It’s been a minute since we checked in with your viewing recommendations – so, what are you watching lately?
It is HOT where I am, with my phone going off with heat advisories and all sorts of uncomfortable nonsense, so I’ve started a few new programs and am very curious what everyone’s been enjoying.
While I had COVID, I started watching Sister Boniface Mysteries, in part because of Lara’s very enthusiastic post. So many of you echoed how much you enjoyed it that I figured it was perfect convalescent viewing. It was! It’s charming and light, though I am growing annoyed with how much Sister Boniface is a side character in her own show. I want more nun drama, honestly.
But then there’s moments like This Hat and suddenly I adore everything about it again:
That’s actress Miranda Raison, who is perfect in every scene, often wears truly absurd hats, and looks fabulous in every single one. Come for the nun science and convent politics, stay for the hats.
Also, no spoilers, but “I’m not sure the Lord created this humble body for physical labor” is something I will now say regularly.
Amanda: We just wrapped Fargo season 5 and I really like it. I love narratives where a MacGuyver-esque woman who escaped a bad background winds up in an upper class family.
Claudia: I know it’s basic but I do love The Bear.
Tara: We watched Delicious in Dungeon as a family and it’s a really excellent anime.
Amanda: We couldn’t get into that one!
Shana: The new season of Grantchester has a very dishy new lead, and I do love a sexy mystery-solving vicar.
I’m currently watching Queenie and so far I think it’s improved on the book, which I struggled with a bit.
And, I really liked the snarky family comedy Unprisoned:
Inspired by Tracy McMillan’s life, UnPrisoned is a half-hour comedy about a messy but perfectionist relationship therapist and single mom whose life is turned right-side-up when her dad gets out of prison and moves in with her and her teenage son. Kerry Washington plays Paige Alexander, a marriage and family therapist, and mom to 16-year-old Finn. Delroy Lindo stars as Edwin Alexander, Paige’s father, who has recently been released from prison.
The new season is out July 17.
Sarah: Has anyone watched My Lady Jane?
Elyse: We have been dealing with lots of family stuff so I haven’t had the time or energy to watch much TV except for reruns of Below Deck.
Rich and I like to joke about what our crazy requests would be if we were the guests.
“The primary wants a D&D session…all staff will be given a pre-gen character…what.”
“The primary is from Wisconsin and requests Hidden Valley ranch. They will know if it’s Kraft.”
Sarah: Did you see the recipe going around for deep fried ranch dressing? Going to need some of those. Maybe six dozen?
Elyse: Ranch is meant to be cold and you dip deep fried food into it. What is this abomination.
Sarah: Speak to your neighbors in Minnesota. Deep fried ranch dressing is part of the Minnesota State Fair offerings this year.
Update: We started My Lady Jane and now my older child is super into it. Two episodes in and it’s really fun.
What about you? What are you watching lately that you recommend?
Oh boy, we are still chugging along with Dimension 20’s delightful D and D series Fantasy High. We’re only at Sophomore Year (I believe Junior Year wrapped up recently). Younger son has dropped out for now (he’s disappointed in the lack of minis and set pieces this year) but my husband and I are still engrossed in the sometimes silly, often intense adventures of Fabian, Gorgug, Fig, Riz, and Kristen. I was complaining that there were two many NPCs this year (as delightful as they were, it was too much to juggle) but now it’s really whittled down to the core cast fighting evil and it’s very emotionally satisfying.
I will say the hard thing about watching it is they filmed this in the beginning of “COVID is on the rise” era and it’s very hard to watch and revisit that time, even though it’s mostly just mentioned in passing. We already know the season finale is two parts, filmed on Zoom, and while I totally appreciate that was what they had to do and it was the right call, it will bring up a lot while I watch it, I’m sure.
On my own, I want to catch up with Abbott Elementary and maybe Only Murders in the Building, but I’m a whole season behind on both. I used to watch TV on epic laundry days, but now I’ve whittled it down to one load a day and it’s hard to motivate myself to watch stuff at night by myself. Nighttime is sleepy time.
I watched the first episode of McDonald and Dobbs, and while the mystery wasw interesting, I am now watching for the Bath p*rn. All those slow sweeping shots of the buildings, especially the Regency crescents.
I need to get back to Sister Boniface as well.
I’m bad at watching stuff that isn’t either sims 4/stardew valley let’s plays, but in April I watched all of Pokerface and loved it.
I’m also watching the new season of Doctor Who with my mom and it’s pretty good. We’re up to the Regency episode.
I want to watch/rewatch the 2010s Sailor Moon series before the last movies are released in North America next month. I’d also like to finally watch Harley Quinn since I’ve been on a DC comic kick recently and it’s finally streaming in Canada.
So, a couple of months back, I watched one furniture restoration video (with an eye to whether I wanted to tackle a repair on an old dresser my husband and I had already “restored” a decade ago) on YouTube, and suddenly the algorithm was flooding me with furniture restoration videos—and I really got into a couple of them:
TRANSCEND FURNITURE GALLERY features soft-spoken former-tattoo-artist Angie going step-by-step through restorations of pieces of (mostly mid-century) furniture she finds on Facebook Marketplace, thrift shops, or even at the side of the road. Her painstaking restorations are done with care and obvious love & respect for the mid-century aesthetic. Plus she has cats and bunnies for triple doses of cuteness.
MODERN MAKEOVERS features an extremely creative restorer with a seemingly limitless supply of various tools, woods, hardware, and other necessities (he never throws anything away and has an enviously organized workspace). The editing on this channel is very clever: how I wish it were as easy as he sometimes makes it appear to strip & revarnish a cabinet.
Because the YouTube algorithm decides all, my interest in furniture restoration videos apparently made me the target audience for YOU SUCK AT COOKING, a comedic (and neatly edited) tutorial of basic cooking techniques. If, like me, you flatter yourself on being a reasonably competent cook, nothing in the videos will be very new or eye-opening, but the usually brief videos (they run around five minutes per episode) are a nice way to end a busy day. And just this week I used the host’s recipe for “crack slaw” (aka, “egg roll in a bowl”) to make my lunches for this week.
Finally, another algorithmically selected channel that I’ve been watching is ROCKHOUNDING LIFE, in which a man and his kids roam the Nova Scotia coastlines looking for interesting rock specimens. My favorite part of these videos is when the host gets the collected rocks back to his studio, cuts them on his table saw, and shows the beautiful variations of mineral types inside. He’ll often select a particularly nice piece and grind it down to make a pendant or keychain. Again, something calming to watch at the end of a stressful day.
TL;DR: sometimes ya gotta just go with the algorithmic flow.
I watched MY LADY JANE. Overall, I thought it was fun, but I did get annoyed that nothing was really resolved at the end (especially since I don’t think it’s been renewed yet).
Earlier this year, I watched the live-action version of AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER on Netflix. I had never watched anything set in that world/series before, and I loved it so much that I watched the original animated series, which was even better. Highly recommend both of those.
THE FALL GUY was cute and fun, but ARGYLLE and THE MINISTRY OF UNGENTLEMANLY WARFARE were disappointing IMO. ARGYLLE went waaay off the rails for me about halfway through, and MINISTRY had no character development, but as always YMMV.
Hope everyone has a good summer! 🙂
I haven’t had a lot of energy for tv shows approaching any complexity lately. I’ve been doing comfort re-watches of Brooklyn 99 & Schitt’s Creek. Also making my way through All Creatures Great & Small (3rd season currently). And I’ve found a pretty bonkers Japanese show called Good Morning Call. Silly premise- a male and female high school student each end up renting the same apartment (I have questions about the rental market in Japan & two minors being allowed to rent property). Its silly and brainless and I think the lead actress is ridiculously charming in her odd way.
I have a few other subtitled shows on the back burner but its too dang hot to pay attention to much right now.
I can’t watch much tv still – I found the early pandemic days broke my ability to watch tv much the way everyone else was having difficulty focusing on full length books, which mercifully has not afflicted me. Also, I think my taste doesn’t align with most – GBBO is so high stakes to me that I wind up yelling at the tv and unable to sleep, The Boys is very soothing. Am I the only one whose brain equates violence and dancing? Just me? The patterns of it? No? I remain bitter that Kingdom is not supplying me with more zombie court intrigue (and talk about hats!) and deeply truly bitter that Babylon Berlin has actually aired a season, years ago, which remains unavailable here. It has actual dancing *and* violence, which is a strangely rare combination.
I know I’m very late to the party, but I finally watched both seasons of FLEABAG. It was as phenomenal as everyone has said.
Currently watching a lot of BTS content, as those guys are my emotional support goofballs. Whenever I get really stressed, I will watch a clip, music video, interview, etc. and it’s instant serotonin. I have literally walked away from my desk at work and hidden in the 11th floor stairwell to watch ‘Don’t Wake Me Up’ in the middle of a hard day.
Also working on the second season of ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING.
As one of Elyse’s neighbors next door in MINNESOTA, I was also surprised by the deep fried ranch and yes I will absolutely be trying it.
We have been watching the UK version of Taskmaster. YouTube has all the complete episodes. I never heard of it before, but each season has 5 comedians who are given ridiculous tasks to complete. They can be amusing individually, but it’s much better when you get to know the contestants.
One of the early series (4 maybe?) has Mel and Noel (former /current hosts of GBBO) as contestants- although it’s before Noel started on GBBO. The hosts Greg and Alex have some definite kink vibes that must be intentional.
@Steph, I love Taskmaster, I miss it, but my husband and I tend to stick to one show at a time. I hope to get back to it one of these days.
My teen was soooo excited about My Lady Jane but has reported to me that she’s a DNF on it. She desperately wants a demisexual protagonist one of this days and is tired of “lust at first sight”. She also takes issue with the hero (I think—I haven’t watched or read). She said that in the book he was a nerd writing poetry but in the show he’s “annoyingly handsome” writing poetry, which I suggested to her sounded more like “broetry” and she agreed. We are very, very down on Byronic heroes in our family.
Thanks @DDD for the YoutTube recs as several of those will be relevant for end-of-day watching for our family. We were just in the UK and I admit that one of the pleasures was getting delivery in the evenings and watching multiple episodes of The Repair Shop which used to be more available over here but is now sadly lacking. We wanted to see about buying episodes to download while we were there but it’s just not an option. We need to look into one of those VPN things I guess. The Repair Shop is great because of the breadth of restoration that occurs and it’s so low-conflict that it’s the perfect family viewing at the end of the day.
I finished watching the whole series of WOULD I LIE TO YOU, a delightful, funny British panel show.
I also watched the canal boat episode of ALL ABOARD, which is an unbroken 2 hours of footage from the prow of a boat traveling a canal, with occasional factoids overlaid on the screen. I watched it alone (and over multiple sittings) but I think a better way to watch it would be with a friend while chatting. Annoyingly, none of the factoids said anything about the canal boats!
Started watching spooky movies again with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4, which is a mixed bag but with some nice surprises: a black nerd girl, a girl lifting weights, and a nice reversal in the girl who turns out to be the hero experiencing hero-type growth and getting a hot, kind love interest who isn’t much of a character.
Oh! I also happened across an episode of RENEGADE, which was *so cheesy*. The moment when the main character took a call on his 1990s cell phone while carefully posed on his motorcycle like a romance cover model was my favorite. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renegade_(TV_series)
I’ve been watching “Love Between The Covers” on a loop (hi, Sarah!). I think it’s been 5 times I’ve seen it in the last week or so. I just want to build myself a romance fort against all of the terrible stuff going on in the world and the upcoming elections and the genocide in Gaza and just… everything.
The previous week or so, it was repeat viewings of “You’ve Got Mail”. Before that, it was the 1995 BBC “Pride & Prejudice”. I might switch over to another favorite documentary, “The Light In Her Eyes”, filmed in Damascus, Syria, prior to the Arab Spring events – it’s all about girls memorizing and understanding the Qur’an and the women scholars who teach them. Very empowering and really pokes a hole in the “oppressed Muslim women” narrative.
In short, I’m very firmly in the comfort watching mode. Nothing new is hitting my tv screen, just old favorites that are worth watching over and over and make me happy.
Lady Jane might be fun but the real life of Lady Jane was anything but. Beaten into submission by her abusive parents (who ignored her most of her life), she was forced to wed someone she detested, forced to be queen and then imprisoned and beheaded all by the age of 17. I love things Tudor but I can’t make myself watch it at all. Her story was so sad and tragic.
I have been watching a Canadian mystery series, The Murdoch Mysteries. The series takes place starting in 1895. My favorite character is Dr. Julia Ogden the coroner. She has no qualms about pulling out some murder victims organs or even checking to see if a decaying corpse is male or female. She really is a character that is refreshing to see in a time period like this.
I’m cautious about My Lady Jane now that I’ve read y’all’s feedback, but I think we’re in too deep to stop watching – my completist family members will never allow us to stop now!
@Christine – what I like about this fantasy alternate history is that it’s based on a book, and the premise is, “that version of history sucks so eff that, here’s what could have happened.” I get not being able to look past the reality though! Her history is dreadful.
@Christine- I love Murdoch Mysteries, and especially Dr. Julia. It does go off the rails sometimes and Murdoch’s uncanny ability to have a hand in every scientific discovery of the early 20th century gets pretty silly after awhile. But it’s got the same partnership and will they/won’t they vibes of Bones with period costumes and a gentler Canadian sensibility.
@Kolforin- I remember Renegade! It came on USA Network in the 90s right before my favorite guilty pleasure show of all time, Silk Stalkings. I may have to see if I can find that one on streaming somewhere for a rewatch of the 90s hair, tech and fashion. Plus the main characters, Chris and Rita, were probably my first tv ship.
We’ve been watching the second season of the Netflix Tour de France documentary, UNCHAINED. it’s really good—lots of strategy, drama, guts, glory, disappointment, etc. As someone who’s a romance reader, I don’t mind knowing at all who won the race, because the story is so fun.
Astrid (et Raphaëlle)— the friendship between the two main characters is just amazing!
I’m very surprised by the criticism of My Lady Jane! I loved it. It’s so FUN, the chemistry between the leads is amazing, and I think the hero is fantastic with no discernible Byron vibes.
If you’re on the fence I’d definitely give it a go.