TV Shows Watched: Outlander: Blood of My Blood: S1E5 (Starz) no audio description, The Hunting Wives: S1E6 (Netflix) with audio description, Dexter: S6E1 (Paramount Plus) with audio description, Two Graves: S1E1 (Netflix) no audio description, The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball: S1E6 (Hulu) with audio description, Pop Culture Jeopardy: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (Amazon) with audio description,Hostage: S1E3 (Netflix) with audio description

Outlander: Blood of My Blood- Coming in as someone who could see, and now cannot, there are very few things weirder than just listening to people have sex. With no context. The audio description can often having varying results, but at bare minimum, when it exists, it provides a modicum of context. Without it, it’s just ten minutes of heavy panting. It is so weird. Also, I must have fundamentally misunderstood the entire show, since I thought Ellen was the last sister in her family to get married, but all of a sudden she has another sister showing up throwing shade.I think if this show had AD, it would make it into the fresh arena, but there are always so many questions, and moments where I’m left wondering what is happening. However, the music is gorgeous. It makes me realize how much I just love that Scottish/Irish vibe, with focus on the string instruments. Beautiful stuff.Also, the Scottish acccent is hot. Just saying. They can laird me anytime.

The Hunting Wives- Things are not looking good for Jill. Her husband becomes aware of her shadiness, but we also have a youth pastor clearly looking to date rape a 14 year old. This series has it all folks, and some sarcastic commentary on abortion to boot. this series has gotten a lot less horny. Careful, Wives, know your strengths.

Dexter-A new season begins and OMG Deb gets to stop a mass shooting. At least, I think that is what it would have been. Kudos to Deb. Also, who is this flirting with Dexter? Who you? Solid audio description.

Two Graves- So I watched a random Netflix International show with no AD because Dave Wallace apparently worked on creating the dub track. So, I wanted to see what it was all about. The series is basically a young woman murdered, and the investigation into it, but seemingly mostly from the mother.I basically look at dubbing as both unnecessary (when not acccompanied by AD), because sighted people can read, but also if you have a hard time seeing the text, you might have enough visual impairment to benefit from audio description, as with shows that now include computers and texting, you wouldn’t know what was on those screens either. But when we do dub casts, I look for people who can act. We have plenty of voice over actors who can kill it, and they often do, and we never know it. I figure if I can’t at least get a dub track that sounds on par with a video game cut scene, we have not done the work. Two Graves is so very close to that. I think the main actress is also on the Squid Game dub, if I’m correct, but there’s a moment where she gets attacked, and that whole moment felt dubbed and fake. The rest of it? Great. No problems. But sometimes with dubs, there’s something about it that just misses. I’ve heard some dead tracks where there’s no background noise anymore. They have a hard time mixing the dub with the original score and sound effects, so things like crowd noise just fall flat. I think maybe my favorite dub in the last year was Apple’s Where’s Wanda, but this one is really solid. Now if Netflix would slap some AD on it. I’m not reviewing the whole series, as I don’t want this show to gain a rotten review simply because someone hired Dave to work on the AD track, but I did want to put out into the world that Dave also does nice work writing a dub script, and working with a dub team that put together a solid final project. There you go.

The Wonderfully Weird World Of Gumball- Just an odd delight every time. An episode about traffic jams. Love it.

Pop culture Jeopardy- Hot take! You might want to put on some fire retardant clothing. Having now seen at least 30 episodes of this, and now also watching Match game and Who wants To Be A Millionaire, I would say that the team that does Pop culture Jeopardy has found a niche for this company. I’m not always a fan of Roundabout, but this is some rather consistently great description for this genre. Hire Roundabout for all your game show needs, and Roundabout needs to retain this writer because all their choices are the right ones. Not always crazy about Roundabouts narrative work, but this is worth a commendation.

Hostage- You know the show has some stuff up its sleeve, when the title of the show becomes irrelevant in the third of five episodes. Without spoiling, they essentially end the initial story, but try to deepen the mystery with other stuff. Will it work?