TV #46 of 2023: Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, season 1 Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. There’s a lot of things I enjoy about this unexpected Netflix revival, which aired in 2016 after the original WB/CW program ended in 2007. In a review at the time, I mentioned: “It really feels like ten years …
Continue reading “TV Review: Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, season 1”
TV #45 of 2023: Classic Doctor Who, season 8 The Third Doctor’s sophomore season leans into the strengths of the previous year, which showed how the venerable sci-fi program could adapt its time-traveling and space-hopping premise to an earthbound format, with the hero assisting the UNIT military forces fend off alien invasions. He’s now joined …
TV #44 of 2023: What We Do in the Shadows, season 5 Another delightfully funny season of this vampire comedy, and one that finally pulls the trigger on a long-mentioned possible direction for the show. (I’m trying, as ever, to avoid major spoilers in the space of a review.) Guillermo starts the year keeping a …
Continue reading “TV Review: What We Do in the Shadows, season 5”
TV #43 of 2023: Justified: City Primeval, season 1 This eight-episode miniseries roughly works as a standalone crime drama, but it doesn’t feel much like Justified. And by pedigree, it isn’t: it’s an adaptation of an unrelated Elmore Leonard novel, onto which Raylan Givens has been somewhat awkwardly grafted as a new protagonist for this …
Continue reading “TV Review: Justified: City Primeval, season 1”
Book #102 of 2023: Doctor Who: Doom’s Day: Four from Doom’s Day by Darren Jones Doom’s Day is a Doctor Who transmedia event, meaning an ongoing storyline that plays out across multiple different platforms, from comic books to video games to novels and beyond. Theoretically, each installment is self-contained enough that it can be enjoyed …
Continue reading “Book Review: Doctor Who: Doom’s Day: Four from Doom’s Day by Darren Jones”
Book #101 of 2023: Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale The neurodivergent heroine of this #ownvoices novel (published as The Cassandra Complex in author Holly Smale’s native UK) reminds me a lot of the titular character in Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine — a comparison which, not to spoil that book, had me dreading a …
Continue reading “Book Review: Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale”
TV #42 of 2023: Good Omens, season 2 This unexpected follow-up just about squeaks by on a character level, but it’s a far cry from either the previous season or the increasingly-distant source text of the hilarious original novel. To recap: that 1990 book by future showrunner Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett was …
Book #100 of 2023: The Clocks by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #39) This novel is a bit all over the place, and not just because the narrative switches back and forth between first-person and various third-person perspectives. Author Agatha Christie could write good mysteries and good spy thrillers, but she seems to run into trouble …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Clocks by Agatha Christie”
Book #99 of 2023: Light Bringer by Pierce Brown (Red Rising #6) Another thrilling installment of the sprawling Red Rising space opera, and although I still don’t think this sequel era quite matches the engaging fury that propelled the original trilogy, this is easily the finest of the later books yet (and a welcome step …
Continue reading “Book Review: Light Bringer by Pierce Brown”
Book #98 of 2023: Orion in the Dying Time by Ben Bova (Orion #3) This time-travel adventure sequel offers probably the most problematic of its saga’s dabbles in what the back of this book calls ‘speculative theology,’ taking as its premise the wild notion that the ancient Egyptian god Set is the same being as …
Continue reading “Book Review: Orion in the Dying Time by Ben Bova”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more