2021 Television Year in Review
Due to the pandemic, 2020 ended up being the very first time I watched any substantial amount of television since I started this journal in 2003. Because I spent that most of that year on my bike I only had five seasons in my first every television yearly review.
In 2021, Birdie's arrival in January precluded going on multiple hour long bike rides, or really any other bike reads. While I replaced the time to some extent with long walks, in the early part of the year there was a lot of "I have to hold this baby or she won't sleep" television watching going on. Then there was "the baby is sleeping in our room" and we're watching television in her room (her room was previously the tv room) so we can be nearby if she cries. Just as happened with my limited movie watching for 2021, my television watching really slowed down when Birdie started sleeping in her own room in August and the television moved downstairs to the living room. Not coincidentally, only 11 of the 38 television seasons that I watched in 2021 came after the August 18 transition date.
I watched a total 38 seasons of 18 different shows in 2021. Of those 38 seasons worth of shows, I watched 15 of them jointly with M and 23 on my own. Either way, I usually only watched them at a rate of no more than one or two episodes per day. The only show I can legitimately say I binged was the four seasons of Castlevania - I finished season 1 on June 24 and finished season 4 not even three weeks later on July 13.
I should add that M binged a ton of television, particularly earlier in the year when I was working and Birdie wouldn't sleep if she wasn't being held. I didn't watch any of these, but I know she watched some or all of Gilmore Girls, Community and countless others. Lately she's been watching Bob's Burgers (which I don't find to be funny at all) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which she's not actually wild about but keeps watching for some reason.
Breakdown by streaming service:
Netflix - 14 seasons - We had this all year, courtesy of Kati. I didn't watch anything on it after August though.
Hulu - 14 seasons - M signed up in May or June when the fourth season of The Handmaid's Tale dropped.
Prime - 4 seasons - M has a Prime membership.
Disney+ - 4 seasons - Our free year, which we obtained last year when we combined our cell phone accounts in the run up to our wedding, expired on June 30. We didn't renew it because with our old unreliable DSL internet it failed constantly. On the exact same old unreliable DSL internet, Netflix was always working and Hulu almost always was, so it feels like Disney+ doesn't have as good of a tech base. Now that we have better internet we may consider using it again.
IMDB - 2 seasons - We used this free service with commercials solely to watch two seasons of Mad Men without paying for it.
After we cancelled Disney+, basically every show that I watched by myself was animation. Add in the four seasons of Archer that M and I watched together and I hit 14 animated shows on the year, but everything after May was heavily weighted toward animation.
I initially thought it was possible that this list represents the most time commitment of any of my Year in Review lists ever, but some estimation appears to disprove that. I didn't track total number of episodes or episode lengths, but if we estimate 38 seasons * 10 episodes per season * 30 minutes per episode that gets us to about 190 hours of television. The most movies I ever saw in one year was 90 in 2006, so at 90 minutes a pop that would be about 135 hours. It's harder to estimate books since there's a mix of graphic novels and wildly varying book lengths and complexities, but if take my peak by numbers in 2008 of 87 books and 72 graphic novels and call it 3 hours per book and 1 hour per graphic novel, we get well over 300 hours of reading. Even if I cut those numbers to 2 hours per book and 30 minutes per graphic novel, I get 210 hours of reading. So books still beat tv!
Here's the complete list. Everything with an * was watched with M. The date is the day I finished watching the season in question.
*Jessica Jones, Season 1 - F 1/08
The Punisher, Season 1 - F 3/05
The Muppet Show, Season 1 - F 3/19
*Mad Men, Season 1 - F 3/19
*Mad Men, Season 2 - F 4/09
*The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 1 - S 4/17
The Muppet Show, Season 2 - Su 4/18
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Season 1 - S 4/24
*The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 2 - F 4/30
Avatar: The Last Airbender, Season 1 - Su 5/16
*The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 3 - Su 5/16
Avatar: The Last Airbender, Season 2 - M 5/31
*Archer, Season 1 - M 6/14
The Muppet Show, Season 3 - W 6/16
*Brockmire, Season 1 - F 6/18
Castlevania, Season 1 - R 6/24
Avatar: The Last Airbender, Season 3 - F 6/25
Castlevania, Season 2 - F 7/02
Castlevania, Season 3 - S 7/10
Castlevania, Season 4 - T 7/13
*Archer, Season 2 - F 7/16
Animaniacs (2020), Season 1 - M 7/19
*Lupin, Season 1 - W 7/21
The Dragon Prince, Season 1 - S 7/24
The Dragon Prince, Season 2 - S 7/31
*Lupin, Season 2 - T 8/03
The Dragon Prince, Season 3 - Su 8/08
*Archer, Season 3 - F 8/27
Afro Samurai, Season 1 - M 8/30
*Brockmire, Season 2 - M 8/30
The Tick, Season 1 - S 9/18
Cowboy Bebop - M 10/18
*Only Murders in the Building, Season 1 - Su 11/07
*Archer, Season 4 - R 11/11
The Tick, Season 2 - M 11/15
The Tick, Season 3 - W 12/01
Hit-Monkey, Season 1 - W 12/08
The Tick (2016), Season 1- R 12/30
As far as other shows go:
- I was midway through Season 2 of the The Tick (2016) at the end of the year. We were midway through Season 5 of Archer at the same time. We've finished both since then, but they'll be covered in the 2022 Television Year in Review (you heard it here first!). We are also slowly working through Season 3 of Brockmire.
- I was mid-way through season 4 of The Muppets when we let our Disney+ subscription expire. It says something about how poorly Disney+ worked on our old internet that I let it die when I could have watched more Muppets!
- I watched the very first episode of This is Pop about Boyz 2 Men. It was fantastic, but most of the other topics covered look less interesting so I never continued.
- I watched the first five episodes of DuckTales, mostly to see if it was still funny. It mostly was.
- Last year we watched three seasons of DareDevil, so early in the year we watched Jessica Jones. We enjoyed it, but M had no interest in watching more of the Netflix shows, and after I watched one season of The Punisher while holding Birdie every day after work I watched no more, and don't really plan to.
- I hadn't watched The Muppet Show since I was a kid, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that quite a bit of it had held up pretty well. There were definitely a few things that wouldn't fly today (mostly sexist stuff with Miss Piggie and the occasional ethnic joke), but a lot less than you'd expect from a show older than me. I will say that the Disney+ "this might be offensive to modern viewers" warning is extremely inconsistently applied. There were a few times where it was clearly warranted and plenty of other times when I was surprised the episode didn't have it. Clearly outrage is a challenging thing to evaluate.
- I totally get why critics loved Mad Men. It looks great, and the plots are intelligent and the characters mostly behave in understandable ways. However, I loathed virtually all of the characters, so I'm not sure I want to invest an hour a pop to watch five more seasons of people doing horrible things.
- I've mentioned before I don't typically care much for standup, either live or via comedy specials. Despite that, I really loved The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and look forward to the next season. I never lived in Manhattan, but for some reason this very fictionalized version of it and the heavy Jewish milieu really appeals to me, and I thought most of the scripted standup was hilarious. Go figure. It's hardly a perfect show; most of the storylines about Mrs. Maisel's parents drive me nuts and it's hard to believe that anyone is so socially oblivious as she is, but whatever, it's fun.
- The Falcon and the Winter Soldier successfully brought Marvel movie action sequences to television, but most of the rest of it was a mixed bag. If it had been a standalone movie, it would have been one of the weaker ones. As it was, it did not inspire me to keep Disney+ just to watch more Marvel television. Between this and my failure/inability to see any of the new Marvel movies in 2021, I wonder if this is the end of my love affair with Marvel entertainment.
- A lot of people had told me that Avatar: The Last Airbender was a great television show, even if it was nominally for kids. They are 100% correct. I enjoyed almost every aspect of it and look forward to one day watching it with my daughter. If I had to put money on which show I watched in 2021 would remain watchable 50 years from now, this is the one I'd bet on. I intend to get to the successor series The Legend of Korra at some point, although a lot of those same people had mixed feelings about that one.
- M owns some Archer DVDs so I wasn't totally ignorant of the series when we started watching it from the beginning. For whatever reason, this office comedy really appeals to me, even though most other office comedies (including The Office) bore the hell out of me. Maybe it's the animation making it seem less like real people getting hurt. Maybe it's that the titular character's obliviousness is dialed up past 11. Maybe it's that the continuity is both followed and mocked. I'm not sure, but we finished four seasons in 2021, knocked off season 5, and look likely to finish all the rest (12 so far with 13 contracted). We shall see.
- A coworker recommended Brockmire to me years ago. Hear me out, but Brockmire is the same show as Archer, but with baseball swapped for spy stuff. The difference is that Brockmire is so completely over the top that it makes Archer seem pretty tame in comparison. Jim Brockmire has done things that Sterling Archer wouldn't dream of doing, and that Jim talks about them in nearly clinical detail, often while doing play by play for the local team. I don't think we've yet been able to watch two episodes in one night, and there are definitely some duds, but when the good episodes land, they land like Mike Tyson punched you.
True story - the night after we watched the season 1 finale, which hinges on a very unlikely ninth inning triple play to win the day for the home team, the Oakland A's lost a game when they hit into a ninth inning triple play. Coincidences are just that, but weird. Also, I don't know what blackmail material they have on Joe Buck to get him to appear as himself in this show, but I never want to see it.
- I'm pretty confident that the Castlevania television show is the best video game adaptation I've ever seen. Granted, that's not a high bar to get over, but whoever thought to have Warren Ellis write a television adaptation of Castlevania 3 (the best Castlevania, I will not budge on this) is a mad genius. This is the only show I flat out binged. It's trashy as hell with very little redeeming value. I loved it.
- A small confession: I never really watched the original Animaniacs, having only seen it in bits and pieces, mostly on YouTube. I decided to watch the reboot in large part because one of M's high school friends is a writer on it (she won an Emmy for "Outstanding Original Song for a Preschool, Children's, or Animated Program"). There were plenty of Trump parodies, a few catchy songs, plenty of slapstick violence. It was good enough to keep watching, but pretty disposable. It also is so pop culture heavy that I suspect that the original hasn't aged well.
- M found a French heist-type show called Lupin, about a hero who takes his inspiration from Lupin. I wasn't wild about it and M had to twist my arm to get me to watch the second season. They set up future seasons, but I don't need to watch them.
- A friend told me that if I liked Avatar: The Last Airbender I'd probably like The Dragon Prince, which was made by the same team. He was correct, but he neglected to tell me that only three seasons of a planned seven had been released, which was a real asshole move! This is high quality children's entertainment and another thing I'll probably try to foist on my daughter when she's old enough.
- I don't remember why I watched the short series Afro-Samurai. It's all style and visuals, and fine for what it is. If it had been more than five episodes I probably wouldn't have finished it.
- I watched occasional episodes of the original animated series The Tick back in college. I decided to watch it to see if it was actually funny, or just fondly remembered from my time in the fraternity. It turns out that this show has aged remarkably well. Only 2-3 episodes were cringeworthy by today's standards, and then only minorly so. It does turn out that most of my memories of The Tick are more memories of my fraternity brothers quoting lines from The Tick, but that's fine. I don't feel I wasted my time watching all three seasons, and if anything they are even funnier since I've read a lot more comics now than I had when I first saw them.
- As discussed, I rewatched Cowboy Bebop. That's the only show on this list I had previously intentionally watched all the way through, and in fact the only show I watched in adulthood prior to last year. It's held up remarkably well. The second time around I can see some weaknesses in the plot - there are far too many "monster of the week" episodes and remarkably few episodes that tie into the main plot, but the style, the verve, the atmosphere, are pretty much on point every time around. The music is still great. I'm glad I watched it.
- M loves both Steve Martin and Martin Short, so we had to watch Only Murders in the Building. While I respect Steve Martin, I find Martin Short to be nigh unwatchable, so there were parts of the show that I really struggled to sit through. I also don't care for true crime podcasts, so the entire starting point was rough for me. Fortunately, Selena Gomez was great, and the supporting cast (notably an uncharacteristically dark Nathan Lane and detective Da'Vine Joy Randolph) were enough to keep me interested to the end. And hey, what a cliffhanger for season 2, right?
- Hit-Monkey was a Hulu recommendation. I enjoyed it while I was watching it, even though it was utterly predictable and Bryce's part was a distillation of Archer. My life isn't any better for having watched it, but nor was it worse.
- After watching the animated Tick, I learned that there was a gritty live action reboot. Season 1 was a little uneven, with a few too many big action pieces and too little of the dialog driven humor or physical comedy that made the animated show so much fun. However, Arthur's origin story was very well done and made up for the comparatively poor use of the title character. It was enough to make me watch Season 2, which I finished in 2022 but (spoilers) was dramatically better than Season 1. I would have watched Season 3 if it had been made. Alas.
So that was my year in television. I suspect that 2021's combination of pandemic and baby means that I will never watch this much television again in my life, and that's fine by me.
In 2021, Birdie's arrival in January precluded going on multiple hour long bike rides, or really any other bike reads. While I replaced the time to some extent with long walks, in the early part of the year there was a lot of "I have to hold this baby or she won't sleep" television watching going on. Then there was "the baby is sleeping in our room" and we're watching television in her room (her room was previously the tv room) so we can be nearby if she cries. Just as happened with my limited movie watching for 2021, my television watching really slowed down when Birdie started sleeping in her own room in August and the television moved downstairs to the living room. Not coincidentally, only 11 of the 38 television seasons that I watched in 2021 came after the August 18 transition date.
I watched a total 38 seasons of 18 different shows in 2021. Of those 38 seasons worth of shows, I watched 15 of them jointly with M and 23 on my own. Either way, I usually only watched them at a rate of no more than one or two episodes per day. The only show I can legitimately say I binged was the four seasons of Castlevania - I finished season 1 on June 24 and finished season 4 not even three weeks later on July 13.
I should add that M binged a ton of television, particularly earlier in the year when I was working and Birdie wouldn't sleep if she wasn't being held. I didn't watch any of these, but I know she watched some or all of Gilmore Girls, Community and countless others. Lately she's been watching Bob's Burgers (which I don't find to be funny at all) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which she's not actually wild about but keeps watching for some reason.
Breakdown by streaming service:
Netflix - 14 seasons - We had this all year, courtesy of Kati. I didn't watch anything on it after August though.
Hulu - 14 seasons - M signed up in May or June when the fourth season of The Handmaid's Tale dropped.
Prime - 4 seasons - M has a Prime membership.
Disney+ - 4 seasons - Our free year, which we obtained last year when we combined our cell phone accounts in the run up to our wedding, expired on June 30. We didn't renew it because with our old unreliable DSL internet it failed constantly. On the exact same old unreliable DSL internet, Netflix was always working and Hulu almost always was, so it feels like Disney+ doesn't have as good of a tech base. Now that we have better internet we may consider using it again.
IMDB - 2 seasons - We used this free service with commercials solely to watch two seasons of Mad Men without paying for it.
After we cancelled Disney+, basically every show that I watched by myself was animation. Add in the four seasons of Archer that M and I watched together and I hit 14 animated shows on the year, but everything after May was heavily weighted toward animation.
I initially thought it was possible that this list represents the most time commitment of any of my Year in Review lists ever, but some estimation appears to disprove that. I didn't track total number of episodes or episode lengths, but if we estimate 38 seasons * 10 episodes per season * 30 minutes per episode that gets us to about 190 hours of television. The most movies I ever saw in one year was 90 in 2006, so at 90 minutes a pop that would be about 135 hours. It's harder to estimate books since there's a mix of graphic novels and wildly varying book lengths and complexities, but if take my peak by numbers in 2008 of 87 books and 72 graphic novels and call it 3 hours per book and 1 hour per graphic novel, we get well over 300 hours of reading. Even if I cut those numbers to 2 hours per book and 30 minutes per graphic novel, I get 210 hours of reading. So books still beat tv!
Here's the complete list. Everything with an * was watched with M. The date is the day I finished watching the season in question.
*Jessica Jones, Season 1 - F 1/08
The Punisher, Season 1 - F 3/05
The Muppet Show, Season 1 - F 3/19
*Mad Men, Season 1 - F 3/19
*Mad Men, Season 2 - F 4/09
*The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 1 - S 4/17
The Muppet Show, Season 2 - Su 4/18
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Season 1 - S 4/24
*The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 2 - F 4/30
Avatar: The Last Airbender, Season 1 - Su 5/16
*The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 3 - Su 5/16
Avatar: The Last Airbender, Season 2 - M 5/31
*Archer, Season 1 - M 6/14
The Muppet Show, Season 3 - W 6/16
*Brockmire, Season 1 - F 6/18
Castlevania, Season 1 - R 6/24
Avatar: The Last Airbender, Season 3 - F 6/25
Castlevania, Season 2 - F 7/02
Castlevania, Season 3 - S 7/10
Castlevania, Season 4 - T 7/13
*Archer, Season 2 - F 7/16
Animaniacs (2020), Season 1 - M 7/19
*Lupin, Season 1 - W 7/21
The Dragon Prince, Season 1 - S 7/24
The Dragon Prince, Season 2 - S 7/31
*Lupin, Season 2 - T 8/03
The Dragon Prince, Season 3 - Su 8/08
*Archer, Season 3 - F 8/27
Afro Samurai, Season 1 - M 8/30
*Brockmire, Season 2 - M 8/30
The Tick, Season 1 - S 9/18
Cowboy Bebop - M 10/18
*Only Murders in the Building, Season 1 - Su 11/07
*Archer, Season 4 - R 11/11
The Tick, Season 2 - M 11/15
The Tick, Season 3 - W 12/01
Hit-Monkey, Season 1 - W 12/08
The Tick (2016), Season 1- R 12/30
As far as other shows go:
- I was midway through Season 2 of the The Tick (2016) at the end of the year. We were midway through Season 5 of Archer at the same time. We've finished both since then, but they'll be covered in the 2022 Television Year in Review (you heard it here first!). We are also slowly working through Season 3 of Brockmire.
- I was mid-way through season 4 of The Muppets when we let our Disney+ subscription expire. It says something about how poorly Disney+ worked on our old internet that I let it die when I could have watched more Muppets!
- I watched the very first episode of This is Pop about Boyz 2 Men. It was fantastic, but most of the other topics covered look less interesting so I never continued.
- I watched the first five episodes of DuckTales, mostly to see if it was still funny. It mostly was.
- Last year we watched three seasons of DareDevil, so early in the year we watched Jessica Jones. We enjoyed it, but M had no interest in watching more of the Netflix shows, and after I watched one season of The Punisher while holding Birdie every day after work I watched no more, and don't really plan to.
- I hadn't watched The Muppet Show since I was a kid, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that quite a bit of it had held up pretty well. There were definitely a few things that wouldn't fly today (mostly sexist stuff with Miss Piggie and the occasional ethnic joke), but a lot less than you'd expect from a show older than me. I will say that the Disney+ "this might be offensive to modern viewers" warning is extremely inconsistently applied. There were a few times where it was clearly warranted and plenty of other times when I was surprised the episode didn't have it. Clearly outrage is a challenging thing to evaluate.
- I totally get why critics loved Mad Men. It looks great, and the plots are intelligent and the characters mostly behave in understandable ways. However, I loathed virtually all of the characters, so I'm not sure I want to invest an hour a pop to watch five more seasons of people doing horrible things.
- I've mentioned before I don't typically care much for standup, either live or via comedy specials. Despite that, I really loved The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and look forward to the next season. I never lived in Manhattan, but for some reason this very fictionalized version of it and the heavy Jewish milieu really appeals to me, and I thought most of the scripted standup was hilarious. Go figure. It's hardly a perfect show; most of the storylines about Mrs. Maisel's parents drive me nuts and it's hard to believe that anyone is so socially oblivious as she is, but whatever, it's fun.
- The Falcon and the Winter Soldier successfully brought Marvel movie action sequences to television, but most of the rest of it was a mixed bag. If it had been a standalone movie, it would have been one of the weaker ones. As it was, it did not inspire me to keep Disney+ just to watch more Marvel television. Between this and my failure/inability to see any of the new Marvel movies in 2021, I wonder if this is the end of my love affair with Marvel entertainment.
- A lot of people had told me that Avatar: The Last Airbender was a great television show, even if it was nominally for kids. They are 100% correct. I enjoyed almost every aspect of it and look forward to one day watching it with my daughter. If I had to put money on which show I watched in 2021 would remain watchable 50 years from now, this is the one I'd bet on. I intend to get to the successor series The Legend of Korra at some point, although a lot of those same people had mixed feelings about that one.
- M owns some Archer DVDs so I wasn't totally ignorant of the series when we started watching it from the beginning. For whatever reason, this office comedy really appeals to me, even though most other office comedies (including The Office) bore the hell out of me. Maybe it's the animation making it seem less like real people getting hurt. Maybe it's that the titular character's obliviousness is dialed up past 11. Maybe it's that the continuity is both followed and mocked. I'm not sure, but we finished four seasons in 2021, knocked off season 5, and look likely to finish all the rest (12 so far with 13 contracted). We shall see.
- A coworker recommended Brockmire to me years ago. Hear me out, but Brockmire is the same show as Archer, but with baseball swapped for spy stuff. The difference is that Brockmire is so completely over the top that it makes Archer seem pretty tame in comparison. Jim Brockmire has done things that Sterling Archer wouldn't dream of doing, and that Jim talks about them in nearly clinical detail, often while doing play by play for the local team. I don't think we've yet been able to watch two episodes in one night, and there are definitely some duds, but when the good episodes land, they land like Mike Tyson punched you.
True story - the night after we watched the season 1 finale, which hinges on a very unlikely ninth inning triple play to win the day for the home team, the Oakland A's lost a game when they hit into a ninth inning triple play. Coincidences are just that, but weird. Also, I don't know what blackmail material they have on Joe Buck to get him to appear as himself in this show, but I never want to see it.
- I'm pretty confident that the Castlevania television show is the best video game adaptation I've ever seen. Granted, that's not a high bar to get over, but whoever thought to have Warren Ellis write a television adaptation of Castlevania 3 (the best Castlevania, I will not budge on this) is a mad genius. This is the only show I flat out binged. It's trashy as hell with very little redeeming value. I loved it.
- A small confession: I never really watched the original Animaniacs, having only seen it in bits and pieces, mostly on YouTube. I decided to watch the reboot in large part because one of M's high school friends is a writer on it (she won an Emmy for "Outstanding Original Song for a Preschool, Children's, or Animated Program"). There were plenty of Trump parodies, a few catchy songs, plenty of slapstick violence. It was good enough to keep watching, but pretty disposable. It also is so pop culture heavy that I suspect that the original hasn't aged well.
- M found a French heist-type show called Lupin, about a hero who takes his inspiration from Lupin. I wasn't wild about it and M had to twist my arm to get me to watch the second season. They set up future seasons, but I don't need to watch them.
- A friend told me that if I liked Avatar: The Last Airbender I'd probably like The Dragon Prince, which was made by the same team. He was correct, but he neglected to tell me that only three seasons of a planned seven had been released, which was a real asshole move! This is high quality children's entertainment and another thing I'll probably try to foist on my daughter when she's old enough.
- I don't remember why I watched the short series Afro-Samurai. It's all style and visuals, and fine for what it is. If it had been more than five episodes I probably wouldn't have finished it.
- I watched occasional episodes of the original animated series The Tick back in college. I decided to watch it to see if it was actually funny, or just fondly remembered from my time in the fraternity. It turns out that this show has aged remarkably well. Only 2-3 episodes were cringeworthy by today's standards, and then only minorly so. It does turn out that most of my memories of The Tick are more memories of my fraternity brothers quoting lines from The Tick, but that's fine. I don't feel I wasted my time watching all three seasons, and if anything they are even funnier since I've read a lot more comics now than I had when I first saw them.
- As discussed, I rewatched Cowboy Bebop. That's the only show on this list I had previously intentionally watched all the way through, and in fact the only show I watched in adulthood prior to last year. It's held up remarkably well. The second time around I can see some weaknesses in the plot - there are far too many "monster of the week" episodes and remarkably few episodes that tie into the main plot, but the style, the verve, the atmosphere, are pretty much on point every time around. The music is still great. I'm glad I watched it.
- M loves both Steve Martin and Martin Short, so we had to watch Only Murders in the Building. While I respect Steve Martin, I find Martin Short to be nigh unwatchable, so there were parts of the show that I really struggled to sit through. I also don't care for true crime podcasts, so the entire starting point was rough for me. Fortunately, Selena Gomez was great, and the supporting cast (notably an uncharacteristically dark Nathan Lane and detective Da'Vine Joy Randolph) were enough to keep me interested to the end. And hey, what a cliffhanger for season 2, right?
- Hit-Monkey was a Hulu recommendation. I enjoyed it while I was watching it, even though it was utterly predictable and Bryce's part was a distillation of Archer. My life isn't any better for having watched it, but nor was it worse.
- After watching the animated Tick, I learned that there was a gritty live action reboot. Season 1 was a little uneven, with a few too many big action pieces and too little of the dialog driven humor or physical comedy that made the animated show so much fun. However, Arthur's origin story was very well done and made up for the comparatively poor use of the title character. It was enough to make me watch Season 2, which I finished in 2022 but (spoilers) was dramatically better than Season 1. I would have watched Season 3 if it had been made. Alas.
So that was my year in television. I suspect that 2021's combination of pandemic and baby means that I will never watch this much television again in my life, and that's fine by me.