Bojack Horseman team's bird-people series about nuanced female friendship soars
TV Lists What's On Tonight
Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Friday, May 3 and Saturday, May 4. All times are Eastern.
Top picks
Tuca & Bertie (Netflix, Friday): It’s the team behind Bojack Horseman. It’s Tiffany Haddish and Ali Wong. It’s surreal animated sequences, visual gags, and punny business names. It’s two anthropomorphized birds supporting each other through the everyday challenges of being a millennial adult. In her first run as show creator, Bojack animator/producer Lisa Hanawalt creates an even more surreal and somewhat more optimistic world than Hollywoo, building her story on a strong, loving and nuanced female friendship. Tuca (Haddish), a loud, blunt, and carefree toucan, and Bertie (Wong), an anxious and caring songbird, share a complementary, co-dependent friendship, bringing out the best in each other as they encounter challenges like asking for an overdue promotion or contracting an STD. Also starring Steven Yeun and featuring the voices of Nicole Byer, Reggie Watts, Amber Ruffin, Richard E. Grant, Tessa Thompson, John Early, Tig Notaro, and Jermaine Fowler, the show’s already raking in positive pre-air reviews. Danette Chavez’s is on the way, but she’s already been singing Tuca & Bertie’s praises.
Regular coverage
Saturday Night Live (NBC, Saturday, 11:30 p.m.)
Wild card
Dead To Me (Netflix, Friday): Here’s yet another odd couple series from Netflix, though this one— a black comedy about a pair of women bonding over their experiences with grief— looks a bit less fun than Tuca & Bertie. At a grief support group, Jen (Christina Applegate), an uptight cynic whose husband was recently killed in a hit-and-run, meets Judy (Linda Cardellini), a free-spirit with baggage of her own, and the two start up an unlikely bond. But as their friendship strengthens, it becomes apparent that Judy is hiding something from Jen: a shocking secret that would utterly uproot Jen’ life. According to Netflix, the series “dives into the painfully unfiltered, weirdly funny waters of grief, loss and forgiveness.” Our own Danette Chavez says that while Applegate and Cardellini are excellent in their respective roles, “the most inspired and resonant moments come from Jen and Judy’s burgeoning friendship” rather than the show’s “adequately teased and deployed twists.” Her full review is on the way.
At The Heart Of Gold: Inside The USA Gymnastics Scandal (HBO, Friday, 8 p.m.): In the last year, Surviving R. Kelly and Leaving Neverland told painful, complex stories, resurfacing important conversations that had been dismissed and silenced over the years. This documentary tells more than 300. Early reviews emphasize that this film is not, thankfully, about Larry Nassar, the doctor who sexually abused countless female Olympic athletes in his care over almost two decades. Instead, it features testimonials from several survivors, highlighting their stories to reveal “a dangerous system that prioritized winning over everything else, including protecting young female athletes.” Reviews also note the film’s bittersweet tone as its subjects rejoice over Nassar’s sentencing while emphasizing that the victory wasn’t an altogether satisfying one: There’s still a great deal of work to be done.
16 Comments
Politics Corner – Lowering the Barr edition. I want to start off by briefly reiterating the stakes of this. Future administrations will seek to use the Trump presidency as precedent to justify their own misdeeds. Every attorney general who tries to pretend Trump’s malfeasance is ok isn’t just helping Trump, they’re undermining the rule of law for decades to come. Speaking of the rule of law, the AG is the top law enforcement officer for everything, not just Trump Russia investigations. Letting him get away with being a shameless shill gives him free rein to aid Trump in further abuses of the law, for instance by using law enforcement to target his opponents. And ignoring the gravity of another country hacking our campaigns encourages them to do it again. This isn’t a game. The legitimacy of America itself is at stake.Barr says the President can shut down an investigation if he believes he’s innocent. Of course, we can’t know what the President believes. Barr’s standard means the President has cart blanche to shut down investigations just by saying ‘I’m innocent’. Determining guilt or innocence IS WHY WE HAVE THE INVESTIGATION! Nothing I say can explain this absurdity better than Kids in the Hall already did. It’s one of their best, and it’s incredibly relevant. It may not be binding legal precedent, but future presidents will try to claim this standard.Also, Barr lied about Team Mueller’s objections – twice. Once about Mueller’s agreement with his conclusions, another about a specific report about his team’s problems. We know he lied, because we’ve seen the letter to Barr where Mueller objected in what is, by Mueller standards, extreme language. Lying in Congressional testimony is a felony. And the Attorney General isn’t supposed to commit felonies, even a little.Senator Harris got at some very important info in her questioning. She got him to admit neither he nor his staff ever reviewed the evidence underlying Mueller’s report, though he had access to it. How can you characterize the evidence when you haven’t seen it? More important, how can you make the determination no obstruction occurred. Barr had no good answer for that. That should be a big damned deal.A lot of people have claimed Trump has corrupted Barr. I disagree. Trump doesn’t corrupt people. Trump brings people’s corruption into the open. Barr was already corrupt when he helped finish off the Iran Contra coverup. But he was respectably corrupt, he put on a good show in public. Now, performing for Trump and the Trumpist base, in the Trumpist era, he is brazen. But stylistically he remains ‘respectable’ – soft spoken, lawyerly, reserved, almost genial. And unlike most everyone else in Trump’s orbit, he is very smart, and knows his job inside and out. Which means no one knows better how to abuse it. When you perform such disgraceful acts with such apparent dignity, the people not paying close attention don’t even notice. That makes him uniquely dangerous.
You’re crushing my head!
Rudy Giuliani told Chuck Todd (in a darkly hilarious interview) that it is just fine to get dirt on your political opponents from hostile foreign powers as long as the info is “true.” Todd then asked the “Meet the Press” panel if we had just normalized that behavior and the panel basically said “well, WE haven’t, but Giuliani sure tried to.”
Your argument is a little slippery-slope there, but I take your meaning. It’s hard to imagine how or if Barr would draw the line between obfuscating the Mueller report’s conclusions and doing the same for other unethical/criminal activity by the President, because it’s hard to imagine why he thinks his handling of the Mueller report is OK in the first place.Really, the strongest evidence that Barr is bad news is his background. He came into this job as a respected veteran of the DC political scene. His record, while strikingly conservative, shows that he’s got an exceptional depth of knowledge when it comes to the law. He’s pretty well-off financially. So why then, would he take a job where he must twist and bend the legal realities to paint unethical, maybe even illegal behavior as not just acceptable, but normal?People who take a job when they don’t really need to work do so because they believe in what the organization is doing. My guess is that Barr is as virulently jingoistic and racist as Stephens Bannon or Miller. He just knows better when to keep his trap shut.
I’m not certain he’s driven by xenophobia, though it wouldn’t surprise me. General Kelly was supposed to be ‘respectable’ and he turned out to be almost as rabid as Miller. I think it’s also plausible that he really, really likes power and relevance. Nobody else was going to pull HW Bush’s AG out of mothballs and put him in charge of American law enforcement. I’m guessing it’s a bit of both. He signed up for this knowing that as AG he’d be the spear of the hate machine, so at the very least it doesn’t bother him.
I’ve been making this dreary, soul-crushing point that you’re reinforcing here for a while now: One day, Trump won’t be president anymore (just savor that fact for a sec). He’ll die, or get removed from office, or die getting removed from office. Great, everything’s fixed, nightmare’s over, hooray!Except it isn’t. The people who voted for Trump aren’t going to stop being racist when he leaves office. Future presidents of BOTH parties are going to point to this shitshow and say “well HE got away with it, and I’m not going to be a ridiculously stupid, bull-in-a-china-shop idiot about how I do the bad stuff I wanna do, I’m going to be smart about it and not tell anyone.” Not to mention that the US is hardly the only country going through a rabid fever-pitch of authoritarianism and far-right groups rising; it’s several big deal countries, and it shows no sign of slowing. My point is, Trump’s not just ruining our present as a country with some shred of integrity. Even if all he did was allow McConnell to appoint drunken frat-boy rapists to the Supreme Court, we’ve already lost for generations and generations to come.
idgaf about the Mueller investigation. Why you all go rabid with theories and bs is beyond me.
He just VETOED the End-the-war-in-Yemen bill that Sanders got Congress to support enough to reach his desk. Union Powers were weakened, Yang isn’t for breaking up monopolies, Several decades ago Biden was for segregation on Buses, Kamala Harris was strongly against BodyCams on Cops, and for the 3 strikes law…
Yall missing some great reporting on youtube that’s TRULY by the people and not donors/commercials. It’s patreon/crowdfunded levels of real. Get on the real news.
So we’re not getting iZombie recaps anymore? It’s like you guys hate me.
Okay, so I found it. Can you post this shit on the main page, pretty please?
It…is on the main page? I saw it above the post about movie Sonic getting a makeover.
Jesus give us break with the politics corner already!! Go to some other site that actually wants to read your overly long rants and boring opinions.
Please tell us who is forcing you to read this so we can rescue you.
Or maybe it’s Peter’s Corner of Whining Babies that people really just want to avoid…
Despite the unnecessarily harsh tone of your comment, I’ll give it a reasonable response. The reception to my post is generally pretty good, it’s easy to skip, and it’s a relic of a time when commenters did their own little league featurettes here on WOT. Others stopped when the site switched to kinja, but I’m still here. Dissenting opinions are welcome. Or you can skip it. Reading it and then complaining about it seems like an unproductive use of time, but it’s a free country.Pro-tip – If you want to respond to a comment like mine, there’s a little ‘reply’ button you can click.
Oh, come off it! The comment section was a better place during your most recent “medical” absence, mostly because it was nice to not see irrelevant, inaccurate bunk in the comment section of an article about what people can watch on television.Most of us would appreciate it if your next suicide attempt, unlike absolutely everything else in your life, was a success. Goodbye, my favorite community organizer!
Ali Wong? That is disappointing, I heard her comedy show once. Was a less funny version of Margaret Cho, lots of pandering and crude jokes in place of ones that make you laugh. Take into consideration that I don’t like Cho very much.Not sure if this is a good idea for a spin off. Bojack is a pretty unique flavor that they have done very well with. This sounds like an odd choice.