You Wait Years For A Cloud Gaming Platform And Then Three Come Along At Once

I was just thinking about posting an update about how my GeForce Now experience had been going, when this popped up in my rss feed. To save you clicking through, it's a news article at Games Industry.biz about Amazon Luna, which is now included with a Prime Gaming subscription.

Wait? Wasn't it already? Didn't they switch "Prime Gaming" over to Luna months ago, when they stopped handing out free games? I thought I wrote something about that at the time? 

Let me check a mo... Yes, I did. Kinda... I mentioned it in a Grab Bag, which is about all it deserved.

The whole thing seemed pretty chaotic back then. I have another post where I talk about being able to access my Good Old Games catalog through Luna, which meant I was able to play games I'd claimed through Prime, but which I redeemed on GOG, on Amazon's cloud gaming service. It was about as convoluted as that sounds. I did it a few times and then completely forgot about it until now, which is about par for the course for these things with me. Make logging in more than a single step and I'll probably bounce, after the novelty wears off.

So, what have they done this time? And is it an improvement?

Ehhh... kind of? I gave it a quick test this afternoon so I have a basic grasp of how it works and I have to say it's not exactly intuitive. Or user-friendly. Or anything like as easy as they seem to think it is. Not for me, anyway. 

Amazon believes Luna offers a low-effort, non-technical, crowd-pleasing way to play games. They see a huge number of people playing on mobile devices, people who own neither PCs nor consoles, and they'd like some of that business, thank you very much. 

Amazon has noticed Netflix getting plenty of traction with their gaming offer, now they've integrated it into their basic service. Take-up there has increased massively and as we all know, no-one gave a toss about Netflix games until recently. (Pretty sure no-one reading this gives a toss about them now, either, but people who read whacking great walls of text on gaming blogs are hardly their target audience.)

I know this because at the same time that news article appeared on GI.biz, so did this. It's an interview with Jeff Gattis, general manager for Amazon Luna and Amazon Game Studios, and he's keen to explain the rationale behind giving away the farm.

That is what they're doing, isn't it? Although Prime subscribers have had some limited free access to the platform for a while, the full Luna service used to require a subscription. Now it doesn't. Is that right?

Who knows how it used to work? Or cares, frankly. I'm not going to waste my time researching it because whatever it was, it's changed now. All these cloud gaming platforms have a free version of sorts, then one or more levels of paid subscription. I don't imagine Luna was much different.

As it stands today (And don't quote me on this because I'm guessing making it up quoting Gemini here.)  there are two levels: you can either get Luna free as part of your Prime subscription or you can pay $9.99 a month just for Luna. Which would seem like an exceptionally bad deal, considering all the other stuff Prime gets you...

Or it would if Prime got you the whole package but of course it doesn't. It gets you what they call the "Standard" package. Or it does if you live in the USA or the UK, which are the only two regions where it's being bundled in with Prime so far . It doesn't look as though Standard is available separately outside of Prime, either. A lot of caveats and conditions creeping in, aren't there?

If you want the Premium package, that definitely costs extra, even if you are a Prime subber. Why you'd want it, if you're in the UK or the US, beats me. The only difference I can see is that you get more games and I'm not even sure of that, as you'll see further in.

That's all already more confusing than Amazon would like to believe, something that I'm sure will surprise no-one reading this. Amazon does not have a reputation for clarity where gaming is concerned.

The whole interview with Gattis is very interesting, not to say revealing, as he talks about the various games divisions within Amazon historically not having known what each other was doing, some of the decisions they made being "weird" and how Amazon were after a big share of the PC/Console/AAA market until they realized Steam, Playstation, XBox and Epic were fighting over the same gamers like a bunch of dogs in a sack and decided not to bother with that nonsense any more. Casts some light on New World's demise, that perspective, doesn't it?

What they want to do now, apparently, is get their claws into the 2.5 Billion active gamers, who don't use any of those upscale platforms. And they think they can do it by making it easy to get in on a device you already have, through a subscription you're already paying. There are 200 million Prime subscribers already so that'd be a good start.

Except my experience suggests getting to the games on Luna isn't quite as smooth an experience as all that. As soon as I read the news, I logged straight into my Amazon account and looked for the games. There weren't any. 

There are thirteen tabs along the top of the page and none of them says "Games". Neither does any of them say "Luna". None of them even says "Prime" for that matter. The nearest I could get was "Prime Video", which goes exactly where you'd think it would. No games there.

Right up in the top, left corner there's the Amazon smiley logo and underneath it, in small, blue letters, it says "Prime". I clicked on that. No dice. Just a bunch of cut-price offers. So where are the damn games?

Finally, in the absence of anything better to try, I clicked on the three horizontal lines with "All" next to them. That gets you a drop-down menu and halfway down it you'll find "Amazon Luna - Cloud Gaming." Click on that and you get a sub-menu with four choices - All Games, Play With Prime, GameNight With Prime and Learn More. 

I went for All Games because why wouldn't I? That got me a page featuring a game I actually want to play, right at the top, as the splash image. Wow! Wasn't expecting that. That's it, up there in the header.

Scrolling down, there's a layout very similar to what you see on Prime Video or indeed Netflix. There's a top ten, the latest additions to the platform and some "Editor's Picks". And as I found out eventually, once you've played a game, you get a "Continue Playing" shelf, just like "Continue Watching" on regular Prime. 

If you scroll right to the very bottom you will finally see an "All Games" button. You can then filter that by Standard or Premium although honestly I could hardly tell the difference. The list of Premium titles also includes all the Standard ones so good luck figuring out what's been added. It certainly wasn't obvious where the extra $9.99 a month value was.

But the good news! There are games in the Standard offer I might at least want to take a look at. Dispatch, for a start. That's on my Steam wishlist. I've been waiting for a decent sale. Looks like I can save my money now.  There's also Death Stranding and both Alan Wake games and Hogwarts Legacy and Hollow Knight...

I might play any of those but I will play Dispatch so I started there. Things didn't go too well, at first. 

The first problem was my browser. There's an approved list and Firefox isn't on it. I can't really rag on Amazon for that. Firefox is increasingly not on anyone's list of approved browsers. I keep Chrome always ready in the background for all the services that won't have dealings with Mozilla any more. 

I swapped to Chrome and that worked. Kinda. Luna opens a full-screen window and my mouse pointer would only display in the top couple of inches. It worked on the whole screen - I just couldn't see it. I had to move the mouse about and wait 'til I saw a button light up. A mini-game all of its own!

After a little of that, I got the game started. Inside I found the same issue with the mouse but you don't really need the mouse in the introduction. It's all watching cut scenes and making choices with the keyboard. 

I gave it a few minutes just to check it worked, which it did, then the traffic noise through my open window drowned out the dialog so I opened the settings and switched the subtitles back on (I'd turned them off at the start.) and guess what? The mouse pointer magically appeared. Must be some glitch with the full window.

I tried to take a few screenshots for this post but the old reliable, Win+PrtScr didn't exactly work. It looked like it might have but there was nothing there when I checked the folder later. That'll have to be sorted or I won't be playing. Can't play a game and not be able to take screenshots. It's inhuman!

At that point I decided to stop and have a look at Netflix to see what games they had to offer. I've looked before and it's been a whole load of mobile games of little interest to me but that was a while ago. 

It still is, mostly. There are a lot of them, though. Can't argue with the amount of choice. And there are a handful of semi-interesting titles scattered here and there.

More importantly, the games are right there on the first page. No digging through drop-downs to find them. Much easier. If Amazon are hoping for the same kind of take-up Netflix is getting, they'd better get their UI guys on the job. But then, Prime Video is a chaotic shambles compared to Netflix, so I'm not convinced they have any UI guys, or not any that know what they're doing...

I did find one game on Netflix I'd be interested to try: Oxenfree. I remember reading about that one a long time ago on someone's blog, or at least I think I do, if I'm not mixing it up with something else. I thought I'd try it just to test the ease of access and Netflix faltered at the first fence.

Obviously it wouldn't work with Firefox but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that Netflix games only work on a mobile device. You can't play them on a PC. 

Officially, that is. By which I don't mean there's some back-door access you can hack your way into via some shady third party app. There's a beta for playing Netflix games on TVs and PCs running right now, albeit only in certain, selected territories, the UK being one of them. I tried it and it worked fine. 

I played Oxenfree for just long enough to make sure it was playable and then I logged out. It looks like an interesting game. I imagine I'll be back.

So now I have three options for playing games I don't own, on other peoples' computers. By far my preferred option is GeForce Now, for which I'm paying, and which I'm finding to be very much worth the money. I can play a huge range of games there that I actually want to play already, many of which my current hardware won't run, or not reliably. Since I subscribed, I've used it pretty much every day.

Amazon Luna places a fairly distant second. It is free, since I won't be bothering with the dubious benefits of the Premium version and it does have a few genuinely appealing titles. Given a choice between even this iteration of Luna and the "weird" Prime Gaming of a couple of years ago, though, I'd revert in a heartbeat. I liked collecting those games, even if I never played most of them. I guess that was too good to last. 

I'm also very skeptical that this latest attempt by Amazon to forge a presence in the gaming sector is likely to achieve much more than the last several ruses they tried. If they think what they've got here is going to feel natural and accessible to the huge, casual gamer market I suspect they're going to be disappointed. Again.

Last comes Netflix. Not because of any shortcomings in the platform itself but because it's clearly not designed for me. I don't have a great deal of interest in mobile games and if I did I'm not sure I'd need Netflix to curate them for me. Most of them are free anyway and I already have several options installed to play mobile games on my computers. And even if I didn't, I imagine that even when the Play On TV and Computer option comes out of beta, there still won't be many Netflix games I'll want to try.

Still, I'm not complaining about being given more options, even if I'm not likely to use them. Nor am I going to whinge about extra value being added to subscriptions I'm already paying, even if the value to me is limited.

And, what with the continuing issues with availability and pricing for computer components and the concomitant price rises, we might all be glad of some options in the years to come. Of course, it is herding us all into the walled gardens of various multinationals, where no doubt we'll be swiftly fleeced like the sheep we've become but as Mrs. Bhagpuss and I often comment, as we stroll the English countryside with Beryl, of all the farmyard animals, the sheep seem to have by far the best deal.

There are worse things you can be than a sheep.  

The Owls Are In The Walls (IYKYK, Right?)

In a vain attempt to prevent this blog from turning into All Neverness To Everness! All Day! Every Day!, something it could so very easily become, seeing as how I have so many ideas for posts - posts about what I'm doing in the game, what I'm thinking about the game, what the hell is going on in the game (Big mystery there and I don't mean the plot because - erm - what plot?), I thought I'd post about a TV show I just watched instead.

And for once it's something current! Not an old show from the nineties I finally got around to catching up with or even something from five or ten years ago. No, I actually watched a new show on Netflix while it was in the Top Ten. It was at #1 for a short while in the UK so I guess at least a few people reading this might have seen it too.

If that's you, feel free to carry on. If not, you might want to know up front that the whole of the rest of this post is going to be 

SPOILER CITY!!

Ah, yes. Spoilers aaall the way down from here on. At least I didn't use that flashing gif for the warning this time. That can be really annoying.

Okay, that's probably given everyone who wants to leave enough time to skedaddle. On with the post...

Didn't mention the name of the show yet, did I? It's The Boroughs. 

Let's see if I can do a quick precis of the premis: 

A bunch of old, rich people settle down to enjoy their golden years in a full-service, luxury retirement village somewhere in the desert only to find creepy monsters are sneaking into their condos at night and sucking out their brain juice. Shenanigans ensue.

Yeah, that about covers it but I left out the immortality, the sociopaths and the sentiment. Stir those in and you're good.

So, what actually happens is grieving widower, Sam. (Alfred Molina. Excellent.) gets dropped off at his new condo that his dead wife insisted they get before she died. (I'd say "obviously" but actually it's not so obvious as all that, as it turns out, since she keeps turning up after she's dead. In dreams. On the TV. In the kitchen.) 

Sam does not want to be there but if he leaves he loses all the money he put into buying the place. Or renting it. Or however it works. It's never explained, just like nothing in the whole damn show is ever explained. 

All he wants to do is get out of the contract and leave but he'd lose all his money (Seems unlikely but there it is.) so he's stuck with it. Until he has the great good luck to be attacked in his own home and lightly stabbed by the previous occupant, Edward (Ed Begley Jr. Great as always but wasted in a such a small role.)

Despite being offered all his money back if he'll just keep quiet and leave, the grumpy old git has started to make friends so he decides to stay. Bad idea. The very next day he finds one of his friends (Bill Pullman, good but brief.) dead of a heart attack because a nightmarish creature has been visiting him in the night and sucking out his cerebral fluid. Unsurprisingly, no-one believes this. More fools them. They'll learn.

I won't rehash the entire plot, although I could because I can remember it all, something that suggests it was quite vivid. It was that, alright. It just wasn't coherent, believable, convincing or sane. None of those. It was fun, though, which is the most important one.

The whole show is fun. It's so high-concept you could sky-dive off it. If you did, it'd be a bad idea to stop and think about it on the way down because you'd be none the wiser when you hit bottom and you'd have missed the great view. If you're the kind of person who likes things to make sense or be explained then you might not have such a good time with it as I did.

I don't always mind if things don't make sense so long as I'm having a good time. It's like riding a roller-coaster (Not that I like those. I do not like those.). It doesn't matter how the car stays on the tracks so long as it does. A thrill ride is a thrill ride so long as you don't come off at the corners and The Boroughs always manages to make those tight turns, somehow.

A lot of that is down to the cast. It's an impressive line-up. If you wanted to get a bunch of old people together for a TV show, you could do a lot worse than this. As well as the aforementioned Molina and Begley and Pullman you get Geena Davis, who does not look even close to being old enough to be in a retirement village. (I just looked her up and she's two years older than me. She looks twenty years younger in this and I look good for my age, let me tell you!) You also get Alfre Woodard, Denis O'Hare, Clarke Peters and a bunch of other people you absolutely will know from big shows and successful movies. 

These people know what they're doing and watching them do it is probably enough reason in itself to go with it but the script is pretty good, too. It doesn't have a whole lot of zingy one-liners but it's frequently wryly amusing and rarely feels awkward, which is quite the achievement if you stop to think about some of the things these people are doing, which honestly you really should not, not if you want to stay in the story. Some good meta bits, too, like the whole Thelma and Louise riff the writers have going on for a while.

Not that any of that makes a whole lot of sense but then what does? This post could so easily become one long litany of "Well, that wouldn't happen..." because even if you accept spider-like monsters that come out of your microwave oven at night to suck out your spinal-cerebral fluids through your open mouth as you sleep then go back to pump it into their mother-monster, who's being farmed by hundred year-old psychopaths for her blood because it makes them immortal, then The Boroughs is still hard to believe because of the way every single person deals with it when they find out. It's like they think they're in a TV show or something!

I mean, for one thing these people aren't prisoners. Okay, yes, eventually they are prisoners but not for most of the run of the show, they're not. They have cars and phones and families in the world beyond the gates. You're not telling me they don't go on vacation or on trips. They're clearly all pretty damn rich. They can leave if they want. We actually see one of them drive in and out and wave to the guard several times. It's only much later, when everything's already gone to hell, that they're trapped inside.

If you found out there were brain-sucking monsters in tunnels under your condo, monsters that were coming into your bedroom while you slept, sticking their feeder tentacles down your throat, making holes in you that can still be seen the next day if you just shine a light down there and look, would you stay another night to see if it happens again? I bloody wouldn't!

Of course, if anyone ever behaved rationally or logically in any supernatural horror show, there would be no supernatural horror shows. Just a lot of aerial shots of jammed roads as everyone tries to leave town at once. 

This is a supernatural horror show, in case that wasn't immediately obvious. It's from the same stable as Stranger Things. Well, the next stable along, maybe. The Duffer Brothers had something to do with it, anyway, although I suspect it may not have been that much. They're listed as "Executive Producers", which means nothing. Netflix is keen you should know the show bears their imprimatur all the same, obviously hoping that'll be enough to grab your interest. It works, too. That's how I came to start watching.   

But The Boroughs is nothing like Stranger Things. Except when it kind of is, which now I come to think about it, is quite often, really, what with all the tunnels and monsters and men in suits stepping out of big, black cars...

The pacing, though. That could not possibly be any more different. The Boroughs positively zips along. As soon as anyone has any kind of idea or plan they're on it the very next minute. No discussions. no arguments. No making diagrams or taking notes. Straight to the execution.

Events and even set pieces that would have filled a whole episode of Stranger Things barely manage a couple of scenes. Oddly, it doesn't make things feel rushed, probably because what's been left out is all that character stuff Stranger Things was so big on. Those countless hours when what we mostly got to see was people getting to know each other. Slowly. The Boroughs has none of that. It takes everyone two days, max, before they're best buds.

Partly it's crisis bonding but mostly it's because there's no time for anything longer. They're old! They don't have much time left! 

Everyone's painfully aware of their own mortality, evil immortals included, which is ironic, isn't it? As for our heroes, it's a bit rich considering how fit, healthy and good-looking they all are compared to actual old people but then the definition of "old" in the show is hazy anyway. Wally reveals he's only 62 at one point, not even state retirement age where I live, let alone where the show's set. 

That looks like it might be Nevada. Where the atom tests were, which might explain the monsters, although it could also just be me, trying to retrofit some kind of origin story onto the whole affair since the writers can't be bothered to come up with one. 

Wally does have terminal cancer though so, yeah, mortality is knocking harder for him than the rest, even if the years aren't. They all make friends fast because they have to get in there quick before one of them dies, I guess. They do go on about it a lot, that's for sure.

And they need to get on with it, too, whatever they're thinking, because friend-bonding is what this show is all about. That and romantic love, which apparently saves some people and damns others. You may remember me citing sentiment as a big factor in the show, up there at the top of the post. The entire motivation behind the insane enterprise that is The Boroughs can be summed up in five words: We Did It For Love. 

Well, one of the two big bads Did It For Love, anyway: Blaine. (Played by Seth Numrich. Numb, scary, nuanced, good.) He just wants to make everything perfect for his beloved wife. Forever. At any cost.

Sideabar: Blaine? Really? He was supposedly an adult in the 1950s. Who was called Blaine in the '30s? Did the name "Blaine" even exist before the 1980s, when it became Hollywood code for "slick, rich, guy who looks cool but everyone knows is hollow inside"? Which is what he is, I guess. So, fair. (Also, edit for truth, I looked it up and Blaine was popular in the 19th century. Peak year for babies called Blaine: 1884. My bad but don't say you never learn anything on this blog.)

His wife, Annelise, (Alice Kremelberg. Plays her like a robot, presumably intentionally but it's hard to be sure.) never gets enough lines for us to work out what the hell she's in it for. She gets to be really, disturbingly, Evil with a capital E. Cartoon evil, that is. 

She makes as much of the part as she can but she's never playing anything you could call a real person. She's like the wicked witch in a Disney movie. Her polio backstory that's presumably supposed to explain her fear and need is so under-sold you could miss it if you were eating popcorn when it's revealed, which you very well might be because this is a total popcorn show. And even if you're paying attention, it explains nothing about her pathological cruelty. 

Was she like that before? Did her pain turn her evil? Was it the alien blood? Who fucking knows? Not me. And not the writers, either, apparently.

Where The Boroughs is like Stranger Things is in the whole chosen family thing. Most of these people have an actual family outside the Boroughs - children and grandchildren that they occasionally mention - but we only ever get to see Sam's daughter (Jena Malone. Excellent and underused) and her annoying husband (And very briefly, at the end, their children, who don't get anything much to do or say.) There's occasionally some talk about family but as in Hawkins, in The Boroughs your family ends up being the people who'll fight monsters with you. If you're related to them by blood, great, but it's by no means obligatory.

There's a good deal of front-loaded irony, what with time running out for the good guys because they're doing the right thing ideal butting up against the immortals being really, really evil and possibly getting to live forever. Some people waver and try to fudge or even change sides but it's the kind of show where you always know who the good guys and the bad guys are. Sometimes they wobble on the line but they never fall over it. Not to mention the ever-popular "But who were the real monsters, anyway?"

It makes the whole thing kind of heart-warming. Everyone who isn't an out-and-out villain is kinda-sorta nice. There's a bit of the grumpy old geezer thing going on but under the crusty exterior or the selfish spend-it-while-you-still-got-it indulgence, you know there's always a good heart. 

The villains are far more underwritten but it makes some of them quite interesting for the space that leaves. I'd have liked to know more about the woman who shows new arrivals around the homes or the doctor who manages Mother. And especially the Police Chief, who looks confusingly like a fatter, slobbier David Harbour playing Stranger Things' Hopper's evil cousin. He gets a weird moment near the end that almost humanizes him, which is very odd. I could have done with a little more of that.

Mostly, though, everything wraps up very neatly in eight episodes, so long as you're happy to accept that absolutely nothing about any of it is ever going to be explained to anyone's satisfaction, yours or the cast's. (What are the monsters? Where did they come from? How did Blaine find out what they could do? What was that peach all about? And that weird goo bath? Why do old cathode ray TV sets have such a devastating effect on the immortals and why not the same effect on all of them? How could those tunnels have possibly been constructed without hundreds of people knowing? And on and on and on...) You'd think it was a mini-series, never intended to continue, except...

Oh, yes. Except. There's always that one hook, right at the end in every mini-series, isn't there? just in case it goes really well and they want to come back for an encore. In this one it happens just before the final credits, when Sam's image glitches in the mirror. And that final shot, too, the one where it looks like the stars go out. That's a door being left open.

I hope there is another season. And if there is, I hope it doesn't explain anything any more clearly more than the first. Mysteries are intriguing but solutions are often disappointing. Leave it all out there in the desert. With the dead crows.

There's A Ghost In My House

Should've done a post yesterday. Didn't. Sorry about that. Will happen again.

Not today though because last night I watched the final episode of Haunted Hotel, which means now I can write about it.  I've been looking forward to that even though I'm not sure I have all that much to say.

There's that thing, isn't there, where you find something you really like and you just want to share it with the world? Doesn't have to be anything amazing. I don't want to overamp expectations here. It's just that some things are good and word ought to spread.

Does Haunted Hotel need any help getting the word out, though? That's always a problem these days, knowing if the obscure thing you discovered is actually super-famous already and you were just super out of touch as usual. 

Remember when the zeitgeist really meant something? Those were the days, eh?

Now there's so much of everything and it's all so tucked away in its own tidy little silo it's hard to know what's big any more. Donald Trump never heard of Bad Bunny until the Superbowl thing, or so he says. Trump is easy to mock but it's entirely possible most Americans didn't have a clue who Bad Bunny was before then.

I mean, let's be honest, how many people reading this own anything by Bad Bunny? Or could name one of his songs? I've known roughly who he is for a couple of years but I've never actually listened to him. 

D'you know what? I'm going to fix that right now. Talk among yourselves for a couple of minutes... no, even better, join me...

 NUEVAYol - Bad Bunny

Pretty much what I thought he'd sound like. Not my kind of thing but I'd dance to it, if I still danced, which I don't.

The point is, I'm very much into music and I like to keep as up to date as I can and still I hadn't heard "the biggest musical star in the world" until five minutes ago. So the fact that I hadn't heard of Haunted Hotel until it popped up in my Netflix Recommendations back before Christmas doesn't tell me a whole heck of a lot about whether it's already a big hit and I'm just culturally ignorant or whether I've found a rare gem no-one else much knows about.

There are clues, though. For a start, it was created by one of the writers on Rick and Morty. At this point I should probably clarify that Rick and Morty is another Bad Bunny as far as I'm concerned. I know what it is and approximately how successful it's been but I've never gone so far as to watch an episode. I saw a couple of clips and didn't think much of them so I left it at that.

There's just so much stuff, now, isn't there? It's not like the old days. There was a time when a reasonable person could expect to do more than just know the names of the famous things of the day. We all watched the same TV channels. All the radio stations played the same songs. 

I bet a lot more people would have known who Madonna was in the '80s or the Beatles in the '60s than know who Bad Bunny is now. For a given subset of "people", that is.

Now, there's the issue of globalization to consider. Globalization of culture, specifically. Bad Bunny sings exclusively in Spanish or so I've read. I can't really offer much in the way of experiential evidence to support that assertion, having only heard that one song. It is in Spanish, but one example is hardly conclusive evidence. 

The Beatles did not sing in Spanish. Nor did Madonna. They sang in English which isn't really surprising because the Beatles were English and Madonna is American, where the main language is English, even if some Americans prefer to call it American these days.

Abba, on the other hand, who might be in with a shout as the Beatles or Madonna of the '70s, at least in terms of cultural domination, although I'm never really sure how big they were in America, also sang exclusively in English, even though they were from Sweden. Everyone sang in English unless they were a novelty act or they did if they wanted to be famous outside the hinterland of their own language.

While I'm on the subject of Abba, I'm going to take this opportunity to throw in a great cover of what is probably my favorite Abba song. I might not get another because Abba aren't likely to feature on the blog all that often. 

 The Day Before You Came - Pulp

I don't much like Abba. In their heyday I couldn't stand them but time and a broadening cultural awareness has reduced my dislike to a grudging kind of respect. It hasn't been a Pauline conversion like my Road to Damascus moment with the Carpenters, when I first heard Sonic Youth's cover of Superstar and the scales fell from my eyes. More a slowly dawning understanding that Abba's songs might actually be about something and that the words could be working in opposition to the bland, annoying tunes. 

(Don't you wish Hope and Crosby had made a Road To Damascus movie? Kinda like their version of Life of Brian...)

The Day Before You Came is a catalog song. A list of mundane thoughts and activities that recede into irrelevance as the singer arrives at a turning point in her life. It's an extremely well-written lyric with some perfectly pitched specific examples that raise it way above the generic. How many pop songs reference both Marilyn French and Dallas?

As the NME pointed out in a news item about Pulp covering the number with the BBC Radio Orchestra, it basically is a Pulp song. Certainly, if you knew Jarvis Cocker's oeuvre and had never heard the Abba original, you'd believe it was one of his. 

(That said, it also includes an echo the string riff from David McWilliams' The Days of Pearly Spencer, which could also be a Pulp song. I'd love to hear them cover that.)

Getting back to Bad Bunny, he's famous and successful even among people who have no clue what he's singing about. That might be a new development. It's noticeable that most of the KPop groups sing at least partially in English. American cultural hegemony is clearly on the wane but English is hanging grimly on as the lingua franca for the world. For how much longer, though?

All of which is a very long preamble to what this post is supposed to be about, namely Haunted Hotel. I realize I haven't even explained what Haunted Hotel is yet. Instead I've covered myself just in case I'm explaining something that almost everyone reading this already knows more about than I do. Look, I'm saying, I may be a culturally ignorant peasant but at least I know I am!

Or maybe I'm not. Maybe none of you know any more about Haunted Hotel than I do. Maybe you know less. Maybe I am, indeed, introducing you to the show for the very first time.

Oh, yes, it's a TV show. Did I even make that clear? Probably not. It's an animated sitcom currently showing on Netflix. There's only one season and it's ten episodes long. 

The situation is that Katherine Freeling, thirty-something single mother to two children, a teenage boy called Ben and his younger sister Esther, has inherited a hotel called the Undervale (Presumably a nod to the Overlook...) from her dead brother Nathan. As you probably guessed from the title, the hotel is full of ghosts. Nathan is one of them.

In fact, anyone or anything that dies there comes back as a ghost. A lot of people appear to have breathed their last at the Undervale. 

Oh, and there's one more regular cast member: Abbadon. Abbadon is "an ancient demon who is trapped in the body of a young boy from the 1700s", some of which you may have worked out from his name. I might have done, too, had I not gone the entire season believing his name was Avedon, like the photographer. It was only when I read the Wikipedia page a few minutes ago I realized my error.

Even though Haunted Hotel is built around a family and has children and teenagers in main roles, it's very much an adult comedy, by which I mean it treats the audience as grown-ups and uses adult themes. I'm not sure I'd classify it as a family show although I guess that would depend on your family. 

I'm not going to make any attempt to analyze of even describe the show other than that. I might have, if I hadn't spent all that time on the Bad Bunny stuff. It wouldn't help much, anyway. When does it ever?

What I am going to do is recommend the show unreservedly. I loved it. It's smart, funny, extremely well-paced and frequently heart-warming. All the characters have depth and detail in the writing, something strongly enhanced by both the excellent animation and the first-class voice acting. The jokes land, the plots work and there's a solid sitcom progression arc that means you come out the end of the season feeling both you and the characters know a lot more about each other than at the start.

I'm very happy to be able to tell you the show has already been renewed for a second season, which does suggest it must have been quite successful, even if I hadn't really heard about it. 

If you've already seen it, why didn't you tell me? If you haven't, what's stopping you?

You Wait Years For A Feel-Good Comedy Like Ted Lasso...

I finished watching another TV show last night so I suppose that's what I'm going to be writing about today. It would probably make more sense to save a few up and do a portmanteau post about all of them but then I'd probably have forgotten what half of them were about by the time I got to write about them, so maybe it's better I keep on top of things.

The show I've been watching is another sitcom. There's a surprise. 

I really like sitcoms. I grew up with them. They were a staple of my viewing - of everyone's viewing - from when I was a child, through my teenage years until I was well into my thirties. More so even than soap operas. Certainly more than serious drama. 

Even now, sitcoms remain an important part of almost any programmer's schedule, whether it's a broadcast network or a streaming platform. And there's persistent cultural interest in the history of the genre. There are documentaries and movies and stage plays based on sitcoms from the fifties through to the nineties. I've seen or heard quite a few.

There are novels, too. I just finished reading one centered on a fictional sixties sitcom. It felt like it was based on a specific show, although I don't think it was any I've seen. I'd tell you what the book's called and who wrote it but I read it in proof and it's not out until next year so I'm not supposed to review it or quote from it. I enjoyed it, though, I'll say that much. 

It's not surprising that, even with my longstanding interest in the genre, I didn't really recognize whatever specific show was being referenced. We didn't get a lot of the really big U.S. shows over here when I was growing up. I don't think we got Leave It To Beaver or The Honeymooners or Gilligan's Island, for example, and even if we had it would most likely have been late, incomplete and out of order.

The novel mentions a number of real sixties sitcoms that we did get, though, and the author clearly doesn't think much of many them. The classics, like the eternal Lucy, get due reverence but there's little respect shown for all those fanciful shows with supernatural or surreal elements, like The Munsters, My Favorite Martian or I Dream of Genie, most of which made it over here and all of which I watched every chance I got. 

None of those get a good word in the novel but the author and the characters all seem to save their greatest disdain for what was one of my favorite shows as a child, The Beverley Hillbillies. I can't pretend that's unfair. It is not, I have to say, a show that's aged well. I tried to watch a couple of episodes on YouTube a decade or so back and it was heavy going. 

A lot of sitcoms from the fifties and sixties have lasted a lot better. I watched the entirety of The Dick Van Dyke Show on YouTube a few years ago. It stands up very well. The Addams Family remains a favorite with many, sixty years after it was first broadcast. I have the box set of the entire run of Sgt. Bilko next to me right now and I could pull out a disc at random and watch any episode and it would still be sharp, witty and very funny.

So, anyway, I like sitcoms. I've watched a lot, read about some and I know a reasonable amount about the history. There certainly aren't as many around as there used to be but I'd say there are still plenty of good ones being made. They're not the linchpins of the schedules the way they once were but they're still culturally and commercially significant, especially when they feature a well-known actor in the central role.

At which point, I imagine, someone reading this is going to guess I'm about to review the second season if the Ted Danson vehicle, Man on the Inside. I am not. I'm watching it but I'm only up to Episode 4. You'll have to wait for my thoughts on that one. 

The show I've just finished watching is Running Point. Terrible title. I haven't been able to remember it even for twenty-four hours between episodes on my one-a-day schedule. I just had to look it up for this post. I can't remember the last time I watched a whole season of a show and couldn't bring the name of it to mind by the end.

In case you haven't heard of it, Running Point is a basketball comedy airing on Netflix and starring Kate Hudson. I can give you the elevator pitch in a sentence: Ted Lasso meets Arrested Development. 

Better do the SPOILER WARNING here, I guess. 

The longer version? Kate Hudson plays Isla Gordon, youngest of the four Gordon siblings and the only girl. The very wealthy Gordon family own the L.A. Waves basketball team, of which eldest brother Cam has been President since their father died. The team employs all four of the Gordon kids in one capacity or another, with Isla shunted off to the sidelines as the Charity organizer.

At the start of the first season (There's only been one season so far.) Cam, who has a crack and coke addiction, goes into rehab. His two brothers each expect to take over but Cam hands the controls over to Isla. 

This sets up a Ted Lasso scenario, where a completely inappropriate person is given control of a major sports team. As with Ted, it turns out she's really good at it, even though at the start it looks like she'll be a laughing stock. And even more like Ted, it becomes obvious after a while that the person who gave her the job expects and wants her to fail.

The whole story arc is almost identical, with Isla making left-field choices that turn out to be inspired, bringing the fractious team together by sheer force of personality, winning over grumpy and self-obsessed players and cynical journalists alike with her genuine enthusiasm and basically shining like a feisty ray of sunlight over everything and everyone until the team starts acting like a real team and winning matches again. 

Seriously, you could probably project the two storylines simultaneously onto a screen and have them overlap almost perfectly.

As for the Arrested Development comparison, that's a bit of a looser fit. There are plenty of dysfunctional families in sitcomland, after all. Schitt's Creek might be almost as good a match. 

Still, the nature of the Gordon's dysfunctionality reminded me quite strongly of Arrested Development, with the relationships between the siblings and their hangers-on occasionally edging towards the irreal if not the surreal. When the fourth, previously unknown, Gordon sibling turns up a couple of episodes in, and turns out to be a lovable, naive, adolescent, whose puppy-dog enthusiasm counter-points the narcissism and interior focus of the rest of the clan, the congruencies become hard to miss. 

Okay then. So it's not exactly original. But is it any good?

Yes, it is. The sporting storyline works as well here as it it did in Ted Lasso. Kate Hudson is as appealing, relatable and amusing as Jason Sudeikis, the supporting cast is strong, especially the three brothers. (I particularly liked Scott MacArthur as middle brother Ness.) Most importantly for a sitcom, the script is consistently and reliably funny.

I was pleasantly surprised to find the basketball scenes, of which there aren't many, far more convincing than their equivalents in Ted Lasso. That may be because I have seen a lot of football matches on TV but very few basketball games. 

Or because I have never been able to follow the action on a basketball court. It's too fast and frenzied. Or maybe they got mostly real basketball players to do the action shots. Whatever, it worked a lot better for me than the borderline embarrassing on-pitch antics in Ted Lasso.

The script is partly credited to Executive Producer Mindy Kaling, who co-wrote the first and last episode and wrote Episode 2 alone. It was seeing her name in the credits when Netflix offered the show up as a suggestion that got me to give it a try, although now I actually think about it, I'm not sure I've ever watched any of her other shows. That's the power of name recognition for you.

I'm happy I did, anyway. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole season. 

It's very much a feel-good comedy (Again, like Ted Lasso.) and I can take any number of those, provided they also have a bit of bite, which this one certainly does. Kate Hudson is a very good comedienne, not just in her delivery of the numerous smart remarks and come-backs but in some very good physical comedy, too. The running gag where she doesn't see the extremely clean glass partition wall gets funnier every time she walks into it.

I'd recommend this to anyone who enjoyed Ted Lasso. It's "inspired by" not "ripped off". If the success of the pair of them leads to a spate of feel-good sports comedies, I won't be complaining.

For non-sports fans, it sits very snugly in the long tradition of both family and work-based sitcoms. If you like to see siblings and/or co-workers striking sparks off each other, this should suit very well.

The whole thing motors along for ten episodes, none of which felt like filler, before wrapping up relatively neatly. The exceptions are Isla's love life, which starts out simple and ends up very complicated indeed and the mystery of what the hell Cam might be up to. 

That one goes unaddressed to the point where I was starting to think the writers had just forgotten about it altogether... until the very, very last scene, when suddenly there's not only a cliff to hang off but a bombshell to hang on to on the way down if you fall. 

It's just as well there's a second season on the way.  

The Vet Will See You Now: Old Dog, New Tricks

Before I get into whatever it is I'm going to write about today I ought to give an update on the YouTube situation. It's fixed!

I've been using another account while the main one wasn't working but I'd been checking the old one every day to see if anything had changed, which so far it hadn't. Then yesterday evening I clicked "Play on YouTube" on a link somewhere, without thinking about it and the video played as normal. 

It was a few moments before I noticed it was apparently playing through my account. I'd never really thought about how that works before. I shut the video down and logged into my channel directly and everything was back to normal. Still is today.

Given the similar experiences of contributors to the reddit thread I mentioned, I'm going to assume that was a direct result of reporting the issue to YouTube through the Feedback function, which I did on Saturday. A two-day fix over the weekend seems like pretty good service, if so. I'm not complaining, anyway. Let's just hope it sticks.

Being able to use my regular channel will certainly make it easier to put this year's Advent Calendar together. I've already collected more than enough tunes to fill all twenty-five days. Almost twice as many as I'll need, in fact. I might double up and post two each day because, unlike last year, when I collected over a hundred and then found I didn't like half of them all that much, this year there are hardly any I'd want to skip.

But that's a discussion for another day. Let's get on with today's topic, which is... 

Hmm. What is it? Have I thought of one yet? 

Oh, yes, I know! I watched a TV show. All the way through. Let's talk about that!

For once, it's something I'm betting not everyone reading this has seen already. I have a habit of getting to things months or even years after everyone else. Even when I'm there from the moment a show first airs, my preference for watching an episode a day tends to leave me at the back of the line when it comes to reviewing.

In this case, though, it's a brand new show that I'm guessing hasn't been on many people's radar so there's a chance I might be introducing it to a new audience. Or maybe I'm just kidding myself and everyone already knows about it. Whatever.

Oh, you want to know what it is? I guess that would be an idea...

Old Dog, New Tricks is the name it's going by in English, although the original title in Spanish is the super-minimal Animal. It's a show made by Madrid-based Alea Media in conjunction with Netflix, which is where I found it purely by chance just over a week ago. 

It came up on one of their many, many suggestion banners, something I do find quite helpful, particularly compared to Prime Video's chaotic, confusing sprawl. In this supposed Dark Age of The Internet, I'd have to say that Netflix has maintained its standards fairly convincingly. Amazon, on the other hand, is showing major signs of deterioration across all fronts, especially in the areas where it used to shine.

While I often browse through the suggestions Netflix gives me, the most I usually do is add the odd thing to my Watchlist, where it will most likely sit, unwatched, for years. It's very rare for me to start watching something I've never heard of immediately but that's what happened with Old Dog, New Tricks.

Mostly it was because I was in the market, as I frequently am, for a new, half-hour sitcom. I get through them really quickly and there aren't as many good ones as you might think. 

It's not the 1960s. Or the '70s. Or the '80s or the '90s. Sitcoms aren't quite the driving force they were in the glory days of the Networks, although they still seem to get plenty of attention when they have a big star name above the title, like Kristen Bell in Nobody Wants This or Ted Danson in Man On The Inside, which is just about to drop a second season.

ODNT doesn't have a big star name. Or maybe it does if you're Spanish. The two leads are Luis Zahera and Lucia Caraballo. Googling them both, though, neither seems to be particularly famous in their own country. They look like the kind of supporting actors you recognize and find yourself wondering what it was you might have seen them in before.

And they're both excellent in this. It's a well-written show with an unusual setting even, I'm guessing, for a Spanish audience, and a familiar set-up that's been given a quirky and effective twist. But it's the two leads who really make the whole thing work. 

As with pretty much every 21st Century sitcom I can think of - indeed damn near every TV show since the 90s - there's a big cast. No-one really makes two or three handers any more, do they? It's not what you'd call an ensemble piece, though. Very much more two main characters and a large supporting cast.

The setting is a small town in Galicia.  I know Spain very well. I've been going there since I was a small child. I've visited just about every large city in Spain and most of the small ones, too, not to mention countless towns and villages. I've explored every region of the country with one exception: I've never set foot in Galicia.

Galicia, along with Asturias, which I have visited, is often referred to as "Green Spain". It looks absolutely nothing like the popular image of the nation. It's on the Atlantic coast and it rains a lot. Most of it seems to be farmland and it looks a lot like wet farmland anywhere. Or it does in this show, anyway.

It could be in Normandy. It could be about a mile from my house, frankly, except Galicia looks flatter. And as setting, I imagine it's about as unfamiliar to most Spanish viewers as it was to me. I did notice the regional manager, who flew in from Barcelona, couldn't even pronounce the store manager's Galician name.

The set-up is that Antón, a sixty-year old country vet, is struggling. The farmers whose animals he treats dodge his bills, preferring to pay him in kind with milk and eggs. Meanwhile, the biggest farming operation in the area is after him to sign off on something illegal to do with a scam involving EU subsidies. They need his signature on some paperwork for the slaughterhouse and he doesn't want to give it to them.

Antón's niece, Uxía, is the manager of a large pet store in the nearest town. It's part of an international chain called Kawanda. To try and keep his head above water and to avoid the somewhat threatening attentions of the local crime family, Antón grudgingly accepts Uxía's offer of a job as the in-store veterinarian at Kawanda. 

Hilarity ensues.

Well, okay, not exactly. More like wry smiles and occasional chuckles. I did laugh out loud maybe three or four times in the nine episode season. It's not really a laugh out loud kind of show and that's not a problem. 

I watched the English dub, which is excellent. I'm not even sure the Spanish version is on Netflix UK. It defaults to the dub and I just accepted it without thinking. In retrospect, I would quite have liked to watch it in the original Spanish with subtitles, not so much for aesthetic reasons as because it would have been good practice for my slim and increasingly rusty Spanish. In practice, though, I didn't even think of it until halfway through the season. 

The two leads are voiced in the English dub by Jeff LeBeau and Veronica Powers, information I was only able to discover by reading the credits. Here's a clip from Veronica Powers' TikTok, which I've uploaded to my YouTube channel so I can embed it here. If you're not happy with that, Veronica, just let me know and I'll remove it. You did a great job, by the way!

It has a pretty solid plot that goes all the way through the nine episodes. I wouldn't say it was a comedy-drama as such - it's definitely a sitcom - but it does provide a full and complete linear storyline over the course of the season. If it ended there, it would feel like a mini series but of course, because it would work as a standalone, a second season has already been commissioned. Sod's law.

In a way it's a bit like there are two separate situations in the comedy. There are the funny country folk, most of them getting on a bit, with their quirky, old-fashioned country ways and then there's the gleaming clean, super-modern pet boutique with all the trendy youngsters and townies. It's as if someone grafted the back end of Newhart onto the front end of Superstore. 

One of the interesting things about the coupling is the way Antón and Uxía slowly drift towards the middle from their extreme outlying starting positions. The accommodations they make, the way circumstances force them to compromise, the assimilation that happens almost unnoticed, none of it is ever foregrounded in the writing, the direction or the acting. It just occurs, organically.

Perhaps the most surprising thing in the entire series (This is a spoiler...) comes right at the very end, when Uxía leaves her job at Kawanda and Antón carries on working there. That represents a complete reversal of their respective positions and expectations at the start of the season and yet it feels entirely convincing.

Slightly more convincing, perhaps, (Another spoiler coming...) than crooked landowner Vicente's decision not only to take the full rap for the scam he's been running and do jail time for it, but also to lie about Antón's involvement, thereby exonerating him completely. For most of the season, that would have felt like a plot twist too far but all the groundwork for the change of heart is expertly laid in the penultimate episode and when the moment came, even though it was unexpected, it worked.

Speaking of that eighth episode, it's a tough one. There's always a risk with shows about vets that at some point the lead character is going to put his arm all the way up a cow and that does indeed happen. What I wasn't ready for was the scene where Antón has to siphon the entire contents of a cow's gut through a plastic tube by sucking on it. 

Other than that, the show is cheerfully free of animal-related unpleasantness. Most of the patients that come to the clinic at Kawanda are suffering from stress or alienation issues or lack of joi-de-vivre. And that's the animals, not the humans. 

There is one sad episode with a dog that has to be put to sleep but it's handled very deftly. It also points up the one area where I did struggle to suspend disbelief, which is that even when an animal is supposed to be extremely ill, they always look really fit and healthy. The cow that isn't meant to last the night looks as ready for another day as all the other cows. The dog that's supposed to have a limp doesn't have any limp I could see.

But that's fine. Actually, a lot better than having animals that look ill and unsettled. That way you'd always be worrying if they were being mistreated in the filming process. In this show, every animal either looks like it's having a great time or is completely oblivious to what's going on around it, which is very reassuring.

I really enjoyed the show. I liked the characters, not only the leads but many of the supporting cast. Angela the ever-smiling receptionist was always amusing and Vicente's doltish grandson got funnier and funnier as the episodes rolled by. Antón's girlfriend Sabella brought a certain degree of gravitas to some of her scenes but I also found her very funny at times.

I'm very curious to see what the writers do with all of the characters for the second season. As I said, the first season has a really tight central storyline. It will be interesting to see if they try to repeat that structure or lean more into the traditional episodic sitcom approach.

Either way, I'll be very happy to revisit Galicia next year or whenever we get Season Two. If I can't go there in person, at least I can follow Antón and Uxía as they drive through the beautiful scenery surrounding the rural backwater of Topomorto, the fictional village where they somewhat reluctantly share a home. 

There are plenty of worse places to be, both in real life and in front of a screen.

Nobody Wants This More

I'm back to watching an hour or two of TV every night, right before I go to sleep. Partly that's because we're coming into the peak season for returning shows, when the days get dark before it's even nighttime and all the stations and platforms start to make a grab for attention by bringing back all those shows they think people liked last year. 

And it works! I can't say I've been losing sleep waiting for the next season of Hazbin Hotel but I was unironically delighted when I logged into Prime Video last night and saw the familiar logo splashed across the top of the screen, somewhat predictably just in time for Halloween.

It'll be a while until you see my review of that one here. Amazon has chosen to employ some faux-retro scheduling, dropping a pair of episodes every Wednesday for a month. Expect a review in December.

The returning show I'll be reviewing today, whose second season I've just finished watching, is Nobody Wants This, the Kristen Bell/Adam Brody romcom. It's on Netflix, who decided to let us have the whole thing at once in the equally old-school style of a DVD box set. I didn't binge but I did end up watching more than my regularly-scheduled one episode per evening, which may offer a clue as to how much I enjoyed it.

The other reason I'm back to watching TV at all, let alone having the time for two episodes of the same show some evenings, is that I've stopped making songs with Suno. For the last six months, I've spent two or more hours, pretty much every night, working on original material. It's been verging on an addiction.

The reason I stopped has nothing to do with losing interest or even feeling I ought to take a break. I just ran out of source material. In half a year I've completed "definitive" versions of well over a hundred original songs, for which I had to generate thousands of works-in-progress (All of which still exist because you literally cannot permanently delete anything you make on Suno.)

The first batch were all actual songs from decades ago that I pulled off of decaying cassette tapes but the great majority (And by far the better results.) are scores of new songs I created by cutting up prose I wrote in the nineties. About a week ago, I finally hit the point where I couldn't find any more sections or paragraphs that felt like they could be converted into lyrics. So I stopped.

I didn't plan on stopping. I was going to start going through the older, less-successful songs and work on better versions. I've found I have by far the best success with Suno v4.5Pro, which didn't come into existence until May and which wasn't as solid when it was introduced as it is now. (Don't talk to me about the downgrade that is  v5.0...)  

That hasn't happened. Not yet, anyway. I did spend some time playing around in Suno, getting Gemini to give me prompts for certain artists or bands, then having the AI do covers of my songs in those styles, but that was more of a party game than any kind of serious project. For the moment, I think I'm done with making new songs with AI. The next thing is to figure out what to do with the half-dozen albums-worth of material I already have. 

I was going to say that I've unsubscribed from the app but when I went to do it a few minutes ago, I got one of those "Please don't leave - we'll  give you a really good deal" offers and it was so good I took it. Suno is already ridiculously cheap at $10 a month but at half-price it seems daft not to keep the sub going for another month. Also, I'm curious to see how many times they'll try to bribe me to stay.

That's a long pre-amble to the substantive purpose of the post, which is for me to tell you what I thought of Nobody Wants This, Season 2. It's possible I might be playing for time. I'm not entirely sure what I did think about it...

I liked it. I enjoyed it. I'd watch a third season if there is one. It hasn't been confirmed but apparently the stars are up for it and "the writers' room is working" on one so the omens are good. I'm just not sure if I buy the premise that the central characters are made for each other...

Starting at the end, since that seems to be where I've gone, the season doesn't really finish with one of those annoying cliff-hangers, nor even with an obvious bunch of loose ends left blowing in the breeze, all begging to be neatly tied up next time around. There are plenty of unfinished storylines, for sure, but they all have more of a slice-of-life feel to them, the inevitable unraveling of lived lives we just happen to be seeing play themselves out, rather than anything that demands urgent resolution.

Time for the spoiler warning, I guess...

That final episode! Hah! I loved it! Also, it made me want to watch When Harry Met Sally again, which is never a bad thing.

Everyone breaks up. Well, the three central couples. Then one pair gets immediately back together, one goes "on a break" (We all know what that means...) and the third is fucking cooked - thank God! All so very satisfying. If you're going to invoke the spirit of Nora Ephron in your title you better have a goddam plan and they did.

So the wrap-up left me feeling like I'd gotten closure. Always what you want, coming out of a season. But how was the build up?

Hmm. Confusing, I'd say. I mean, come on, I love Kristen Bell. We all love Kristen Bell. But do we love Joanne? I'm not sure we do.

She's kind of annoying, isn't she? And a lot more so in Season 2 than last time. In the first season it seemed like sister Morgan was the self-centered, solipsistic one but this time around she came across as considerably more vulnerable and capable of self-analysis. Also sadder. 

Okay, the pair of them are terrifyingly judgmental and prone to acts of petty vindictiveness not usually seen outside of high school but at least Morgan seems to be learning something, occasionally. Joanne is mostly just doubling down.

And then there's Esther, the sister-in-law, who acted like such a terrifying hard-assed bitch in Season 1.  She's much warmer, more nuanced and yes, again, vulnerable. A lot of character growth there, too. Possibly more at times than seems entirely likely but then much of what was there before was obviously an act. Obvious now, that is.

Even Rebecca, the fiancee who gets dumped at the start of the first season and who just gets a couple of cameos here, even she seems to have grown. Joanne, though? She might have shrunk.

All of which is in the writing and the playing. It's a great performance as always by Kristen Bell but it isn't very endearing. There were multiple episodes where I didn't like Joanne all that much. Of course, she was frequently at her funniest when being at her least likeable and this is a sitcom so it's a valid trade-off. Plus "endearing" isn't really Kristen Bell's thing, is it, now I come to think about it. 

In the end, though, for a romantic comedy to work, the audience has to want the prospective couple to get it together and there were plenty of times I was rooting for them to realize they were dead wrong for each other and call it quits. 

Which, I think, might even be the idea. You're supposed to feel that until the very end, when they turn it around. And they do. It is, nonetheless, a lot of Shawshank before the redemption, as the saying goes. Also, it might feel a lot different on a re-watch. And no-one just watches these things once, do they?

So that's Joanne. How about Noah?  Geez, but he's infuriatingly un-ininfuriating! I feel like I ought to be able to say I wanted to punch him in the face but it would be like punching one of those inflatable bosses they supposedly have in the basements of office buildings in Japan. He'd just roll around a bit and come back up for you to punch him again and it wouldn't get either of you anywhere.

He's so fricken' unbelievably nice without really being very nice at all. He has so many barely-concealed anger issues with which he is not dealing at all but he has a seemingly-bottomless well of niceness he can smear all over any emotion he feels to tamp it down so he can pretend it isn't there. And it works! For him it works, anyway. Not so much for anyone around him or indeed anyone who has to watch him doing it.

The other thing about Noah is that he's hardly ever funny. He's mostly a straight man for others but he does occasionally do a kind of pained fish-out-of water thing, like when he's running about between the Strongly Agree/ Strongly Disagree markers with the teens at his new job and getting it wrong every time, something that passes for humor only until you think about it. 

Also, is he really that good-looking? I have issues with the scraggly facial hair but I guess I'm not the target demographic.

He does a job, anyway. It's fine. And he is good when it matters, in the non-funny bits. He convinces me every time he cracks and tells Joanne how he really feels about her. If Adam Brody couldn't sell that, the show would be in real trouble. But he can.

The really funny characters, though, are... all the others. Another generic problem with romcoms, of course. The couple at the center can't always be making it with the one-liners and the funny faces and the pratfalls. They have to gaze meaningfully into each others' eyes once in a while.

The show is full of hilarious couples that aren't Joanne and Noah:  Esther and Sasha, Sasha and Morgan, Morgan and Dr. Andy, even Joanne and Morgan's parents ffs. Every time any of those pairs gets going it's like someone switched the "Sitcom Filming" light on. 

I would personally love a spin-off starring Justin Lupe and Timothy Simons as Morgan and Sasha. They have a ridiculous chemistry that just burns off the screen. Not specifically a romantic one, either, although if the script took things that way it would be entirely convincing. It's the way they communicate so comfortably, intuitively and naturally that makes me want more of them together.

The whole dynamic between Sasha, Morgan and Esther in Season 2 is so unexpectedly lovely it almost overwhelmed the main plot for me. It's rare, even now, to see this kind of male/female friendship between characters, who could viably have a romantic relationship but have something different and deeper instead; to see it alongside recognition and acknowledgment of its value and purpose from a partner, who could very plausibly be expected to be threatened and concerned by it, is astonishing.

It is a clever show, though, which shouldn't come as any kind of surprise. The one thing that ties all Kirsten Bell's projects together is their intellectual rigor. They all make you think. Hard.

At which point I ought, I suppose, to say something about the central conceit, which is that he's Jewish and she's not. Only I'm not going to, other than to say I found it confusing and distracting in the second season in a way it wasn't (So much.) in the first. I feel as though it's adding something to the show that makes it harder to analyze and understand than a romcom normally would be and harder still to talk about. 

Did I learn anything from it? Hmm. Maybe. Maybe not. Except the bit about how you can apparently just decide to be Jewish. That was new. And some people make a big deal about gender!

What I would say is that regardless of whether Noah is a rabbi or a vicar or a policeman or the Wichita lineman, anyone who openly states that marrying them would be, first and foremost, marrying a job does not make for a very convincing romantic lead, even without all the angst over changing religion. There's a lot of talk about "red flags" in Dr. Andy's behavior that could easily apply here, too.

"Nobody Wants This" is a very interesting title. It's the name of the sisters' podcast but it also refers to the central relationship, in which it's never clear who actually does want it. The text is that even if the pair at the center do (And at any time one or both of them might not.) any number of outside forces certainly don't. The subtext is that all those outside forces might be right. Maybe the universe doesn't want it either.

I do, though. The show, that is. There were plenty of moments where what one or other character was doing annoyed me more than amused me but that's the grit that builds the pearl. I'm still not remotely convinced that Joanne and Noah ought to be together. As things are now, I do kind of hope that the series finale, when it eventually comes, sees them go their own separate ways. I think the prospects of them having a long and happy marriage are vanishingly small. 

Until then, though, I'm more than happy to watch them struggling with the same doubts for another ten episodes, this time next year. And for a few years after that, if Netflix so allows.