Author: S. Brady Calhoun

I have spent, perhaps, too much time thinking about Adam Sandler movies.

The original Murder Mystery was one of those light surprises you find sometimes in the world of streaming cinema. Jennifer Anniston and Sandler had interesting married couple energy and the jokes mostly landed.

I didn’t exactly rush to my tv to see the sequel but I had some time to kill over a weekend and I flipped it on.

I did in fact finish it but lost interest pretty early. And that led me to think about Sandler’s career.

So we should start with a Jimmy Kimmel clip where Sandler says that he sometimes makes movies by setting them in places that he wants to go on vacation. I can’t find that clip now (I suspect it’s been scrubbed because he gave the game away).

Murder Mystery and it’s sequel have that lazy, eh I want to get paid to go on vacation feeling.

The premise is an American couple — Sandler’s a cop, Anniston is a hair dresser — who get caught up with European royalty and accused of murder.

There is an elaborate dance number in Murder Mystery 2 and every person in the cast does the moves perfectly … except for Sandler and Anniston. This is explained away as dumb Americans who missed the directions in the room (or something, I’m hazy on it). But it’s just as likely that Sandler and Anniston said “learn an elaborate dance for this movie? Nah, I’m going back out for shenanigans in Europe.”

I mean I don’t know anything about movie making, I’m sure that’s not true, but yeesh.

Another moment that caught my eye was that they made some poor VFX artist turn smoke rings into CGI images of coitus. Kinda a funny. But also made me think, ‘of all the things you could have spent money on you chose this?’

I think it’s clear that I didn’t much care for Murder Myster 2. But man, do I think Adam Sandler earned the right to make this particular kind of thing if he wants to.

If you go all the way back to the 1990s Adam Sandler and a core group of friends because hot on Saturday Night Live.

He’s popular. He’s inventive. He’s the funniest person in the show. And then he gets fired.

Sandler then strings together a decade or so of hit movies and becomes one of the biggest comedy stars of all time.

He basically owned a decade from Billy Madison in 1995 until 2004. Sandler’s movies definetly had a formula but the secret of longevity in Hollywood is giving the audience what it wants.

Tom Cruise owned the 80s by making the same movie a half dozen times. And, Tarantino knew when he cast John Travolta in Pulp Fiction that people would really want to see him dance.

But even early on, Sandler was willing to take chances. Anger Management and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love looked at the darker side of Sandler’s angry man child persona.

In 2014 Sandler signed a $250 million deal with Netflix to make 6 movies. The deal has been extended since then and he’s made … more Adam Sandler movies.

Looking back this may have been one of the shrewdest moves by a movie star in that entire decade. What happens to just about every star? People stop going to the theater to see them.

The headlines about box office bombs crush them. And either they climb their way back to the top or they move into TV.

Sandler dodged that part of his career and kept making what he wanted to make.

Brilliant!

You need to check out Sandler’s triumphant return to Saturday Night Live. He performs two songs, one a hilarious tune about how he got fired from the show. And the other a touching tribute to his friend Chris Farley who was on his way to having an all time comedy career when he died.

As he’s singing about Farley you can see how much he’s still broken up, even now.

So here’s a guy, you can imagine, who was changed by a number of things, getting fired, losing his friend, and the weirdness that comes with being the biggest movie star in the world.

And he, retreats? Plays it safe? Makes broad comedies with his comedy pals and keeps them successful.

If I could count Chris Rock, David Spade and Kevin James as my friends I would probably cast them in as many movies as I could too.

Meanwhile, Sandler also occasionally makes himself available for something as astonishingly great as Uncut Gems. That movie was a heart attack but it was also amazing.

There’s a tendency to yell at movie stars, “Just make great movies!”

As if they aren’t trying to make great movies most of the time.

Maybe that was just the best they got offered that year? Or maybe they thought that’s what their audience wanted. Or thats what Netflix wanted for its $250 mil.

Maybe they just wanted to film a movie in Africa and they got offered Beast?

I mean would you turn that down?

Even my little note at the top of this piece about Sandler picking wild vacation spots to film his movies. Even that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a bad movie.

The first time he did it the movie was set in Hawaii. Great vacation spot. And also home to one of the best Sandler films of all time: Fifty First Dates.

To answer the headline, they are all shows I am watching right now and they are so tense that I, at times, couldn’t take it.

Spoilers for a lot of this, including a major spoiler for Succession as we get going.

In the third episode of the fourth and final season Succession played the Ace showrunner Jesse Armstrong has been holding up his sleeve since the premiere. Logan Roy, the head of a right-leaning media empire died. His children, all broken by his monstrous behavior (but also all extravagantly wealthy) must now navigate a new world and determine how or if they will take over his company.

Given that his ailing health has been a constant part of the show Roy’s death should not be a surprise. But it hit me at least as hard as the infamous Game of Thrones episode The Red Wedding. I’m confident that this episode of Succession being called Conor’s Wedding is no coincidence.

My explanation of this episode would be somewhere between The Red Wedding and The Body from Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

All of them deal with a shocking death and the immediate ramifications for the characters. They also happen to be exceptional single episodes of television.

BRIAN COX INTERVIEW

Everything here is a masterclass, the acting is up in the seventh Heaven but the directing work by Mark Mylod maximized the tension.

One example of the great choices: You see a stewardess doing chest compressions on someone but you only actually see Roy very late in the process. As a viewer, you still think, “Is this really happening?”

Another: We see Tom’s phone calls to his estranged wife Shiv but she and the audience don’t know why he keeps calling. And she naturally, ignores them.

And then, she’s the last one to maybe speak to her father who was most likely already gone.

How can I as an audience member, be going through the five stages of grief (especially denial) alongside a fictional man’s fictional kids? I don’t know. But I was. Even now I’m hearing from fans and others who are still in the denial stage.

It’s Logan trying to get one over on the kids! It’s a trick of some sort! We never saw the body! (Narrator: We did.)

The actors, writers, and director put their own audience into one of the stages of grief. How great is that!

Anyway, next comes bargaining guys. It’s part of life.

SARAH SNOOK INTERVIEW

In the second episode of this season, I started writing down lines that made me cackle because I wanted to be able to recall them when talking about the show in the office. Basically, everything everyone says in the first two episodes is impressive and has hilarious dialogue.

But this episode wasn’t that kind of thing, because everyone was dealing with an actual distressing fact instead of the usual fun and games nonsense people this wealthy mostly (theoretically) face.

And then it was Succession again as the kids started to deal with the fallout.

We’ll get a funeral off the rack. We’ll do Reagan with tweaks.

Kendall Roy

I don’t want to just do quotes but this one after Logan’s girlfriend moves through the plane in obvious shock is another home run in a show full of them.

Judging by her grin it looks like she caught a foul ball at Yankee Stadium

Tom Wambsgans

There was another moment where Keiran Culkin just sneered at one of the minions when they offered their condolences that absolutely killed. Culkin has the best sneer in the majors.

In the first episode of this season, Logan Roy compared himself to his fellow humans in the only way that matters to people like him: his wealth.

“What are people? They’re economic units,” he said. “I’m a hundred feet tall. These people are pygmies.”

Write that bit of philosophy on his gravestone. It will be as much use to him now as all that money.

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This weekend I started Beef on Netflix and the first season of Yellowjackets on Showtime.

Hoo boy.

I watch plenty of stuff as it comes out and while I certainly binge, I tend to watch an episode and then go do something else. Over a weekend, when I’m keeping an eye on a kid and watching tv on my iPad, I’ll try and pick a few things to break up the time.

And if you have watched these shows you might be laughing at me right now. Yellowjackets is a thriller that is occasionally so tense that it can almost be too much. Beef is ostensibly a comedy but it is occasionally so tense and so connected to the suppressed anger of its two main characters that it can almost be too much.

It was a heck of a weekend.

I only made it through three episodes of each and will probably slowly work my way through the first seasons of Beef and Yellowjackets over the next week or two. But I won’t be able to use one as a sort of relief valve for the other. A new, good, 30-minute sitcom is great for this. Shrinking was filling that role for me for a while. But I’ve finished it. And Ted Lasso remains great but

A. I’m watching it as it comes out.

B. It’s hasn’t really been a comedy since the first season. It’s a funnyish drama now.

Tension, of course, can be great fun in the film and tv world. I loved Uncut Gems, but it was a heart attack and not a movie. There is a decent chance I will never watch it again even though I thought it was great.

Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone’s TV critic, has related more than once that he could not initially get through The Bear because it was, “the most stressful thing on TV.”

Anyway, the tension was set to boiling for me this weekend and the black comedy that is normally Succession offered no relief. A new episode of Abbott Elementary cannot come soon enough.

Ben Affleck is going to mess around and have a directing career as storied as Clint Eastwood.

Affleck’s Air is a dramedy about the men at Nike who figured out before his rookie season that Michael Jordan would be one of the great NBA players of all time and made a big bet on landing him for their poorly performing basketball division.

The Air Jordan would become the most iconic shoe, and one of the most iconic products of the 20th century.

In the world of the movie Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) watches a game tape and realizes that he must land Jordan. He then drags Nike founder Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) to the table. He’s assisted by Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), Howard White (Chris Tucker), and Peter Moore (Matthew Maher) as the men who will eventually blast Jordan and Nike into the stratosphere. Vaccaro drafts Jordan’s mother, Deloris (Viola Davis), to his cause and outmaneuvers Jordan’s agent, David Falk (Chris Messina).

There’s a temptation to single out individual performers here (cause this is the section in the review where that goes) but everyone nails every moment.

Falk? Smashes it.

Tucker? Amazing.

Moore? Weird and wonderful.

Julius Tennon gets, I think, three lines as Jordan’s father. He nails it.

Viola Davis? Come on man. She’s perfect.

Now in real life, even though Jordan was not picked first in the draft there were plenty of people who knew what he was about to do. Affleck and Damon talked about how Bobby Knight recognized Jordan’s unique abilities and was explaining it before he went to the NBA.

Does that matter in the movie? Nope. Every scene in this movie works. Every scene shows Vaccaro as the guy who sees what others either don’t understand or don’t yet believe.

No one out there can play earnest belief quite as well as Damon and no one can hit ego-driven anger like Affleck. I don’t know quite how Phil Knight is going to feel about Affleck’s portrayal of that particular moment in his life but in the context of the movie, it was just the right amount of sound and fury.

The other thing that’s striking is that while you know how the story ends (or think you know) it has no impact on how strongly the movie engages the audience. You know what’s going to happen in Titanic too. But knowing actually enhances that story. Here too, interesting characters, smart dialogue, and a unique view of the material make the movie a lot more than its ending.

One thing that the audience gets with a setup like this is that the movie can convey something to us that the characters do not yet realize. Everyone in the flick who works at Nike can’t stop talking about how fun it used to be. How Nike was great when it was just starting out. They don’t know, I thought, how great this thing is going to become. These men in their 40s who think they are done, don’t realize that some really great days are yet to come.

You may not feel that, but as a dad in his 40s, I can confirm that it hit me hard.

When we get to the conclusion Affleck and screenwriter Alex Convery have one more card to play, something basketball and shoe people know but a general audience member (like me) did not know.

I don’t want to spoil it but it’s not only the thrilling cherry on top it also feels like a statement of purpose for two guys (Affleck and Damon) who just started a movie studio with the idea that everyone who works on the movie will share in the success.

My final thought was how Affleck the director (divorced from his star persona and celebrity) has made a series of incredible movies. Gone Baby Gone, The Town, Argo, and Air are all four or five-star flicks for me. I’ve never seen Live by Night but I clearly need to remedy that.

What I’m struck by is that Affleck, like Eastwood or Eastwood mentor Don Seigel, never does more than the story requires and never lets the flick drag. It’s clean, professional, and winning storytelling.

Here’s hoping for several more decades of Affleck the director.

Spotting a trend is always asking for trouble. You think you see where the culture is going, or where it’s coming from, and then it darts into a different alley and leaves you in blood and tears.

However, the last few years seem to show that the creatives who can get mystery stories up on the big screen are telling stories about detectives working outside the law.

One of the most satisfying moments in the first episode of Poker Face — the Ryan Johnson mystery of the week show starring Natasha Lyonne as semi-superpowered Columbo — is when she reminds the villain that she is not a cop.

Meanwhile, much of the entire first season of Perry Mason had him acting as a private detective working for a defense attorney. Comic book fans will recognize this trope as Perry Mason Year One.

Supposedly detective fiction works like this: when the country is in a good mood and its institutions are trusted the popular detectives on tv, in the movies, and in books are cops. When the country’s cynicism is high, the government is not to be trusted, and the heroes (sorta) are private dicks like these two counterculture icons from the 1970s: Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes (Chinatown) and Elliot Gould playing Philip Marlowe as half a hippie in The Long Goodbye.

Charlie Cale is a fugitive, both from the law and from a criminal organization in the first season of Poker Face. The show doesn’t have a strong agenda though. Its mystery-of-the-week format allows it to go everywhere and anywhere required by that week’s story. The first season did give Cale a pal in an FBI agent who rises through the ranks thanks to his partnership with her and he manages to both befriend and help her without, essentially, deputizing her.

That she’s not a cop is one of the most vital parts of the show. It both forces the writers to invent new situations and people for Cale to encounter and it forces them to come to different methods of ‘justice’ for Cale to enforce on the murderers.

Please never forget that when they wanted to make Batman safe for children they made him a duly deputized law enforcement officer who worked for Chief Gordan in a — I’m gonna call it singular — partnership.

Cale’s friendliness with everyone is a key selling point of the show. Perry Mason, on the other hand, is a burned out and cynical World War 1 veteran who has nearly bottomed out by the time the show begins.

The show’s main villain? It’s the Los Angeles Police Department of the 1930s. Perry Mason also eschews mystery of the week in favor of one season long story.

Poker Face creator Ryna Johnson said when he tried to sell the show as a mystery of the week he got blank stares from most of the television (streaming?) executives he spoke with.

It’s amazing that an industry built almost entirely on telling one story in a 30- or 60-minute chunks now can’t even conceive of such a thing. Reality shows really will rot your brain I guess.

Anyway, Perry Mason has come back for a second season and it’s a solid slab of detective/lawyer/crime fiction. If the central mystery of the first season (the murder of a baby) was too much for you I can confirm that the show manages to rise above its shaky start.

Season Two has some connections to season one and it’s worth it to watch all of it, but if you start fresh in the second season I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

If nothing else it’s consistently one of the best looking shows on television. The second best? It’s Poker Face.

My pal David Ginsburg started a podcast nearly a decade ago. Tales From the Fandom is a kindhearted visit to various fictional worlds with passionate fans of everything, everywhere, and quite a few things you may have never heard of.

David occasionally gives me time to rant, mainly cause he’s a nice guy and also I used to cook dinner for him in college.

Anyway, you can listen to us here. And if you want a whole lot more the link will take you to the seven other times I have crashed his podcast.

Some time ago, I wrote a bunch about Nic Cage in a review of Pig. Pig is a near perfect movie that uses Cage’s considerable talents to craft an astonishing drama.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is not that, and it shouldn’t be judged by that standard. It amused me though. And I certainly enjoyed how much of the conclusions that I had about Cage were similar to the points that Director Tom Gormican and writer Kevin Etten make here.

Maybe the guy just likes to keep working you know? 

Anyway, Massive Talent is a fun comedy that plays with Cage’s persona but doesn’t tax his acting abilities to any great degree. 

Cage gets to play both a normal version of himself and the Pure Id version of Nic Cage that he often displays in classics like The Rock, Gone in 60 Seconds and Ghost Rider. 

The flick makes a few moves toward the version of Nic Cage who can nail down a serious drama. However, in this movie, the Nic Cage of Leaving Las Vegas, Pig and (I assume) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, is a feint, a shadow, and set up for another joke.

Which is probably as it should be. 

The movie is a blast and Cage gets to have fun, playing two versions of Nic Cage, neither of which the actual Cage (Nicolas Coppola) really wants you to think is real. 

The granddaddy of this particular kind of meta work is Being John Malkovich. Written by Charlie Kaufman. Cage would play Kaufman, and his imaginary brother, struggling to write a screenplay for The Orchid Thief, in Adaptation. 

Which is to say that in a filmography that spans more than 100 movies sometimes when you watch a Nic Cage flick you can feel like you have been here before. 

I’m pretty sure he made some version of Drive Angry like 5 times. 

However, this thing made me cackle a bunch. It shouldn’t work but Cage and Pedro Pascal sell it with charm and enthusiasm. You are likely to see the twists coming but everything is handled with such joy that you won’t be disappointed.

It played with my expectations in a fun way but it also clearly did not want to do anything to tarnish the legacy of the man who has been the beating heart of movies as good as Raising Arizona, as wild as Face/Off and as ridiculously bad as Left Behind. 

Morgan Freeman says he was once told, as he was getting ever more famous, that he would be asked to play God. He ended up with the role in Bruce Almighty. 

In the same way it was inevitable that sooner or later Nicolas Coppola would be asked to play Nic Cage.

We are quite lucky that he plays “Nick Cage” in a movie as good as this one.

This is excellent work that expertly raised the tension to 11 for the first half and then hammers home the humor and horror for the second half.

It looks great on a budget that must have been small but doesn’t feel low-budget or schlocky at all.

Bill Skarsgard and Georgina Campbell manage to deliver the first half of the movie by themselves with no help from special effects or other cast members. It’s impressive work. 

I especially enjoyed and laughed heartily at Campbell’s reaction to an early discovery. 

And bonus points for Justin Long, who proves once again, that he can make a project with his singular abilities.

Those of you who love horror have probably already seen this. But if you missed it this is a solid little scare flick.

It nurses you along and then it rips your heart out.

I spent a lot of time in John Wick: Chapter 4 thinking about Zatoichi, The Blind Swordman.

A version of the character, or perhaps of descendent of the character appears in John Wick and is played by Donny Yen.

Before we get too deep into the wilderness here let’s just explain one of the coolest characters in cinema. Via Wikipedia, “created by Japanese novelist Kan Shimozawa. He is an itinerant blind masseur and swordsman of Japan’s late Edo period (1830s and 1840s).”

And, “This originally minor character was drastically altered and developed for the screen by Daiei Film and actor Shintaro Katsu, becoming the subject of one of Japan’s longest-running film series.”

How long running? They made 26 films about Zatoichi. That doesn’t count a remake, which I adore, from 2003 by Takeshi Kitano. It was the first movie I can recall that was shot digitally. Kitano used digital effects to turn in some cool scenes and in particular, in a shot I haven’t forgotten in 20 years, floating droplets of blood.

It also ends with the main cast doing a dance number after the story is concluded. And I’m sorry, there is no way for you ever to hate a movie that ends with everyone dancing.

If you have even passing knowledge of cinema history (and my knowledge of it is barely passing for sure) then you know that the directors of samurai films and westerns frequently borrowed from each other.

So the plot of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo becomes the basis for Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. Kurosawa was pilfered again for The Magnificent Seven and some portions of Star Wars.

Zatoichi did not translate all that well into westerns although they did try it, in 1989, with Rutger Hauer playing the character as a Vietnam vet in a movie they called Blind Fury.

I missed it (I was 11) but Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs up. But the American version you most likely know is Daredevil.

I don’t know that Stan Lee, Bill Everett and Jack Kirby had seen Zatoichi (1962) by the time Daredevil (1964) came along. The early version of him gives him radar superpowers created by chemicals that landed in his eyes.

Eventually, writer/artist Frank Miller pushed the character into ninja/samurai territory and ignored the radar superpowers in favor of Daredevil just being a guy with heightened senses who was well trained by a blind master called Stick.

This almost gets us to John Wick: Chapter Four and Yen’s latest version of a Zatoichi-like character, except for one thing. Yen played the Zaitochiesque, Chirrut Imwe, in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Shout out to ScreenCrush cause I had forgotten that one.

I don’t want to talk too much about Yen’s Caine in John Wick: Chapter 4 but he’s the second coolest person in the movie and the filmmakers give him a lot of room to both be awesome and tragic. There are a bunch of little moments and action beats that show you how Caine can manage to survive and thrive in a world of superassassins.

I also have to say, as wave after wave of bad guys attacked Wick I thought, “My God, are they gonna make 26 of these things. Is John Wick doomed to wander the earth forever, killing mostly faceless enemies until the end of time.”

Not to ruin anything but the movie suggests a final ending but the box office and the producers clearly want something else.

At this point, I’d be super happy with another Zatoichi remake with Yen in the lead. Something a bit quieter and with a bit more character development would be welcome.

However, Wick leaves the door open for a spin-off movie with Yen’s Caine as a co-lead. That would probably make a lot more sense financially. And, I’m ok with that too. If the Wick team is behind it there is no doubt it will look slick, and the stunts will be unreal.

Regardless, if you are doing a Wick rewatch throw on a couple of Zatoichi flicks into the mix. Also, check this out. It’s delightful.

John Wick: Chapter 4 looks amazing, it’s full of interesting and compelling action and it comes to a satisfying conclusion.

You should probably ignore the fact that I didn’t like it all that much. I went to an IMAX showing where they pumped up the volume to 11. And, for me, a lot of this movie hinged on the soundtrack. And the soundtrack was Europop? Dance? Electronica? played relentlessly and punishingly while Mr. Wick went about his violent business.

A lot of this is on me. I was done with this franchise when the third movie in the series ended on another cliffhanger. I don’t think I ever walked out of a theater more annoyed at the ending of a movie than I was at the end of John Wick: Chapter 3. And yet, here I was again on opening night paying for another installment.

I want to skip through all of my complaints and get to the good stuff, and there is a lot of good stuff here. Enough that I might go back through someday and watch them all. The short version might be that I liked the first John Wick so much that I almost wish they never made a sequel. I think the sequels got increasingly ridiculous and the mythology got so unwieldy as to be nonsense.

I believe in Kang and a Quantumverse more than I believe there is someone important on planet Earth whose name is Marquis Vincent De Gramont.

Anyway, the soundtrack mostly, killed this movie for me. That’s closely followed by how long it is. This is a movie where a guy kills the same five or six stuntmen over and over again in the same kind of way from the start until the finish. If you watched this thing I want you to ask yourself how many times you saw two things:

1. A guy using his kevlar suit like Batman’s cape to block a bullet (utter nonsense)

2. John Wick having to get the muzzle of his gun in just the right spot on his enemies face in order to kill him.

However, the movie has plenty of reasons to recommend it to a certain kind of moviegoer. It absolutely looks amazing. And every sequence from New York to Japan to Paris has its own visual style and color and verve. If you are one of those guys who just want to watch something beautiful then this is for you.

This cast is stacked with heavy hitters. An action role that allows Keanu Reeves to be mostly silent and physical was the perfect spot for him and I don’t blame him for going back to the well again and again.

Meanwhile, Hiroyuki Sanada, Donnie Yen, Rina Sawayama, Laurence Fishburne and Clancy (freaking) Brown are all carrying entire worlds with just a few lines and facial expressions.

Bill Skarsgard is practically perfect as arrogant Eurotrash. The Marquis is a great villain who you absolutely want to see get taken down by Mr. Wick.

Nearly all of Ian McShane’s career is built on playing devious father figures to television and movie heroes. And he’s so completely on point here and makes every thing just a bit better.

I love the way he says, “Johnathan.” It’s perfect, please give him all your acting jobs.

And, the final 40 minutes or so of this movie is incredibly good. I imagine I felt that way because the shootouts got more physical and umm crunchy and because the soundtrack finally gave us some relief. They mixed in some classic rock hits and that made a world of difference.

Anyway, I liked the end of this, I just felt like I had to march through a lot of things I didn’t need to get there. There is a version of this movie that has a different soundtrack and is an hour shorter that I would have adored.

But this ain’t it.

I watch … a lot of things. Including several hours of television a week. I was always this way but dadhood changed the game.

I need to keep an eye on kids who are watching kid stuff on my big beautiful television while trying not to watch the same episode of Abbie’s Flying Fairy School for the 500th time.

So what happens in my house is I have AirPods and an iPad Pro and plenty of things to keep me entertained thanks to this new golden age of nerd-centric television.

Here are a few quick hits.

Season 3 and Picard is finally the show that Star Trek: The Next Generation fans all wanted Picard to be. If you grew up with TNG, like I did, then you finally get a show that gets Jean Luc Picard on the bridge of a Starfleet ship and surrounds him, mostly, with cast members from the original show.

It’s a season of television that looks like a movie-level production and hits, so far, all the right nostalgic beats. People might call that fan service, but I would argue that like Star Trek: Brave New Worlds, it’s not fan service to make the thing that fans of the thing expect.

There is a lot of online talk about spinning out this show with a Captain Liam Shaw series. I’m not opposed to it, and his character (who’s basic level is: ‘I’m a jerk and I hate all of you’) is a unique new role in the Star Trek ensemble. Odo was maybe closest to this but he had a heart of gold, I’m still not convinced, even though they have softened him in the last two episodes, that Shaw won’t just sell everyone out the minute he gets a chance.

And quite frankly, I hope he does.

Actually, as I’m typing this I think I just figured out who Captain Shaw is in the Star Trek universe — Frank Grimes. If you don’t know the reference please go find the Simpsons episode and check it out. But his reactions to Picard and Riker and very much, “How can you keep breaking all the rules and then somehow spin that nonsense into gold?”

I may start saying ‘Grimey’ every time Captain Shaw pops up on screen. The online chatter is that everyone wants a Shaw spin-off. I will only allow this if you bring back Wesley Crusher and make him the head of engineering. I would prefer someone just hand Will Weaton the keys to the Enterprise but my guess is that remains unlikely.

Anyway, every episode of this season is a treat and a love letter to Star Trek fans of a certain age. It’s as good as a cup of hot earl grey tea.

Quick Hits

I know everyone is excited about Ted Lasso and for me the show remains one of the very best sitcom / dramedy things on television. But I need you all to go check out Shrinking.

Shrinking is Ted Lasso but with psychiatrists in California instead of footballers in England. In some ways, as Ted Lasso ends Apple TV managed to find the perfect show to carry the baton.

No surprise, given that most of the Ted Lasso team is behind Shrinking. A show that starts with its main character in both a deep depression and a mental health crisis should not be this much fun. But it’s light and breezy and it became one of the shows I couldn’t wait for each week.

Bill Lawrence, who created (co-created?) Shrinking and Ted Lasso also created Scrubs way back in the 1990s. If these shows connect with you I hope you check out Scrubs. It was a high-quality sitcom all the way to the end.

I’m running through the first season of Perry Mason. I’m not sure that I care all that much about the central mystery. I gave up on it after the pilot came out because I wasn’t emotionally in a place where I could watch something about a murdered baby. However, I’m better this time around and I think it’s intriguing. Mainly though, I’m staying with it because it’s visually stunning. The folks doing this are from Boardwalk Empire and the shows share a similar look. They also — at least so far in the first three or four episodes — share a similar problem. The main character is often not the most compelling person in the show.

The Mandalorian endures. I don’t agree with two of the takes I’ve heard so far from this season.

A: That the creators committed a grievous sin by reuniting Grogu and Mando in an episode of a spin-off show. To me, that’s the kind of complaint people make so they can be relevant on social media. I want you to show me the Star Wars fan who was only watching The Mandalorian and declined to watch the spin-off on the same streaming network that they were already paying for. This person does not exist. Please stop.

B. That The Mandalorian has taken a dip in quality. Four episodes in and I think it’s as good as it’s ever been. This is to say that I think everything Marvel does is a work of staggering genius and I think most of Star Wars is silly nonsense for babies. Please, if you read these missives from me, adjust your expectations accordingly.

C. Only lightly kidding there. But, given the reactions to lots of different things, we may be at a point where the audience really is exhausted with Star Wars and superheroes. Just taking Star Wars and live-action this season of Mando begins after Disney gave us two previous seasons, a season of Boba Fett, a season of Andor, and a season of Obi-Wan Kenobi. That doesn’t count new cartoons and old movies. Even if the audience wants more how do storytellers give them something that’s entertaining but also isn’t just a complete rehash of something they have already seen?

Or to put it another way: Why does this season of Picard hit me so hard? Because it’s the first time in 30 years I feel like I’m watching the actual thing I wanted: More Star Trek: The Next Generation.

If it had not been gone for so long, I would not have missed it, nor would I be having such a great time with the new version of it. How do you fix that?

Maybe just by giving people a road sign. Hey, we have a story we are telling and it ends in Season 6.

That’s a dangerous way to do it, but these types of shows aren’t really murder-of-the-week things. Given their structure, each season theoretically is supposed to be building to one big story that ultimately ends. It may not be the worst thing, three or four years in, to tell people how much longer the journey will take.