2024 telly round up

Here is a round up of very short reviews of the more memorable telly I watched in 2024.

Bluey - The Sign / minisodes

I love Bluey. It's one of my favourite TV shows. The big thing this year was the release of a half hour episode called 'The Sign'. The big plot point is the impending sale of Bluey's family's house and the family moving to another city. Meanwhile Bluey and Bingo and their cousins Muffin and Socks are preparing to be flower girls at their uncle's wedding. Things go slightly awry and the four flower girls become part of a last ditch attempt to make sure the wedding goes ahead. 

There is a big emotional ending that I'm willing to admit made me cry, and the overall message - that you don't know how things will work out in the end until you reach the end - was positive without being wishfully optimistic. There was also an interesting sub-theme of parents trying to do what is best for their children, but not really knowing the best way forward and reconsidering decisions.

This year there have also been several 'minisodes', very short tales from the Blueniverse. I've found them very entertaining. 'Burger Dog' is probably my favourite. (The way Bandit's eye twitches as he is forced to listen to a terrible song makes me laugh every time.)

Wallace & Gromit ~ Vengeance Most Fowl

We watched this on Christmas Day and laughed a lot. It was packed full of jokes, saw the return of the evil penguin, Feathers McGraw, and managed to find a suitable replacement for the vocal talents of the late Peter Sallis, the original voice of Wallace. I think this is the best one off programme I saw in 2024. 

Ludwig

David Mitchell stars as a puzzle-setter who takes on his twin brother's identity as a police officer when his brother goes missing. Of course, he soon proves himself rather good at solving murders. I found this highly enjoyable and some of Mitchell's lines really made me laugh.

A Man on the Inside

This Netflix comedy starring Ted Danson was written by Michael Schur, whose previous credits include Parks & Recreation, Brooklyn Nine Nine and The Good Place. Those are all shows I enjoyed and I enjoyed this too. Ted Danson is a retired college professors hired by a private detective to go undercover in an elderly care community to try and solve a theft. Stephanie Beatriz, one of my favourite actresses, is the manager of said care home who suspects something is up. There is a deeper theme about loss and continuing to love those we have lost, and learning to live without them, that elevated this above other comedies. 

Nobody Wants This

Another Netflix comedy, this time starring Kristin Bell (who was in The Good Place) and Adam Brody. She's a sex and relationships podcaster, he's a rabbi. They meet. They fall in love. Worlds collide. There are some very funny moments, particularly from their supporting cast. One thing I noticed was the cinematic way of filming, especially in some scenes set at a youth camp. The series ended on a cliffhanger and there was a reassurance that a second season was coming. 

Star Wars: The Acolyte

This was supposed to be the big 2024 reboot of Star Wars. I found it boring. Some Jedi are being held to account for something they did by someone who feels wronged. I found it hard to care. I gave up watching. 

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

This has been dubbed 'The Goonies in space' and so far it has been brill! (Half the episodes were released in 2024, there are still a couple yet to drop.) A bunch of kids find a crashed starship and accidentally fire it up. They end up on the run from murderous pirates searching for lost treasure. It's silly and goofy and fun and what Star Wars is meant to be! (In my opinion as someone who has been a fan for over 40 years now!)

Doctor Who

I watched the series with Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor. It was okay. I feel like I say that a lot about Doctor Who these days. 'Dot and Bubble' was the most interesting episode. The overall story arc for the series seemed to be a whole lot of nothing. Literally. The Doctor's companion, Ruby, was 'special' because she was so ordinary, seemed to be the big reveal. It felt like a cop out. I suspect the showrunner Russell T Davies wrote himself into a corner and then couldn't come up with a satisfactory way out. I haven't watched the Christmas special but haven't heard much positive about it. 

Old stuff...

In addition to the series released this year, I've watched a lot of older stuff. This included:

Both seasons of Gravity Falls - a cartoon about two kids who go to stay with their great uncle (grunkle) who runs a 'Mystery Shack' roadside attraction in Oregon. Started out very funny, then became a story about averting an apocalypse.

All three seasons of Amphibia - a cartoon about some tweens who accidentally get transported to a world of talking frogs, called Amphibia. Again very funny, but the final season was about a war to free Amphibia from an evil hive mind.

The four seasons of Never Have I Ever - a Netflix series set in high school about a girl who is terrified she might never lose her virginity. This actually became quite a sweet story of finding love and growing up. 

All 6 seasons of Spin City - a comedy from the 90s that hasn't aged well and had to go through a hard re-casting when the star, Michael J Fox, had to leave due to health reasons. He was replaced by Charlie Sheen and the show went rapidly downhill. 

All 8 seasons of Psych - a comedy-drama about a guy who pretends to be psychic and help his local police force solve crimes. The pilot for this played it fairly straight, but it quickly became very silly indeed. 

Several seasons of vintage Doctor Who. These are now all available on iPlayer. I started watching them semi-accidentally, and watched a series with the Daleks in the era when Jon Pertwee was the doctor. I then carried on watching Pertwee's final season, then into the Tom Baker era. It's actually great fun seeing actors and trying to work out where I know them from. I spotted Camp Freddy from The Italian Job, but I had to look up the guy who played Chief Bast in Star Wars. (I could have kicked myself for not working out who he was before I googled him.)

The melancholy magic of the FA Cup

I watched the FA Cup final on Saturday. The timing worked well for me to watch it as I have been confined to the house isolating after being infected by covid.

A generic picture (by me) of the Wembley Stadium arch...

I have actually made more of an effort to watch the FA Cup final in the last few years. I enjoyed last year's game when Leicester won the Cup for the first time in this history. This year's contest was less exciting on paper, with both Liverpool and Chelsea winning it multiple times in the past and also being two of the really big teams in the league. FA Cup finals are always better when the less successful clubs get a tilt at winning. 

Back in 2019, I blogged about how the first FA Cup final after my Dad died was an unexpected moment where I keenly felt his loss. That feeling has diminished somewhat over the last couple of years, but it's still something missing from the occasion. Dad would always watch the cup final and talk to me on the phone about it afterwards, even when for several years I wasn't particularly fussed about it and hadn't bothered watching. 

People talk about the "magic" of the FA Cup and really what they mean is nostalgia. As I watched Liverpool and Chelsea punch and counterpunch their way to a 0-0 draw, extra time and penalties, I remembered watching the various cup finals when I was a kid. It made me feel melancholic as the nostalgia washed over me. 

Cup final day was always a big day in our house. In the 1980s it was one of those very rare times that a football match was broadcast live on TV. It almost seems silly now - my time off isolating has been spent watching live football from almost every level in the top five tiers of English football - but back then there was the Cup final, and that was about it.

It was also on both main channels, BBC1 and ITV, so it felt like a real moment when the nation stopped to watch the football. (They did that again this year, but we have way more than 4 channels now so it dominates the schedules less.) We always used to watch it on the BBC, often starting with the build up before lunch time. Some years we would switch over to ITV for the bit presented by "Saint and Greavsie" (Ian St.John and Jimmy Greaves, who had a weekly football chat show on Saturdays). But normally we ignored the ITV output. 

Those were halcyon days for FA Cup finals. I don't remember the one from 1984, when we had just moved into our house in Shrewsbury. But I remember watching Manchester United v Everton in 1985 - notable for Kevin Moran becoming the first player sent off in an FA Cup final, and Manchester United winning in extra time through a goal from wonder-kid Norman Whiteside. I wanted Everton to win and was disappointed that they lost. 

I don't particularly remember anything from the 1986 final when Liverpool won the FA Cup and became the first team to win the League Title and the FA Cup in the same season (the "Double") in my short life-time. Everton were the losing finalists again.

I have vivid memories of the final in 1987 when Coventry City won the FA Cup for the first and only time in their history, beating Spurs. Firstly, there were lots of goals, including a great diving header by Keith Houchen, and a looping own goal that sliced in off Spurs defender Gary Mabbutt's knee. But it was also played in brilliant sunlight and the Wembley grass was bright, bright green. We had a video recorder and taped the game. My brother and I rewatched that match several times, which is probably why it burns so bright in my memory.

And then in 1988, there was the famous win by Wimbledon over Liverpool. Nobody gave Wimbledon much of a chance, but they nicked a 1-0 win. By then I was fed up with Liverpool winning everything and all the gloryhunters at school, so I was very happy that Wimbledon won. 

Those are the finals I really remember. I'm sure I watched others. I remember Gazza being stretchered off after injuring himself with a ridiculous tackle in 1991. But other memories are hazy. What I mainly feel when I think about the FA Cup final relates to the whole family sitting down to watch the game, my father's infectious excitement, the sheer novelty of football on the telly, and this marking the end of a football season and in its own way the beginning of summer.

The other thing I remember is the family sweepstake. Once the team line-ups were announced, my dad would write all the player's names on tiny bits of scrap paper and we would take it in turns to draw them. Whoever had the piece of paper with the name of the first player to score a goal won. The prize was picking a box of chocolates afterwards, when we would walk across the park opposite our house to the little paper shop near the school, where there would be a small range of boxed chocs behind a glass screen. 

It felt like my mum won every year, even when she picked unlikely players to score first. This might be a trick of memory as I have no record of who actually won each year. It just felt like it was always my mum who was lucky in the sweep. It didn't matter anyway because the chocolates got shared. 

That vignette in itself is wrapped in nostalgia, like all these memories. The paucity of television channels. The simplicity of a sweepstake with very little at stake. Just those little family traditions that made the day special. That's where the magic lay, if there was any magic at all. Not on the field at Wembley, but in our living room. We made those moments happen and then froze them in sunlit amber as happy-sad memories. 

Maybe Dad was trying to keep those moments alive, with those phone calls after the game all those years after I left home when we didn't watch the game together any more. I understand that now. Now that the phone calls have stopped. 

This is the Way to my 2020 TV review

Here's a review of the telly I watched in 2020. (The picture is relevant!)

The only 'reality TV' series I watched was The Great British Bake Off. Kudos to the team for being able to film it during a pandemic, but really it followed the same format as it ever does. It was nice escapism to watch something where the only dreadful crisis is if someone has burned their biscuits or dropped their doughnuts on the floor. My main criticism is that Sandi Toksvig was a big loss on the presenting front. 

Back in the summer we started paying for BT Sport so that I could watch baseball on ESPN. I ended up getting up in the middle of the night on a couple of occasions to watch my team, the Padres. That included the post-season play-off games, all of which were shown across BT Sport. I've since taken up a special offer and we now have Sky Sports as well. So I've been watching a lot of football. 

Cathy and I have been having lunch together almost every day in lockdown. We tend to watch an episode of a comedy with lunch and have worked through all 11 seasons of Frasier, starting from season 1, and other American comedies, Man With a Plan, Superstore, and Single Parents.

Man With a Plan stars Matt LeBlanc as Adam and his on-screen wife, Linda, is played by Liza Snyder, who we used to watch years ago in a sitcom called Jesse where she was the sparky best friend of Christina Applegate's titular character. Given the twenty or so year gap between watching her in Jesse, it's quite funny to imagine that Joey from Friends married Linda from Jesse, and they both changed their names and moved to Pittsburgh. We watch a lot of American comedies and the connections via actors is quite funny. For example, Swoosie Kurtz plays Adam's mom. But she was also in Mike and Molly, playing Molly's mom. Again, it would be quite feasible for Adam and Molly to be estranged siblings with the same mom.

Superstore is set in a Walmart-style big box store populated by a mix of eccentric staff-members. What I like about it as a show is that none of the characters are just out-and-out stupid. Some are naive, and others are weird, but unlike in many British sitcoms where you tend to have one smart character surrounded by idiots, all these characters have depth. Single Parents is about a group of single parents whose children are all in the same school, and who have grouped together for mutual support. The cast is lifted by Brad Garrett, who I rate as one of the most overlooked comic actors at work today, and some really cool kid actors. The twin girls to whom Brad is a single dad, are perfectly cast as malevolent evil geniuses in waiting and yet manage to be adorable at the same time.

It was weird going back to Frasier after so long. It was well worth second look and it has held up much better than Friends, some 20-25 years on. Some plotlines jar, particularly around discussions of homosexuality, which were probably quite progressive when the show was written in the 90s, but feel a little bit old-fashioned now. One episode where Frasier is erroneously outed as gay doesn't have the same edge to it as it may have done originally, because who would really care now about that sort of thing?

One British sitcom we have discovered and quickly watched through on iPlayer is Upstart Crow, written by Ben Elton and starring David Mitchell as Will Shakespeare. There are a lot of laughs in this as it shows Will as a shameless plagiarist who is also adept at turning everyday life into scenes for his plays. There are running gags about terrible coach journeys between Stratford and London, and knowing nods to issues like immigration, European unity, and a country run by rich posh boys. There are a few rude bits, but they are placed in mock-Shakespearean language, and are quite funny. There are some jokes where it helps to have a bit of knowledge of Shakespeare and some of the controversial conspiracy theories about his writing, but overall I don't think you absolutely need to know what's going on to enjoy it.

And so on to my absolute TV highlight of the year - The Mandalorian on Disney Plus. This show was the reason we bought a year's subscription to the streaming service, and it was worth it. I reviewed the first season back on Star Wars Day. The second season was even better.

#####SPOILERS FOLLOW#####

The second season follows the Mandalorian as he embarks on a quest given to him by his cult leader to deliver The Child (aka Baby Yoda) safely to the Jedi, who can train The Child to use the Force. It's a straight 'quest' narrative. Along the way the Mandalorian has to fight monsters like the Krayt Dragon and giant ice spiders, deal with treachery, strike up new alliances, and keep The Child out of the hands of the sinister Moff Gideon who wants to exploit The Child's abilities to help relaunch the Galactic Empire. 

I would quite like to know what people who aren't steeped in Star Wars make of The Mandalorian, because this series really felt like it was aimed squarely at fans. We see some characters return from the first series, but also live action debuts from two characters who were well-established in the Star Wars cartoon series. These are Bo-Katan Kryze (played by Katie Sackhoff), the exiled ruler of Mandalore, and the apostate Jedi, Ahsoka Tano (played by Rosario Dawson). Both these characters featured in The Clone Wars cartoon series and Star Wars Rebels. 

The episode with Ahsoka seemed to lay the groundwork for a future series about her, as she is seeking the whereabouts of Grand Admiral Thrawn. The last episode of Star Wars Rebels shows Ahsoka setting off on a quest to find Ezra Bridger, another Jedi survivor, who has disappeared along with Thrawn and Thrawn's fleet into hyperspace as part of a plan to liberate the planet Lothal. But I don't think you would need to know any of that to appreciate the episode.

This is something that the Mandalorian does very well. It throws in all these references to Star Wars lore, like the Krayt Dragon, or Operation Cinder, but in a way that doesn't bog down the storytelling or rely on you knowing what any of these things are before watching it. 

And then there were two big characters from the movies that returned - Boba Fett, and Luke Skywalker (three if you count R2-D2, which we probably should). It is now Star Wars canon that Boba Fett survived his encounter with the Sarlacc in Return of the Jedi and lives on to hunt bounties for another day. Meanwhile, we got to see Luke Skywalker in the early days of the New Republic when he was trying to create a new Jedi Academy. We know how that panned out from the events relayed in Star Wars Episode VIII - The Last Jedi. 

That leads on to a source of real concern for fans of the show. We now know The Child's name is Grogu, and he was entrusted to the care of Luke Skywalker. But we also know from The Last Jedi that Ben Solo went beserk and massacred the other Academy students. Grogu was once apparently in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, where the child Jedi were massacred by Anakin Skywalker.Will Grogu survive a second massacre of Force-attuned children? Let's hope so. 

There is going to be a third series of The Mandalorian, which I think will focus on the Mandalorian helping Bo-Katan's efforts to liberate the planet Mandalore. Given that this series ends with the Mandalorian fulfilling his quest, aided by Bo-Katan, it makes sense for the next series to pick up from there. Katie Sackhoff played the part of Bo-Katan very well, and I would be happy to watch a series where she had a main role. 

The big reveal at the end of Season 2, however, was that there is going to be a Boba Fett series called The Book of Boba Fett. As a fan of Boba Fett, this is excellent news and I am beyond excited about it.

I think the future for Star Wars is probably going to be these short-form series. Both series of The Mandalorian are only eight episodes long and yet they have been much more satisfying than some of the recent movies, which haven't performed as well as hoped at the box office. At one point Disney were planning to release a movie a year, but I think they have backtracked on that now.

And why would they invest in movies that might not work when TV shows like The Mandalorian can generate as much interest. The merchandise available for the show seems to have been very popular. It is also going to drive subscriptions for Disney Plus, and they don't have to split their costs with distribution companies or cinemas. And overall the shows are cheaper to make. They are filmed almost entirely on virtual sets with a small cast. The return on investment must be incredible. The executives must be thinking this is the way forward.

So that's my review of TV in 2020. In a year when I needed some escapism I got to travel to a galaxy far, far away, and thoroughly enjoyed it.