Over the holidays, my son and I managed to binge on not one, not two, but three first seasons of original streaming TV series. I may never get my sleep schedule back in shape but at least he’s gone back to work and won’t be dragging me into late night binges anytime soon.
I hope.
Anyway, the three series we binged were all good. Either that or I’m sleep deprived and lacking in judgement. Which is why I’m keeping this short and may write more on each individual series after I catch up on sleep.
The Witcher (Netflix)
This one was at my son’s insistence and I was really surprised at how much I liked it. My son is very familiar with The Witcher story since he’s read most of the books and played the games but he was immediately concerned that the way they were telling the story in the show would be confusing to me. Anyone who has watched it will know what I’m talking about when I say that the storytelling style was definitely unusual. Let’s just say that they didn’t take a linear approach to telling a story that covered a long period of time but jumped around. A lot.
But it worked. Once you figured out what they were doing anyway. It’s going to be interesting to see if they continue that approach in the next season.
Also Henry Cavill is freaking amazing. Just saying.
The Mandalorian (Disney+)
I wasn’t sure I was even going watch this one until I started hearing the buzz about Baby Yoda. Even then I figured “The Child” as it’s called in the show would be in one, maybe two, episodes. It’s not. It’s in all of them.
And talk about Disney hitting the merchandising mortherload with this one.
The series is extremely good. The relationship between Mando (The Mandalorian) and The Child is absolutely unexpectedly charming. There’s just no other way to describe it.
Also, it “feels” more like Star Wars than the recent movies. Just an observation.
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (Netflix)
Okay, let’s just say upfront that watching this one came out of the blue. Certainly no plans to watch it. However on New Year’s I was tired and bored and looking around for something to watch. For some reason I ended up on Netflix and just started browsing and it was already on my watchlist but I’d never gotten around to checking it out. I made the mistake of asking my son if he knew anything about it. Then I decided I’d watch the first episode at least. Next thing I knew he was watching it, too, and we ended up watching the entire season.
Oddly it wasn’t bad at all. Once you got used to it being muppets. Oh, and also stopped trying to figure out how it connected to the movie. Apparently it’s a prequel, which is a really odd choice.
Anyway, that’s a short version of my holiday viewing fun. I did get some reading done which I’ll talk about later. I have to say that I’m continually surprised at how easy it is to get drawn into binging TV series that are specifically designed for streaming.