I hope y’all had a wonderful July 4th. Yes, I just typed y’all. After all that patriotic pride, y’all felt appropriate.Coming up this week, honestly, is pretty bare. Some game shows return for fans of things like Celebrity Family Feud or Press Your Luck, but the week is nearly fully dominated by Netflix’s launch of Little House On The Prarie, which drops on Thursday. The only other notable series debuting is The Five Star Weekend starring Jennifer Garner which also lands on Thursday but on Peacock. Big movies? Reminders Of Him hits Peacock on Friday. Big returning shows? Apple has the fifth season of Trying on Wednesday.
TV Shows Watched: A Good Girls Guide To Murder: S2E2 (Netflix) with audio description, Your Friends And Neighbors: S2E6 (Apple) with audio description, MIA: S1E4 (Peacock) with audio description, Euphoria: S2E7 (HBO MAX) with audio description, and Scrubs: S10E7 (Disney plus) with audio description.
Epic Fail Award: Disney. After apparently allowing artificial voices to trickle into Marvel via the X-Men, they failed to include the audio description track on Ready Or Not: Here I Come, which also dropped last week. In comparison, HBO MAX had no problem putting audio description on Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, day and date. Why is this a recurring Disney issue?
A Good Girls Guide To Murder- Pip is still trying to figure out what happened to Jamie, and deal with the Max case, as her safety comes into question, and secrets are unearthed. The AD here seemed fine, notably pointing out facial cues when people felt uncomfortable during questioning.
Your Friends And Neighbors- The loss of a recurring character brings everyone together, and brings up complicated emotions for all. I really enjoyed the work by several actors in this episode, notably Jon Hamm, but also Lena Hall, as Aly, who doesn’t get the praise she deserves which for some reason always goes to the wrong supporting actress. The audio description did a nice job of pointing out things happening at this crowded memorial, like the passing out of articles of clothing from the deceased.
MIA- Fuck it. I’m out. I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve quit a show because the audio description track was so bad, I just couldn’t do it anymore. Ironically, one of those was a Peacock show, The DAy Of The Jackal, but this track on MIA is so distracting, and sounds so awful, I cannot physically finish this series. i can’t even bring myself to stay focused on the episode, because everytime I hear the audio description it makes me mad. In this day and age, when we have AI that sounds freakishly human, and is mixed perfectly, how on earth this exists is one of the great mysteries of life. MIA is DOA.
Euphoria- THis episode that takes an artistic look at the lives of the cast, presenting it as a staged work, was really fun. I’ve been pretty mid on Euphoria the whole time, with a few episodes popping, and this one certainly stands out. Lovely. Really nice audio description too, describing this somewhat avant garde way of furthering the story.
Scrubs- This was mainly a JD and Carla thing, as she gets to bring back the Bambi reference, and all using a barbeque as a backdrop. Much like all sitcoms, this has an uphill battle, and while there’s something here, it isn’t enough. Though, with all the cut aways, even when I was including the original series rewatch on my Diaries, I noted the high degree of difficulty Scrubs presents.
The best AD doesn’t matter, because MIA is so bad it makes Abbott Elementary’s description look good. MIA is so bad, it makes the fans of X-Men 97 and Deli Boys, both who just got shuffled into AI voices, think… it could be worse. MIA sounds terrible. There might have been a talented writer in there at some point, but if you create a beautiful orchestral arrangement, and hand it to musicians that can’t play their instruments,it really doesn’t matter what you wrote, does it? Because no one can decipher it.
