Benjamonster's TV

Welcome to my Monday newsletter! This week, I am looking at It: Welcome to Derry and the second season of Nobody Wants This . Plus the latest episodes of Abbott Elementary , Only Murders in the Building and The Lowdown . I'm also continuing my Top 25 Shows Since 2000 with #6 and doing a Pilot Re-Review on the short lived Lone Star ! WHAT'S NEW IT: WELCOME TO DERRY I watched the It movie recently for the first time partly because I knew this show was coming. I was very mixed on the movie and it truthfully made me less interested for the show. But I still went in with an open mind especially because I was intrigued by the early 60s setting. After watching the pilot, I'm not sure if this is a show I'm going to stick with. Horror is a tough sell for me in general, especially when tied to the supernatural. I need some sort of thriller element that will make it feel more real to me and so when a woman was giving birth to some bat like demon in the first couple minutes of the ...

Welcome to my Monday newsletter! This week, I am looking at Murdaugh: Death in the Family, DMV and Boston Blue plus the finale of Task and the latest episodes of The Lowdown and The Morning Show . I'm also continuing my Top 25 shows Since 2000 with #7 and doing a Pilot Re-Review of Better With You ! WHAT'S NEW MURDAUGH: DEATH IN THE FAMILY One of the (many) benefits of me not being a true crime afficionado is that when a TV series adaptation arrives on a high profile crime, I so often know little to nothing about what happened so I am left guessing and curious about the plot. I think that helped me enjoy Good American Family more in the spring and now we have a show about the Murdaugh family. Maybe I've been living under a rock but I literally don't know anything about this story or this family besides what I learned in the first three episodes which dropped on Hulu last week. I thought the first three episodes were a solid version of the show it's trying to be. It ...

Welcome to my Monday newsletter! This week, I am looking at The Chair Company and 9-1-1/9-1-1: Nashville plus the latest episodes of The Lowdown, Task and Only Murders in the Building, my next entry in my To 25 Shows Since 2000 and a Pilot Re-Review of Blue Bloods . WHAT'S NEW THE CHAIR COMPANY I only recently had my first experience with Tim Robinson when I watched the movie Friendship starring Robinson and Paul Rudd. I sort of liked it but felt like his brand of cringe didn't quite work as a feature film and would be better off as a weekly TV series. And here we are. A weekly TV show on HBO that is a conspiracy thriller mixed with Robinson's patented unique brand of humor. I was very into the vibe of this pilot. I thought it was really fun to mix the cringe humor with a show that has some actual stakes (however ridiculous those stakes may be). There will probably be some comparisons to The Curse  because it's another scripted comedy from a cringe artist who usually pl...

Welcome to my Monday newsletter! This week, I am looking at Chad Powers, Monster: The Ed Gein Story and the new seasons of Abbott Elementary and Saturday Night Live . Plus, the latest episodes of Platonic, Task, Only Murders in the Building and The Lowdown , my next entry in my Top 25 Shows Since 2000 (#9) and a Pilot Re-Review of The Event ! WHAT'S NEW CHAD POWERS Chad Powers is the new Hulu comedy based on the Eli Manning Omaha Productions skit. There are some obvious comparisons to Ted Lasso , another sports comedy that was based on something quite small (in Lasso 's case, a commercial). But the more apt comparison might be Apple TV+'s  middling summer comedy Stick . The reason? It's a show that is much less sure-footed than Lasso was in its first season with only a few funny moments and a lot of awkwardness despite a great cast and a promising premise. I didn't love the first episode but then I really didn't like the second episode, which tried to show that ...