TV Shows Watched: Mating Season: S1E5 (Netflix) with audio description, The Bear: S5E5 (Disney Plus) with audio description, Spider-Noir: S1E8 (Amazon) with audio description, Star City: S1E6 (Apple) with audio description, Tracker: S3E16 (Paramount) with audio description, Life Larry and the Pursuit Of YUnhappiness: S1E2 (HBO MAX) with audio description, and The Hawk: S1E1 (Netflix) with audio description

Mating Season- A pretty cute episode that sends up the Fox and the hound. I appreciated this, and the audio description… is really a hard sell for this show, but it does try. It wants to be good, but these characters never shut up, so it just isn’t. No news on a second season.

The Bear- This season is insufferable. Great audio description, but this one night format is dragging the show. The first three were the worst of the series, it picked up a bit in four, and flatlines. This is the most pretentious season of television. It has believed its own hype this much to believe this is what the fans want. The AD is the best part, which is very sad for an Emmy winner. I’ve heard the last three episodes are significantly better… and they’d better be, or my review is rotten.

Spider-Noir- The first season wraps in somewhat predictable fashion. Amazon still hasn’t picked the show up. I plan to do a full review, so this is brief.

Star City- We finally get some focus on actual space travel, and the space program, and resting bitchface has to drag us back into the slog of Russian politics and espionage. Is this a spinoff of For All Mankind or what? I’ll say, she becomes one of the more profound villains of 2026, when she does what she does at the end of the episode, which is disturbing, cruel, and inhumane. If the season ends with her slowly having the skin removed from her body, I’m here for it. I love For All Mankind, and I find large chunks of Star City to be tedious. Sure, you don’t want to mirror the other show exactly, but this one is really trying hard to be what For All Mankind is not, and that is leading to a pull away from the revisionist space drama that elevates For All Mankind in the first place. This feels less about a space race and cosmic superiority than it does a political referendum on Soviet paranoia.

Tracker- Colter goes to rescue a young man at the behest of his pregnant wife, in an episode that gets unnecessarily twisted upon itself.Media Access did some nice AD for it though.

Life, Larry, and the Pursuit Of Unhappiness- While the series is just Larry David’s version of Drunk History, he has a very pointed conversation about having guardrails in place, should the electorate in the future decide to vote for someone… well… you know. I assume if you love Curb Your Enthusiasm you’ll love this. It is fine. He is occasionally funny, but the totality is not consistently so. The AD is OK, also given the format.

The Hawk- I got viscerally angry when I heard Vito on The Hawk. I’ve tried to tiptoe around him, valuing human audio description, but stop fucking hiring this guy. Since everyone can’t figure out where or what he should be narrating, stop until you do. No, he should not be the narrator for The Hawk. he shouldn’t be the narrator for Abbott Elementary either. he shouldn’t be the narrator for Nemesis. He shouldn’t be the narrator for The Burbs. He shouldn’t be the narrator for Ted. He WAS decent on the Stranger Things: Behind The Curtain. He probably could narrate several of these documentaries and docuseries these streamers drop on a regular basis. There’s nothing emoting here, he doesn’t engage the audience in the least, and he shouldn’t be the narrator for the new Will Ferrell comedy. The series is struggling as it is to be funny without the world’s least funny narrator attached to it. I want to preserve human audio description, but every single time I’ve given a warning about how TTS is encroaching on the space, I’ve suggested that narrators who thrive on flat narration are being surpassed by TTS voices. That’s what is so confounding, because Vito only works for bargain providers, he can’t work for Deluxe, IDC, DVW, and Media Access Group. Fuck, I don’t even think he’s worked for Point 360, Pixel Logic, Zoo Digital, Audio Eyes, or any of the other fairly major houses. He seems to universally hop around companies like Diffuse, that I imagine get their work from netflix by pitching the lowest quote of any studio. He represents death of audio description, as every time you hear his voice, a studio has decided to choose the cheaper option, and by pushing out a voice I’ve seen mistaken for AI more than once, it really starts to make those improved TTS voices look a bit better. The continued existence of shitty human AD as a byproduct continues to sell to an audience listening that that is the best we can hope for, and the most Netflix is willing to pay for. Put that up against how much attention is paid to the visual aesthetics of The Odyssey, where IMAX built Christopher Nolan a new camera so he could record in the highest possible visual quality, while also getting sound, because the previous camera was too loud so every prior production was adding the sound back in during post. It seems as though in terms of quality for sighted audiences, there’s a consistent push for the best at all cost, while in providing us with the meager audio description, which sometimes doesn’t even exist, they nickel and dime their way down until we’re just happy to hear an AI replicated voice of Harvey Fierstein graveling his way through Paw Patrol. I don’t know what future you think is ahead for us in audio description, but it is bleak as fuck, and certainly not being pushed to the forefront like IMAX 70mm. In ten years, you’ll be lucky to hear Laura Post on Christopher Nolan’s IMAX 70mm retelling of Beowulf, because even though the studio will give him a couple hundred million, and IMAX will build a virtual IMAX 70mm 4D camera for him, or whatever else we are doing with film then, they’ll have removed all quality from audio description, so even Nolan’s big extravaganza’s are susceptible to crap. Will Ferrell hasn’t been a series regular on a TV Show since SNL, and even though Netflix managed to nab him, they still didn’t feel this show was a priority enough to put the best audio description on the series to represent it as best as it possibly can be. No, they called up their bargain bin companies, who then flicked through the Rolodex of names willing to be underpaid, and shat out something ww shouldn’t have to put up with. But what’s worse, is that with the prevalence of TTS rising in the industry, we’re just supposed to Oliver our way up to Netflix, and “please Sir” for some more gruel. I want my cold jelly and custard, dammit. “Can I have some more?” We should not have to beg to get companies invested in attending to us the same way they build a new fucking camera to shoot The Odyssey. And No, Nolan didn’t use AI.