I am definitely going to hit a point where I’m watching too many damn television shows at the same time again, because there is an onslaught of television coming our way thanks to the fall season. And, of course, the streaming services that continue to increase their prices are bringing us more and more entertainment at the same time everyone else is. They have to, because in case you missed the news yesterday, Disney+ is raising its prices, and I just got a notification from Apple that they’re also raising their price. Cool, cool. Thanks, bro. Really appreciate the mad love coming from these streaming services as they continue to completely defeat the purpose of having cut the cord. At this point, it’s hard to tell if we’re actually saving money unless you are exclusively watching shows that are on Tubi. So, to make good use of my increasingly expensive subscriptions, I hopped around them.

I started off with Ted Lasso, Season 4, Episode 8, the most recent episode on Apple TV, which does have audio description. There definitely was a point where I wasn’t too crazy about the audio description this time around. There’s a scene where Ted follows his assistant coach because she’s clearly having a rough time after something happens to one of the players at the top of the episode. There were a lot of beats where the description didn’t take the opportunity to fill in anything that might help support the acting choices or what was happening emotionally in the scene. It’s not even that heavy of a scene, but it was treated like nobody wanted to touch it or describe it. As someone who was able to see for so many years, I’m already aware of all the things audio description doesn’t have time to describe, so when it doesn’t take full advantage of the gaps to bring us something, anything, I get disappointed. That being said, I love the show right now because our world is on fire, and there’s something about the return of Ted Lasso, more so than other shows, where his general kindness and empathy toward other people feels sorely missed. There’s something refreshing about the way Ted treats people nowadays, and I look forward to starting a day with Ted Lasso, not necessarily because of the audio description, but because it’s a much-needed breath of fresh air. And for anyone who has been waiting on the will-they-or-won’t-they between Roy and Keeley, this episode will resolve that for you, while Higgins also goes on a mission to figure out who has secretly been buying up shares of AFC Richmond. The answer will surprise absolutely no one.

After Ted Lasso, I watched another episode of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime on Crunchyroll, Season 1, Episode 3. It doesn’t have audio description. I explained before that I’m trying to watch a few episodes of this before seeing the movie, because having watched Chainsaw Man without ever seeing an episode of that series, I definitely felt like I was missing things. I’d like to be less confused with this whole reincarnated-as-a-slime situation before watching the movie. The premise is fairly simple, and because Rimuru has a lot of inner thoughts, it’s actually not the hardest show to follow without audio description. I have certainly found much harder things to follow. So, if you’re blind, big into anime, and want to do the same thing I’m doing, there are worse shows we could stumble through. I’m not saying that excuses the lack of accessibility, though. It remains weird that you can make the movie accessible with audio description while leaving the television series inaccessible. How exactly are we supposed to get from Point A to Point B?

I also started Season 3 of My Life with the Walter Boys, and the big season premiere actually had a really well-edited recap that reminded me of pretty much everything I needed from Season 2. It had all the right scenes to get my head back in the game, including the big catastrophe at the end involving the Walter family patriarch having a heart attack and being rushed to the hospital. So the premiere has to deal with the fallout from that, while also continuing the whole love triangle situation and the eternal question of who is going to end up with whom, and whether this is even the right time to be worrying about that. We also kind of brush past a lot of the Walter children again. One of my frustrations with Season 2 was that while the Walter family is nearly entirely male, they do have a daughter, Parker, and the series seems to have absolutely no idea what to do with her. The Season 3 premiere doesn’t really fix that. We follow up on the older kids while mostly disregarding the younger ones. My counterpoint to the Walter Boys writers would be Everwood. That show had the same small-town vibe, and while it obviously spent a lot of time with Ephram, played by Gregory Smith, it still made space for his younger sister Delia, played by Vivien Cardone. It is actually possible to find meaningful storylines for your younger cast members. You don’t have to exclusively care about the ones who are in high school. The audio description here, though, was really good. There’s a lot of scenery to describe in addition to the massive number of characters, and the track consistently finds room for facial expressions and reactions. Even something like describing Cole standing there with a towel wrapped tightly around his waist, followed by how his expression changes during the conversation, gives me considerably more information. I definitely appreciated this track. I didn’t quite catch who did it at the end, but hopefully I will on the next episode.

I also finished Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on Paramount+, the Mutant Mayhem spinoff series that was canceled as Paramount was going through its ownership transition. It has audio description from International Digital Center, and they did at least wrap up the storyline involving Rod and the effort to steal mutant DNA. I wish they hadn’t canceled the series, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Since I already knew it was canceled, there was never much urgency for me to finish it, which is why it kept getting pushed onto the back burner. What were they going to do, cancel it again because I was watching it too slowly? The show premiered last December, and here we are at the end of September, so admittedly it took me a while to make my way through 12 episodes. Still, I got there eventually. Take that, Paramount.

Finally, I continued trying to catch up on Best Medicine, with an episode where everybody thinks the plague might be upon their little town, while Martin once again has to deal with the nonsensical interactions of the people living there. We deserve better television than this, but I’m trying to appreciate the fact that this has turned into a breakout hit. I’m still trying to figure out exactly why, other than the fact that it has an uncannily excellent cast for what it is. Annie Potts, in particular, is heavily underutilized, although I could say that about most actresses of her generation because we seemingly don’t know how to write for them, cast them, or figure out where to put them. Not everybody gets the opportunity Jean Smart got with Hacks, and it’s easy to forget how long Smart had been working before Hacks suddenly gave her one of the defining roles of her career. The other day, I saw a casting announcement for Susan Sarandon and thought, good, Susan Sarandon is working. She’s an Oscar winner. She should be working all the time. Anyway, did the plague actually come to town, or was it something else? You’re just going to have to watch and find out. You’ll also have to watch Martin continue to clumsily deal with his romantic life. After sitting through what I assume has to be most of the first season at this point, I will say it is better than I thought it was when I gave up on the pilot halfway through back in January. I did something similar with The Pitt, although I at least watched two full episodes of that before wondering what made it special. The Pitt is a show where you have to stick with it because what makes it special is the accumulation of time, especially because of its real-time structure. Best Medicine is different. It has this weird, quirky, small-town vibe, and I can see it appealing to the same general audience that gravitates toward shows like Sullivan’s Crossing or Virgin River, or really any lighthearted small-town dramedy. It still has synthetic audio description, though.

So that’s it for the day. For best audio description, this one is pretty easy for me: My Life with the Walter Boys. Not because everything else was bad, but because its audio description was actually really good, surprisingly so. Down at the bottom, I have a bit of a gamble. I could pick the Crunchyroll show with no audio description at all, or the Fox drama with synthetic description, and I’m going with Best Medicine. There’s something about how these streaming services decide which shows get human audio description and which get synthetic that remains so weird to me. Because when I think about cost-cutting, I think about projects somebody doesn’t really care about or doesn’t believe in. Since Best Medicine has turned into this breakout hit for Fox, it makes the decision to use synthetic audio description feel even stranger, almost like nobody thought the show had much of a shot to begin with. Where are my humans at?