Dan Slevin has a long list of shows to finish but he can’t quite get around to them.
Photo: Disney
Endings are important. We all know that. Especially if you are a film and television reviewer.
Unlike many of my colleagues, I don’t like to go on the radio – or here to the website, or my newsletter – to tout a show that I’ve only seen a few episodes of. After all, I don’t want to be the person that persuaded someone to watch all seven seasons of Game of Thrones, only for them to be disappointed when the whole thing went up in smoke.
I use an app called JustWatch to keep track of my viewing and my watchlist – it reminds me how many episodes of a show that I have seen and alerts me when new ones drop. But I’m finding that it is becoming a bit oppressive, a bit judgy. There are so many shows that are incomplete, and so many reasons why that might be, that I thought I would use this space to get a few things off my chest and, maybe, force me to finally close a few of those shows out.
After all, I don’t get paid if I don’t write the full review...
The Mandalorian
Like many others, we were delighted when the first season of this new Star Wars show hit Disney+ in 2019. It had a decent big screen scale to it, but it was in service of old fashioned episodic TV storytelling. Underlying the grand quest of the thing – the bounty hunter has to return the Yoda-looking child Grogu to his people and keep him out of the hands of the Empire – each episode was set in a fresh new location and there were problems to be solved and adventures to be had right then and there.
It reminded me of that 1970s Western show Kung Fu starring David Carradine and I enjoyed it on that basis.
Then in season two it became apparent that the creators wanted the show to become part of the big old Star Wars universe and it spent far too much time attempting to get its tentacles into other shows like The Book of Boba Fett.
So we watched the first episode of season three and said, you know what? Nope. It felt like we were being strung along and it wasn’t a great feeling.
Good Omens
We enjoyed the first season of Good Omens – I even wrote about it here – but felt that it ran out of steam by the end. It never occurred to me that there would be a justification for a second season beyond the fact that everyone working on it seem to be really nice and enjoy each other’s company.
Jon Hamm (centre) as Gabriel gives Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) a dressing down in Good Omens. Photo: Amazon
So there it languishes, utterly unnecessary, on Prime Video.
For All Mankind
When it’s good, this Apple TV+ show is very good, but during season two (of three so far with a fourth due before the end of the year) those moments were few and far between.
Photo: Apple
An alternate universe story wondering what the late 20th century would have been like had the Soviets landed on the moon before the United States, when it was in space it was often thrilling but back on Earth it deteriorated into a whiny repetitive family soap opera.
Still, I’m curious about season four and my television OCD requires me to catch up before dipping my toes in the water again. If I ever bother.
Gentleman Jack
This one is particularly perplexing as we enjoyed the first season very much and there’s really nothing else like it on TV. A BBC/HBO co-production, this historical drama is about a financially and romantically independent woman who returns rather unwillingly to the run-down family estate in Yorkshire that she has inherited from her uncle.
Photo: Ben Blackall/BBC/HBO
I reviewed season one here in 2019, and was looking forward to season two. But it took too long to get here - almost three years – and by mid-2022 my anticipation had gone off the boil.
And there it is, the lonely season two, sitting on Neon waiting for the BBC to find another partner to help them produce the third season that they had planned.
And that’s another reason why I’m wary of giving it another go. Not because it won’t be good, but it will probably end on some kind of cliffhanger which may never get resolved. Orphaned shows like that are terribly unsatisfying.
Song Exploder
This Netflix music documentary takes a great podcast – about how songs are constructed in the studio – and adds visuals. The episode I saw was super-interesting – Losing My Religion by R.E.M. – but I have no interest in the other seven and the subtle nagging about it from JustWatch and Netflix is just annoying.
The Handmaid’s Tale
Like many people, we watched an enjoyed the detailed world-building of the Hulu adaptation (on Neon in NZ) of Atwood’s beloved novel but after season one it was clear that the creators were going to have to expand a lot on the book. That’s fair enough, but each successive season – and even individual episodes – felt like they were going around in circles.
Elisabeth Moss returns as June in season three of The Handmaid’s Tale (Lightbox). Photo by Elly Dassas. Photo: 2019 Hulu
When the violence and brutality is this harrowing you really need a decent narrative payoff and it didn’t come until late in season four by which time we were wondering whether it was worth it. It certainly wasn’t fun.
But, you know, that sunk cost of 46 episodes still bugs me and I’m kind of curious how it ends but that won’t be until season six next year.
There are a few others. Westworld started strongly but lost its way during an overly complex season three and I felt no compunction to push on through with season four, especially when I heard that the planned season five was not going to happen.
And loyalty to local TV makers is not enough to make us watch the second season of Sweet Tooth on Netflix – it just wasn’t compelling enough to push it to the top of the queue.
And my wife, who is as dogged a TV watcher as they come, just gave up on season six of Outlander after enjoying the first five so much that she rewatched some of them. It just wasn’t working, she tells me, making me glad I didn’t buy her the box set of all seven seasons for Christmas.
