We watched the first two episodes of the recent season 2 of Loki and were utterly bored out of our minds. I was determined to finish the season since it's short and the last one but with the long Thanksgiving weekend away from out living room, I don't see that happening. There was just a lot of explaining of plot stuff that I didn't care about any more because of the long break from the previous season and our general no longer giving of a shit of Marvel. Oh well.
The recent season The Morning Show was quite... something. It's one of those shows that "objectively" is actually rather bad, but I enjoy it. It's pure stupid soap opera at this point and Jon Hamm's "what if Elon Musk but sexy" character was absolutely absurd. I would still strongly recommend the first season of that show to anyone but after that... *blows raspberry*
New season of For All Mankind is getting mixed-to-negative reviews as it fulfill the pattern of a Ronald D. Moore show starting strong than petering out (Battlestar Galactica and Outlander say hello). As with Morning Show, it might have exhausted the larger themes and plot past the point of interest which then pushes the interpersonal drama from something interesting into soap opera cheese. With Mankind, I think now that they're on Mars I dunno how much further they can go to make it interesting in terms of speculative "hard" sci-fi, which made the show so interesting. But I'll still watch the season despite my reservations.
The Curse is the new psycho-mindf*** cringe masterpiece from Nathan Fielder and lemme tell you... if you like his whole schtick, this show is for you and if not, run away. Now me- yeah, I'm a fan. A huge fan. Nathan For You was great and I still think about that insane episode of The Rehearsal where he was like sort of married but not all the time. The Curse is fully fiction and scripted though and he got Emma Stone who, I gotta say, is maybe my favorite actress alive. She also has been doing hilarious stunt promotion with Fielder (i.e., their deliberately uncomfortable Jimmy Kimmel appearance) and call me a sucker but this whole thing is exactly my jam.
The premise is a gentrifying HGTV couple trying to earnestly ingratiate themselves with the economically declining native populations while also glorifying themselves with fame and fortune all through the lens of their f'd up marriage. My favorite details are things like when a John Carpenter like soundtrack swells while they are discussing intimate issues. Truly horrifying. My wife suffered through the first episode and will not watch any more. It gets my very highest recommendation as the best TV show of 2023.