Kicking off today, I continued with Furious, season one, episode two, which is available on Hulu and through Disney+ with Hulu, with audio description. This definitely is a winner. I can understand a bit more now as to why it has become a breakout hit. Lola Petticrew is still captivating here as this killer with a sympathetic angle, allowing you to follow her as a protagonist instead of purely as an antagonist. Sort of like the mysterious person in The Shards, it would be hard to justify everything that she does, but the way Furious shapes Petticrew’s mysterious character allows for there to be that level of, “They deserved it.” In case you think that sounds a bit harsh, you have to watch the show and find out what her reasons are, which I think you should. The audio description is really good, but Disney has been doing this weird thing where they’re not crediting anybody at the end. The Shards has no credits, and neither does Furious, even if you listen all the way to the end. Whoever these companies are that are doing audio description for Disney, they have a very weird take on accessibility right now, and I’m not here for it. You guys deserve to be credited for your work. At bare minimum, we deserve to know who made it, company-wise, so that if there’s a problem with a track, we know where to complain. Trying to talk to customer service at a company where the representative has no idea what audio description even is can be maddening, and simply bothering them on social media has a low-to-medium chance of actually doing anything. I don’t need to complain about this particular track, but tracks occasionally have issues, sometimes as simple as being uploaded incorrectly. Credits matter.

Then I continued my rewatch of season one of MobLand since season two came back, and I actually made it past that weird scene where Tom Hardy holds a decapitated head and decided to press further. The show isn’t terrible. It actually made me think, having seen Guy Ritchie’s recent film work with In the Grey, that he might be doing better work on television right now between MobLand and Young Sherlock than he is in film, which is weird for him. Between Young Sherlock, MobLand and Netflix’s The Gentlemen, those projects feel a little bit more like Guy Ritchie to me than In the Grey does. MobLand also benefits from having three extremely high-class talents in Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren. The story is okay, and I’m liking MobLand more than I thought I would based on bailing after the first two episodes the first time around. We’ll see how this attempt at jumping back in actually goes. No one was credited at the end of this either, so I can’t make any predictions as to who did the audio description. Apparently, it’s not just a Disney thing, although it’s rare for Paramount because so much of their audio description is handled by Media Access Group.

Then I continued the recently canceled Ride or Die with season one, episode four. I’m going to finish this thing anyway because I’m holding out some hope that it gets saved by another streaming service, especially since Paramount Television Studios is reportedly shopping it around. The performances are just too good. Unlike The Boroughs, which was sci-fi, I can’t see them saying the budget for this is so prohibitive that another service couldn’t move forward with it. It’s nice to see Debbie and Judith mending fences and moving forward, still going after their target while also being chased because they themselves are targets. The show gets progressively better as you move forward and the pieces of the puzzle start coming together. It’s also nice to see Octavia Spencer’s Debbie making smarter character choices. Prime Video has yet to let me even watch the credits for the show, so I have no idea who does the audio description here. I could make a guess, but that would be it. Just a guess.

Then I finished season two of The Comeback on HBO Max, which has just abysmal audio description. There was a long stretch where nothing was described, not even attempted to be described. I actually forgot audio description was on. I was sitting there wondering, where is it? Where did it go? What happened? Did I not turn it on? It was like the track was gaslighting me into believing audio description had never been there in the first place. A couple of times since I started rewatching The Comeback, somebody has asked me what I consider a bad audio description track, and I’m like: this. This is a bad track. I feel bad because I think the narrator was probably just helping to jump in on catch-up work, and sometimes if you don’t know what it is you’re describing, you’re just reading words and putting your voice onto the screen. It’s not like the narration itself is bad. The problem is that the writing makes absolutely no effort to cohesively convey what is happening in this show. AI would have done a better job, and that is saying a lot coming from me. When you take a photo of something using one of the AI-powered assistive tools like Seeing AI or Be My AI, the descriptions those programs generate can be far richer than almost anything happening in the audio description for this series. That goes for both season one and season two.

Then I had another show on my checklist to jump into, only to realize Netflix didn’t provide audio description for it. I decided I’d try it anyway, just for shits and giggles. For anyone wondering what The Airport Chaplain is like, it stars Hugo Weaving as Tobias Wallace, and it is pretty much what it says it is. It’s an Australian SBS production that Netflix acquired for international distribution, which explains why it showed up on my list looking like a Netflix release even though it isn’t really a Netflix original in the traditional sense. It’s not really a comedy and not entirely a drama, landing somewhere in that dramedy territory, and I didn’t find it particularly interesting. More importantly for me, there’s no audio description. Being an Australian acquisition isn’t an excuse for Netflix to distribute an English-language series without accessibility. I get a list of new and returning television shows, and it doesn’t distinguish between Netflix originals and licensed or acquired titles, so The Airport Chaplain popped up on there as a Netflix release. I don’t think I’m going to watch another episode. There’s really no point. I figured I could at least say something here for anyone who had this on their list, but it wasn’t entertaining enough for me to try to force my way through seven more episodes without audio description.

Lastly, I watched Jeopardy! Masters, season four, episode five. We’re still in the quarterfinals, and the audio description here is better than Celebrity Jeopardy!, but not quite as good as Pop Culture Jeopardy! I like to think Pop Culture Jeopardy! inspired this to be better than previous iterations of Jeopardy! had been, so that’s something at least. Interestingly, there’s also no audio description company credited at the end of this either. I’m watching through Disney+ with Hulu, so this is very much becoming a thing. It also raises an interesting question about why sometimes an audio description company is able to be credited on Disney+ while other companies are not. If I watch a bunch of shows on Disney+ without credits and then hop over to something like The Dummies, which I’ve also been watching, that one actively tells me who did the audio description. So I guess Pixelogic has enough clout with Disney to make sure its credits end up at the end of the show, while whoever is doing The Shards and Furious apparently does not.

As far as a winner for the day specifically based on audio description, I would give it to Furious. Not necessarily by a wide margin, but there are some interesting sequences that give it a slight edge over MobLand and Ride or Die, which are both very close. At the bottom, I’m going to call it a tie for once because I truly dislike The Comeback’s audio description, but I also need to shame Netflix for distributing The Airport Chaplain without bothering to provide audio description at all. These are different problems, but they arrive at roughly the same destination for a blind viewer.

And that’s really the point. Everybody’s taste is their own, and all of this is subjective. There could be somebody out there who thinks The Airport Chaplain is the best thing they’ve seen in the last 50 years. I don’t think that would be more than one person, but that person might need audio description. The point is to build accessibility so that it is there when somebody needs it, not accessibility based on somebody else’s perception of whether there is enough immediate demand to justify it. Accessibility shouldn’t depend on whether somebody thinks the show is important enough to deserve it.