4 Best TV Shows Similar to IRODUKU: The World in Colors

The pleasures of the romantic comedy are well-documented. When they work, they make for the best kind of fantasy. The ones where our all too numerous flaws may stall but never derail us. Of course, their failures are similarly well documented, making the ups and downs of lust and love feel like products. Moving the genre from its typical medium—film—to television with the new series Nobody Wants This carries the threat to magnify those shortcomings until they blot out anything else. And then there’s that title. Oof. If ever there was a juicy fastball down the middle for critics looking for an easy headline dunk, it’s that one. It’s more than a relief then to find that blowing out rom-com tropes from an under two-hour film to a 10-episode season helps, not harms, the storytelling. Nobody Wants This isn’t doing anything revolutionary, but it plays the hits well. It makes a thing you’ve seen a hundred permutations of feel fresh and lively. Sorry, lovers of ironically mean-spirited headlines. The story is a tale of mismatched lovers. Joanne (Kristen Bell) cohosts a podcast with her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) dedicated to their love life’s successes and failures—mostly failures. Her producer Ashley (Sherry Cola) has her over for a small gathering, warning Joanne there’s a rabbi in the house. Joanne jokes with another guest, Noah (Adam Brody), about it, their chemistry immediate. When Noah blesses dinner, Joanne realizes her error. Continue Reading →

The difficulty in reviewing television is, often, critics only receive a fraction of the season’s episodes. As a result, one sometimes has to offer a full review on a partial product. Frequently, that’s fine. Shows often tell you who they are, if you will, fairly early on. A character or a twist that changes things might show up in an episode down the road. Even then, though, such things often don’t change the bedrock quality of the endeavor. Sharing all of this is by way of a disclaimer because, after the first two episodes of Agatha All Along, it remains unclear what kind of show it will be. Some aspects of the tone are clear from the start. It’s obviously playing with a healthy dose of irreverence. It’s clever. Kathryn Hahn slips back into Agnes/Agatha Harkness like a second skin, quickly giving her depth without erasing the villainousness of her turn in WandaVision. The supporting characters, including Teen (Joe Locke), Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), and Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone?!), can hold the screen despite Hahn’s charisma bombardment. Aubrey Plaza’s Rio Vidal even gives Agatha a run for her money in the charm department with a frighteningly sexual/sexually frightening turn. She carries the conclusion of episode 1 with three or four sentences that are…very intense. Debra Jo Rupp, Ali Ahn, Patti LuPone, and Sasheer Zamata support women's rights and women's wrongs. (Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Television) But is the show a drama? A comedy? A horror-drama? Horror-comedy? Horror-dramedy? One’s guess is as good as another. Episode 1, “Seekest Thou the Road,” is almost entirely a parody/homage episode, taking WandaVision’s sitcom-trappings storytelling approach and applying it to the crime-thriller limited series genre, specifically Mare of Easttown with a dollop of The Killing thrown in via the opening credits. It’s an interesting idea, a nod to the Agatha All Along’s parent series with a parallel storytelling technique. More importantly, it gives the series room enough to be more than just a reinvention of the wheel. And the show seemingly ditches it by the episode’s end. Continue Reading →

“Brief, they made a monk of me; I did renounce the world, its pride and greed, Palace, farm, villa, shop, and banking-house, Continue Reading →

The ScienceSaru-produced animated series rebuilds rather than retells Bryan Lee O'Malley's beloved comic. Late in the final volume of Bryan Lee O'Malley's 2004-2010 comic series Scott Pilgrim (Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour), once the action's done and the hateful Gideon Graves has been slain, protagonists Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers take a moment to process everything. Defeating Gideon meant facing not only the vicious misogynist swordsman but also their respective character flaws (It's telling that one of Scott's key moments is his realizing just how alike he and Gideon are, and by gaining that understanding, he affirms that, yeah, Gideon has so got to die). There are a few candidates for Scott's actual finest hour in Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour. His after-action conversation/reconciliation/renewal with Ramona is my pick. Bryan Lee O'Malley/Oni Press. As Ramona says, change is one of life's constants, which applies to Scott Pilgrim's ventures into new mediums. Edgar Wright's thoroughly enjoyable movie shifted around characters and reworked some of Scott's flaws. The colorful, impeccably soundtracked, hair-tearingly difficult Ubisoft-produced video game ramped up the goofy save for one particularly pointed ending. And now, with the Netflix animated series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, creator O'Malley—joined by co-writer and co-showrunner BenDavid Grabinski and animation studio ScienceSaru (with episode director Abel Góngora) have changed things up yet again. Rather than retell Scott Pilgrim as it's been since 2004 (a story already told, with riffs, as a comic, movie, and video game), the creative team opts for something more radical. It's a work as much in conversation with the Scott Pilgrim that came before as an adaptation. Continue Reading →