TV
Barry
The first season of the HBO series Barry ended last week and I’ll come right out and say it — Barry is the best new series of 2018 so far.
About a hitman of the same named played by Bill Hader, the character lives in Cleveland but winds up in Los Angeles to kill a wannabe actor who’s sleeping with a mob bosses wife. When the hit goes wrong and some of the bosses goons try and take out Barry but are gotten the better of, Barry ends up having to stay in L.A. to make up the hit but falls in with an acting class where he realizes he’d rather be an actor than a hit-man, even if he’s a much better hit-man than actor.
The tone of Barry is something that I don’t think I’ve seen before on TV, or even in the movies. At times the series is genuinely funny yet at other times it’s terrifying as Barry plies his trade or as others try and ply the same trade on him. The show never pulls its punches when it comes to the violence as it all feels very real, unlike what I would’ve expected Barry to be in what would seem to be a comedy. And the characters too range the gamut from mob underling NoHo (Anthony Carrigan) who’s got a man-crush on Barry but isn’t afraid to use a chainsaw in order to get his bosses way or acting class student Sally (Sarah Goldberg) who’s so self-centered she doesn’t realize how self-centered she is, even if Barry’s in love with her.
All throughout this first season I rooted for Barry. He’s a great, conflicted character who wants to move from his old murderous life but who’s uncle and manager (Stephen Root) won’t quite let him move on. But every time we think we know who Barry is he does something terrible. I don’t want to spoil things but Barry does things in the series that are so reprehensible that in any other show he’d be the bad guy. Barry is able to justify these things by telling himself that it’s all about him extracting himself from being a hit-man. Yet I think that it’s worth remembering that Barry’s a dangerous guy with a set of skills that includes murdering people and covering his tracks.
I almost feel like if Barry goes on a few more seasons, which I really hope it does, I’ll be rooting against Barry as much as I started out rooting for him.
Upfronts
Honestly, this year’s TV Upfronts was one of the most bland in memory. Coming out of the Upfronts last year there were eight network series that I was interested in checking out. This year there’s just three. For the most part, it seems as if the TV networks are going back to the old “standards” of multi-cam sitcoms, cop shows, lawyer shows and medical shows. The stuff that’s dominated TV screens for years now is going to dominate the networks even more in 2018.
I think the biggest thing to happen at the TV Upfronts actually happened a week before the Upfronts, with two shows Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Last Man Standing switching networks. Nine-Nine was a FOX show but next season will air on NBC and Last Man was cancelled by ABC but has found new life on FOX. This does happen with series from time time to time, the last time I remember it happening with scripted series was when Stargate moved from Showtime to The Sci-Fi Channel. It does make sense for Nine-Nine and Last Man to switch networks since in actuality even though Nine-Nine aired on FOX it was being produced by Universal Television, which is a subsidiary of NBC, and Last Man was being produced by 20th Century Fox. So by those series moving networks means a few more episodes of them for syndication and streaming which would mean a few more bucks for their production companies down the line.
The shows I’m looking forward to are, Roswell, New Mexico on The CW but only because I was a fan of the original Roswell series, Manifest on NBC that looks a whole lot like a take on Lost and the post-apocalyptic vampire drama The Passage on FOX that’s been in development for a few years but will finally make it to TV screens this fall.
And that’s about it. I was interested in checking out the Magnum P.I. reboot on CBS until I saw the trailer where apparently in the world of Thomas Magnum physics are optional, and the Murphy Brown continuation also on CBS looks interesting even if it’s been so long since the last time I’ve seen an episode of that show it feels like a lifetime ago.
I’ve been disappointed before in the past with a lot of the network TV fare and it looks like in 2018 and 2019 I’ll continue to be disappointed.
Movies
Bohemain Rhapsody movie trailer
Mission: Impossible – Fallout trailer
The Reading List
- Babylon 5 is Coming to Amazon Prime in June
- Abandoned Spider-Man 4 movie storyboards
- A tiny cube sees the Earth and Moon on its way to Mars
- ‘Lethal Weapon’: Damon Wayans Shares Graphic Video Detailing Issues With Ousted Star Clayne Crawford
Cool Movie Posters of the Week
I should’ve known something was up last winter when SyFy didn’t promote The Expanse as heavily they did in years past. For Krypton we got loads of posters and a TV commercial every break promoting that show, for The Expanse there was one poster and just a single TV spot I can’t ever remember airing. I had to find it myself on YouTube.
The Expanse will join other shows that got cancelled after three seasons like Deadwood, Ash vs Evil Dead and a little show I don’t think many people have ever heard of called Star Trek that were all cancelled after year three.
