I’m still trapped in my own personal hell, so welcome back to Reinventing the Small Screen Diaries for the time being. I tried to watch some things today, and while my attention span wasn’t always willing to cooperate, I did manage to bounce among four very different shows.

First up was the new Netflix series My Brilliant Career, which follows Sybylla Melvyn, a young Australian woman who wants to become a writer and has absolutely no interest in getting married. She doesn’t necessarily want to leave her family behind either, but they’re poor, have too many children to support, and her mother essentially admits that Sybylla marrying someone would remove one mouth from the household. When Sybylla’s wealthy grandmother offers to bring her to Caddagat and introduce her to high society, she accepts because it could expand her horizons and provide her with experiences that might make her a better writer.

That creates the central conflict of the first couple of episodes. Sybylla wants education, experience, and independence, while her grandmother sees this as an opportunity to polish her into someone suitable for marriage. Sybylla is also more than a little uncouth. The first episode shows her freely urinating outside on the lawn, almost like someone letting the family dog into the backyard, which may have been the most amusing thing I encountered during the two episodes I watched.

The audio description for My Brilliant Career was produced by VSI London, and I didn’t notice any major problems with it. However, I also wasn’t deeply invested in the series, so they could have slipped something past me while my attention was wandering. I began the show thinking I might knock out the entire six-episode season, but two episodes were apparently the limit of my brilliant career with My Brilliant Career.

After that failed attempt, I went searching for something else and discovered that the streaming landscape felt like slim pickings. I finally finished the tenth episode and first-season finale of HBO’s Rooster, a series I really love and am glad will be returning for a second season. Its audio description is solid. It’s a comedy filled with dialogue and overlapping hijinks, so the describers have to squeeze information into some tight spaces, but I generally feel as though I’m receiving what I need.

The finale does leave me scratching my head. For anyone who doesn’t mind spoilers for a season that ended months ago, Connie Britton’s Elizabeth is revealed as the incoming president of Ludlow College, replacing John C. McGinley’s Walt after his final semester. Elizabeth is also the mother of Katie, a professor at that same college who is working toward tenure. I’d love to be a fly on the wall during the trustee meeting where everyone decided that appointing the mother of a current tenure-track professor wouldn’t create a massive conflict of interest. I would think Katie might have to find another job, but apparently Ludlow exists in a fantasy universe where nepotism is just another item on the faculty agenda.

Hopefully, Season Two finds a way to send Elizabeth packing and allows Walt to remain involved, because McGinley has been excellent in the role. Steve Carell is also terrific as Greg, and the ensemble chemistry has turned Rooster into one of my favorite new comedies. If you haven’t watched it, I highly recommend checking it out. Perhaps I’ll eventually get around to writing a proper review.

I also watched Breaking Bad Season Four, Episode Eleven, “Crawl Space,” as I continue working my way through the series. We’re getting close to the end of the season, and this episode appears to be setting up a catastrophe for Walt. Gus fires him, Walt becomes terrified for his family’s safety, and he begins scrambling to protect everyone while also warning Hank that his life may be in danger. The audio description remains excellent, produced by Descriptive Video Works and narrated by the late, great Diane Newman. Watching another episode of Breaking Bad is never a chore, and its consistently strong audio description makes the experience even better.

The last thing I watched was DMV, because I know everyone was waiting on pins and needles to discover whether I would ever finish it. I watched Episode Twelve, “The Fourth Wheel,” in which a new driving examiner named Robin joins the branch. Robin is played by Anna Camp and happens to be the niece of Ray Henderson, the director of the California DMV. Everyone is initially excited to welcome DMV royalty until they realize Robin may have been planted there to make their lives miserable, forcing the employees to figure out how to get rid of her.

I thought DMV was a promising comedy, and I’m disappointed that CBS didn’t give it more time to grow. The cast had the chemistry necessary to turn it into a successful workplace sitcom, but networks don’t seem willing to be patient with comedies anymore. It’s especially difficult for traditional sitcoms right now. I vote in an awards body that still has a category designed specifically for multicamera programming, and finding even five eligible nominees can be a challenge. We once ended up nominating The Late Show with Stephen Colbert alongside the available multicamera sitcoms because there simply weren’t enough of them. DMV itself was a single-camera comedy, which only reinforces how close the traditional multicamera sitcom may be to becoming an endangered species.

Of everything I watched, Breaking Bad easily had the best audio description. I can’t select a worst track because none of the others failed to cut the mustard. They were all perfectly serviceable, even when the shows themselves couldn’t always hold my attention. Breaking Bad, however, remains the clear winner thanks to Descriptive Video Works and Diane Newman’s terrific narration.