📺 Be cool, soda pop.
Hey y’all. Almost the end of the week again, yeehaw. There are a bunch of finales coming up in the next week, including the series finale of This is Us. Also re: endings, Mr. Mayor was canceled. Please send your condolence cards and chocolate to our P.O. box.
In today’s edition:
I Love That For You
Conversations with Friends
The Lincoln Lawyer
Veronica Mars
— Jenni Cullen and Jess Spoll
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Where we each choose a recent-ish show to review and feature every week.
If you like satire and dark humor, try… I Love That For you
Keywords: workplace comedy, dark humor, coming-of-age
Watch if you like: SNL, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Single Drunk Female
Jess’s Rating: B+
I Love That For You (ILTFY) is a show that I love for me (sorry). It’s laugh-out-loud funny, it’s original, and it features an ensemble cast of over-the-top personas.
Created by SNL’s Vanessa Bayer, ILTFY was inspired by her childhood battle against leukemia. Bayer plays Joanna Gold, a woman who beat cancer in her teens and now, in her 30s, lives with her parents and is stuck at a dead-end job. Her dream is to be a host on a home shopping channel (think QVC), and she finally achieves that goal and begins working alongside her childhood hero (played by another SNL alum, Molly Shannon). After a rocky start to her tenure, she blurts out a lie that her cancer has returned.
Bayer was best known on SNL for playing cringey characters, and she is true to form here. I was worried that the show would feel like an extended SNL sketch in a bad way, or that it would be too much of her signature awkwardness to be enjoyable, but I’ve been happily proved wrong so far. The rest of the characters are a good balance to Bayer’s overly-friendly desperation and the environment of a home shopping network is a surprisingly funny backdrop for a sitcom.
I think the show is still finding its footing — one moment it feels like a standard workplace sitcom, the next a (very) dark comedy — but all of those elements individually work really well, and it’s starting to feel like they’re coming together.
Length: 30-min runtime, 3 episodes out so far with new ones on Sundays
Watch on: Showtime
If you’ve got a stomach for repressed melodramatic characters, try… Conversations with Friends
Keywords: introspective, melodrama, adaptation
Watch if you like: Normal People, Love, Modern Love
Jenni’s Rating: D-
One thing Double Take is missing is a Sally Rooney fan to review all her books-turned-TV shows. Unfortunately, you get me, a lukewarm reader of hers at best. Do with that what you will!
Conversations with Friends is a story about two college best friends who used to be romantically involved and become entangled in various ways with a married couple. Ordinarily, I like when a book is turned into a miniseries rather than a movie, because it affords more space to get into the details and set up a proper arc; but for this story, a movie might’ve been a better fit. The show feels small in scope, focused more on feelings and tension than any real plot — and not in a deep or moving way. There’s a lot of flirtation, attraction, and boredom between mildly unlikeable, passive aggressive characters. It’s a slow-paced, frustrating show to watch and I think fans of the book will find the series wanting. I made it through 4 episodes before I decided I was really not in the mood to be depressed on a Friday night.
Length: 30-min runtime, 1 season / 12 episodes total
Watch on: Hulu
Where we feature a show that you may have been tempted to check out, but we’re here to tell you…it might not be worth it. 🤷♀️
The Lincoln Lawyer
Keywords: legal drama, murder mystery, adaptation
Watch if you like: Better Call Saul, How to Get Away with Murder, The Good Wife
Jess’ Rating: C
You probably know The Lincoln Lawyer to be the Matthew McConaughey-led 2011 movie adaptation of a Michael Connelly book of the same name. Well, this isn’t that. This The Lincoln Lawyer is also not a true reboot — it’s loosely based on the sequel in the same Connelly book series. Micky Haller is back as our main character, a charming defense attorney who is recovering from a drug addiction when he unexpectedly adopts a full case load from a recently deceased peer, including a high-profile murder case.
The murder mystery is the most appealing aspect of this show, but it’s sadly bogged down by lengthy legal exposition. One episode includes half an hour of the jury selection process. And the writing is so clunky that even I, a person who only-somewhat-ironically enjoys the terribly written Riverdale, find myself rewriting the lines in my head. Even Neve Campbell, who is underutilized as Haller’s ex-wife, looks like an amateur delivering these forced lines.
If this were 2008, and I was looking for a show to watch each week on network TV that kept me mildly interested, this would fit the bill. It’s easily digestible, but doesn’t offer anything that you can’t get from the legal dramas that came before it.
— Jess
Length: 45-min runtime, 1 season / 10 episodes
Watch on: Netflix
Where we highlight shows that have long-since ended or been canceled, that are well-worth digging back up.
Veronica Mars (2004-2007, 2019*)
Keywords: neo-noir mystery, drama, witty
Watch if you like: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Monk, Jessica Jones
Jenni’s Rating: A+
Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) is a high school student in Southern California who begins moonlighting as a private detective for her peers after her best friend Lilly (Amanda Seyfried) is murdered. The show is set up a bit like Monk or Psych — with various episodic mysteries comprising a season — but includes an overarching and compelling series arc: Veronica is determined to figure out what really happened to Lilly.
This is, in my opinion, a perfect show. To the casual observer, it could get written off as another teen drama (which, don’t get me wrong, I’m very fond of) but that would be selling Veronica Mars extremely short. This series has so much going for it; the dialogue is excellent, there’s nuanced class conflict, the casting is chef’s kiss, and, perhaps most importantly, the mysteries are smart and satisfying to watch unfold. I don’t have enough space or time in this review to enumerate all the things I love about Veronica Mars, but please just trust me. This is a must watch. Put the pilot episode in your queue for this weekend, you can thank me later.
*Full disclosure, I did not watch the 4th season (filmed 12 years later) because I was afraid it would not be as good as the original 3. This review is of S1-3 only.
— Jenni
Length: 42-min runtime, 4 seasons / 72 episodes total
Watch on: Hulu
Your shows, returned:
RuPaul's Drag Race: All Stars, Season 7: Premieres May 20 on Paramount+
Love, Death + Robots, Volume 3: Released May 20 on Netflix
Masterchef, Season 12: Premieres May 25 on Fox
Upcoming new releases:
Angelyne: Premieres May 19 on Peacock
Night Sky: Released May 20 on Amazon Prime
Now and Then: Premieres May 20 on Apple TV+