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Squid Game (TV Series)
Squid Game, the South Korean TV Series has been one of the most widely watched shows worldwide, earning more than a billion dollars for Netflix. The nine-episode series is a fictitious tale about hundreds of players, most of them debt-ridden and desperate being invited to play survival games with lucrative rewards and bloody consequences. The series by Hwang Dong-hyuk can serve as a great study for film-making students on how to write a gripping screenplay – it has a hero(es) who we can identify with, identifiable bad guys, hundreds of characters we care little about providing the ambience, a dysfunctional society that we all suffer from, clear win or lose…
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Pretty Smart (TV series)
Pretty Smart is yet another one of those serialized American TV shows that attempts to fill the void left by Friends. It is about four roommates and the sister of one of them sharing a house, their minor wins and loses, and about finding love. Though the stories had nothing imaginative, I found the episodes to be fun to watch with the characters being cheerful – a welcome break for the pandemic year. Available on Netflix it gets my Ripe for that reason. There are four friends living in a house in Malibu, each from a different background: Claire is a happy-go-lucky character who enjoys her job as a waitress…
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Brave New World (TV series)
Brave New World (2020) is an SCI-FI that was released on peacock in the USA and on Netflix for countries including India. It is based on Aldous Huxley‘s classic book of the same name, which came in 1932. Even with a story that was intriguing, visuals that were stunning, a convincing performance from the lead pair, the show doesn’t get you engaged as it proceeds mostly on expected lines. I like the genre so I completed the nine-episode series in two days, but most may not find it interesting enough and so the show gets a ‘Raw’ rating. The story is about New London, a world on earth where the…
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Doogie Kameāloha, M.D. (TV Series 2021-)
As a teenager, in the early 1990s, there were two TV shows on the then new private entertainment channel (Star Plus) in India that I watched with great interest and absolutely loved: One was the Wonder Years (1988-1993) which was a coming-of-age family comedy [Available on Disney+Hotstar] starring Fred Savage as the young boy Kevin Arnold; and the other was Doggie Howser, M.D. (1989-1993) starring Neil Patrick Harris playing the namesake as a 14-year Doctor and a child prodigy. Growing up watching them, these two are classics to me, and I felt sceptical when I read both are being remade this year. The former is produced by ABC, and I am…
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Disjointed (2017)
Disjointed (2017) is a comedy web series on Netflix, that deals with the staff and the customers of a legal marijuana dispensary in Los Angeles. Reading the description, I thought it was not for me – surprisingly I liked the series of twenty episodes, it grew (pun intended) on me and I binge-watched it over the last few days. The show stars Kathy Bates as the owner of the store Ruth’s Alternative Caring and an activist Ruth Whitefeather Feldman, she has a black son who is the co-owner of the store Travis (played by Aaron Moten). It is co-created by David Javerbaum and Chuck Lorre, the creator of many of…
