Kicking off the diary this week, we start with a look at the week ahead, which is actually quite busy, far busier than many other weeks. There’s a whole slate of movies scheduled to hit streaming services. Stop That Train releases today on Netflix. Tuner, the excellent Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman film, hits Paramount+ tomorrow. Toy Story 5 lands on Disney+ on Wednesday. Backrooms hits HBO Max on Friday. In addition, there’s also a new Amazon Prime movie, The Love Hypothesis, landing on Wednesday, and on Friday Netflix is debuting Unabomber, starring Jacob Tremblay, Russell Crowe, and Shailene Woodley. So, on the film front, we’re already looking pretty strong. In terms of returning shows, that list is pretty exciting as well. Best Medicine and Doc are both returning to Fox, as are the game shows Celebrity Name That Tune and Celebrity Weakest Link, which both air on Mondays. You’ll also get a new season of Survivor starting this week, and the 13th season of American Horror Story drops on FX on Thursday.

In terms of new shows, there are plenty of those to be had as well. American Hostage, the new limited series that’s getting solid critical reception and stars Jon Hamm, drops on MGM+ today. Youth, the new show starring Sharon Horgan of Bad Sisters fame, is hitting HBO Max today. Line of Fire, the new Peter Krause drama, hits NBC on Monday. Brothers, the new comedy starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, hits Apple TV on Wednesday. And there’s even a Willy Wonka reality competition, Wonka’s Golden Ticket, hitting Netflix on Wednesday. That’s just a smattering of the programming you can expect. Now, onto the diary.

I kicked off the day with Season 1, Episode 3 of Ride or Die, which saw the ladies continuing to try to escape while also looking for answers. They spend a lot of the episode on a train, and the show is definitely buoyed by some strong lead performances, even if the show itself is extremely predictable. The audio description here, which I still have not actually heard the company name for because Amazon is constantly pushing me into the next episode, is one of the stronger tracks, especially when it comes to the scene where Hannah Waddingham’s Judith is trying to regain her composure after ingesting something she did not mean to ingest. Some of the reveals within the episode aren’t necessarily that surprising, though, and I immediately had guesses as to what Queenie was talking about with her request.

Then I started Furious, Season 1, Episode 1, which is on Hulu. This is the much-talked-about series that has swept the nation, or so I’ve heard. Not a single person has run up to me and talked to me about Furious, but the internet tells me people are talking about Furious, so I felt like I had to jump into this. And it’s pretty solid. Right from the start, it’s intriguing. It feels a little like Killing Eve in many ways, where we are supposed to become attached somehow to the killer in the series, not just the agent trying to find her. A lot of that has to do with Lola Petticrew’s performance as the mysterious killer whose real name is not actually revealed in the first episode. Every bit of audio description involving her has to keep finding ways to describe who she is. Eventually, she picks up an identity, but it’s not hers, so she remains the mystery woman. Petticrew impressed me a couple of years ago with her performance in the Hulu limited series Say Nothing, about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, for which she absolutely deserved an Emmy nomination. Emmy Rossum is also here as FBI agent Alice Black and continues to mature into this tough female lead. Alice wants more from the FBI than what they’re giving her, and this case may be her opportunity to get where she wants to go professionally. The audio description here is pretty great, and I’m happy Disney found another project where they could invest in human audio description instead of synthetic. So, a victory in and of itself.

I finished St. Denis Medical Season 2 on Peacock with audio description, and I have always loved Bruce, played by Josh Lawson. He continues to be my favorite character on the show. I love how he’s a mixture of all the problematically dimwitted characters we’ve seen in the past. He’s very much the Michael Scott of the show without actually being the boss. Everyone turns in interesting performances, though, and I think St. Denis Medical is one of the most underrated shows on television. The audio description is okay. Sitcoms are just really hard to get excited about unless the track is mind-blowing. It’s a tough format because they rely so heavily either on sight gags or dialogue that there’s either not enough space to describe something or a joke gets missed because there simply wasn’t time to catch it. Luckily, St. Denis Medical has one of the most talented ensembles on television, and they somehow make it work for the audience.

Then I knocked out Rick and Morty, Season 9, Episode 4, which I’m still catching up on. The audio description here is great. The same team that does Mating Season on Netflix does Rick and Morty for HBO Max, and they are very committed to trying to make adult animation as funny and engaging as possible. I appreciate that. This has some really excellent audio description, and I really hadn’t been let down thus far in the day.

I also finished the second season of Pop Culture Jeopardy! on Netflix, knocked that out, and found out who won. Man, they took some big risks there at the end. But talk about a comeback. I’m not really sure how to review Pop Culture Jeopardy!, so I probably won’t. I can’t think of a solid way to review a game show, especially something like Jeopardy!, which has been running forever. This is just a pop culture version of that, and it’s already in its second season. I don’t know what I would say other than: I love this show, I think it’s phenomenal, and Colin Jost is a great host. End of review. That’s not enough. Do you grade the individual contestants? I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

I did The Five Star Weekend, Season 1, Episode 5, which has audio description by Iyuno on Peacock. This is the Jennifer Garner-led series with a wonderful ensemble that includes Regina Hall, Chloë Sevigny, D’Arcy Carden, Gemma Chan, and Timothy Olyphant. It can be a little schmaltzy at times, but it does have really great audio description. Everyone has their own problems, but I’m sure they’re all going to come together in the end. I know this has been a huge hit for Peacock, and I think that has a lot to do with the cast more than anything. They all seem to work really well together. It’ll be interesting to see how this ends and what the second season is going to look like.

Then I capped off the day with another episode of The Rookie, Season 8, and based on everything that happened, I was on Episode 13, “The Thinker.” Bailey picked up a trainee named Oakley, and things did not go well for him on his first day. It’s amazing when you think about these shows that have been running for a long time and how much peril their characters get put in all the time. I feel like if you listed everything that has happened to John Nolan since he started as a rookie in the LAPD, there isn’t a single living human being on Earth who has experienced the same sort of concentrated misfortune as this character. They also did a little bit of recruiting, which ultimately went nowhere, so I don’t really understand what the whole point of that plot was other than allowing them to bring Seth back for an episode. They also set things up for Wesley to lose the district attorney election. I guess we’re all assuming he’s losing, but I’ll find out more in the next episode. The audio description was fine. I didn’t have any problems with it.

As far as a winner in terms of audio description, this one is a little tough for me because I thought a lot of these programs were exceptional. I think I’ll give the vote of confidence to Furious for the win here because they did so much with the episode in terms of detail. There’s specifically a scene involving Emmy Rossum’s Alice that indicates the kind of sexual encounter she likes to have without the audio description needing to fully spell everything out, and that was really well done across the board. As far as the weakest track of the bunch, sort of by default, it’s St. Denis Medical, but it is by far not one of the worst audio description tracks I’ve heard, so even using the word “weakest” feels like the wrong choice. If I ranked these tracks, it would be at the bottom. Let’s just put it that way. But I also don’t know how much more it could realistically be doing. Audio description on a fast-paced sitcom is already swimming upstream.