Tags: tv, blog, sci-fi, thriller, 2025, essential
Author: KickingK
Date: Tuesday May 20th, 2025
There's an episode of the tv series Spaced that features the greatest depiction of clubbing in cinema history. It's greatness is that it understood that a truly great night out isn't just about the club you go to. It's what you're running from, to get to where you end up. It spends most of the episode detailing the tensions and problems of the cast, the bit in the club is literally just a few minutes. But because of the time spent on the tensions and anxieties and problems and fears, you get the release of an epic night out.
Anyway...part way through the second series of Andor, fifteen episodes into a relentless narrative equivalent of a Shepard tone, there's a wedding party scene. And it goes OFF
And maybe Spaced doesn't have the best club scene anymore.
I don't think I can add much to the conversation regarding Andor's greatness, other than my slightly shonky Spaced comparisons. Pick an element: music, costumes, acting, script, anything at all, it's all superb. However, I do want to mention a couple of personal highlights.
Firstly, the brokeneness of the antagonists. Every single character working for the empire is a shell of a human being, living half a life. Too many movie and tv villains are hyper-competent, charismatic, sexy bastards. When the reality is these kind of people are deeply pathetic, emotionally limited turds.
Secondly, all of them are punsished for their loyalty and competence. Literally every single one of them is crushed by the weight of the system they are trying to uphold. If any of them had just clocked in, did the bare minimum and clocked out again they'd have been fine. But the one thing fascism absolutely demands is comformity. Stick your head up too high and it's going to get scythed off.
And lastly, if there's one point that Andor hammers home relentlessly, it's that fascism contains within it the seeds of it's own destruction. Fascism won't work, can never work, will never work because it will always create the conditions that will bring it down. The harder the Empire pushes, the more the people push back.
To go back to that G.K. Chesterton "quote"
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.
Andor tells us that whilst that victory is long, painful and must be fought for, it is inevitable.
Tags: blog, tv, comedy, action, essential, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Tuesday December 30th, 2025
So whatever it is that makes you unhappy...I'll wreck it for you.
Just how badly can you make something and yet it still somehow works? Most of Baby Assassins Everyday seems like an attempt to answer that question. Outside the duo themselves the acting is mostly terrible. Only mostly because occasionally it's awful. Sometimes you can see the pause before an actor remembers it's their line.
The plot doesn't make much sense. The script is clunky as hell. Entire scenes go absolutely nowhere and then are completely forgotten about. Multiple characters seem only to exist for the purpose of annoying the viewer. Multiple episodes go by without a single fight scene.
The first half of this series is only held together by the effortlessly charming duo of Mahiro and Chisato. The extra space afforded by a tv show allows the two to diverge and differentiate their personalities. We see just how awkward Mahiro finds human interaction, trying her best and failing. And we see Chisato fret and care over Mahiro even more, compensating for her friend's deadpan face by turning hers into a rubber ball of expressionism, bouncing from one emote to another.
But even that is barely enough, those first six episodes are a tough watch at times.
And then the second half of the series kicks in.
Episode 7 sees the pair visit Chisato's family and hooooo boy, what an episode. No action, not even any drama, just the two of them spending quality time with people they love and loving life. It's like somebody took the sweetest bits of Bob's Burgers and just rolled them up into a single episode. This also takes the time to highlight the nature of their friendship, something that's been left open to interpretation up to now. But here it walks us right up to the point of saying it explicitly and then stops just short. Just. The message is heard loud and clear all the same.
And then from there we get an increasingly dark storyline where the two are split up and have to deal with bullying office politics and company loyalties. The shonky production is still there but seeing the two pushed to their limits, to the point of their friendship beginning to break down, by a toxic work culture is heartbreaking.
Inevitably, it all has to end in violence. Mahiro's promise to kill everyone is delivered like a marriage proposal and I sobbed my heart out.
Because the team behind Baby Assassins know exactly what they've got. They've crafted the finest queer, neurodivergent, kung-fu depiction of teenage love in the 21st century by focusing entirely on the characters and shooting people in the head.
Would it be better if it was made by people who could write and edit and act? Maybe. But somehow, the awkwardness of it all perfectly fits their characters. The only time the show isn't stilted and awkward is when they're fighting goons or goofing around with each other. At which point it's the most wonderful thing in the world.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday November 01st, 2025
I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards
At what point does a metaphor or allegory get so on-the-nose that is stops being a metaphor/allegory and simply becomes the thing that you are talking about? Sometimes, Bet feels like it's attempting to explore that question.
Set in an ultra-exclusive private school for the kids of the mega-mega-mega-rich, where status is entirely defined by money and the only way to gain (or lose) money is to gamble. The winners get to literally own the losers as their personal slaves and the very, very top ranked players form the school council, setting the rules and rigging the games in their favour.
It's not exactly subtle, is it?
Enter Yumiko, a compulsive gambler who's parents (also compulsive gamblers) were assassinated when she was a tiny child, who's on a secret mission to find out who was responsible and get revenge. She shakes up the whole school order by being really good at gambling and also weirdly unaffected by peer pressure and school norms.
The series is at it's best when it treats the school as the beginning and end of it's world building, highlighting the inherent weirdness of forcing a bunch of kids into close proximity, whether they like it or not. This has the side effect of making it feel like a kids tv show, but rather than try and hide that it leans right into it, flatly treating the absurd as normal whilst simultaneously treating the juvenile trials and tribulations as completely valid and worthy of drama.
It's view of the world is bleak as hell. Nobody escapes the story with the audiences full sympathy. Yumiko's gambling gradually tips into self-destruction before her lust for revenge tips into manic violence. Every other character is given an empathetic background but each steadfastly refuse any redemption that's offered to them by the plot. Only Ryan comes away without a stain on his character and that's mostly because he's too wet for anything to stick.
So it's a dog eat dog world with everyone trying to knife each other in the back (and the front, side and any other angle they can get) in order to claw their way up the ladder.
At times it's breathtakingly good as it hammer's you in the face with it's absurdist indictment of capitalism. And the next moment you question what on earth you're watching as high school drama aimed at pre-teens directly references BDSM.
Sadly, it falls at the final hurdle. The last two episodes take place after school term and outside school grounds. The central problem the story has is that in making every character absolutely awful, we don't really care about any of them. Consequently, the mystery of Yumiko's parents simply isn't engaging. It's fine as a macguffin that moves the plot forward, but fails completely when we're asked to invest in it.
I'll probably watch the second series though. There's not much out there like it.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Tags: blog, tv, animation, sci-fi, 2025, recommended
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday October 25th, 2025
Dan! Dan! Dan! Dan! Dan! Dan! Dan!
What am I doing here? Watching anime as a middle aged man is a deeply weird experience. When I was younger I was witness to the original UK anime/manga boom of the early nineties. Akira, Appleseed, Manga Mania. It was always weird but... It was a kind of weird that was curated towards a young western audience. It was a slice of Japanese culture carefully selected for the kind of teenagers who'd be receptive to it.
Now though? There's so much of it, so many different styles, so many different genres, such a wide audience. And, seemingly, for this audience it's all so normalised. When I was reading Gunsmith Cats as a teen I knew, right from the get-go, that this was something a little out there. That was what I wanted. But it seems like Attack on Titan is as standard to today's kids as Stranger Things.
Which, conversely, makes the act of watching this stuff when you're not completely immersed in this culture even more weird. I have no way of understanding it as part of a wider culture.
Is DanDaDan normal? Is this level of bizarreness de rigueur? Or does it stand out even amongst the, quite frankly, impenetrable field of anime weirdness?
I have no idea. And I have no idea how to critically evaluate it or, ~waves hand at the entire, diverse field of anime~ how to evaluate that. I once watched two episodes of Attack on Titan and they were the worst two episodes I've ever watched of anything, in my entire life.1 So I clearly don't know what I'm talking about.
But I do know that DanDaDan manages to capture teenage friendship and crushes in a way that's delightfully endearing. The whole show is deeply, deeply horny but in that oddly innocent, early teens way of having deeply intense longings and not having a clue what to do with them. And even though there are whole episodes where all the characters are fighting demons whilst stripped to their underwear, it never leers or objectifies.
The most intense, and most affecting, moments are when they're just trying to navigate the fact that they think they've been stood up during lunch, or their fingers touch whilst sat next to each other in the car. It's oddly sweet for a show where the main running plot-line is about trying to recover a characters genitals.
Sorry, yes, the plot. Two senior school nerds meet and argue about the merits of the occult vs UFO's. Momo was raised by her (absurdly hot, ridiculously cool, seemingly barely older then her) Grandmother who's a witch and dares Okarun, an introverted sci-fi junkie, to visit a haunted underpass to see a ghost. In return, he dares her to go to a notorious UFO sighting spot. Obviously, he gets possessed by the spirit of a demon-witch and loses his balls, she gets abducted by aliens.
That's episode one. It get's rapidly more grandios and unhinged from there.
It does do some of the stuff that turns me off of a lot of anime. Characters start shrieking at each other for no reason. In the rush to the next plot device, nothing ever gets completely resolved. And whilst it's attitude to gender and sex is mostly positive, series one is bookended by threats of sexual assault. The fact that these are kind of played for laughs makes it even more of an incongruous miss-step.
But somehow, it has a charm and vibe that's infectious. Two series in and I'm looking forward to a third.
Where to Watch
1. I only watched the second one because I couldn't believe that anything could possible be that bad. It was.
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Tags: blog, tv, animation, drama, recommended, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday November 08th, 2025
It's business as usual for privately-owned taxi driver Odokawa as he drives a variety of passengers around the city.
A misanthropic taxi driver gets in way over his head in a tangled web of mysteries and messy lives.
Each of the the passengers that Odokawa ferries around becomes another thread that spirals out, weaving around the other stories, eventually looping back round to arrive at Odakawa's taxi door.
The whole thing kicks off with a mystery about a missing teenager but then, Katamari-like, rolls ups stories of corrupt and incompetent cops; social media influencer vigilantes; wannabe comedians; a pop group and their controlling manager; competing gangsters; a thieving nurse; a mobile-game addicted teen; a debt ridden janitor; a caring but intrusive doctor; a catfishing extortion scheme and an otaku lottery winner.
The use of anthropomorphic animals as characters serves two functions. Firstly, with such a huge cast, it allows every character to be distinctive and immediately memorable. It's easy to remember the cast of pop group Mystery Kiss as they're all cats. You can't get any of them mixed up with Miho as she's an alpaca.
Secondly, and conversely, it highlights the deeply human nature of the characters and their stories. The animation style strips each character back to only the qualities needed to tell us who they are. Each character gets their own back story, their own motivations and their own vulnerabilities. There are no purely good guys here, but then even the worst characters here are relatable. You end up rooting for them when they have a chance at redemption or realisation.
The biggest mystery is Odakawa himself. He's obviously highly intelligent, an early scene where he masterfully diverts his prying doctor's conversation onto the subject of Bruce Springsteen is comedy gold, but he only shows that guile in brief spurts. Other times he struggles to get to grips with what's unfolding around him. He's no mastermind, which means that when the web he's helped to spin begins to tighten, the way it shakes out is believably messy, but also beautifully poetic.
There are some criticisms. There's a Tarantino-esque propensity for characters to monologue their backstory, or recite a wikipedia article that introduces a plot element. This is not helped by the perfunctory-at-best translated subtitles. And the subtitles are at their worst for the character of Yano, a character who raps every line. They technically work but they're unbelievably clunky and clash badly with the original audio. Every scene he's in is almost painful to watch.
But overall this is a genuine one-of-a-kind tv show. A magnificent blend of empathy and intricacy, noir and kitchen sink.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Tags: tv, blog, comedy, drama, 2025, recommended
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday August 02nd, 2025
In praise of mid-range TV
Great art should be challenging. Great art should challenge what is possible, should challenge what I am capable of comprehending.
But when I've got home after thirteen hours working two jobs, when I've only got a few hours to sit down and decompress, before I have to go to bed and get up ready to do it all again, I don't want to be challenged. I want to be entertained.
It's times like this that I miss the days before "prestige" tv, before multi-series story arcs and a cast of thousands. I miss being able to switch on an episode of Columbo or Quantum Leap or Star Trek TNG, know who all the characters are within the first few minutes, and then get a story with a start, a middle and an ending.
Poker Face gets this, it's not a challenging show. You don't even have to work out who the murderer is, it just shows you right off the bat. But what Poker Face also understands is that I'm not an idiot and I don't want to be condescended to.
Poker Face is smart. It just puts those smarts into producing a solid, witty, delightful story into every forty five minute episode.
It does have some concessions to modern tv mores. The first and last few episodes of each series act as story bookends, setting up and paying off Charlie Cales' dealing with the Mob and the FBI. But it's not where it's at it's best. It's at it's best in the middle episodes of the series which most closely hew to the syndicated shows like Columbo and Murder, She Wrote that it's so clearly enamoured with. Episodes 5 to 9 of Series 2 in particular is an astonishing run, every one a belter. The John Cho & Melanie Lynskey helmed "The Sleazy Georgian" is the standout. Fun, funny, smart and deeply empathetic. The kind of storytelling that makes you feel connected to the world and the people around you. That makes you feel good about going to bed and getting ready to start the day anew.
Author: KickingK
Date: Thursday April 11th, 2024
Dick Turpin and His Essex Gang
Over the last ten years or so, sit-coms seem to have gradually shifted in tone. Less snark, less sarcasm, less satire. More inclusive, more diverse, more hopeful. It's not just that the news is so relentlessly grim that people want something to take their minds off it. It's also the fact that the news is so utterly stupid that it's impossible to satirise, so completely shameless in its stupidity that even if you did there would be no point.
And whilst I loved the snark, sarcasm and satire of the comedies of my youth. A combination of wearied age and experience means that I'm very much enjoying this new inclusivity, diversity and hope.
The latest sit-com to push those qualities to the fore is Noel Fielding's Dick Turpin, which is amiable and good natured to a fault. It's border-line 18th Century Ted Lasso.
Dick wants to be a famous highway man but also wants to be good and kind. Much of the comedy comes from this incongruity. His crew want to be a team of tough criminals, but they also want to be themselves. Even more comedy from this. It's often delightful, occasionally laugh out loud funny.
There's a couple of stand out performances: Hugh Bonneville is in cracking form, and Kiri Flaherty is a delight as Little Karen.
Only Connor Swindells disappoints as Tommy Silversides and that's only because his character is so clearly inspired by Lord Flashheart that it's impossible to avoid the comparison. And comparison to Rick Mayall is never going to end well.
So it's not Blackadder. It is however, very much Maid Marion and Her Merry Men. Which either means my initial observation about the changing tone of sit-coms was wildly incorrect. Or Maid Marion... was massively ahead of its time.
Tags: blog, tv, comedy, fantasy, 2024
Author: KickingK
Date: Thursday May 30th, 2024
Dead, dead good
The third best thing I can say about Dead Boy Detectives is that if this had been made twenty years ago it would have been one of the most radical pieces of tv of the era. And yet now it’s depictions of same sex relationships feels completely normal. In fact, those relationships are possibly the most ‘normal’ thing about the show. This is a very good thing.
The second best thing I can say about Dead Boy Detectives is the way it handles real world darkness (such as domestic abuse, child abuse, male violence, bureaucratic ‘violence’, homophobia, agoraphobia etc) whilst staying in the framework of a ‘Monster of the Week’ show. It either deals with this stuff head on, via metaphor, or subtly and in the background. There’s a lot going on here, everything feels like it’s about something and the fact that it packs so much in without feeling over stuffed, ponderous or frivolous is a marvel.
And the very best thing I can say about Dead Boy Detectives is that this is just fabulous entertainment. Funny, warm, witty, imaginative, caring. Honestly, the superlatives could keep flowing for pages. The entire cast play their roles to a tee. A special mention has to go to Lukas Gage’s supurrrlative1 Cat King and it’s a wonder that there’s any scenery left at the end after Jenn Lyon has so enthusiastically chewed through it.
Magnificent.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
1. Sorry, not sorry ↩
Tags: blog, tv, comedy, 2024, essential
Author: KickingK
Date: Monday April 15th, 2024
Peak Minty
Whisper it: I think this is the funniest thing on iPlayer.
Diane Morgan has taken the essence of the 80's British sitcom, it's idiotic main characters, it's absurdly contrived plots, it's mixture of utter banality and occasional surrealism. She's jettisoned all of the set-up, all of the fluff and filler, anything that isn't generating a laugh every few seconds. And she's ended up with a fifteen minute show that's a rocket fuelled gem.
She's improved upon her influences in just about every way. Let's start with the main character, Mandy.
Each episode see's Mandy Carter trying her hand at a new job, usually at the behest of her exasperated Job Seeker's officer. And each episode it goes disastrously wrong. But not because Mandy's stupid or clumsy. It's usually because she's just bored (something we can all relate to at work) or distracted. Sometimes it's because she's actually hyper-competent and ends up taking things too far.
Because Morgan clearly loves Mandy. Mandy isn't an object of scorn or ridicule. We laugh at her, yes, but it's always with affection. Mandy is, in a very bizarre way, somebody to be admired.
Then there's the celebrity cameos. A combination of Morgan's eye for casting and the fact that each episode is so brief means that there's an avalanche of celebrities of all stripes prepared to give up a day (probably significantly less) for filming, all looking like they're having the time of their lives.
And each one is a surprise. Either because the cameo is deliciously played against type (Sonia-from-Eastenders channeling her inner Don Logan from Sexy Beast is an absolute treat) or because the setup is so misdirected and obfuscated that the punchline is glorious.
And finally there's the surrealism. The sheer pace of the jokes and inventiveness leaves no place for something as boring as reality. If it's funny: it's in. So even though the form of the jokes feel familiar, the way each joke jackknifes the plot further away from mundanity makes everything a surprise.
Just glorious, an absolute gem.
Oh Mandy, you came and you gave without taking...
Tags: blog, tv, animation, sci-fi, 2024, essential
Author: KickingK
Date: Thursday April 25th, 2024
Stranger, Wilder Things
A standard way to start a review like this would be to give an overview of the main characters and the start of the story. But the characters who find themselves crash landed on an alien planet aren’t really the protagonists and it’s not their story.
The star here is the planet itself and the ecosystem that exists on it. The story is one of billions of years of evolution and adaptation. The ecology here is wild and fantastical. Some things are seen in the context of a co-dependant ecosystem. Others are presented completely devoid of context or explanation, with no clue as to whether it’s a once-in-a-millennia moment or an every day occurrence. The planets complete indifference to the characters who are journeying through it is both terrifying and awe inspiring.
Terrifyingly, the only thing on the planet that really pays attention to them sees them as a resource to be exploited. 1
That’s not to say that there’s nothing to the character’s stories. Whilst the beauty of the alien world is incredible, it’s the beating hearts of the humans that drive us through it and allow us to experience it alongside them. Whilst the animation is the showstopper, it’s the warmth of the story that’ll get you to binge watch it in a few evenings.
Unique and essential viewing.
1. Whilst the humans only want to survive and get off the planet, the only alien that is interested in them is driven by traditional human motivations of exploitation and greed ↩
Tags: blog, tv, comedy, drama, 2024
Author: KickingK
Date: Wednesday May 08th, 2024
Totally Completely Thomasin McKenzie
This show starts with Vivian, her life a mess, contemplating suicide, finding out her grandad has died. The man who raised her from a small child when her parents died in a car accident spilts his estate equally between her and her two elder brothers. John gets his massage recliner chair. Hendrix gets his golf clubs. Vivian gets his huge cliff edge mansion.
Except it’s a set up. It turns out that the huge, vertiginous cliff face on which the house is perched is a hot spot for suicide attempts. Her grandfather’s calling was attempting to dissuade those attempting to jump. And, by passing that calling onto his granddaughter, hopes that she might save herself by saving others.
The undoubted highlight of this series is the family dynamic between the three siblings. Watching each of them bicker and argue, all of them failing to come to terms with their grief and decades of feuding is both funny and heartbreaking. This is one of the most believable onscreen families I’ve seen.
A large part of that is down to Thomasin McKenzie who is approaching Toby Jones’ levels of watchability. Like Jones she has an absolute charisma that is constantly engaging. And yet also seems so completely normal and down to earth. She has an ability to make me believe in any story she’s telling.
My only criticism1 is that there’s two story elements fighting for space in the script: the one about trying to save people from committing suicide and the one about the family coming to terms with grief. And whilst both feed into one another, it’s the family narrative that gets most of the attention. And whilst that’s arguably justified, it’s absolutely wonderful after all, it feels a little unbalanced. Lives are at stake here and yet it gets less screen time than Hendrix’s marriage.
It’s not helped by the fact that Amy, the first suicide attempt that Vivian prevents, is one of the least well drawn characters in the show.
Still, despite the fact that it never quite manages to live up its central premise, there’s enough good stuff here for me to heartily recommend it.
1. Well, apart from the music which is either slightly too kooky for it’s own good or has needle drops that sound like they were chosen and edited by the same people who work on Home and Away. ↩︎
Tags: blog, tv, comedy, recommended, 2026
Author: KickingK
Date: Friday January 09th, 2026
The Good-ish place
The problem with having a really great concept and then nailing the execution on your first try is how do you follow it up?
The first series of A Man on the Inside is such a perfect idea and so well executed that it's difficult how to see how the same trick could be pulled twice.
It's a problem that the show's creator, Michael Schur, has encountered before. Previous success, The Good Place, had one of the all time greatest sit-com first series, ending with a bang that made simply repeating the formula impossible.1
And you can see the lessons learned from that shows evolution on display here, A Man on the Inside doesn't try to pull the same trick twice. For a start, Charles Nieuwendyk is actually good at his job now. He's grown and improved.
Now the 'inside' is a university campus that Charles must infiltrate by posing as a temporary lecturer. The contrast is obvious, going from old people nearing the end of their life to young people just starting there's. Which makes it curious that the show makes no use of that switch whatsoever. The students barely exist in this, instead it concerns itself mostly with the teaching staff whilst also pulling across half the cast from the last series as well.
It ends up having too many characters to keep track of to truly make any of them stick. There's too many stories that start and end neatly in the same episode. Everything rattles along a little too quickly for its own good.
The flip-side is that there's always something happening and nothing ever stands still. It never suffers from trying to replicate it's past success, it's too busy moving forward. Plus, having such a wide variety of characters means that there's always someone or somewhere to pull a joke from. This season is consistently, effortlessly funny.
It also features a genuinely great heist in its penultimate episode. It's no Relay or How to Blow Up a Pipeline but it actually feels believable.
It's let down a bit by the final episode which doesn't really make sense. But the ride to get there is a fun and entertaining jaunt. Just don't expect the same level of heart as the first series or anything like the depth of The Good Place.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
1. To be clear, the following series of The Good Place are fantastic as well.
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