TV Shows Watched: X-Men: 97: S2E3 (Disney Plus) with audio description, Big mistakes: S1E6 (Netflix) with audio description, Spider-Noir (Amazon) with audio description, Monarch: S2E10 (Apple) with audio description, Daemons Of The Shadow Realm: S1E6 (CrunchyRoll) with audio description, Breaking Bad: S4E4 (Netflix) with audio description
X-Men 97- The controversy is brewing over Disney’s decision to commission AI for this, following a disturbing new trend. I do disagree with the overblown statement on mispronunciations, but I’m still not happy with it.Sadly, not the only show with tTS synthetic voice on this list. The third episode featured Apocalypse, Magneto, Professor X, Beast, Nightcrawler, Rogue, and Bishop.Magneto tries to reconcile with Apocalypse in the past, hoping to change the future, but he goes about it in an ill advised manner. Instead of being honest with Apocalypse about who he is, and why he can speak from experience, he keeps it all a mystery (somehow) leaving Apocalypse to ultimately feel betrayed, which is fair. I heard there’s a 10 season plan for this, which would be insane, but amazing.
Big Mistakes- Laurie Metcalf nails another big moment for her, and if she doesn’t get an Emmy nomination this morning, I’m eating your hat. Not mine, I like my hats. I thought the conversation between Nicky and the random gay guy he and Tarek ran into was kind of hilarious as they search for the Out and Loud awards. DVW does the audio description here, and for a comedy, there’s a really good amount of description here. Already renewed for Season 2, by the way.
Spider-Noir- Almost at the end here,and Amazon still hasn’t picked up a second season, which scares me. I’m sure the conversation is largely around the question of color or black and white, since going back and colorizing everything ballooned the budget. But heading into the finale, I love this show, Cage has been great as Ben Hardy, and Media Access has done really well with audio description that for those who choose black and white, doesn’t explore color to ruin the experience. It’s like they knew, so they found ways around it. Brianna Leon is doing lovely work here.
Monarch- I truly don’t care. Apple hasn’t picked up the show for a third season yet, and they may not.This lives in between the movies, and with the next Godzilla/Kong film coming out next year, they’d have to wait beyond that anyway. the audio description is good, I’m just always a little bored because the show so heavily relies on human interaction over titan moments for budgetary reasons. Kurt Russell leaving would cause me to make a hard exit. The audio description is solid though, and that’s worth mentioning.
Daemons Of the Shadow Realm- Right back into brutal violence. Not quite as impressive as Witch Hat Atelier, but the writers working at Global 3 are low key fantastic. If you’re running another company, and a writer from Global 3 is applying to work for you, I’d take it seriously. This is also TTS audio description, but they pull a lot out of the anime violence. Gobble gobble?
Breaking Bad- Still trying to make it through this. DVW narrated by Diane Newman, and it always has great audio description. Perfect. Change nothing. Walt is frustrated with everything in his life, and Hank almsot figured it out, but Walt immediately caught the misdirect.
Best? Spider Noir/Breaking Bad. Worst? X-Men 97/Daemons for using synthetic voice, and there wasn’t a worse narrated show that I watched. I probably could ahve put X-Men at the bottom, but I had the least amount of problems with Episode 3 out of the first three episodes, so it would just be residual, and it wasn’t the only cheap track made.
