Appointment Television

Wow Teenage Bounty Hunters is a great show, right?! Dang. In this episode we talk about episodes 2-4, but we also answer a few questions from the ol' ask box, and we go on a long-ish mid-episode detour about the first time we found ourselves quite drunk at a college party. What a fun time.

This week we talk about the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, both politically and as TV spectacle. No show notes this week, we have a lot going on, ok???

As the title implies, this week is the first part of our TV Book Club series about the Netflix one-season wonder that is Teenage Bounty Hunters. TEENAGE BOUNTY HUNTERS ON NETFLIX: https://www.netflix.com/title/80244296

You guessed it, folks: we're talking about the new Netflix series Bridgerton this week! There are bosoms! They are heaving! There are dicks! They are pumping! There is more specific information about the nuts and bolts of pumping and nutting than you might anticipate! ( About which Kathryn recently conducted a fascinating interview. ) And, to top it all off, there is also special guest Christina T...

We're taking a week off! Pasted below are the original show notes for our 2017 episode about Netflix's A Christmas Prince.  — It's holiday time, so we dedicate the entire episode to a close reading of one of Netflix's forays into the wide world of dedicated Christmas programming: the Hallmark Christmas-style movie A Christmas Prince. Strap in for lying! Mothra! Negging! Jellied meats! Birther scan...

Sadly they stopped making new Christmas Prince movies (BOO!) so we are celebrating the holidays with an installment of The Old Type. This time we're watching several Christmas episodes of The Bob Newhart Show, a '70s sitcom that led Andrew and Margaret to ask Kathryn "uh why are we watching this?" 

This week, we're checking in with how TV is handling its uncomfortable task of depicting a pandemic that requires hot actors to cover 1/2 of their face. Spoiler: they aren't doing great! We start with a long, harrowing, collective look at the opening episode of Bull and its terrifying demon CGI baby and then continue on to touch upon: Black-ish, Super Store, The Good Doctor, and a handful of other...

All three of us definitely showed up this week having seen every minute of both of the shows we're discussing—Showtime's intriguing The Good Lord Bird, and HBO's weird-ass mystery box drama The Third Day.   SHOW NOTES The Good Lord Bird: https://www.sho.com/the-good-lord-bird The Third Day: https://www.hbo.com/the-third-day

Let's check in with what's happening on network TV! Specifically, let's check in with unscripted network TV: the reboot of Supermarket Sweep and this high-drama season of The Bachelorette. We've asked our beloved games corresponded Craig Getting to return so he can weigh in on the Sweep update; in a shocking turn of events, everyone gets very animated. 

In this episode, we discuss Andrew's Good One/Bad One pairing: AMC's Soulmates , which we all liked a little bit more than we were expecting and The Comey Rule , which was even worse than we could possibly have imagined. Along the way we discuss Sarah Snook and her acting partner, her butt, whether Andrew and Kathryn would soulmate test despite being married, whether Margaret is doing something re...

For our belated good one/bad one episode week, we pull off what is known in podcasting circles as the Queen's gambit—by watching the show The Queen's Gambit on Netflix and then talking about it! We also watched Ratched, which is obviously the bad one.   SHOW NOTES:   THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT: https://www.netflix.com/title/80234304 RATCHED: https://www.netflix.com/title/80213445

Margaret definitely does not cry at all in this discussion of the conclusion of Never Have I Ever, a show that's really about grief and fathers who die and the kind of ripple effect that has for every member of the family. Nope! Zero crying. Also Kathryn definitely remembered to select the correct microphone, and that's why her audio sounds exactly as good as it always does. 

On this week's episode, we introduce an important concept from Our Last Tapes: The Old Type, the official name for our periodic episodes where we open the creaky haunted vault of Ancient Television and bring forth a mummified TV corpse to examine. THIS WEEK, in honor of the SPOOKY TIMES in which we all live, we discuss The Addams Family (snap snap). Learn: what Kathryn's 6-year-old thinks of it, w...

We begin this episode by taking the opportunity to respond to one more item from the mailbag, a very thoughtful email that expands on some of our discussion from our previous conversation about the cultural context of Never Have I Ever (and notably, how ill-equipped we are to see some of it!) Then we jump back into the show, with our discussion of episodes 5, 6, and 7. 

This week's episode begins with a funeral, but like, the kind of funeral where no one is surprised or sad? Then we talk about this year's off-feeling season of Bake-Off, Kathryn's latest weird dick show, and a bushel of listener questions. SHOW NOTES: RIP in peace Quibi: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/21/21527197/quibi-streaming-service-mobile-shutting-down-end-katzenberg GBBO on Netflix: https:...

In this lightly frankensteined episode, we discuss both a piece critical of Never Have I Ever (in a segment recorded last week), episodes 2, 3, and 4 of Never Have I Ever, and the myriad glories contained in what shall from here on out be known as The Lost Tapes (recorded just last night). And, as a bonus, we have a snippet of a song from a band to which Andrew so kindly introduced us last night. ...

Thanks to a change in our recording setup last week, the episode we intended to release today (our next TV Book Club installment on episodes 2, 3, and 4 of Never Have I Ever) does not exist. INSTEAD, we are bringing you a rerun of a Golden Oldie: the team recommends their favorite shows for watching with only 80% attention and then, then. Then we dedicate ourselves to dunking on a terrible procedu...

The quarantine Emmys were ... good?? We are as shocked as the next person, but we spend most of this episode discussing what made the socially distanced pandemic awards version of the Emmys so much more compelling than the regular version. Afterwards, we turn to a brief conversation about the role of seasonality in TV plotting, which is mostly an excuse for Margaret to mourn about the cancellation...

We answer some questions from our vaunted Tumblr ask box, which Margaret swears she won't get upset about but then she totally does. It leads to a discussion of how important objectivity is to reviews and whether it exists at all (hint: it isn't and it doesn't). Then, we talk about the first episode of Netflix's Never Have I Ever, a teen comedy that is definitely narrated by tennis legend John McE...

This week we have: sad dirgeses about two recently announced cancellations, bad one picks from the fall TV lineup in which we have the deepest confidence, good one picks about which we're.... like..... IDK.... maybe!!!??!?! about, more uncertain squeaky uptalk than you can shake a stick at, and a full minute of Margaret explaining a driving game called cows that anyone other than Margaret would su...

Inspired by the absurd, impossible inescapability of 2020, we decide to take a trip to TV past. A fateful trip. A three hour tour, if you will. (Okay fine, this episode isn't quite that long.)  First we have a chat about our own personal histories with Nick at Nite, and then turn to the bizarre phenomenon of Gilligan's Island. At one point, the fact that the castaways are able to bake a pie render...

This week, we talk about the bizarre experience of watching a COVID-era awards show (in this case, the VMAs), and then we talk about the first episode of HBO's Lovecraft Country. It's a horror show that is surprisingly tolerable for people who don't normally like horror! And it's an interesting way to deal with the fact that HP Lovecraft's work is both foundational to the sci-fi genre AND written...

On this week's episode we discuss CBS All Access's most recent addition to its Star Trek universe of shows, Lower Decks , which is  different from the Bravo reality TV show BELOW Deck contrary to... one of your hosts' expectations-- bet you can't guess which!! HOWEVER, according to Kathryn, the two have more similarities than you might expect! THEN we branch off into an omnibus of Fall TV we're an...

It's a round robin of short topics this week, including Harley Quinn, why is Louis CK back, the joys of watching Perry Mason get fucked into the crevice between a bed and the wall, and whether Lovecraft Country is too scary for wimps.  Then, Andrew and Kathryn go head to head in the important debate of our time: are the title credits of Babylon Berlin actually a DVD menu screen? 

Friend of the show Craig Getting joins us this week to explain what the deal is with televised sports in this time when, really, no one ought to be playing any kind of sports at all. Then, in anticipation of the Supermarket Sweep reboot, we talk about some of the episodes of the old show that went up on Netflix not that long ago.  SHOW NOTES: This is just how sports audiences look now: https://www...