For the Small Screen Diaries today, I definitely made more of an effort to dig myself out of the hole I’m in while I wait patiently for my YouTube appeal to go through. Fingers crossed on that. I started my day with Ted Lasso because we all need that level of optimism in our lives. I watched season four, episode six, “Don’t Jump Around Much Anymore,” which airs on Apple TV with audio description from Pixel Logic.

I thought the episode was fine. It’s set on New Year’s Eve, with Ted reconsidering his own love life while talking to his ex-wife, Michelle, and Henry helping out at a local pub on one of its busiest nights. The biggest draw is the brief return of Jamie Tartt, who hangs out with Roy until Roy gets a little too drunk, injures his knee while dancing and has to be taken to the hospital by Keeley. Their dynamic remains weird because Keeley knows Roy is seeing someone else, even though she encouraged him to do it. That situation comes to a head when they arrive at the hospital and discover that Roy’s doctor already knows him.

I liked the episode, and I liked the audio description. The women attending the New Year’s Eve party on the boat gave the description team plenty to work with, and the track did a good job covering the evening’s costumes, activity and general chaos.

I also continued Netflix’s My Brilliant Career, watching episodes three and four of the first season. The series has audio description by VSI. It seems as though Sybylla is moving closer toward finding a potential suitor, while also dealing with the rejection of her writing. That rejection seems largely based on the belief that a woman simply couldn’t write that well, which is insane but also something women frequently encountered during that period. There’s a reason so many women published under male names to circumvent the entire issue. The audio description here is fine, but I’m having a really difficult time becoming attached to the series. I keep reminding myself that I can’t exclusively review television shows I like.

I watched another episode of The Comeback, season two, episode seven, on HBO Max, with audio description from someone who apparently doesn’t want to be credited. I completely understand that decision because I haven’t liked the audio description in a single episode of The Comeback. The show itself is funny, and Lisa Kudrow does a lovely job with Valerie Cherish, but this audio description is abysmal. I’m hoping this is merely catch-up audio description and that HBO Max hired a different company for the current third season. There’s a negligible amount of description throughout these older episodes. The exact quantity fluctuates a little, but it never comes close to being enough, even if I try to grade it on a curve because it’s a comedy.

The episodes feature numerous transitions between locations and leave a lot of questions unanswered. Something clearly happens, and then the characters bicker about what just happened, but the description never gives us the necessary visual reference. In this episode, Valerie and the documentary crew argue over whether she drove through a yellow or red light. I have no idea what color it was. Maybe it doesn’t matter, but I’m fairly certain the camera showed us. “Valerie runs a red light” would have taken about one second to say, but apparently there wasn’t enough time or care to include it.

I moved on to episode 13 of Daemons of the Shadow Realm on Crunchyroll, with synthetic audio description produced by Global 3. The characters encounter more daemons, including two attached to a dog, which is certainly interesting. Our protagonist also learns that his childhood best friend was a daemon. The audio description is well written, even though it uses a synthetic voice, and that voice is at least passable.

Next, I watched the third episode of the fourth season of The Legend of Vox Machina on Prime Video, which has audio description from the Media Access Group. This series has always had solid audio description. The group is mostly back together as one of their own ascends within her people’s leadership structure, and everyone gathers to celebrate. The celebration is interrupted by destructive forces attacking her people. Instead of killing their victims, however, the attackers leave them blind. Vox Machina doesn’t understand why the enemy isn’t simply killing people as they attempt to fight back, while the episode’s villains make it clear that they don’t fear death.

I also squeezed in the season two premiere of The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball, which is short enough that you can literally squeeze it into the day. The audio description is produced by Deluxe and narrated by Darren Rivitz. It’s very well done and matches the tone of the series. I love hearing an audio description track comfortably use a word like “fart.” It’s completely on brand and meets younger viewers exactly where they are. The show is primarily aimed at children, but its humor is broad enough that adults who enjoy animation without necessarily needing it to be aggressively adult should have a good time with it.

Finally, I watched the first episode of the new season of Jeopardy! Masters, which surprisingly appears to have human audio description. That was kind of amazing and completely blew my mind. My body was not ready. I’ve heard so much terrible audio description from ABC’s reality and game-show programming recently that encountering decent description on Jeopardy! Masters genuinely shocked me. Whoever wrote the track clearly made an effort to fit in as much useful information as possible. After sitting through the most recent season of Celebrity Jeopardy!, this is a massive improvement and much closer to what Netflix has been doing with Pop Culture Jeopardy!

The best audio description of the day belongs to The Legend of Vox Machina. The series contains numerous fantasy creatures, elaborate environments and bloody battles, so it’s difficult not to notice how much work the description is doing and how effectively it handles that material. At the bottom is unquestionably The Comeback. The ironic part is that Daemons of the Shadow Realm uses synthetic audio description while The Comeback has a human narrator, and I still dislike The Comeback’s track that much. At least Daemons has well-written description and a synthetic voice that is passable. The Comeback simply makes me angry, and a comedy shouldn’t be doing that to me.