sorry but I couldn’t help thinking of

The cold open shows the cooler snapping shut, the insinuation being that the octopus killed the staff and then stowed itself away in the cooler.

I really enjoyed this one - it leans on very familiar types and then does the work to make the characters realistically juvenile in ways that complicate those types. And the ambiguity of who is responsible for the magic was capably handled.

We don’t see it leave Zara’s hand, just her arm swinging in the background. Jasmine obscures the shot in the foreground.

After Dexter I can’t really fault Showtime for making unremittingly shitty shows, it’s gotten them to where they are now.

Watch the original Penny Dreadful! It was fun camp, as opposed to whatever this is supposed to be.

Also it’s apparent they have a lot of cash to blow on set design, but having your professional busker (??) live in the ultramodern apartment from About A Boy is... a choice, even when she’s living with family.

This was easily the worst of the bunch. Slack AND obvious, and unlike the Peele-written “Downtime”, the episode doesn’t lean into its absurdity to create an off-kilter vibe. There’s no element of humor - even in the “tense” driving scene, where the truck is veering all over the road and the heroine is careening around…

It’s interesting to think about the opening joke as being dreamlike, it struck me as being extremely writerly and awkward (not as performed, the actor makes it seem natural as dialogue, it’s just kind of... immersion breaking).

The listing on the AVC main site doesn’t line up with what’s been reviewed so far either, something has clearly gone weird:

The more I think about it the more it even seems like the racial tension aspects of the show, which should be giving it life, feel perfunctory. I feel like it’s going through the motions, and Tiago isn’t a solid enough figure to represent the proverbial Borderlands on behalf of the show.

I’m just not connecting with this show. Part of it is that I have no great affection for Ellroy-style LA noir (or the orange tinting it demands of cameras). I didn’t have a ton of love for specifically Victorian English gothic either, but the original Penny Dreadful worked because of its game cast and how they played…

I want to say it’s a Richard Matheson short story, which tracks, as he wrote a lot of iconic TZ episodes.

There are a lot of books of his that he doesn’t like, in retrospect, either because he was too fucked up when writing them (The Tommyknockers) or because the experimentation he was doing didn’t produce the effect he wanted (Insomnia). But Pet Sematary is his least favorite novel because the ending is so bleak.

I’m rereading Desperation right now (holds up weirdly well, King doing McCarthy is... something) and he had that even in his more savage books. There’s some strained patter between unlikely duos (I loved that as a kid, though) and some scenes of both argument and celebration that are like, really? Now? You’re going to…

Really, one consistent thing about successful King adaptations (as discussed at length by THE LOSERS CLUB A STEPHEN KING PODCAST) is that they tend to lean away from his sometimes dissonant, almost always corny sense of humor. Like a big reason why King’s shot at a televised Shining didn’t work is because the ghosts…

They put the adaptation several stars over the book simply by having Holly refrain from describing anything as “poopy”. She was still somewhat magical, but the performance was good. All the performances were good.

It is a little bit strange that in the era of algorithm-driven decisions on show life / death at places like Netflix, Showtime’s willingness to let its shows coast for years on meager creative juice ended up being kind of endearing.

I’m curious to how Holly’s handled. I split from the writer here in that I find Holly one of King’s worst characters, like a scapegoat upon whom King foists all of his latter-era baby talk / language tics and his sentimentality, plus a dash of Rain Man.

The stench of greatness does not typically linger