6 Best TV Shows Similar to Spirit Rangers
Agatha All Along
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 →
The Smokey Bear Show
So it’s fairly obvious that the first two seasons of The Bear had a whole birth/death thing going on. The show opens in the aftermath of the shocking and abrupt suicide of Mikey Berzotto (John Bernthal), and the first season charts the slow, inevitable death of his restaurant, The Beef, under the stewardship of his little brother Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and best friend Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). The second follows the birth of The Bear, the new restaurant that rises from the ashes of The Beef, as well as the blossoming of many of its employees from a sloppy blue-collar crew to a careful, refined, highly efficient team. And Carmy flirted with birthing a life outside the kitchen through his relationship with old-flame-from-back-in-the-day Claire (Molly Gordon). But while the first season ended in pretty unambiguous triumph when Carmy, Richie, and the rest of the Beef staff were suddenly flush with cash and a plan for the future, season two ends on a significantly darker note. The Bear manages to open its doors on time and have a successful opening night, but Carmy’s relationships with Richie and Claire are in tatters—casualties of Carmy’s rage and anxiety. There was a kind of dry run for the catastrophe that closed the end of season two near the end of the first. Carmy loses his shit, breaks a bunch of stuff, yells, and alienates pretty much everyone. But the final episode brought them all back together, stronger than ever. Carmy is what George Costanza would describe as a “delicate genius,” ferociously gifted but intense and unpredictable. To work with him is to warm yourself by the raging fire of his mind while trying to avoid getting burned by the constant sparks and flares that burst from it. “THE BEAR” — “Tomorrow” — Season 3, Episode 1 (Airs Thursday, June 27th) — Pictured: Jeremy Allen White as Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto. CR: FX. The show did an elegant job pacing Carmy’s assholeishness with revelations about his past home and professional life. He grew up in a single-parent home with an alcoholic, mentally unwell mother, prone to fits of rage and depression. He worked under a monstrously critical chef while he was coming up, who criticized and undermined everything he did. These revelations are for the audience, not necessarily the other characters in the show. So when Carmy melts down in a fit of panic and self-loathing on opening night, we know it’s informed by his hyper-tense childhood and abusive mentor. But the people who work under him don’t. Some know parts, but no one knows everything. And it’s harder for them to understand.Now we come to season three, and the completely reasonable expectation is that it will open much like season one closed. Having learned a valuable lesson, Carmy will gather the crew back together, apologize, and things will return to normal in the kitchen. Oh, it might take a little longer for some of them to come around than others, but everything will work itself out. Except it doesn’t. Because while the first two seasons were concerned with birth and death, the third is a lot more about life. And the thing about life is that it’s its own thing, separate from birth and death. They’re related, obviously, but life is also a distinct thing in ways that birth and death are not. Continue Reading →
Franklin
Michael Douglas's career so deeply connects him to as specific kind of late 20th/early 21st Century man. As a result, throwing him back to the 18th Century and into the body of Benjamin Franklin feels deeply counterintuitive. It is not surprising that Franklin—an adaptation of the book A Great Improvisation by Stacy Schiff—is one of the few period projects Douglas has done, joining the likes of The Ghost and the Darkness and those flashback scenes in the Ant-Man films. What is surprising, and to the series’ credit, is how quickly that strangeness recedes. It isn’t that Douglas manages to fade into the role of Franklin until he disappears entirely, but he does manage to recede enough that he doesn’t disrupt the show’s reality. In some ways, Douglas proves a surprisingly apt selection. No stranger to playing womanizers on screen, Douglas easily finds the correct valence to portray Franklin’s specific flavor of late 18th-century skirt chaser. The metacommentary works in his favor as well, an aging icon who retains much of his skill but perhaps can no longer command the same buzz or box office returns embodying an aging icon whose mind remains sharp but whose body—and possibly will—has been beaten up by life and time. While almost a decade older than the Franklin he’s portraying, Douglas also excels at the moments where the audience witnesses the statesman energized like old times. Thibault de Montalembert has neither the time nor the interest in your lame attempts at Call My Agent/Dix pour cent joke attempts. (AppleTV+) Still, the script too frequently hamstrings the actor. Not bad by any means, the writing still suffers for trying to match Franklin’s reputation. It’s the old conundrum of trying to build a series, film, or play around a singular piece of art. How does a creator convince the audience that someone is singing the most fantastic song ever without truly writing the most fantastic song ever? Similarly, how do writers provide dialogue to what is, by historical reputation, one of the greatest wits in American History without simply quoting his greatest hits? Continue Reading →
What If...?
Disney+'s animated exploration of what could've been continues to intrigue in Season 2, but not all episodes are created equal. With What If…? Season 2, the time seems right to take a look at both seasons and rank them for your entertainment. Is it wrong to rank art? Possibly, but we’re of the mind that something that feels this good can’t possibly be bad. On that note, let’s not waste a moment more and start counting down from worst to best. The Watcher (Jeffrey Wright) hates to be kept waiting! Continue Reading →
Doom Patrol
Doom Patrol Season 4 Part 2 dives headfirst into what has consistently been a series favorite topic since the beginning: death. While much of Patrol has pondered what it would be like to live agelessly—essentially without fear of any possible death except the violent and unusual—but still struggle with every other aspect of being human. The members screwed up, had mental issues and physical ailments, struggled with vanity and loneliness, and frequently gave in to any number of self-loathing varietals. They would never age, but they wore their pain the same as the rest of us. Continue Reading →
Gen V
The Boys is good. Often, it is excellent. However, the Eric Kripke-created adaptation of the Garth Ennis-Darick Robertson-created comic book series sometimes overindulged in juvenilia and “is this too edgy for you, square?” baiting. To be fair, that isn’t exactly unfaithful to the source material. Ennis frequently vacillates between scathingly insightful critiques of the human condition and truckloads of dick jokes (see also, Preacher). Continue Reading →