Just a quick note of some of the funnest content I consumed last month (in no particular order):
– David E. Kelley (of Ally McBeal fame) has a new series on Disney+ called Big Shot, which is based on an idea by Brad Garrett (of Everybody Loves Raymond fame), and stars John Stamos (of, uh, Scream Queens fame?). It centres around a temperamental basketball coach who is fired from his high-profile job with a major team, and forced to join the staff of an elite private girls’ school in order to make ends meet. There he forms an uneasy alliance with his assistant-coach (Jessalyn Gilsig), rankles under the watchful eye of the school’s no-nonsense principal (Yvette Nicole Brown), clashes with an interfering parent/patron (Michael Trucco), and rubs various other faculty members up the wrong way, while slowly winning over “his” squad. I doubt any actual teenage girls watching the show will be wowed by its verisimilitude to their own lives, but as an out-of-touch old man myself, I found it to be entertainingly snappy/sappy comfort-food. There’s also some great performances from the younger members of the cast, including Nell Verlaque as the team’s “poor-little-rich-girl” MVP, Tiana Le as the coach’s sassy surrogate-daughter, and Sophia Mitri Schloss as his estranged actual-daughter. Note: While there may not be any “crying in baseball”, there seems to be plenty of it in high-school basketball!
– I discovered* a Facebook group called “Japanese Girl Bands and other music”, which provides daily links to videos by previously unknown (to me) artists… including the fairy-tale spookiness of Aimer’s “Wonderland”, the shopping-centre surrealism of Nakigoto’s “Unknown Planets”, and the gothed-up splatter of Bridear’s “Bloody Bride”.
– Superstore posted a bunch of deleted scenes from their Final Season, including several featuring Nichole Sakura as ‘Cheyenne’… which is probably the last we’ll ever see of that particular character… sniffle…
– I finally got around to watching My Blind Brother (2016), a low-key rom-com starring Nick Kroll as the under-appreciated brother of an overachieving blind athlete (Adam Scott), who both (kinda) fall for the same do-gooding gal, played by the ever-adorable Jenny Slate. It’s currently rocking a score of 60% over on Metacritic, which seems about right to me, despite my pre-established crush on Slate (as well as a lesser-crush on Zoe Kazan, who plays her snarky BFF), and admiration for Kroll, who’s very winning here as the cast-against-type underdog. It’s just never as funny as it should be with so much comedic talent upfront, or as emotive as it could have been with such a potentially explosive premise.
– SXSW hosted a video-call confab between Samantha Bee and Amber Ruffin about various topics, including their respective late night shows, and mutual love of cheesecake. The sound is a little choppy, and the perpetual split-screen makes it kinda hard to know who to focus on at times, but there’s a lot of good insightful meat on the bones, if you can get through the gristly bits.
– And, er, that’s about it! There was plenty stuff I started watching and gave up on last month, including several new shows starring people I really like that have garnered great reviews, so… maybe I’m just getting too impatient/dismissive in my old-age…?
– Perennial faves include Meg Tilly’s Cozy Tea Time chats, Ryan George‘s Pitch Meeting skits, and Bailey Meyers‘s gaming streams!
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* And by “discovered”, I mean the algorithm kept “suggesting” it to me until I finally gave in and “followed” it!
Valet of the Ultra-Vixens 
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