Well, here we are again, this time talking about some other TV shows I've watched recently, just before those other ones from last week...
Let's start with Sandman. I didn't get into the comics until about a decade ago. I know, I know, that's like twenty years later than all the cool kids, but whenever it happened I finally got there. The efforts to adapt Sandman to movie and/or TV were byzantine, but it finally happened, on Netflix, and that of course meant someone who has never had Netflix was possibly never going to see it...Until Netflix decided to release the first season on physical media. Which of course I snapped up.
For a comic book steeped in the goth culture of its time, there were probably going to be a few changes to keep it from feeling dated. So that happened. Along with about half the cast, Death is now black, and not the other most goth character in the story, but it really doesn't matter. Same character, just as awesome, and half the best episode of the season, along with Hob Gadling (a tweet referring to which went as viral as I'm likely to). Listening to Morpheus after all this time, just having a voice for the character, that's the biggest adjustment to make. Absolutely totally worth the wait. Will they really be able to adapt the whole comic? Time to tell!
Titans finished out its run, and I caught up of course on home media (the way I've watched the whole series), with its fourth season (one whole episode of which finally gave Beast Boy a proper spotlight, which owed more than a little to Grant Morrison's Animal Man), and the whole run has a very symmetrical feel to it, along with the sliding time scale of the X-Men movies as close to a true comic book experience as live action adaptations have gotten. Any regular reader of comics will know superhero team lineups come and go, and usually have a beginning and end of some kind. The show began with the Titans getting back together (some of its best early material across the first two seasons are flashbacks to the past, a whole prior lineup we get to see with some of them coming back for me, including Wonder Girl), and ends with the group going back its separate ways.
The whole series has gotten so little attention (mostly in the beginning, when observers called it "needlessly violent"), and as such will be a welcome bit of rediscovery in the years ahead. Definitely one of the hidden gems of the streaming era.
Speaking of which! All these shows I've talked about in the past few weeks have come from one streaming service or another. This last one this week is no exception. Frasier is a reboot/continuation of the classic Frasier sitcom, which itself was of course a spinoff of Cheers. Early reviews criticized the new version as lacking the depth of comic talent, specifically the actors playing Frasier's son and Nigel's son, but I find their unique characters in the general franchise to be refreshing, helping establish yet another identity for the third look at Frasier's world we've gotten to see. It's also one of those shows I'm baffled has to be relegated to streaming (Paramount+), although the broadcast chances are maybe dicey with sticking strictly to Kesley Grammer as central star (whereas Night Court had a new face to the premise, and what's now known as The Connors had a whole cast it brought back).
Anyway, this old fan loved the results, which also helped keep me visiting my Paramount+ account in the absence (a fairly rare occurrence) of new Star Trek material (not that the service doesn't have other material, too). There was a time (certainly when my working status had much different parameters, much less working hours) when I watched a flood of television programming, at least one show every night. We're not really in a golden age of network television (although I think Ghosts is a classic too many people sleep on), so I'm not missing too much, and most of what streaming offers I can reasonably catch up with as I want. I've also been watching Yellowstone (but curiously, not the streaming spinoffs). Cable (premium or otherwise) rarely has much to interest me, and much of what critics love these days is indistinguishable from what they love in film.
So I guess I can say I'm keeping up about as well as always.
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