I appreciate your patience in taking a day off from the Small Screen Diaries. I needed that in my life. So today, as a reward, I’m going to kind of smash together what I saw on Monday and Tuesday to create a day full of entertainment for you.

Starting things off with Lanterns, Season 1, Episode 7, which is on HBO Max with audio description by International Digital Center, narrated by Dakota Green and Ren Leach. Lanterns continues to be excellent both as a series and as an audio-described program, with Dakota and Ren continuing to do excellent work. This episode has a lot to do with who may have killed Hal Jordan, with John investigating alongside the hologram of Hal that he stores inside his ring. The two of them end up on an interesting journey that takes them to a very strange place, while Hal’s hologram also has some thoughts about who may have pulled the trigger. His perspective is certainly interesting. There’s also some backstory involving Hal as a kid, his father, and what could basically be called the Jordan family curse, which I think helps shape the series and Hal as a character. I’m still not really sure why people hate this series so much. I guess they just don’t like good things. Lanterns continues to prove that you can do more with a superhero than just put a cape on him and have him punch bad guys.

I also checked out Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, Season 1, Episode 1, on Netflix with audio description. Had I done the Small Screen Diary yesterday, I would probably remember who did the audio description, but now, two days later, I don’t. I was expecting this to be horrific because I have yet to see something truly terrific from Ryan Murphy in a few years now, and this actually started off fairly decent, all things considered. It does hit you right up front with the whole “Lizzie Borden took an axe” part of the story, but it is shot in a way that at least wasn’t described gratuitously. Murphy has certainly had more horrifying moments before, where his shows linger too long on things purely for incendiary purposes, but here it actually feels like he’s trying to tell a story, and I appreciated that. It also has a different vibe from the previous seasons of Monster. I watched the Menendez brothers season from start to finish, but never finished the other two, and I could actually see myself finishing Lizzie Borden. Although I still think it’s absolutely ridiculous that, at some point, Aileen Wuornos is apparently going to appear. I cannot wait to see how they justify that. But this was not terrible, and if you’ve seen me continuously reviewing Ryan Murphy’s shows, you know that’s practically a rave coming from me. I would say it’s starting out fresh. It can either go up from here and stay fresh, or it can go down. That is all up to Ryan Murphy.

I also continued on with Ride or Die, Season 1, Episode 6, which featured the death of one character and the near-death of another, although some quick thinking from Octavia Spencer saves lives. I seriously do not understand how this show got canceled. It makes absolutely no sense. It makes about as much sense as Amazon canceling Spider-Noir and then reportedly getting back into bed with Sony to develop another live-action Spider-Man series involving Ben Reilly, the same character we just followed. I have no idea what world, planet, Earth or reality this is anymore. They’re basically saying, “We would love to make a Ben Reilly show, but maybe not that Ben Reilly show.” I don’t get it. My mind does not compute.

I moved forward with my MobLand rewatch, which isn’t actually even a rewatch anymore because I stopped after the first two episodes the first time, and now I’m on Episode 4. I’m liking the show more and more. I don’t know that this is going to suddenly become my favorite show of all time, but for a series that I initially gave up on, I’m finding it increasingly rewarding. Tom Hardy’s performance, especially, is really making the show for me. It also has pretty solid audio description for such a violent TV series, which certainly helps.

I also checked out the most recent episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which goes really hard on Jair Bolsonaro. It was sort of a learning experience for me since we’re talking about a leader from a country I’m not a part of, and it was also pretty damn funny. I love that John Oliver brought up the Ken Paxton stealing-a-pen conversation right at the top because it’s just such a hilarious fact. The idea that a man’s entire career could potentially be derailed because he really wanted to take somebody else’s pen is hilarious.

I am still in Season 2 of Lioness on Paramount+ with audio description by the Media Access Group, and this is kind of an interesting show, so I’m going to continue giving it latitude. I did like the Season 2 premiere. I never came back to Lioness after the first season, so if you’re wondering why I’m catching up now, it’s because I just never watched the second season. I need to get through this in order to understand Season 3 and whatever craziness apparently happens by the end of Season 2. So I’m catching up slowly, and for now, I’m happy with Lioness.

I also checked out Season 3, Episode 2 of My Life with the Walter Boys, which has pretty great audio description on Netflix from VSI. They’re doing quite a bit here with George’s stroke and all the different characters in this series. It’s still not necessarily a show that ropes me in too much with its relatively safe teen-drama mentality. Sometimes it feels like a modern-day 7th Heaven or something along those lines, but it’s fine. I do think it’s funny that they’re so focused on the Walter boys that the poor daughter in this family is never given anything to do. I remember noticing that during the second season and constantly wondering if they were ever going to give this girl a storyline. They never did, and they still aren’t. Why bother? At this point, she could literally disappear from the series like Cory’s sister did on Boy Meets World, and I don’t think anybody would notice.

I also tried to stay awake during A Tale of Two Cities on MGM+, Season 1, Episode 3. I mean, the best thing I can say about this series is that it has competently made audio description. But this thing is a slog. I don’t know if reading the book feels like this, but I’m getting to the point where I feel like I need to pay somebody to sit next to me and keep me awake while I try to get through A Tale of Two Cities. I can’t even focus on the series anymore. I find my mind wandering even when I manage to stay awake. I just do not care. I could not care less what happens in this series. I realize it’s a Charles Dickens classic, but I would genuinely love to know how people who are huge fans of the book feel about this adaptation because this thing moves like molasses.

And then I tried to experience Breaking Bear, which is a Tubi original, but that apparently proved to be a bit too much for Tubi. They’ve reworked their app so that it tells me audio description is available. Even while I’m on the screen playing the episode, I can go into the settings, where it gives me things like playback speed and then tells me that audio description and closed captions are available. But if I click on “audio description available,” it doesn’t actually open an option or menu that allows me to turn it on, nor does the app naturally know that I want audio description enabled. So I ended up watching the entire first episode, featuring the voices of Brendan Fraser and Sarah Michelle Gellar, without it. I spent most of that time wondering whether I would come back for more and whether the show is really uniquely funny in and of itself. Considering Netflix also has Mating Season, I have to say Breaking Bear doesn’t hit that level in terms of comedy involving forest animals. I also didn’t get a strong sense that the show understood the Breaking Bear/Breaking Bad correlation beyond the title. Stylistically, it doesn’t really seem interested in doing anything that approaches that level of creativity.

So that’s it. That is the Small Screen Diary combination of two days’ worth of TV watching. Of everything I watched, the audio description winner, since we’re combining two days, is going to be a tie between Lanterns and Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. I think those two shows had the best audio description of the bunch. At the bottom, Last Week Tonight doesn’t have audio description when I watch it because I’m getting to it too quickly, while I have absolutely no idea what was happening between Tubi and Breaking Bear. I’m flagging this less because of the show itself or the quality of its audio description, which I couldn’t actually hear, and more because of Tubi’s bizarrely unusable implementation. If I play an episode and the app specifically tells me that audio description is available, but tapping that option doesn’t take me anywhere or actually turn anything on, that’s deeply frustrating. Is there audio description? Because I would love to hear it.