Kicking off today’s Small Screen Diaries is a look at the week ahead, which is kind of bare, if I’m being honest. Maybe it’s just my perspective, but at least it gives you plenty of time to catch up on shows. The biggest returning show this week is Nobody Wants This, which returns to Netflix for its third season on Thursday. NBC’s Reba McEntire-led sitcom Happy’s Place returns Friday for its third season, with a new companion in Newlyweds, a sitcom starring Téa Leoni and Tim Daly, which has a tall order to follow considering how good Stumble was, and NBC let that go. ABC is also doing I Will Always Love You, a tribute to Dolly Parton, on Wednesday. Hulu has a new limited series starring Connie Britton called Phony, which starts Tuesday. Amazon is somehow doing a second season of The Terminal List with Chris Pratt. Not really sure how that’s happening, but I can’t wait to see how they pull that off. Roku has something called Battle of the Streaming Stars, which I’m sure is meant to hearken back to the days of Battle of the Network Stars, which used to be a thing, but happened so long ago that I can’t imagine anybody who remembers it is particularly excited about whatever Roku is doing. AMC+ is dropping Yaga on Friday, and the only meaningful new film release I could find was The Invite, which hits HBO Max on Friday.

Kicking off at the top of my list absolutely, positively has to be Carrie, season one, episode five, on Amazon Prime Video, where Carrie starts realizing her powers, and everyone starts realizing that Chris is behind Carrie Red. There was a scene between Sue and Chris that pretty much defines how entitled bullies think they have a right to do what they’re doing, to bully and belittle people because freedom of speech or whatever, as though their negative opinions about others have just as much value as everyone else’s. Margaret also really steps up this episode and becomes somewhat relatable as she becomes a parent who is heavily involved in Carrie’s life in a positive way. The Mike Flanagan-produced adaptation of Stephen King’s work has been excellent, and one of the things they’ve done is add a new character whose eventual twist I clocked immediately. By episode five, it’s basically revealed, at least enough that I think Carrie is starting to pick up on what’s happening. The audio description here was great, and I’ve been having a blast with this show. There’s also a home invasion scene that will make you want to clean everything in your house if you’ve ever suspected somebody might have been inside it without your knowledge. It’s a genuinely unsettling sequence, and another example of how well this series has been working.

Landing in second place, even below Carrie, which might shock some people, perhaps because I knew what was coming, is Breaking Bad, which I’ve been catching up on through Netflix. I finally got to that episode. The one that rocked the world, which they actually re-released in theaters about a month ago, giving Breaking Bad fans an opportunity to experience it in all its cinematic glory. It’s still a great episode, and seeing it all play out for the first time was amazing. The only problem was that I already knew what was coming, whereas with Carrie, because Mike Flanagan has made some changes to the story to fit our 2026 world, I’m a little more surprised by the evolution of what’s happening. Breaking Bad narrowly comes in second mostly because I was expecting what was coming. If I could place myself back in the timeline when this was brand new, with absolutely no idea what was going to happen, Breaking Bad probably would have topped Carrie. But I’ve been anticipating this episode for so long, and finally getting to that moment was a different experience than it must have been for people watching it when it originally aired. The final appearance of Giancarlo Esposito is unforgettable, with excellent performances all around and fantastic audio description from Descriptive Video Works, narrated by the late Diane Newman. I have nothing but praise and love for this episode, but there’s something about anticipating and waiting for something for so long that makes it nearly impossible to live up to the mountain of expectations you’ve built for yourself.

Coming along in third place is Crew Girl, the new Netflix series, with audio description that I believe is provided by Descriptive Video Works and narrated by Tristan Snyder. This is my first episode, and the series follows a young rowing-centric teenager named Tegan, whose father absconds with a ton of other people’s money, leaving her and her mother with nothing. They retreat to her deceased grandparents’ house, where her mother grew up, so Tegan can attend school at a wealthy private academy. Apparently, the authorities weren’t allowed to seize the trust her father had established for her education, which means she still gets to attend this swanky private school. It used to be an all-boys school but only started admitting girls two years ago, so it hasn’t amassed a women’s crew team yet. That means Tegan is unable to do the very thing that was about to earn her a scholarship to Stanford. Now she has to climb her way back up the high school rowing rankings, and she has to do it with a bunch of boys, a bunch of privileged boys, except for the one townie who’s there on scholarship too, who is definitely going to be her love interest. The show is fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. It was a good pilot, and it did exactly what a pilot episode should do. It’s already been picked up for a second season, so I don’t necessarily feel the need to watch this at rapid speed. I’ll come back around to it off and on. I did like it, though, and I thought the cast had charisma, which is really important with young adult dramas because these shows live and die based on the screen presence of their young stars.

In fourth place is Rick and Morty, season nine, episode six, I believe, where the central gag is that Rick separates himself from his body, leaving his disembodied head and his body running around independently, arguing and fighting with each other while Summer and Morty are trying to get everything back to normal. It’s a ridiculous premise, which is pretty much par for the course with Rick and Morty, and the show gets some good mileage out of the absurdity of Rick essentially becoming his own worst enemy in a very literal sense. It was a solid episode with solid audio description once again, and while it didn’t necessarily blow me away, it was an entertaining enough installment of a show that continues to find increasingly bizarre ways to complicate the lives of its characters.

In fifth place is the controversial Saturday Night Live episode hosted by Shane Gillis. This is actually my first episode of the season, and for some reason, even though I was completely caught up last season, when I clicked on Saturday Night Live on Peacock, it took me straight to the Shane Gillis episode, which isn’t the season premiere. I don’t know why Peacock did this to me, but even a week after its original broadcast, the episode still didn’t have audio description. So I guess my season is going to start with Shane instead of whichever host came before him. His monologue had been blown up quite a bit online for being overtly offensive, and honestly, it’s pretty much just what Shane does on a normal basis. He’s a complicated comedian, somebody who walks a fine line and sometimes stumbles onto the other side of it. I get what he’s trying to do, and I think he’s doing a better job of it than Theo Von, whom he makes fun of here, in trying to bring a little edge back to comedy without worrying so much about people’s feelings. There’s a difference between intentionally harmful comedy and comedy that’s crude and inappropriate, and I think Shane is a little closer to the latter of the two. He had some good sketches, including an air conditioning sequence that was certainly spot-on. I also really enjoyed whichever cast member was doing Kevin O’Leary, because I thought that impression was perfection, and that whole little sketch was terrific. The lack of audio description on Saturday Night Live was disappointing, though, and I do believe a week is more than enough time to upload whatever audio description they’re using for the live broadcast to Peacock.

Sixth place goes to Daemons of the Shadow Realm, season one, episode seventeen, on Crunchyroll. What’s interesting is that as I get deeper into some of these anime shows, I feel like they’re almost intentionally directionless. They’re really all about world-building without necessarily having a clear, concise storyline with a beginning, middle, and end for the season. They feel like they’re continuously building upon the worlds they inhabit without offering any indication of where the show actually wants to go. I know this benefits some of the longer-running anime that have over a hundred episodes because they can just keep building. And we certainly have shows here in America that get very procedural and repetitive, or long-running children’s shows like SpongeBob SquarePants that don’t really have a linear plot. But the thing with Daemons of the Shadow Realm is that it becomes increasingly difficult to describe because, other than understanding the basic concept of the world this show takes place in, I really don’t understand what the end goal is. I don’t know what they’re building toward. I don’t know what journey we’re supposed to be taking or where it’s supposed to lead us. At least with One Piece, I know what they’re looking for. They could sail the high seas for another hundred years and give us five hundred more episodes, but at least I know what it is they’re trying to find. With Daemons of the Shadow Realm, I’m really not sure what’s supposed to be waiting for us at the end of this particular rainbow, and that makes it difficult to become fully invested in the larger narrative.

Out of these six shows, the best audio description goes to Breaking Bad, whose audio description has just been excellent the entire time. Diane Newman’s work on that show is perfect, and I’m so glad she gets to be part of one of the most heavily watched and celebrated television series as part of her legacy. At the bottom, I’m actually going to zigzag here. Yesterday, I threw the synthetic show under the bus, but I feel like a week is enough time for Saturday Night Live to have acquired audio description. Compounding that with the fact that, for some reason, Peacock thought I should skip the other episodes and go straight to the most recent one makes the whole experience even more frustrating. So we’re going to throw Saturday Night Live in front of the moving train this week. Congratulations, Peacock. You’ve earned it.