This Week: I'm Hoping Colin Farrell or a Donkey will Pop Up

I haven't really watched a ton of TV or movies lately, and instead got sucked into Marvel's Midnight Suns, a shockingly good game that came out at the very end of 2022 and promptly flopped.

I'm very sad that it did, because it's easily in my Top 10 favorite games of all time. It feels like I'm in one of those late 90s, early 00s cartoons that I grew up with and formed a foundational part of my childhood. (Plus, where else can I play as a half-demon and join a book club with Blade, Captain Marvel, Steve Rodgers, and Wolverine?)

What are you guys watching?

ChrisB: I’ve been listening to a podcast that discusses every episode of The West Wing. I started bingeing it and it has brought me back to the show. There are parts of the show that have aged less well than others, but it is still lovely in many ways. I am enjoying watching it all over again.

Victoria Grossack: I enjoyed the rom com Love at First Sight so much that I tried a few others and have mostly discovered I had good reason to avoid the genre. I recently tried out Netflix's Mother of the Bride and – although there were a few bits that I liked – most of it made me cringe. Also, why put Shields, who is already tall, in high heels? No scientist would wear stilettos to work on a regular basis.

Now I'm watching the series Psych – and I also dislike the set-up, the guy pretending to be a psychic, why not just do what he can do although I guess that would make him like The Mentalist – but I rather like the mysteries in the episodes. They're entertaining.

It's also reassuring because I sometimes feel that I am too generous with stars in my reviews. This demonstrates I generally only choose to review entertainment I like a lot. I'm not going to review Psych and I'm not going to review Mother of the Bride. I might consider reviewing Resident Alien – even my husband liked that – but only the first season is available in my market so I'm way behind.

An Honest Fangirl: Was reading entertainment news, and Mike Flanagan is writing and directing a new Exorcist movie. I’m very excited simply because it’s Mike Flanagan and I’ll watch anything he makes. I’m already curious about what role Kate Siegel will inevitably play. ;)

Billie Doux: I'm totally wrapped up in catching up with two related long-running shows that aren't sci-fi/fantasy, which is not like me – seven seasons of 9-1-1, and four of its spinoff, 9-1-1 Lone Star. My only excuse is that the focus is totally on the characters and lives of the first responders over the actual emergencies, and that their showrunner is Tim Minear of Angel, Firefly and Dollhouse fame.

In Lone Star, Gina Torres is the female lead and I've been so tickled by the stream of familiar guest stars, like Amy Acker, Julie Benz, Harry Groener and Adam Baldwin. And D.B. Woodside, the principal of Sunnydale High! I also love how wonderfully diverse the casting is on both shows.

And I'm feeling guilty that I haven't finished reviewing the last three episodes of 3 Body Problem. My writing skills seemed to be clogged up right now.

Victoria Grossack: He's also Amenadiel in Lucifer.

Billie Doux: Yes, I absolutely loved him in Lucifer. He had a long-running continuing role in 24, too.

Josie Kafka: Victoria, I understand what you mean about trying one good example of thing and getting burned by the rest. A friend of mine recently recommended a lighthearted mystery (The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett) and I loved it. So I tried a few other books that Amazon recommended based on me liking that book and... ugh. It wasn't the genre that I liked. It was just one person working in that genre.

Luckily, Hallett has written more books. They're really good! Alperton Angels is written entirely as "found documents": WhatsApp messages, emails, notes, etc. The Twyford Code, which I'm in the middle of right now, is similarly structured. It's very propulsive, and the mystery resolutions have been satisfying.

Weirdly, I'm also watching a mystery show. (I guess I'm feeling mysterious?) It's called Bodkin. It's on Netflix. An American podcaster, a disgraced Irish-British journalist, and a British personal assistant go to a small town in Ireland to create a podcast about a disappearance that occurred 20 years ago.

The mystery plotting is horrific. It takes three episodes for the team to realize that two characters were brothers. (That's just one example.) The tone is inconsistent: sometimes it seems like Only Murders in the Building. Other times it seems like Scandi-noir. It also raises the same question for me that all true crime raises: is it really moral to profit from digging up other people's misery and broadcasting it to the world?

But I keep watching. I'm not sure why. It may have been filmed in the same village as Banshees of Inisherin, so maybe I'm hoping Colin Farrell or a donkey will pop up.