Appointment Television

You know how sometimes you get a text or an email, and you say you’ll get around to it later, and you totally MEAN to get around to it later, and you even know that the person on the other end of the message KNOWS that you’ll get to it when you get to it, but then suddenly literal MONTHS have passed and it seems like it would be weirder to reply to the message than it would be to continue letting it sit in this liminal unanswered state? Anyway, here’s our last good one/bad one of, uh, fall 2023, about The Curse and Lawmen: Bass Reeves. We recorded this months ago. I dunno man, let's all just try to keep it light.

In this week's episode, the gang is all here and we're discussing Margaret's Good One/Bad One Picks: The Buccaneers (good, theoretically) and The Irrational (bad, verily). In the episode, we mention this sweater: And also, somehow, against all odds, Mpreg Clippy, which I have linked in case any of you are self-loathing enough to wish to pollute your brain with his visage. We will be back NEXT WEEK to discuss Kathryn's GOBO: The Curse (good) and Lawmen: Bass Reeves (bad). We hope you come back despite mpreg Clippy, but understand if that was simply a bridge too far.

Listener beware, you're in for a scare! This week we watch a horrifying scream-filled nightmare of a television episode, where characters toy with forces beyond their comprehension and exhume corpses that would best be left alone. We are, of course, referring to the Frasier reboot. We also watch the first episode of the new Goosebumps show, which is fine.

We're back again! This time with a "Fall 2023" edition of Good One Bad One, which we started recording pretty late in the season and have finally gotten around to releasing even later. (November hit hard this year, listener.) We've got a great lineup for you this season! Presenting the Good Ones: Apple TV+'s The Buccaneers Hulu's Goosebumps Showtime's The Curse And, of course, our formidable Bad Ones: Paramount+'s Frasier reboot NBC's The Irrational Paramount+'s Lawmen: Bass Reeves

In which we finish our miniseries on Citadel and attempt to wrestle with what, exactly, we have brought upon ourselves.

Is watching this show not unlike descending into pure mindless sensation? Like a sensory deprivation tank, but as a TV show? Also why on earth does the Priyanka Chopra-Jonas character make these choices?! They're such bad choices!

Extra Hot Great co-host and TV critic extraordinaire Tara Ariano parachutes into our Citadel series this week, to help us break down exactly what is going on in all these flashback sequences where characters look and act exactly the same way they do in the "present day." This episode moves the season's main story forward by roughly 37 seconds.

It's so hard to remember any individual thing that happens in an episode of Citadel that I'm not sure how we keep sitting down and having a conversation about it, but our journey continues, flying forward with the inevitability of a super-spy on ski-boots.

We gently encouraged you to tell us whether you wanted us to watch more of Citadel, and you gently encouraged us back, so here we are with another episode about this dumb, dumb show where nothing is as it seems but in a super predictable kind of way. We'll watch all six episodes of Citadel season 1 on Amazon, one at a time, posting on Thursdays(ish).

We saved the best and the worst for last this year! Mrs. Davis is a little zeitgeisty and a little head-fake-y and a lot of fun, while Citadel kind of wants to be all of those things and isn't any of them? Also if three or four dozen of you tweet at or email us I guess we'll fuck around and watch the entire first season of Citadel, don't disappoint us!

In this week's (comically belated) episode, we're tackling Kathryn's Spring 2023 GOBO picks, the shoulder devil and should angel of the Mom TV genre: The Diplomat (good, currently streaming on Netflix) and The Last Thing He Told Me (preposterous, not in a fun way, currently streaming on Apple TV+). In addition, we take some time off from discussing wood turning, houseboats, and even-weirder-than-Sweeney-Todd Stephen Sondheim musicals to discuss the current writer's strike in Hollywood and what's driving writers' discontent. Listen and enjoy and pretend this came out on Thursday like it was supposed to!

Daisy May Cooper's Am I Being Unreasonable is fascinating and strange and maybe (probably) doesn't work? Particularly because we all get into an argument about who we're supposed to be sympathizing with and why! But one thing's for DANG sure, and it's that Am I Being Unreasonable is a more interesting and successful show than Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies!

We're back gang!! This time we pick through the spring 2023 TV season to find shows to hang our hopes and our anti-hopes on. Next week! Prepare to watch Am I Being Unreasonable on Hulu and (ugh) Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies on Paramount+.

It is our final GOBO of this run, in which we discuss NBC's Quantum Leap and ABC's Alaska Daily. We promise to send you out on much skepticism about the wisdom of building a new Quantum Leap machine, and also a few thoughts on The State of Journalism.

Star Wars TV shows need to learn how to do episodes. So Help Me Todd is, so help us, not our worst-ever watch, even though it's very goofy and stupid. Classic bad one!!

Hello poppets! You're in for a treat with this one, posting up juuuust in time for everyones' commute home from work. We gather together to discuss Margaret's GO and BO: Reboot (GO) and The Vampire Academy (BO) and the vast majority of the episode is us trying in vain to figure out the vampire rules of a poorly written show to which we may or may not have paid much attention. Margaret gets sent to horny jail by minute 18.

Have you heard? People love giant fantasy series! They really do. Or at least, they definitely WATCH giant fantasy series, and whether or not they love them is maybe beside the point? In any event, we're doing a free space Good One / Bad One episode to discuss both House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power, which are your two choices for overstuffed fantasy extravaganzas this fall. No one gets mad about anything.

Ah, the promise of a new TV season. Maybe one of the premieres will be one of your new favorites! Maybe you'll watch something so bad that you can make yourself mad years later just by thinking about it. The world is alight with possibilities! We're back for a FIVE-episode fall engagement! This week we'll announce our picks, and next week we're going to do an obligatory Oops! All Fantasy episode about the House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings shows.

We wrap up this season's round of Good One/Bad One with one entirely predictable bad one (Amazon's Lovestruck High) and one pleasantly surprising good one (Paramount+'s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds). See you in the fall!

This is, fundamentally, an episode about life's most existential questions. Some of those questions are fairly simple: what is good TV? How many shows about the same true crime murder is too many shows? Some of those questions are much more complicated, like "if a time traveler poops in the woods and Steven Moffat is the showrunner and he changes the rules of how the story works so that detached parts of the time traveler's body follow him around through time and space ... what are the implications for Thanksgiving?"