September media diet

TV

And Just Like That…, S1 & S2 — Max | I didn’t realize I missed Carrie Bradshaw and friends until my Carey and I finally started watching this series, which came out in 2021, 23 years after the original. Kim Cattrall didn’t sign on, but they found new friends, the jokes still land more than half the time, and the fashion and New York City are as gorgeous as ever.

Physical, S3 - Apple TV | This Rose Byrne dramedy regressed a bit in its final season. Still a solid 80’s soundtrack, big hair and great tights, but the series finale was a dud. Jumped ahead five years and the writer’s room couldn’t think of anything better to conclude with than: Let go of your demons, keep dancing, and you’ll be fine.

Ragnarock, S3 — Netflix | Hoo boy, this Norwegian show that I really liked for two seasons really just “spit the bit” in season 3, as an old horseman would say. The premise was reminiscent of the genius “high school as a hellmouth” theme of one of my all-time favorites, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But Norse mythology didn’t lend itself as elegantly to that template, I guess, and so we’re left with a muddy mess by series end.

Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the New York Jets — Max | Given how Aaron Rodgers’ season with the Jets ended before it truly began, I feel bad for what I initially wrote about this show earlier this month, which was: Aaron Rodgers under center for the J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets will either be the No. 1 story of the NFL season or the biggest waste of money since…. Russell Wilson to the Denver Broncos last year? The team did a good job hamming it up for HBO’s cameras though, and narrator Liev Schreiber made an actual appearance in Florham Park, N.J.!


Reservation Dogs, S3 - Hulu | Took a while for this Sterlin Harjo/Taika Waititi series to find its stride in its final season, but the storytelling starting with episode 8 ranks it among the best dramatic comedies I’ve ever watched. It does what only the best television shows or movies can do — transports viewers to a place most of them will never be and makes them feel what it’s like to live there.  

Books

The Exchange by John Grisham | Thirty-two years after “The Firm” launched his career as a legal novelist who churns out bestselling books that inevitably become movies, John Grisham returns with a sequel starring Mitch McDeere. Set about 15 years after “The Firm,” McDeere is now a high-powered partner at the world’s largest law firm, living a very privileged life in Manhattan until a London-based colleague gets kidnapped in Libya while assigned to one of his cases. My AP review.

Holly by Stephen King | The horror master reveals just how depraved retired college professors can be! The title character is a private investigator he’s been featuring in lots of books/stories lately — part autistic and socially awkward, but those character “flaws” make her a dogged detective! My AP review.

Nineteen Steps by Millie Bobbie Brown | The young woman who plays Eleven on “Stranger Things” wrote a book! It’s based on stories her grandmother told her about the bombing of London by the Germans in WWII. Touching enough, but not going to win any writing awards. My AP review.

Leslie F*cking Jones by Leslie Jones | The comic who found late-career success on “SNL” and as NBC’s No. 1 Olympics fan on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, wrote a memoir about her messed-up childhood and itinerant life as a standup comic on the road, but she’s not looking for pity. She just wants readers to associate her with one word: Undeniable. My AP review.

The Night House by Jo Nesbø | Norwegian crime writer pens a fantasy/horror novel, but with a twist. The bulk of the story is like an HP Lovecraft tale with a boy-eating phone booth and a kid who turns into a cockroach, but it turns out the narrator is super unreliable and the real “story” is about his personal trauma and how he’s processing it. My AP review.

Movies

Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game - Amazon | When you give Carey control of the remote, this is the kind of thing you end up watching for 92 minutes. Not uninteresting, necessarily, but there are other ways to spend an hour and a half. Fascinating history of pinball as a wartime amusement and the industry’s corruption by the mafia though!