This week’s episode of House Of The Dragon (MAX) hit some real highs. I have never liked King Eamon or the actor who plays him, but now I need to memorize this guy’s name, because he was brilliant. This entire episode opened up new layers to a King that has been basically a C-List interpretation of what Jack Gleason already did in the flagship show. S2E2 really sets them apart, as the King really shows wide ranges of emotion, anger, and utter despair and grief. Other than randomly checking in on what Adam was up to, when he had no relevance to the main plot of this episode, this was a near perfect experience. At first, I was thrown by the audio description during the Eric segment, but after asking for feedback from sighted people, and even sighted people who watch with audio description turned on, everyone was confused. Because, I certainly was. But also, we shouldn’t necessarily get more, which would have been doing like an Eric 1 and Eric 2 thing, which would have clearly defined, but that wasn’t how the scene was directed. Therefore, I once again commend Connor DeWolfe and Roy Samuelson on another excellent episode of audio description.

Eric (Netflix). it turned out to be a day of Eric for me, as I pushed closer to the finale of Eric. That poor kid is alive, and he’s not even kidnapped. What the hell. He’s just hiding from his family, meanwhile his father is slipping out of reality, seeing a giant puppet following him around, doing so many drugs he gets fired from the show he co-created, and his wife kicks him out. At least some of this likely could have been avoided by this kid going home. Jesus. Meanwhile, our heroic cop loses his partner to AIDS. Paula Hoffman is a stealth boss ass narrator. She’s not someone people talk about enough, but I really love the stuff she does. I think I noticed her back on Billions, and now she’s doing this, and Chaos Theory, and just killing it.

Clipped (Hulu) decided to walk a bit down memory lane for Doc, and put his plight into context. We also saw an earlier version of V. Then, of course we still see how out of touch the Sterling’s are with reality. Laurence Fishburne is doing some really good work here and I’m not sure people are quite appreciating his performance. Jackie Weaver is doing a good job of making me really truly dislike a character, oddly more than the character I’m supposed to dislike the most I think. Ed O’Neill is a likeable guy who is given nasty things to say, but at the end… there’s still something there to like because of how he’s playing himself. Jackie has decided to drive the wife off the deep end.

I also finished two shows and their current seasons today. Them (Amazon), which got so weird as the end approached. I loved like the final three minutes, which nod to Season 1, but ultimately, Season 1 just had more to say, instead of being mostly weird body horror. And I’d love to not see Good Times anymore. I’m not sure how the black community feels, but the writing here isn’t that sharp. Instead of catering more toward elevated humor, the kind of smart situational humor the original show had, this feels far too much like it wants to be black Family Guy, right down to the talking baby. There’s so little across this series you don’t already see in every other adult animation right now. I’m a fan of adult animation, and even I can see that we’re overdoing this genre a bit, and a lot of shows are being pushed out that really don’t have a voice of their own. Sadly, Good Times really is that. Both Them and Good Times do have really strong audio description though. So, that’s ultimately what’s really important.