Still been watching more TV than movies for the last few years. Though "Knives Out" and "Everything Everywhere All At Once" were fantastic.

We got Disney+ to watch "Wandavision" and "Loki"; also made it through "What If", "Hawkeye" and "Obi-Wan Kenobi".  I watched one episode of "Falcon & The Winter Soldier" but mostly gave it a miss. The Marvel shows are interesting but uneven, and watching Star Wars shows reminds of how little I really care about it any more.

We put Disney+ on pause when we got Prime and Netflix to watch "Wheel of Time" and "Sandman" with the family. "Wheel of Time"...I'm not quite satisfied with the adaptation, though not for racisty kind of reasons. The casting is not a problem. But they just played too fast and loose with the story, particularly near the end of the season, until it just wasn't the story I wanted to watch any more. Admittedly, the first book was never my favourite, but I just hope they don't screw up the later stuff. "Sandman" was better, though I'm still That Guy who mostly focuses on the things they did differently. Maybe I'm just doomed to always be disappointed by adaptations unless they're word-for-word identical.

With the family we've been watching Babylon 5 on a weekly basis; we're up to Season 5 now. At some point in the past I'd thought to myself, "Simon will have graduated from university before we finish. I wonder if we'll make it through?" But Simon is still job-hunting, and not eager to move out in a pandemic, so maybe we'll make it.  We also started belatedly watching "The Good Place", which we've been alternating with B5, mostly two episodes a week, and we're only two from the end. That is a great show, and it is good to know I'm not completely unable to like new things.

With my wife we've been making our way (slowly) through a number of shows. We're two episodes into "Rings of Power", two episodes from the end of S2 of "Star Trek: Picard", two episodes into the new "Quantum Leap", one episode into S3 of "Star Trek: Discovery" (but we haven't watched it in a while). We had been watching Doctor Who with two of the kids, but they bailed after the end of Tennant, so it's just been the two of us watching Matt Smith. (I've already watched to the end of Smith, and I stopped there so the others could catch up.)  We just finished "The Pandorica Opens" there.

And myself I've been rewatching a lot of stuff--I finished making my way through Star Trek: TOS and have started on the animated series, which is better than I was expecting, and also jumped ahead to TNG (where I'm in Season 3). Also rewatching "The Muppet Show" desultorily, "Friends", "Red Dwarf" (which I've been buying on DVD because it's so hard to find online), "Buffy" (but only to sync up with a podcast I've been listening to), "Lost", and "Lexx". I had been rewatching "South Park" but it disappeared from the streaming service it was on, and I find that I have aged out of its humour or something so I may just give up.

I'm also watching "Glee" (into Season 3, now, I think), and "The X-Files" for the first time. I avoided "X-Files" first time around because I think UFO mythology is stupid, but I decided to give it a try anyway, and I find that I mostly just like the Mulder-Scully dynamic.

There are of course also a few that I've tried and given up on. I got four episodes into "Yellowjackets" before deciding I didn't care about it any more, and two episodes into "Only Murders In The Building". I've watched two episodes of "The Man In The High Castle", at least partly because one of my friends is in it, but it's just too bleak for these days so I doubt I'll keep up. We tried "Resident Alien" but haven't gone back to it, and I wasn't impressed by the first episode of "Star Trek: Lower Decks" so I haven't pursued it either.

I stopped "Torchwood" after the end of Season 2 because they just decided to kill off half the characters; we stopped "Angel" after Season 4, though we haven't quite given up on it yet. (I mean, they did get rid of Connor, but it doesn't sound like we're getting Cordelia back, and Whedon's star is on the wane, so enh.) We never did get back to "Supergirl" after "Man of Steel", and we don't find ourselves missing it either.

Then there are things we mean to watch sometime. I'm very curious about "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds", and I enjoyed the first two seasons of "The Orville" and want to continue that. The kids evinced some interest in "Stranger Things" so maybe we'll try that while we have Netflix (which may not be forever). We watched "Good Omens" on DVD but Jinian wasn't old enough yet and keeps bugging us about watching it. And there's tons of other stuff too. "The Witcher", maybe, or "Andor", or "The Mandalorian" (though see above re: Star Wars), or "Orphan Black" or "The Librarians" or "The Magicians" or...who knows what.

But we are not binge-watchers. With the family, we can manage our one night a week, most weeks at least; with my wife, maybe we can manage one more hour of TV a week. And by myself, it'll depend heavily, but I hardly ever will manage to watch an hour of TV every night. So we will never catch up. There will always be more stuff. The FOMO is real.

As I mentioned, I've been watching the new Twin Peaks...but very slowly.  The PVR has been a boon in allowing us to slack off on watching things, and sometimes we go a little overboard on it, but who cares, right?  (Spoilers probably follow for the new series, if you care...)

I watched the original Twin Peaks when it first came out.  Well, I caught the second half of the first season in reruns in the summer, and was hooked and had to watch the second season.  It was a few years before I even saw the pilot and the other first season episodes.  I had recorded a bunch of them on tape at some point, too, and eventually got the full series on DVD, and rewatched them over the last couple of years.

The new series is not like the original series at all.  Well, hardly at all.

The original series was quirky, sometimes brutal, a number of disagreeable characters, but with the axis of Cooper, Truman and even James, Donna and Audrey to show that there were people with, at least, good intentions.  There were the occasional surreal episodes--the dreams, and the excellent Black Lodge finale--but there was always some sense that people with discernible motivations were doing things.

The new series is a mess.  We're nine episodes in now, and the last few we've been watching with a gap of a month or more in between.  Episode 7 was particularly off-putting, with its extensive section in the middle dedicated to nuclear bomb footage and cacophonous music.  Plotting is barely coherent, with scenes from the first frickin' episode still incomprehensible.

I've watched some, but not all, David Lynch movies.  I enjoyed Mulholland Drive, and I like the "most of it is a dream" theory.  "Fire Walk With Me" was at times a bit off-putting, but it made a decent prequel/coda to the series, and it had a certain unity of place and time going for it.  "Blue Velvet" was...fine, I don't remember it much.  "Dune"...well, it was Dune.  "Wild At Heart" I don't remember much either, but I don't recall caring for it that much.

"Inland Empire" was a mess too.  I gather that he was writing scenes as they went, so it's no wonder it was incoherent.  There are sequences I remember, mostly near the beginning and near the end, but I couldn't tell you what happened in the middle.  And that's what the new Twin Peaks is like.

My theory is that David Lynch doesn't give a crap anymore, and is trolling the people who clamoured for a new Twin Peaks series.  He puts in as many of the old actors as he can (or will agree to it), but doesn't always give them much to do--Jacoby just gets to swear a lot on Youtube while Nadine watches his videos, Jerry gets lost in the woods...  His own character, Gordon Cole, is central to the closest thing we have to a plot.  There's what looks like occasional stunt-casting--Amanda Seyfried is wasted, Michael Cera's appearance as Andy & Lucy's son is excruciatingly painful.

And the best thing about the original series, the consistent throughline, the backbone, was Agent Cooper.  So what does the new series have?  First, we have the "bad Cooper", the evil version from the plot-twist ending of the origial series, who's grown his hair long and is now an amoral criminal and killer, who seems to have some weird abilities.  And then there's the "good Cooper" trapped in the Black Lodge for 25 years, who escapes through a sequence which is expectedly surreal, but generally good, and ends up replacing the hapless Dougie Jones.  And seems to have suffered a lot of brain damage in the process, because he's spent half a dozen episodes as someone who only repeats what you say to him, an "idiot savant" who can spot slot machines about to pay off and, somehow, insurance fraud.  Maybe he'll "snap out of it" and return to the old Cooper before the end of the series, but at this point I'm not holding my breath.

Lynch is screwing with us.  He's showing us that we really didn't want a new Twin Peaks series at all.  I'm used to, say, 80's bands getting back together and recording new material, and generally what happens is new music which is not like the music of their heyday that everybody loved, but like the latter-day stuff that they coasted on for a little while.  I would have been happy with a new Twin Peaks series that was up to the level of the second half of the second season, where they floundered a bit, but it was watchable and often funny.  Instead we get Twin Peaks filtered through Inland Empire, and it's kind of crappy.

Last episode we watched, #9, was full of angry white men beating women around and/or swearing vociferously.  I'm not the biggest fan of profanity myself, but it has its uses...and it was way overused.  I'm only really interested in about 25% of what's going on in the average episode (closer to 10% in episode #7), so why am I watching this?  In the vain hope that maybe it gets better.  But it's feeling like a goddamn abusive relationship at the moment, so I'm not sure I'm going to make it all the way through.

In our house we don't watch as much TV as some people.  We make it a policy to not watch more than one episode per day, generally.  And my wife would often just rather read...so we tend to fall behind a lot.  At the moment, for instance, we are trying to watch Agents of SHIELD (where we still have one episode left in the last season, for heaven's sake), Supergirl (with Luke and Jinian), the new Twin Peaks series, Star Trek: Discovery, The Orville (a.k.a. the other new Star Trek show), The Big Bang Theory, and (when it returns) Timeless.  In addition, on my own, I am watching Doctor Who (about halfway through Matt Smith), Torchwood and Glee (finished the first season of each), and rewatching Star Trek and Star Trek: TNG.  Plus rewatching Buffy (and going past Season 2 of Angel for the first time) with Simon, and watching bits of Rozen Maiden with the kids.

Some of this has been complicated recently by the fact that the streaming service I use for watching the Star Trek series and Doctor Who on my computer still uses Silverlight, which no major browsers now support, so I have to watch it on the actual TV, which is less convenient.  But tonight I did get around to rewatching "The Immunity Syndrome" from the original series (with what I suspect is enhanced special effects, but I don't recall for sure). The last one, "A Piece of The Action", I remembered well, but found it a little too jokey.  This one was actually pretty good, with decent tension, not bad SF elements, good character.  I remember when I first watched it that I was surprised that such a thing as an all-Vulcan crew (on the Intrepid, which was destroyed near the beginning of the show, causing a disturbance in the Force) existed, but considering these days it's clearer that Vulcans were in space before humans, it's less surprising now.

I've been listening to the Mission Log podcast discussing Star Trek episodes, and I actually got a few episodes past their discussion of this episode before I stopped, deciding that I should rewatch these episodes.  Now I've been trying to make sure that I listen to the episodes only after rewatching (and with the TNG rewatch as well, where I'm still only in the first season), since I don't remember many of them very well.  And there's always the occasional episode that I never did get to see, too.  I can't appreciate Star Trek the way I did as a kid, the productions not always having aged well, but it's nice to revisit it anyway.