gone up another star in my rating. But this is ultimately a forgettable thriller with a hokey and contrived ending, and that earns the Goodreads two-star “it was ok” in my opinion.

★★☆☆☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

Book Review: Men Have Called Her Crazy by Anna Marie Tendler

Book #65 of 2025:

Men Have Called Her Crazy by Anna Marie Tendler

All I really knew about this memoir before picking it up was that its author Anna Marie Tendler was the comedian John Mulaney‘s ex-wife. That caught my attention less in hopes of learning salacious details about their separation and more for the broad feeling that having heard him discuss their relationship in his stand-up routines, it would only be fair to seek out her side of the story. As it happens, that’s very much not the point of this book, but even taking it on its own terms, I’m pretty ambivalent about it as a finished product.

The immediate hook is the writer voluntarily checking herself into a psychiatric hospital in early 2021 for a 30-day program to help with her self-harm, disordered eating, and suicidal ideation. Structurally, the text then bounces back and forth between her experiences there and her life leading up to it, and the passages in both sections are well-observed and clearly written. Yet as a reader, I felt as though the sequences in the past would be building to some terrible trauma that precipitated the current crisis — and one presumably involving men, given both the title of the work and her insistence upon check-in that she needed to be in a female-only ward. That never manifests, however, perhaps to give her former husband a degree of privacy: in addition to omitting his name and career (beyond the vague acknowledgment that its earnings supported her art), she cuts off the earlier narrative in 2013, which the internet tells me is one year before they got married.

The result is oddly unbalanced. If the personal history is supposed to contextualize her subsequent struggles, why are we missing nearly everything she got up to across those last eight years? I also don’t think Tendler succesfully makes the case that she’s been uniquely abused by the male figures in her life; although there were older men who acted inappropriately towards her as a teen (including sexual encounters she viewed as consensual at the time but later recognized as coercive), the worst actors she highlights here all seem to be women, from her emotionally abusive mother to a gaslighting therapist to a photoshoot director who screamed at her over nothing. I’m open to the argument that these dynamics were negatively influenced by the patriarchy or that I’m not the most objective reviewer as a man myself, but I don’t believe the volume truly lives up to its apparent thesis. (Or its name! On a literal level, she openly acknowledges being mentally unwell and seeking treatment for it. That’s not a label unfairly placed upon her by anyone of any gender.)

But the writing is good — the author’s description of having to euthanize her beloved dog Petunia is particularly moving — and the inside look at her neuroses and in-patient routine is interesting enough, I suppose. I wouldn’t say the whole thing is a wash, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, either.

★★★☆☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog