Idiot Boxing: The Good Place, seasons 1 and 2 (2017-2018); Castlevania, seasons 1 and 2 (2017, 2018)

The Good Place, seasons 1 and 2 (2017-2018)

A really fun, often smart show that exhibits plenty of sly and absurd humor. My wife and I jumped on this train just a little late and barely missed the third season, but we were glad to have discovered it while it's still in the middle of its run.

The show follows Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) as she awakens in a strange place, sitting face-to-face with Michael (Ted Danson). Michael informs Eleanor that she has died and is now in "the good place," (a rather non-specific term for the general idea of an idyllic after-life existence, or "heaven" to some of us). This is all fine and good to Eleanor, except that she is sure that there has been some mistake, seeing as how she had been far from a "good" person during her life on Earth. As she meets more and more other amazing people, including her "soul mate" Chidi (William Jackson Harper), she grows ever-more terrified of being discovered and sent to "the bad place."

It is tempting to say more about the plot, but one of the great strengths of the show is its unexpected plot turns and how it reveals everything to the viewers. As such, I'll leave any further description alone.

The dynamics between Eleanor and Michael shift several
times through the first season, allowing Ted Danson and
Kristen Bell to show off the varieties of their comedy chops.

The show does a brilliant job of having an absolute blast with concepts about life after death and what constitutes people's "heaven" and "hell." And the creativity behind the mythology is as impressive as it is fascinating. The writers clearly have plenty of fun working with the hierarchy of everything, revealing the greater workings of the fantasy world which they've created. There are plenty of fun sight gags to go along with the characters and dialog, and the cast all seem to revel in embracing the often strange tones and shifts which they must portray. As the circumstances change wildly around them, the six primary characters are buffeted about, creating for some surprising and hilarious reactions.

The cast is phenomenal. Bell and Danson are well-established actors. For me, though, the two great revelations are William Jackson Harper as Chidi and D'Arcy Carden as Janet, the artificial intelligence informational system in The Good Place. And there are even some recurring characters who just nail their often-specific roles with hilarious precision. Jama Williamson as Val and Jason Mantzoukas as Derek come to mind, but they're hardly alone. All of these comedy acting pros bring an already-great script to its best comedy life.

I've only just read that the show runners have stated that the fourth season will be the last, as they would rather tell their original story and conclude it there, instead of dragging it out for other motivations. This will likely be for the best, though it will be a shame to say goodbye to such a clever, funny show as this.

Count Vlad Tepes "Dracula." The show does a decent job of
making the classic horror character a bit sympathetic, but
spends way too much time in the second season on his
underlings and their selfish plots.

Castlevania, seasons 1 and 2 (2017, 2018)

A made-for-Netflix adaptation based on the immensely popular, three-decades-old video game series. I found it to be modestly entertaining, but no more.

I've been a fairly avid video-gamer for most of my life. Despite this, I never feel the need to watch TV or film adaptations of games, as they have a horrible track record. The only reason I watched Castlevania was that it is written by highly creative and talented comic book writer Warren Ellis, whose work from the 1990s I read and enjoyed quite a lot. And given that the first season was composed of a very manageable four 25-minute episodes, it seemed like a small initial commitment.

The first season was fairly compelling. Taking narrative elements from the video game mythology, which itself borrows heavily from classic horror literature such as Bram Stoker's Dracula and other noted vampire tales, Castlevania begins its focus on Dracula (Graham McTavish) himself. In roughly the 15th century, the immensely powerful and mostly reclusive Vlad "The Impaler" Tepes - a.k.a. "Dracula" - is approached by a young woman, Lisa, hoping to learn arcane medical arts from the intimidating alpha vampire. Though it may seem so, this is not an unusual request, as Dracula is actually a highly learned creature who has amassed vast troves of literature and knowledge on human health and medicine. Lisa and the count soon fall in love, and even marry. Tragedy strikes, however, when Lisa is one day taken and burned for a witch by the regional religious zealots. When Dracula returns and learns of his, he vows to destroy all of mankind as a blight on the earth.

The first season briskly tells the tale of how a handful of talented fighters come together in a desperate attempt to thwart Dracula and his hordes of dark, supernatural monsters from obliterating humankind. Primarily, the sorceress Sypha (Alejandra Raynoso) tracks down the legendary monster hunter Trevor Belmont (Richard Armitage), whom she finds in a drunken, cynical stupor in a remote tavern. Once convinced to lend his skills to the fight, Trevor and Sypha help humans take a small stand against the forces of darkness, and they literally unearth a mysterious and powerful ally in the fight - a vampire named Alucard (James Callis) who has his own reasons for seeking Dracula's demise.

That first season served as an entertaining teaser for the larger story, and it embraced its "mature content" label by not holding back with the animated violence, rough language, and occasionally deeper themes around religion and the darkness inherent in human beings.

Sypha, Trevor, and Alucard. The first season suggested some
really intriguing possibilities for this trio of monster hunters,
but only a few of them were realized through the 2nd season.

The second season changed focus a bit, spending a great deal of time on the machinations in and between Dracula's monstrous forces. We meet and follow the schemes between his most powerful lieutenants and the "architects" who animate the horrific creatures that make up his armies. Frankly, I found these storylines mostly dull, often wishing the tale to turn back to Sypha, Trevor, and Alucard. However, even when the show did focus on that heroic trio, the pace was often rather slow and meandering, seeming to want to build relationships and rapport between them, but never coming together or feeling as organic as it could have.

There were a few interesting action sequences, and some funny moments, courtesy of Warren Ellis's sly, dark wit. But by the end of the second season, I really had no desire to see any more from this series. A third season has been confirmed, but I won't be bothering with it. I found the show to be decent, but there are just too many excellent television shows out there for me to spend any time with something that I only find "decent." 

Idiot Boxing: F is for Family, season 2 (2017); Brockmire, season 2 (2018); Runaways, season 2 (2018)

No longer the primary bread-winner, Frank has to adopt
some new roles within his family, including taking part in his
daughter's troop meetings. He doesn't take to it very well.

F is for Family, season 2 (2017)

An animated show that improves upon its solid first season and may be on its way to becoming a rather unique entry into the canon of excellent animated U.S. TV shows.

The first 10-episode season of F is for Family introduced us to the Murphy family, who are based on actor and comedian Bill Burr's own Irish-American family during Burr's childhood in 1973. The show focuses mostly on the father, Frank, a hard-working father of three who is thoroughly locked into the narrow perspectives typical of men in that era. To Frank, the concept of the nuclear family, where the man works and the woman stays home to raise the kids, is the only structure. But while Frank has the semblance of this "perfect" situation, he is a man with a hair-trigger temper, often set off by his disappointments in his kids and his own professional shortcomings. The first season actually had a legitimate, well-crafted arc to it, with Frank's already-agitated world getting further up-ended when he first loses his job at the local airport. This is all exacerbated when his wife, Sue, decides to get a job of her own.

Season 2 continues the story line, with Frank now working a reliable but menial job delivering concession sundries around town, while Sue tries to work her way up through a Tupperware-like company dominated by ultra-chauvinistic men. This second season takes the strengths of the first one, hones them a bit further, and goes deeper into the most unique thing about the series - the need for Frank to accept how his family and the world are changing around him. After losing his job at the airport, he's had to swallow his considerable pride and take a job delivering vending machine concessions. As he muddles through this existential crisis, Sue continues to put together a bit of a career in plastic-ware, though the misogyny continues to run thick. All the while, their three kids try to find their way through a gantlet of bullies, academic failure, and society's expectations for women.

I must confess that I had taken a breather from this show after watching the first three episodes, but I really got into it once I returned and finished the second season. It appears that the writers are actually making a very conscious effort to do something that very few animated series do - have the characters actually develop. Over the first 22 episodes, each of the five family members, and even a few of their friends and neighbors, seem to learn a few things. No, none of them comes anywhere close to evolving into a fully "healthy" person (where's the humor in that?), but they lurch or are pushed there in noticeable ways. And for anyone who has a sense of what typical life was like in the U.S. in the early and mid-1970s, you know just how many cultural shifts were happening. Watching the disillusioned and easily-enraged Frank deal with all of this is certainly hilarious, but it also provides some reasonably compelling drama between the laughs.

I'll soon be tuning into the third season, which was released not long ago on Netflix. I hope the show continues down the path laid out so far, as it has developed something of its own place in a landscape awash with animated series which can be uproariously funny but wherein there is little to no continuity or character growth.

The ever-responsible Charles drags the ever-intoxicated Jim
out of another drunken sinkhole. This image is a solid
metaphor for much of their relationship.

Brockmire, season 2 (2018)

A surprisingly strong follow-up season to a show that has impressed me simply by building on what could have been a one-note premise which could have grown very old very quickly.

At the end of the show's initial 8-episode season, the ferociously addicted Jim Brockmire had been offered a broadcasting gig for the minor league Crawdaddy's in New Orleans - a job which he promptly accepted, leaving behind the lowly Frackers of the burnt-out burg of Morristown, Pennsylvania. The second season picks up well into Brockmire's first season with the Crawdaddy's, where he has been doing fine work despite regularly indulging in nearly every vice known to mankind. The only thing that keeps him in any financial security is the management of Charles, the young man who was his assistant in Morristown. Brockmire experiences a bit of a hiccup in his dream of returning to the big leagues again when he is pitted against fellow broadcaster Raj, a handsome young man of Indian descent who, while knowing little about sports, knows exactly how to pander to his audience to raise his popularity and brand.

This season was just as funny as satisfying as the first, as we get a bit more insight into Brockmire's and Charles's backgrounds. We see Jim deal with the death of his father, and Charles have to confront his highly self-involved family. We get the addition of several new supporting characters, as well as heavy doses of the pitch black humor that set the first season apart.

The only reason I would steer anyone away from this show is that Jim Brockmire is a thoroughly depraved individual, and the show doesn't shy away from exhibiting him at his drug- and booze-drenched worst. People who find no humor in addiction will likely find no humor in this show, despite the fact that it is far from any sort of endorsement for substance abuse. For my part, I was glad to learn that the show has been renewed for both a third and fourth season.

The Runaways, plus one. The members of the crew tend to take
turns making poor decisions, which is something one would
expect from a group of teenagers from wealthy families.

Runaways, season 2 (2018)

A Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) TV show that continues the tone and quality of its first season, even if the longer episode run more clearly exposes its weaknesses.

The ten episodes of season two still see the six titular runaways hiding from their parents while they attempt to learn the secrets of Jonah - the man, or creature, that is at the center of nearly all of their horrible crimes. The Runaways make various sorties from their hideout in a buried, secret old mansion just outside of L.A., and they learn more about their own mysterious powers and themselves as people.

The strongest part of the show is the plot. The story behind Jonah and his long relationship with the Runaways' parents is unfolded well, and there are more than a few curious twists to the story. The nature of his own amazing abilities is also compelling enough to carry the season fairly well. There was also one very intriguing connection to the greater MCU raised towards the end of this season's run. In fact, it is by far the question that I most want to know the answer to.

I did find myself tiring of the interpersonal drama, although I do realize that this is a show aimed more at viewers between ages 11 and 18. Beyond that, though, the dialog and scenarios can sometimes feel a bit contrived to achieve more dramatic effect. And there are some plot holes that rear their heads as the story moves along, both within the story's internal logic and in the show's greater place in the MCU.

I'm undecided as to whether I'll tune in for the third season, which is likely to happen. Like nearly every other MCU show, it is decent enough for a dedicated fan of the franchise to enjoy on some level. However, with more shows coming, I sense that I will likely be drawing a line soon. Shows geared towards younger viewers, such as Runaways, the worthy Cloak and Dagger, and maybe the forthcoming Disney+ shows scheduled to come out later in 2019 may be on the chopping block. There are only so many hours in the day, and there is only so much TV I have the time or desire to watch. The Runaways could be a casualty of those realities. 

Idiot Boxing: Stranger Things, season 2 (2017); Rick and Morty, season 1 (2013)

Who ya gonna call? The show wears its blatant love for
1980s pop culture nostalgia on its sleeve, without it ever
feeling purely gratuitous or exploitative.

Stranger Things, season 2 (2017)

I thoroughly enjoyed the first season of this great little TV show/love letter to 1980s Spielberg-esque, PG-13 adventure/horror shows. I found the sophomore season satisfying enough, but one that wasn't quite as dazzling or well-constructed as the first season.

At the end of the first season, Will was saved by his three faithful friends from a dark dimension which they had termed "The Upside-Down," a world where some strange type of plant monster seemed to be attempting to break into our own world. Although Will had been pulled out of The Upside-Down, he brought back some tadpole-looking lifeform, which escapes. The young girl, "Eleven" or "Elle," who had inadvertently been responsible for the rift, and Will's subsequent rescue, has gone missing.

In this new season, we fast forward just about ten months, nearing Halloween. The four main boys are mostly trying to live their lives normally, though Will occasionally is visited by strange episodes during which he feels that he is seeing back into The Upside-Down. Not only that, but he sees and feels the presence of a massive, shadowy creature looming over everything. We learn that he's been seeing doctors brought in by the military agency responsible for the troubles during the previous year. We also learn that Elle has been hiding out in Sheriff Jim Hopper's remote cabin in the woods near  town. As Elle fight the urge to leave the cabin, Mike, Will, and the other boys who had become her friends work to deal with another round of odd occurrences that spring up around Will's visions and a reptilian lifeform that Justin discovers rummaging through his trashcans. All of these elements come together as the shadow creature from the Upside-Down slowly tries to break into our world.

Between both seasons of the show, there hadn't been any
episode that felt out of place. That is, until episode 7 of this
second season. The writing, characters, pacing and plot were
oddly out of whack in this lone departure from Hawkins.

This second season was fun and entertaining, though maybe not quite as much as the first. The fantasy/adventure elements are still there and done very well, though there isn't a lot that is new. So much of the fun of the first season was discovering and learning about the world and the bizarre situations. This second season really just continues the same story, with a few flourishes, rather than offering much that will truly pique our curiosity. It doesn't help that a few elements smack just a bit of a lack of creativity, such as Will scribbling out his massive visions and having the drawings sprawled out all throughout his house. This little supernatural art project is a tad too similar to the iconic (and brilliant) "Christmas lights" communication system in season one. This is just one a few plot elements that perhaps drew a little too heavily from strengths of the first season.

The characters are still great, and I thought the show did a very nice job dealing with the boys' and girls' budding adolescence. We learn more about Dustin and Lucas, and their somewhat rivalry over the new girl at school, the tomboy Max. I did find Max's older brother, Billy, to be an over-the-top "bad boy" who bordered on caricature much of the time. But the adults are still solid, even if their personal story arcs don't show any particular amount of personal growth.

For the most part, the pacing of the tale was good. Oddly, though the seventh episode seemed highly unnecessary, and featured some rather poor dialogue and acting by Linnea Berthelsen, who plays Kali. I understand the point that Elle needed to rebel a bit and deal with her anger, but this episode seemed clunky and far less entertaining or compelling than those that take place back in Hawkins. It was an odd outlier in a show that had been very tight, and even added an episode to this season.

This was still a good show, and I'll likely tune in for the next season. However, the magic of watching that first season wasn't completely there this time.

We hardly know much about Rick or Morty before we have
Rick convincing his grandson to stuff a couple of alien plant
pods into his rectal cavity in an effort to sneak them past
intergalactic transportation security officers. This gives you
some idea of the tone and humor of the show.

Rick and Morty, season 1 (2013)

It's been quite some time since I found a show that made me laugh so hard, so consistently as Rick and Morty.

This was a show that had always been at the top of the "Recommended" list on my Hulu page, but I didn't give it a thought until a close friend with very similar tastes recently sang its praises to me. Roughly ten minutes into the pilot episode, I was completely hooked. By the end of the episode, I was literally in tears from laughing.

This animated show, which airs during the Cartoon Network's late-night Adult Swim hours follows the wild adventures of the title characters. Rick is an inconceivably brilliant scientist who is able to use his inventions to jump between galaxies, alternate dimensions, and other bizarre realms outside of the perception of most mortals. He often brings his none-too-bright, 14-year-old grandson on his far-flung and often extremely dangerous escapades. These might include shrinking Morty down to microscopic size and injecting him into a transient, in order to resolve problems in an amusement park inside the bum's body. Or it could involve the two working their way through a series of Matrix-like world simulations to evade an alien race seeking Rick's powerful technology. The plots are often extremely brisk, multi-layered, and place the odd pair in bizarre scenarios that only an LSD-addled sci-fi savant could dream up. The entire premise is a dream for any fan of science-fiction and fantasy action/adventure books, movies, and TV shows, and the writers are consistently razor sharp.

The episode with the Mr. Meeseekses (the blue guys) is a
perfect example of how one of Rick's genius inventions gets
horribly misused by his family. Things, of course, go completely
bonkers and those Meeseeks aren't smiling by episode's end.

Then there are the characters Rick and Morty themselves. Rick is clearly a misanthropic, borderline sociopath. He also happens to be a high-functioning alcoholic. Basically, he's what Doc Brown from the Back to Future movies would be if Brown had been a hundred times smarter, thoroughly unconcerned with humanity, and a complete booze bag. He makes the perfect comedy companion for Morty, his endearingly dim and frustrated grandson. There is something oddly sweet about Rick's dependence on Morty's presence on so many of his insane and highly dangerous forays into the far reaches of space and alternate realities.

The final episode of this first season was a great one, wherein Morty's teenage sister Summer and Rick decide to throw their own parties at the same time in the family house, when their parents are away. In the 24-minute episode, we're treated to a hilarious array of teen angst and back-biting happening right along with the gonzo gathering of Rick's various inter-dimensional associates, all of whom are looking to get drunk, high, or whatever it is that aliens and beings from other dimensions do to enter altered states of mind. It's a great representation of so much of what is great about the show: brilliant science-fiction gags, a boatload of events told at a somehow accessible pace, and a few sprinkles of heart here and there.

So I have now quickly become a major fan of this show. I've already dived right into season 2, a review of which is sure to be coming before too long. 

Idiot Boxing: Castlevania, season 1 (2017); Game of Thrones, season 7 (2017)

Classic series protagonist, Trevor Belmont. We initially meet
Trevor while he's drunk in a bar, getting into a scuffle with
local morons over his family's misunderstood history as
monster-slayers.

Castlevania, season 1 (2017)

So this was the Netflix equivalent of an impulse buy of a package of Reese's Peanut Butter cups while waiting in line at the drugstore. I'm not a massive devotee of either anime or the Castlevania video game series, but both offered me more than a little entertainment in my younger days. So when I saw that Netflix had a tidy little four-episode series, I decided to give it a shot. To my surprise, it was good.

I wouldn't have been so surprised had I realized that the show was written by Warren Ellis, the wonderfully creative author of varieties of mature comic books since the early 1990s. In Castlevania, he imbues his dark wit into the deep mythology of the video game series to give us an incredibly violent and often pretty funny story pitting the forces of good against those of the arch-nemesis of the entire series, Vlad Tepec "The Impaler," also known as Dracula. The tale kicks off in a different fashion, as a young aspiring scholar approaches Dracula's castle seeking scientific knowledge that will allow her to become a healer to her village. Not only does the Count agree, being impressed by this woman's courage, but he eventually marries her and lives with her in as human a way as possible. A few years later, however, while Vlad is away on a journey, his wife is labeled a witch by the local clergy and burned at the stake. When Vlad finds out, he is none too pleased and promises to unleash his hordes of dark creatures upon the land. When this inevitably happens, the drunken former vampire-hunter Trevor Belmont is forced to shake himself out of an inebriated haze and get to work rediscovering his purpose as one of humankind's last defenses against the forces of evil.

One of the attacking demons confronts The Bishop - a zealot
whose black-and-white approach to good and evil makes
things worse. These initial episodes are a bit heavy on the
religious commentary, but I didn't mind it much at all.

This short little series serves mostly as an introduction to what promises to be a longer series of tales. In that sense, the resolution can be somewhat unsatisfying, as it merely sets up the larger confrontations promised in these initial episodes. There is also an odd arrhythmia to the pacing, which will shift from some rousing fight scenes to some overly long and wordy exchanges or even extended action sequences that are animated well but add little to the story. This latter aspect is rather strange for a season that has only four twenty-five minute episodes to it.

Still, the good outweighs the bad. The story, characters, and dialogue are quite strong. Ellis clearly wrote this for mature viewers, as he treats the Catholic church as an anti-science, anti-progressive force, and has certain characters allude to the deeper war of philosophies surrounding good and evil. The show is also quite literally violent as hell. There is more than a little imagery that is quite graphic, making this a show that I do not recommend letting your 10-year old nephew or niece watch - I don't care how much they like playing the video games. Fortunately, there is also some legitimately funny humor, thanks in no small part to a lack of language restriction. Ellis doesn't go crazy with blue language, but he uses it effectively when it punctuates a funny line here and there.

It's nice to come across a fun little show like this, which offers some fantasy/horror fun while not insulting an older viewers' intelligence. It created a the feeling like I was watching a savvy, respectful update of the classic 1985 anime Vampire Hunter D. I'm on board for upcoming seasons, especially if Ellis is penning them.

One of these "Stark" kids ain't a Stark - just one of several
long-running questions that is finally answered during this
season. 

Game of Thrones, season 7 (2017) [Spoiler-Free]

These show runners are quite simply not messing around. With this abbreviated, penultimate season of one of the most popular shows in recent TV history, we get plenty of the fireworks that have been teased and implied for the last several seasons.

The previous season ended with more than a few literal and figurative bangs. Jon is in the north, forming and leading alliances to help fend off the encroaching, undead White Walkers. Cersei has blown up all rivals in King's Landing and is ready to go on a revenge tour to end all revenge tours. Daenerys is finally on her way across the Narrow Sea with her army of Dothraki horsemen, Unsullied, and her three fully-grown dragons. It looked like we were finally heading towards the convergence of all of the most powerful figures who have emerged victorious through all of the bloody battles and secretive back-stabbings. And converge, things have.

This season had already been announced as the penultimate season of this insanely popular series. And it is abundantly clear that the show runners are steering all of the show's many moving parts towards the inevitable final clashes and ultimate conclusion in its final season. No longer are we seeing long, slow journeys across the plains of Westeros or Essos. And seemingly long gone are the more relaxed heart-to-heart conversations between various characters, both great and small. No, with this season, it is very much about trimming away any fat and getting to the business of putting Daenerys's army and dragons in position to square off against the Night King and his massive force of White Walkers. Many long-awaited reunions take place; many long-standing grudges are settled with extreme prejudice; and more than a few tertiary and secondary players in "The Game" are taken off the board, permanently.

One could raise the complaint that the storytelling rhythm picks up to an overly brisk pace, but I was never much bothered by the pace, per se. Yes, the questions about "fast travel" are legitimate, with characters appearing in far-off locales in the blink of a quick cut, but this was hardly any kind of deal-breaker for me. The only thing that irked me is that several potentially intriguing characters and plotlines have been completely jettisoned (usually in the form of a good slaying) in the name of streamlining the greater tale. Honestly, though, a show that had teased audiences for six seasons about the great showdowns needed to finally get to it. Fans of television shows have seen far too many great premises devolve into unfocused, bloated messes with too many characters, too many dangling plotlines, and a frustrating lack of focus on a primary story. Game of Thrones seems to trying to avoid all of that and get back to the relative simplicity of the very first season - Starks, Lannisters, Targaryens, and those zombies north of The Wall. At the end of this seventh season, all lesser characters and concerns have fallen in line with one of those four primary players, or they've been put six feet under ground.

Lena Headey wears the proverbial black hat of a villain as
well as any actor ever has. In this season, she starts picking
many of the bones that have accumulated around her.

I suppose it is worthwhile to address the celebrity cameos that so many people have griped about. I have to say that, on principal, I don't like the idea of using non-actor celebrities on shows, especially escapist fantasies like Game of Thrones. There's just too great a chance of it breaking the spell of suspending disbelief when I see a famous person whom I know and start thinking, "Oh hey! That's so-and-so!" The show did actually have quite a number of them this season, but I must say that most of them were extremely stealthy. The most controversial was only so because it was also the most in-your-face - the instantly-infamous Ed Sheeran appearance. Honestly, I didn't know what the singer/songwriter looked like, so it didn't bother me one whit when I watched the episode. Once I heard about it, though, I was bothered by how obvious it was. That aside, one would be hard-pressed to locate and identify the several other celebs who appear for a few brief moments here and there during the season. Hopefully the show runners learned a bit of a lesson here, and season eight doesn't give us LeBron James throwing a boulder down through a hoop and onto an enemy's head.

It now appears that we fans have quite a wait on our hands, with early reports suggesting that the eighth and final season may not appear until early 2019. For some, this may seem like an eternity. For those of us who have been longtime fans of the source novels, though, waiting a little under two years is child's play. We waited from 2001 to 2005 for the fourth book to be published, and and then until 2011 for the fifth book. It's now been over six years and still no solid word on when the next installment might arrive. Waiting is, for us, a part of the long-term "GoT" experience. But from the way that the seventh season of the show went, the relatively short two-year wait will have a solid payoff.

Idiot Boxing: Brockmire, season 1 (2017); Archer, season 8 (2017)

Brockmire, season 1 (2017)

I wasn't completely sure that the concept behind this show would carry an entire season, but it fortunately proved me wrong. Credit to Hank Azaria and the writers for taking a funny little short sketch and expanding into a larger world and narrative that maintains it humor well beyond its humble origins on Funny or Die.

Brockmire follows the titular baseball announcer attempting a comeback after an all-time great fall from fame. The show opens with this very fall: it's 2007 and Kent Brockmire is doing play-by-play for the Kansas City Royals, where he has done the job for many years. As usual, he is imbibing alcohol during his broadcast, but unlike previous ones, this time Brockmire confesses to the entire listening audience that he had just earlier that day walked in on his wife having an orgy. This triggers a full-blown, on-the-air, profanity-laden meltdown that leads to Brockmire's dismissal and eventual departure from the United States altogether. Flash forward to 2017. Brockmire arrives in a fictionalized version of Morristown, Pennsylvania, where he has been offered a gig as the public address announcer for the Morristown Frackers, a bottom of the barrel minor league team in an impoverished, burned out town of no consequence. Although he wants to try to work his way back to the big leagues, Brockmire still carries with him virtually every vice known to mankind.

The show is a great vehicle for "man of a million voices" Hank Azaria, probably best known for his over-a-dozen characters on the Simpsons (including Moe, Apu, Chief Wiggum, and tons of others), delivers that classic, smooth-as-silk and overly polished pipes of the classic baseball broadcasters in the vein of Vin Scully. Hearing that American-as-apple-pie voice delivering some of the degenerate and self-reviling existential musings of a broken man is just as funny as you think it might be. There are a few moments when the show almost veers too far into depression to make a successful turn back, but it always manages to end on humorous notes.

At the end of a long, beer-soaked baseball/drinking game,
Jules, Brockmire, and Charles celebrate a big win.

If Azaria and the Brockmire character were all there was to the show, it would probably wear thin pretty quickly. Fortunately, the supporting cast and characters are almost equally entertaining. Amanda Peet plays Jules James, the owner of the Frackers who is desperate to keep the pathetic team alive as one of the few emotional buoys in the failed town. Jules is nearly as depraved as Brockmire, able to keep up with his immense appetites for booze and sex, making them quite the pair. Then there's Charles, the goofy, nerdy, millennial kid who assists Brockmire in the booth (and who knows and cares little about baseball). The play between the two is often gold.

The structure of the show is solid, as well. Almost every episode is a flashback to a period during Brockmire's dark decade - the 10 year period between 2007 and 2017, when he was off the grid calling oddball sporting events in foreign countries. While also hilarious, these manage to flesh out the character a little more. And rather than just be eight episodes of Brockmire spewing raunchy observations, which would get somewhat tired, there is an actual arc to the season. Human drama is hardly the point of the show, but it does offer a welcome touch of depth.

Final verdict is that the wife and I liked it (and the wife isn't always on board with shows about sports and the disgusting characters who populate the world of sports). Thanks to some sharp writing and all-in performances by the cast, I'm looking forward to the second season, already scheduled for next year.


Archer, season 8 (2017)

The theme of season 8 draws deep from the vast well of
noir tales from the '40s and '50s. 

After playing catchup on this series by binging the first seven seasons over the course of a few months, this was the first season that I watched as it aired. For the most part, I wasn't disappointed.

Being subtitled "Dreamland", season 8 picks up directly after the cliffhanger ending of season 7, and we now have Sterling in a coma. Using the brilliant device from the classic 1980s British crime TV series The Singing Detective, this season takes place almost completely inside Sterling's mind, wherein he plays a version of himself in the Los Angeles of late 1940s noir cinema. Instead of a spy, he is a private detective and World War II veteran who tries to track down the killers of his partner, Woodhouse (who in his real life was his horribly abused butler). The other regular characters of the show are now altered versions of themselves, each now occupying a role typical of the noir films and novels. Cyril is now a stuffy, crooked cop, Lana is an undercover U.S. Treasury agent, Pam (who is, hilariously, a man in Archer's coma dream), and all of the other characters see similar shifts, including Malory as a crime lord known conveniently as "Mother."

The show features all of the lightning-quick zingers and depravity of the previous seven seasons, but there are so many extra layers to be enjoyed for fans of noir fiction. True to the genre, there is an overly complicated plot, made only the more complex by the various characters' bungling and idiocy. A little off-beat spice is added by including Kruger as a former Nazi scientist conducting his typically insane experiments, perhaps as a tip of the cap to the emerging popularity of the science-fiction genre in the late 1940s.

The real-world Pam, known only as Poovey in Archer's
coma dream, is now a male cop. It's one of the better
alternative takes on what is one of my favorite characters
in the show's entire run. 

I will say that this season was perhaps not quite as thoroughly satisfying as some of its predecessors. Part of this is due to the season's brevity - only eight episodes as opposed to the normal 13 or even 10 of seasons one through seven. There are also a few gags and sequences that don't quite hit, which is a little surprising given the smaller number of episodes. The expected trade-off of a shorter season is that the writing will be even tighter than more protracted seasons, but such is not quite the case here.

The only other minor disappointment for me with this season was that it did not end with the typical lead-in to the next season. Given the atypical, fantasy nature of this arc, I was fully expecting to get at least a quick teaser for what season nine might have in store. Alas, it was not to be. I suppose we fans of the show will simply have to wait and guess at what direction the show will take next. Regardless, I'll be ready and eager for it.