I think the biggest, and really only relevant, TV news to kick this off today is the fact that Netflix has once again proven the term “limited series” means absolutely nothing. They have picked up The Beast in Me for a second season. Originally billed as a limited series, the show is coming back with Claire Danes set to return as Aggie Wiggs following her Emmy-nominated work in the first season. We’ll see if this turns out to be a good decision for Netflix or not.

In other TV news, only because I don’t think I’ve mentioned it yet, Disney+ is actually moving forward with its long-gestating Darkwing Duck revival, finally announcing it after giving Mark Hamill the cape as Drake Mallard, the terror that flaps in the night. So, pretty soon it’ll be time to get dangerous again. Seth Rogen’s Point Grey Pictures is producing the series, with Rogen himself voicing Launchpad McQuack. Considering Point Grey also successfully rebooted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Mutant Mayhem, I would expect something somewhere on that level. Lizzy Caplan is also part of the voice cast as Gosalyn Mallard, and the original Darkwing Duck creator Tad Stones is involved as a consultant. I’m definitely curious to see what they do with this one.

The first show I watched yesterday was Lioness, because I kept seeing everything about the Season 3 finale and how it was apparently some kind of game changer, and that ended up kicking me in the ass. Paramount+ hasn’t actually renewed Lioness for a fourth season yet, but I haven’t even watched the second one. So I’m revisiting Lioness Season 2 before getting to Season 3. I vaguely remember Season 1 and remember not being overly enthusiastic about continuing the series, although the Season 2 premiere is interesting and engaging. Maybe I was wrong on Lioness, much like I appear to have been wrong on Landman. Both shows might be slightly better than I remember them being. I’m a whole season behind right now, though, so it’ll take me a minute to get where everyone else is. The audio description here is pretty excellent. There are lots of gun battles and a fairly large ensemble cast to navigate. I did not catch an audio description production team on this one. I know who does a lot of the Taylor Sheridan productions, but I still don’t want to take a swing without actually hearing those words in the credits.

I finally finished Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, almost a year after its final season dropped. Much like I mentioned with Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, since these shows were already canceled and ending, I just didn’t feel the need to rush through something I liked just to get to the end. It took me a long time to finally get there, but damn, I’m going to miss these kids. Between the seasons of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous and then the sequel series Chaos Theory, this little conglomerate of animated youngsters has been far more engaging than a handful of the live-action Jurassic films have been. The storytelling is better here. The character development is better here. Honestly, the people behind these shows should be afforded the opportunity to write a live-action Jurassic movie. Descriptive Video Works has done an excellent job the whole way through, with Paula Hoffman narrating. I always love that the description specifically identifies which dinosaur genus something is instead of simply trying to describe the dinosaur. Technically, this is a show aimed at kids, and actually telling them what these creatures are can spark that interest to look them up and learn more about dinosaurs, which is exactly how so many kids end up becoming obsessed with them. I think this series does an excellent job of helping spark that passion. One of the best animated shows Netflix has. Full stop.

Next up, I did Ride or Die, Season 1, Episode 5 on Prime Video, still making my way through this series. The Octavia Spencer and Hannah Waddingham-led series has some lovely audio description, and Amazon has yet to even tease me with the possibility that I might get to watch the credits long enough to hear the audio description company. Maybe when there are no more episodes of Ride or Die left, it will actually let me hear the company name, but Prime Video has been incredibly concerned with making sure I do not stop watching. What I liked most about the fifth episode was that Octavia Spencer’s Debbie is starting to come together more as a character, making some more logical choices and realizing that she is in a very tough situation and needs to get on her game, even without the training that her best friend Judith has. I think it’s pretty obvious that we know who the villain is at this point, but I guess we’ll wait a few more episodes for the big reveal. I would be shocked if they somehow managed to twist this around and surprise everybody. I’m still shocked Amazon canceled this, because Octavia Spencer and Hannah Waddingham have excellent chemistry.

I moved on to Season 1, Episode 4 of The Dumies on Disney+, and this monster-themed show continues to be interesting enough. In this episode, the kids are pretty sure someone is a vampire. They just need to prove it, and all the little gags along the way, including straight-up eating garlic, were cute. I’ve already had such a weird relationship with this audio description track because I’m not a big fan of it. The narrator sounded synthetic to me from day one, and then on the second episode I actually heard the credits, heard Pixelogic credited along with an actual human narrator, and I was flabbergasted. So now I’m trying to reckon with the fact that this is a human being and not a text-to-speech voice, and I’m wondering whether emotion is somewhere within the realm of possibilities.

I also jumped back and watched Monday night’s episode of The Daily Show on Paramount+, which does not have audio description, the lone program here with that stigma. I generally always watch at least Jon Stewart’s night, and I wanted to catch up on that since I hadn’t previously had the time.

Lastly, I closed out with Jeopardy! Masters, Season 4, Episode 6, which was the end of the quarterfinals, meaning we had to say goodbye to two people. That last match was a nail-biter because of the way two contestants were basically sitting on the bubble, and it really did matter how everything was going to fall. Now I know who the final four are, and it’ll be interesting to see whether the person sitting in fourth place can kick it into high gear and get into the finals. I have somehow managed not to have this spoiled for me yet, so if you haven’t seen it either, I’m not going to spoil it for you. I will just say that Victoria Groce is ridiculous when it comes to trivia. It’s amazing what her brain has retained.

If I’m picking the best and worst audio description today, I’m actually giving best audio description to Lioness. It had a lot it needed to accomplish within the confines of the episode, from non-English translations to high-octane action sequences, and it managed to pull everything off in an engaging way that matched the tone of the series. At the bottom, I’m not putting The Daily Show. This is one of those programs where I can understand why audio description becomes complicated. It’s shot so close to when it actually lands on a streaming service, and it’s basically the news. I don’t know how many people are going back and watching The Daily Show from six months ago. It has such a short half-life that I can at least understand the argument against prioritizing audio description here, and realistically, if it ever got description, I could see it ending up synthetic simply because of the turnaround time. I can point to a hundred other things Paramount+ has sitting on its streaming service that make far more sense to audio describe, and yet they still haven’t.

So the bottom spot goes to The Dumies. If we’re going to continue into a second season of this show, and if he ends up being the narrator again, get him a Red Bull. Wake him up. Give him some sugar. Something. Light a fire. I should not hear a voice and think, “This is not a human voice,” only to discover that it is, in fact, a human voice. There should be enough emotive expression in the performance to avoid that entirely.