You Watch Too Much TV, You Play Too Many Games

Friday, huh? I feel a Grab Bag coming on...

Cancelled Netflix Shows

So, I saw this on NME. Depressing, right? Of those fifteen cancelled shows, I watched and enjoyed four: Raising Dion, The Imperfects, Space Force and Fate: The Winx Saga. Of the four, one was tight, well-crafted and highly professional, one a little loose around the edges but fundamentally sound and two were sloppy and chaotic but still fun. 

I thought Raising Dion wrote itself into a corner it was never going to find a way out of, although you could argue that, like Cloak and Dagger, it was another superhero show that spent two whole seasons on an origin story and then folded before the first real adventure. 

Fate: The Winx Saga was yet another supposedly dark, edgy teen-oriented reimagining of a much-loved children's show. The first season was so clunky and shambolic I was amazed it got a second. The second season was, if anything, even less believable than the first but it did seem to be developing some internal momentum that might carry it forward.

Key to both shows were likeable characters. That's the main reason I enjoyed them and stayed with them. Unfortunately, likeable doesn't sell. It may also be the reason Space Force didn't make it. That was a very well-crafted, well-written, well-acted, grown-up show, genuinely funny throughout. I suspect it was also just too amiable to generate much of a commitment from the audience. You always felt it was nice while it was playing but you wouldn't really miss it if it wasn't there. And now it's not and I don't.

Of the four shows, the only one I'm mildly annoyed to see cancelled is The Imperfects. I thought it had real promise and it certainly didn't suffer from the "too many likeable characters" problem. The opposite, if anything. Mostly, I wanted to see more of Rhys Nicholson, an astonishing screen presence of whom I had been hitherto unaware. I did a bit of googling on them after the show ended and found out they're an Australian stand-up. I really hope they take on more acting work.

Of the other eleven shows Netflix cancelled, I was thinking about watching only one, The Midnight Club. Guess I won't bother now. It's funny but when I'm considering watching something that's not brand new these days, I routinely check how many seasons it ran and if it's only one I don't even bother. Which is nuts.

Wednesday

I think I'm safe with this one. As I write, it's still #1 on Netflix UK. It's a major hit and even now I get some spurious "news" item about the show in my feeds pretty much daily. People just don't want to stop talking about it. I haven't heard if the second season has been commissioned yet but I assume it's a lock-in

I really liked the show, which was smart, funny, sharp and good to look at. I'm not exactly sure why it's been so well-received, other than the obvious name recognition of the title character with eighty-four years of history behind it. It didn't seem to be obviously superior to a number of other teen-inflected fantasy/horror series I've watched, particularly The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina or Riverdale, both of which began in a similarly grounded fashion, before spiralling into glorious insanity.

Once again, the absolute highlight of the show was the excellence of the performances. Jenny Ortega was pretty nearly perfect in the lead and Emma Myers equally brilliant as her friend and roomate Enid. I particularly enjoyed Gwendoline Christie as Principle Weems, so it was a big disappointment when... okay, no, I won't go there. I guess there may still be someone reading who hasn't watched it yet.

Probably the biggest surprise for me wasn't anything to do with the twisty plot. For the record, I worked out who the real villains were well before the end. I assume we were meant to be one step ahead of Wednesday all along. When it comes to High School P.I.s she's no Veronica Mars, that's for sure. 

No, the thing I wasn't expecting was how convicing a Morticia Catherine Zeta-Jones would make. It's a shame she was only in a couple of episodes. I hope she gets more screen time in Season Two. Luis Guzman was great as Gomez, too. He looks very much the Gomez from Charles Addams original New Yorker cartoons, although I have John Astin's suave, sophisicated take on the character from the sixties' TV series so firmly embedded in my brain, the transition took a bit of getting used to.

Wednesday the show is a gloriously female-led affair but I think it would have helped if the male romantic leads hadn't been quite so wishy-washy. It's hard to see why any of the girls would give them the time of day. As has been pointed out pretty much everywhere, there's close to zero chemistry between the would-be romantic couples, while you could power the Christmas lights of a small town off the electricity generated every time Wednesday and Enid get together. I'm totally shipping Wenclair for the next season. If Wednesday's going to break character for anything, it ought to be that.

And finally, I lied when I said Catherine Zeta-Jones performance was the biggest surprise. That had to be the scene where Wednesday first meets Eugene at the beehives. It was one of those "Wait... is that? It frickin' can't be!" moments. Moosa Mostafa, who plays Eugene, was also Nasir Roman in The Last Bus, a show I described as being like "something the Children's Film Foundation or the National Film Board of Canada might have made in the 1970s".

To see him pop up in a major U.S. show like Wednesday, in a significant supporting role no less, was positively bizarre. He was great, too, albeit playing almost exactly the same character as he played in The Last Bus. Apart from a tiny role in a Christmas movie as a background character who doesn't even merit a name in the credits, those two shows seem to be his entire career so far. I wonder if he can play anything else?

Other TV Stuff

On Amazon Prime I finished the first three seasons of Veronica Mars, every episode of which was genius. The fourth season wasn't included for some reason, so I did a little investigating of my own to find out why. That turned into a whole thing, which I'm not going to get into here except to say what kind of dimwitted network exec cancels a show like Veronica Mars, ffs?

I ended up subbing the Lionsgate channel, which used to be Starz, because that's where Season Four is playing. I already used up my free month of Starz back when I was watching Doom Patrol but luckily there was a three months at 99p a month deal going on so I took that. The second and third seasons of Doom Patrol are on there, too, so it's a steal.

And of course so far I haven't watched a single show on Lionsgate. The fourth VM season apparently feeds off the movie, which I have on DVD, so I need to watch that first but so far I haven't made the time. I'd better get on with it. The clock's ticking.

On Netflix I watched Exception, a pretty good anime Science Fiction show that ended in a way I didn't like. I'd recommend it all the same. I'm also re-watching Parks and Recreation, whose characters are nowhere near as likeable as I remembered. Might explain why it ran for seven seasons. Still funny, though.

I had to take a break from The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself, not because it isn't excellent, which it is, but because I was finding it just too intense to watch, right before I was supposed to be going to sleep. Of course, it's fatal to pause anything mid-run. Now I've fitted something else into that slot and there's no room to ease it back in. I guess I'll have to watch the rest of the season in the daylight. That's going to be weird. TV is for nighttime.

The show that replaced Bastard Son in my schedule was Wednesday and the show that's replaced Wednesday is One Of Us Is Lying. I was a little surprised there was a second season because it's based on a book, the plot of which Season One followed closely, and that book has a very definite conclusion. The showrunners have done a fine job of coming up with a way of keeping the whole conceit going, albeit somewhat at the expense of realism.

The least useful criticism of any work of fiction, however, is "Well, that would never happen." Fuck realism. All that counts is internal consistency. Nail that and we're good. I think they've managed it although it's been a close call at times. Still a couple of episodes to go and I have to say I almost want to go to bed early some nights just so I can find out what happens next.

I probably watched some other stuff but if I did it hasn't stuck. 

New Games For Next Year

Yesterday I only had one multiplayer online title to look forward to. Now I have three. 

The one I had is Nightingale. I declined to apply for the alpha/beta because of the NDA so I'm reliant on press releases but my decision not to participate has had an odd effect on my interest and involvement with the title. I'm still just as keen to play it when it arrives but since I decided not to get involved I find myself shying away from any news I see about the game. I was going to link one of the latest videos, which I haven't watched, but now it comes to it I don't even want to do that much, so I won't.

Instead, I'll link one for a game I wasn't planning on playing at all: Blue Protocol. I knew there was a hype wave building for it but it hadn't swept me along... and then I saw this morning that Amazon Games have picked it up for worldwide publishing next year.

That means I won't have to set up a load of new accounts or email addresses. Well, I hope I won't. I should just be able to use my existing Amazon credentials. It's astonishing what a psychological difference that makes. I wasn't keen and now I am.

Game looks good, too. The weirdly filmic flatness of it is intriguing. I'd like to see what it looks like from the inside. It's free, anyway, so why wouldn't I try it?

And finally, a game I had never heard of until a few hours ago but for which I have now submitted a beta application: Wayfinder. It's being developed by Airship Syndicate and the people behind Warframe, Digital Extremes and it's "a character-based, online action role playing game", which totally sounds like a thing.

I wouldn't have been particularly interested but then I looked at the promotional screenshots. Once again, that's a place I want to see from the inside. It has housing, too, and it's going to be on Steam, so there are a lot of plusses. Whether they outweigh the negatives (Seems like grouping is strongly recommended and I never really got on with Warframe) I guess I'll find out in testing - if I get in. 

If I do, I'll be sure to post about it here, always assuming I'm allowed. If I'm not then I suppose I won't bother. Testing, that is. Or I might. I'm fickle that way. Depends on the fine print in the NDA, if there is one, which you can bet I will read thoroughly. Well, skim, at least. Let's not go overboard.

That's enough for one Friday, I guess. Time I went and played some games.

Before And After Science -or- Imperfect Fate

I finished watching The Imperfects. It was a ride. I don't believe there was a moment when any of it made any sense but who cares?

There was a time, before the MCU turned superhero movies into the kind of money machine Chris Roberts could only dream of, when "comic book" was shorthand for "makes no sense". If a review said a movie had a "comic-book sensibility" it wasn't usually a compliment. (Although it could be if the film was showing in arthouses.) Generally, what it meant was a lot of surface but very little substance and a plot you could drive trucks through, sideways.

These days there's a touch more nuance to the term but TV shows adapted from comics still tend towards the looser end of the narrative spectrum. Ironically, they still sometimes hang together better than the comics that inspire them but that's not always a high bar.

Nothing in the main titles or publicity I saw about The Imperfects said it was based on a comic but it had to have been, didn't it? I would have put money on it. No-one was taking that bet so I did a little digging instead. 

Seems there was a comic called The Imperfects, published by Marvel in 2005. Full title: Nemesis: The Imperfects. It ran for six issues in a limited series. 

The comic book was itself a spin-off or at least a sidebar. In 2004, Marvel partnered with Electronic Arts to produce "superhero fighting games" based both on existing Marvel properties and new IPs. "Marvel Nemesis: The Rise of the Imperfects" was the first - and, as it turned out, the only - co-production to come out of that alliance.

The game launched on both Playstation 2 and Playstation Portable (PSP), apparently with radically different gameplay. Neither was successful. It came out on most of the other console platforms around at the time, too, but there was no PC release. 

The plan was for a series of games and comics featuring the characters to follow but the game bombed and that was the end of that. Marvel and EA terminated their arrangement in 2008 with no further games appearing in either this or any other series.

At first glance all of this would seem to have nothing to do with the Netflix 2022 series of approximately the same name. I'm about as sure as I can be that it doesn't but there is one conceptual conceit the two hold in common and it's a striking co-incidence.

Both superhero teams, if you can call them that, get their powers as a direct result of being experimented on by a scientist, variously described as "mad", "evil" or "rogue". In the comic-book that's just one more would-be supervillain but the television Imperfects is without any doubt the most virulently anti-science piece of science-fiction I have ever seen. It virtually amounts to anti-science propaganda. The word "scientist" is interchangeable with "villain" throughout the entire narrative arc.

In the comic/game Dr. Niles van Roekel uses his "super-genius intellect" to genetically engineer a bunch of "test subjects" into super-powered "prototypes". They all have various problems, illnesses or disabilities that his experiments could, theoretically, cure or improve but the results are less than ideal. They're known as "Imperfects" because he hasn't quite "ironed out the kinks" of his process just yet.

Although Dr Niles is "evil", it transpires he's made himself like that for good reason, or what he sees as good reason, anyway: "A race of slavers had taken many of his people prisoners and he had to drop his compassion for others in order to win the war on his home world. He escaped the planet with many other resistance members and he had chosen Earth in order to create an army to help him free his planet from slavery."

In the Netflix series, the Imperfects are also the result of unauthorised genetic experimentation by Dr. Alex Sarkov (Superbly and hilariously portrayed by Rhys Nicholson.) and an unspecified number of scientists working with or for him. The subjects of his experiments are children and adolescents with potentially life-threatening conditions. Sarkov's treatments are supposed to effect a cure or at least alleviate the symptoms but when the treatment is withdrawn there are side-effects, which just happen to be the exact equivalent of super-powers.

Without going into too much detail for fear of spoilers, as the series progresses it becomes clear that, while almost everyone else sees Sarkov as either evil or mad or both, he has a much more nuanced worldview. By his own lights, he is trying to do something positive both for his subjects and the world, but in order to push past the inevitable ethical and beaurocratic barriers he, like van Roekel, has had to harden himself so as not to feel any compassion.

Those are quite similar set-ups but that's as far as it goes. I've had a flip through some of the issues of the comic (Everything's online, ins't it?) and the whole series is pretty much fight scenes, as you might expect given its provenance. It's a notable co-incidence, all the same.

As for the show, it's one insane revelation after another. Everyone swaps motivations like hats. The side-effects/superpowers morph and warp to suit the plot. There's no actual fourth wall breaking but some of the dialog indicates a level of metawareness that gives the whole affair a virtually cubist perspective. 

The final episode is a massive, unrelenting, unashamed pitch for a second season that so far hasn't been commissioned. Given that reviews have been pretty good and public opinion is favorable (78% on Rotten Tomatoes right now.) if the viewing numbers match, I'd say the omens were favorable.

Then again, what do I know? As soon as I finished The Imperfects I started watching another Netflix superhero-analog show - Fate: The Winx Saga. I'm almost ashamed to admit it although, as should be obvious by now, I really have no shame where my cultural tastes are concerned.

I watched the first season of Fate:TWS with a degree of disbelief. It's nominally a re-envisioning of a kids TV show called Winx Club that ran, on and off, on Nickolodeon for most of the first two decades of the twenty-first century but you'd never guess if you didn't know.

Winx Club was a vivid, animated, child-friendly series featuring " the adventures of a group of girls known as the Winx, students at the Alfea College for Fairies, who turn into fairies to fight villains." It was squarely aimed at sub-tween girls. Fate:the Winx Saga is "targeted towards an audience of young adults", meaning there's a lot of smouldering, swearing and sex. Also some violence and torture, a lot of alchohol and the occasional drug reference. Something for everyone, pretty much.

The first season was a critical disaster. Rotten Tomatoes, with a critics rating of 37%, headed their entry "Flat, flimsy, and forgettable, Fate: The Winx Saga is a fantastical flop that fails to capture the magic of its source material." 

That's harsh but not entirely unfair. I watched the six episode arc, embracing it for the hamfisted farago it was, but when the final episode closed on a cliffhanger I never expected to find out what happened next. Surely no-one would commission a second season?

I was astonished to see a second season slotted in to Netflix' September listings. I was even more astonished to see it go straight to #1 in the Netflix UK chart. 

Happy enough to see it come back, I remembered nothing at all about the show other than a vague, warm feeling that I'd quite enjoyed it. Three episodes into Season Two, I can still barely remember anything that happened in Season One, even when the characters drop retro-expositionary hints. The story made that little of an impression on me.

What I do remember is the feel of the thing, which was mostly teen angst with some awkward humor until the big reveals at the end. The second season feels darker and bleaker, although I'd need to re-watch the first to be sure. Maybe I'm remembering it as cosier than it was. 

The acting and dialog, which I remember as stagey and not all that convincing, haven't improved much but the show benefits from having a likeable cast, possibly the only holdover, other than some names and locations, from the original IP. Even the bad fairies don't seem that bad although the new villain is more than adequately nasty.

Fate: The Winx Saga isn't a comic book adaptation either but it sure feels like one. The characters may be "fairies", just like the characters in The Imperfects are "monsters", as everyone in both shows misses no opportunity to remind each other and the audience, but they all behave and act just like superheroes. They're all defined first by their powers and second by the moral choices they make when they use them. If that's not called "being a superhero" I don't know what it is.

For all its faults, and it has plenty, I'm enjoying Fate:TWS. It's trashy but so were the New York Dolls. I'll be watching the rest of the season and the third, if they get one. I really do have no shame, it seems.

Ironically, one show I keep meaning to write about but never seem to find the right peg to hang the post on, Paper Girls, is based on a comic book, even though no-one in it has super powers of any kind. Maybe that's why, despite getting great reviews and being, y'know, genuinely good, it's not getting a second season.

Fortunately it ended in a less cliffhangery way than most, which made it seem less desperate but also maybe more resigned to its destiny as a one-season show, at least on Prime. Word is the showrunners are hawking it around, looking for another platform to continue the story. I hope they find one. Quality deserves to succeed.

Unfortunately for the less obvious shows, the lesson to be learned seems to be go fast, go hard and don't care too much about whether any of it makes sense. Stranger Things may have come good with its slow burn, low key vision but already the days when something like that was possible on a streaming service seem lost to the past. 

There are too many platforms now, all competing viciously for the same subscriptions. The concept of building an audience over time is becoming as alien to streaming as it used to be to network television. Comic books, video games and cartoons make for great source material but only if they're presented with the same pace and punch that made the originals a success. Slow them down, flesh them out, take them too seriously and you'll be looking at a single season, if you're lucky.

It seems like an odd way to go. After all, in other media isn't it the sequels and long-running franchises that make all the money? As interest in Wrath of the Lich King Classic seems to prove, what people really want is more of what they've already had. 

Why keep throwing the dice?

Screen Time

About time I did a TV catchup, I think. Seems like it must have been a while. For once, I'm going with "What I'm Watching" not "What I've Just Watched". I usually like to wait wait until I've seen a whole season before attempting any kind of serious, critical assessment but that does tend to miss out on the immediate, emotional reaction, which is kind of the point of tv.

A sober analysis of a full season arc often focuses on flaws that get overlooked in the passion of a first watch but tv's not about what lasts, it's about what's there. Good television rides the moment, just like good pop music does. Or should.

And now, having set out my stall, I'm going to begin by kicking it over. Here's one I've already watched all the way through. 

Uncoupled is a six-episode romcom that debuted on Netflix earlier this summer. The setup is simple: in the first episode, Michael is dumped by Colin, his partner, on the latter's 50th birthday. The rest revolve around Michael's struggles, as a gay man in his late forties, to come to terms with his newly-single status and the huge changes dating culture's spun up during his seventeen years of monogamy.

I only started watching this because it stars Neil Patrick Harris, best-known, depending on your age and tates, either for playing the titlular teenage physician in Doogie Howser, M.D. or the teeth-gratingly mysogynistic Barney Stinson in How I Met Your Mother. I have a love-hate relationship with HIMYM, which I only started watching because it stars Alyson Hannigan, best known for playing Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Anyone sensing a pattern here?

As Barney Stinson, Harris was unbearable but also disturbingly compelling, something that applies almost equally to the whole cast and the show itself. I thought it would be interesting to see what he was like in another role (I confess I hadn't realised he was also Doogie Howser. It was a long time ago and we were all a lot younger then, none more so than Neil Patrick.). I didn't expect to find him sympathetic, relatable and above all convincing as an actual human being with recognizeable emotions.

I also didn't expect to see the actor who played the pathologically heterosexual sex addict reframed as possibly the gayest man on television. Indeed, the whole show is probably the gayest thing I've ever seen, if not the campest. Just to have lived through a change in the culture that accomodates such a show on a mainstream television platform fills me with vicarious pride. I mean, I know I didn't do anything to make it possible, but at least I was there, dammit!

It's a very funny show with a lot of shard-sharp dialog coming in hard from every direction. It also has a lot of pathos and some genuinely emotional moments. I felt the eight episodes stood well as a completed narrative, not needing any further explication. No second season has been announced and I didn't feel it begged for one. I'd watch one if it came, though. Recommended. 

If Uncoupled is the gayest show I can think of right now, Bee and Puppycat is the most surreal. Someone hold the net, while I attempt to describe it.

The first episode opens almost normally, with Bee losing her job as a waitress when the kitchen of the restaurant where she works catches on fire. A dog-cat hybrid, Puppycat, who only speaks in incomprehensible gibberish, rendered into English by subtitles, falls on Bee's head out of thin air. 

The two of them travel to another dimension, where a talking television set called Tempbot changes Bee's clothes and sends the pair out on temp assignments to other planets. Everywhere they go, rubbery arms like Mr Fantastic's try to grab them but never quite do. After that it gets weird.

I had never heard of the show but it has a long and extremely complicated history, none of which I intend to go into here. If you're interested, go read the Wikipedia entry like I did, or ask Xzzysqrl, who I'm absolutely sure will be all over it.

When I clicked on Bee and Puppycat it was purely because of the name, which could have been designed specifically to draw me in. I knew nothing about it at all other than that it was an animated show. I also thought it was anime and since I'm very slowly beginning to educate myself by experience in that culture (See next entry.) it seemed worth a shot.

From the get-go, Bee and Puppycat felt decidedly western in orientation. It's hard to say why. It's not the American/English voices. All dubbed shows have those. It's something about the expectations it sets up but I can't quite tell if those are visual or cultural. Even the hyper-trippy imagery feels very "western", somehow.

Despite all the weirdness, there are some very solid characters and storylines fighting for attention. Bee needs to take the temp jobs to make rent. Her child landlord, Cardamon, needs the money to care for his sick mother. Bee's relationship with her friend Deckard is awkward-sweet and borderline unhealthy but I want to know where it's going. So does Deckard's sister/roommate, Cass, who I actually thought was his girlfriend until I learned otherwise from Wikipedia just now. That explains a lot, actually...

The Netflix show is some kind of remake/mashup of some of the earlier versions. Once I found that out I watched one of the originals on YouTube but it would be too confusing to watch them all mixed together so I'm going to finish up the Netflix episodes then go back and watch the rest, like I did with Cowboy Bebop. I hope it turns out as well as that did. Reccommended. 

Rilakkuma's Theme Park Adventure might be even weirder than Bee and Puppycat. It's hard to say. I can't stay awake long enough to tell.

Seriously, I've tried to watch three episodes so far and every time I fall asleep. It's like a drug.

I had no idea who (Or really what.) Rilakkuma was until I wrote this post, when I looked him up and found he's basically the bear version of Hello Kitty. He did start in a comic but his fundemental purpose is to sell stationery and merchandise, something he's turned out to be really good at: $10b so far.

This is Rilakkuma's second outing on Netflix, his first being Rilakkuma and Kaoru. Kaoru is his - I don't know - owner? Friend? Roommate? They live together, anyway. She's "an office lady in her thirties" and she shares her life and her home not just with Rilakkuma but with another bear, a smaller female called Korilakkuma and a yellow chick called Kiiroitor. 

What Kaoru did to deserve this isn't explained but it seems like it must be a difficult life. All of the plot I've managed to stay awake for so far seems to consist of Rilakkuma blundering around like Paddington on downers while Kaoru desperately tries to keep him fed and safe. 

I feel like I need to keep watching this if only to work out what the hell is going on but so far I haven't even made it all the way through a single episode before keeling over. I'm going to have to go back to the beginning and start again. Neither reccommended or not reccomended until I can stay awake long enough to decide.

Lost Ollie is a show I've mentioned in passing already. It's also another I've watched all the way through, not a great commitment since it's only four episodes long. It's a complete-in-itself mini-series based on a children's book I've never heard of by an author I don't know.

I watched this one because I have a major thing for toys that come alive. (Also imaginary friends, although there aren't any here so I don't know why I even mentioned it.) It's the old story: Boy Loses Toy, Boy Looks For Toy, Boy... oh, come on! You think I'm going to tell you how it ends?

Something you should know about Lost Ollie: there's a surprising amount of violence for a PG rated show described as "family entertainment". It's also bleak as hell most of the time and the themes are painfully "adult", grief, loss, bereavement, sexual jealousy, memory loss, psychosis... some of it, especially all of episode three, is bloody terrifying, frankly.

Also almost everyone speaks in a very strange accent. I found it highly offputting at the beginning, to the point where I almost gave up on the whole thing. I persevered, though, and after a while I stopped noticing.

The visuals are very satisfying, an excellent blend of live action and stop-motion animation and the whole southern gothic aesthetic is compelling. The central toy characters are all very strong, particularly the deranged, damaged Zozo and the weary, wary Rosie (voiced by the ever-excellent Mary J Blige.) Ollie himself I found quite annoying at first but he very much grew on me over the course of the four episodes.

I would be very cautious about recommending this to its supposed target audience, children. It strikes me as having the potential to be the kind of thing people refer back to in later life as a traumatic experience that changed them, like the death of Bambi's mother. I certainly wouldn't want to be the one having to deal with the nightmares.

For adults who like their whimsy lit by lightning and drenched in floodwater, not to say blood: recommended.

 

And finally, the show I'm keenest on right at this very moment, The Imperfects.  I had no idea what this was when I spotted it on Netflix but it looked like the kind of thing I watch so I watched it. 

Wow, talk about high concept! It just starts and there you are, in some version of the world where scientists (Say it with sneer, like you'd say "vivisectionists", because isn't that what all scientists really are, when you come right down to it?) run undocumented trials on sick children without any informed consent then abandon them when the results don't go as planned.

Naturally, when the drugs are withdrawn, there are side-effects and naturally, those side-effects are super powers. Why wouldn't they be? 

The first episode is a real firecracker of set-up, character introduction and action. It moves at the speed of hysteria and every scene is over-the-toppier than the last. When the baddest of the maddest scientists, Dr. Alex Sarkov, made his first appearance I just sat there in awe.

Remember David Bowie in Twin Peaks? That's what it reminded me of. Is that a good thing? You be the judge. I only hope the fact that Sarkov looks several years younger than the test subjects he mistreated as children turns out to be some kind of plot point. Also that accent...is it Australian?

I'm three episodes in now. The show doesn't quite keep up the pace of the first but it's not far off. The three lead characters have already been abducted and tortured by a whole new bunch of mad scientists before killing them all (Self defence! Accident! Suicide! Murder!) and escaping. Now there are at least two more hostile factions in play, one of them hunting the very scientists our heros need to persuade to "fix" them. No explanation for any of it, of course.

The Imperfects is absolute tosh. I love it. It makes absolutely no attempt to tie up any of the countless loose ends that fray from the ever-unravelling plot. There's no concession whatsoever to realism, naturalism or logic. The core three act like they're in some kind of avant-garde theater troupe all of the time. Everyone says things that make them sound cool, whether they're things anyone would say or not. 

I like all three of them a lot. They're cartoons but they're very well-drawn. I particularly like Abbi, the Indian girl with the genius IQ and the pheromones that make her the (Ironically asexual.) equavalent of the Mandrill. Obviously, I also have a strong regard for Tilda, the foul-mouthed, leather-wearing lead singer of an alt-rock band, who (Equally ironically) gets super-hearing and super-screaming as her power-set - sorry, side-effect. She's pretty much from my personal central casting. All she needs is a chainsaw.

And Juan, the diffident, curly-haired hispanic comics creator who turns into a werewolf (Chupacabra! It's a chupacabra!) and just happens (Ironically!) to have a girlfriend who's been obsessed with human-monster relationships since her dad took her to see Beauty and the Beast when she was a child (The Cocteau, not the Disney.) - well, who could dislike loveable little Juan? Just don't let him near your dog. (He eats them.)

Best of all, though, is Italia Ricci as Dr. Sydney Burke, the only good-bad-mad scientist. She's trying to help the Banshee, the Chupacabra and the Succubus (Not their official super-hero names because they're not super-heroes. Yet.) I spent much of the first two episodes trying to think who she reminded me of and then it finally came to me: Dr. Linda Martin from Lucifer! Looks a little like her (The glasses, mostly.) but sounds almost exactly the same.

It's always a good sign when I can remember the characters' names without having to look them up. For the Imperfects I can remember whole lines of dialog, too. That's a strong indicator I'm going to come back to this again and again just to watch individual scenes on YouTube as though they were songs I like. Speaking of which, the show has some great music choices. Recommended!

And I think that's about it for now. Oh, there's that show on Prime that all the fuss is about, isn't there? I guess I should at least mention it. Hang on, let me check the name...

The Rings of Power. That's it. Yeah, I don't have much to say. I watched the first episode and it was... alright. That was a week ago and I haven't gotten around to watching the second. I guess that probably tells you as much as you need to know.

As for all the controversy... seriously? What is wrong with people? I swear, if I hadn't known there was something "different" about it I'm not even sure I'd have noticed. And I've read the bloody books three times. Some of those celtic accents though...

No, don't let's even go there.