DOA On TV : I Will Find You

 

I Will Find You (Netflix)

 

This is an eight episode series that I watched all in one evening.  It's the sort of thriller/suspense story I really enjoy these days.

David Matthews is serving his fifth year in prison for the brutal murder of his little boy.  He is believed to have committed the crime while under the influence of "night terrors".  Apparently, according to the show, a person can do anything in this condition and not remember it at all.

Not a single person believed him when he said he didn't do it, so he's been in prison without visitors for his entire sentence so far.

His sister in law, a former journalist, comes to see him one day despite this.  She has a picture sent by a friend who was visiting Six Flags. In the background is a young boy with a distinctive birthmark on his cheek that is the same as David's dead son had.   She believes, and David soon also comes to believe, that somehow Matthew, David's son is still alive.

What about the body in the bed?  What about the DNA evidence saying the body was Matthew?  What about the testimony of a neighbor saying she saw David burying the murder weapon in the woods?

The story is off and running from there.  The Warden of the prison is David's father's old police partner.  With his help and Rachel the sister in law's help, he escapes prison and begins to hunt for his son. 

I loved the story, pacing and characters.  There were as many and more twists as you could wish for. 

DOA On TV : La Brea Season 1 and A Good Girl's Guide to Murder Season 2

 

La Brea

New on Netflix is La Brea, a 2021 series that lasted three seasons.  I've seen all but the last episode of season one.  I love science fiction concept shows like this.  I don't know how I missed it in it's original run. 

A family is driving in LA packed traffic to school and work, when a huge sinkhole opens right on top of the La Brea tarpits.  The son and mom fall into the sinkhole, but the daughter gets away.  Her father, estranged from the family, is soon there to help her cope with the disaster.

Meanwhile, at the bottom of the sinkhole, the mom and son awaken in separate spots unharmed by the fall.  A bus and some streets signs, and a few cars that can be looted for supplies are all the 30 or so survivors have to work with.

Once a sabertooth tiger shows up, the groups knows they aren't just at the bottom of a hole waiting for rescue, they're out of place and time.  10,000 years out of place and time.

The episodes are full of action, most characters are likeable.  Puzzles pile on puzzles.  What's not to like? 

 

 

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder Season 2 

In the small English town of Little Kilton, Pip Fitz-Amobi continues to be the person to go to when there's been a crime or disappearance.  

Pip carries a lot of guilt for the way things played out as she solved mysteries in season one.  She's reluctant to try to find a friends missing brother, but eventually agrees.  Secrets are unearthed nobody wants revealed, there's plenty of guilt and regret to go around.  Pip feels bad for digging awful information up, but once she's on the track of a possible killer, she can't be stopped.

Pip has a fierce foe in Max Hastings, a nasty rich boy who just keeps getting off scot free no matter the evidence against him.   I'm no fan of invulnerable villains, so I hope Pip brings him to justice if there's a season three.

This show is also on Netflix. 

DOA on TV The Boroughs Ep 1-5 (Netflix)

 

I’ve watched the first five episodes of the Buroughs and will finish tonight.  Promoted as science fiction, I think it’s pure horror. What a great scary, spooky show.

It takes place in a retirement community far out in the desert. The homes look like something from the 70s or 80s inside. Dark and full of wood paneling. Single level ranch style with attached garages. 

New to the community is Sam Cooper, a retired engineer who was supposed to come here with his wife. She recently died of a stroke and he’s sad and angry and doesn’t want to be here but he can’t sleep on his daughter’s sofa anymore.

He definitely doesn’t want to join the community in any way described by the community “transition manager”, who he ousts from his new home as she’s cheerfully in mid-spiel.

He works at first to try to get out of his contract though he has no place to go. 

His neighbor Jack blows past all of Sam’s reserves with his irresistible charm and understanding of Sam’s lot in life. 

Soon Sam is still grumpy and unfriendly, but slowly gets to know his neighbors.

When one dies, it’s not unexpected but it’s the middle of the night and Sam is wakened by alarms at his neighbor’s place. Breaking in when there’s no response at the door Sam finds something with impossibly long legs hovering over its victim and Sam grabs a hammer to chase it away.

Despite the fact he knows it will sound crazy, Sam tells the EMTs what he thinks he saw, but has to draw back from it when the EMT wants to bring him to the hospital for an assessment.

Little by little all the neighbors are drawn into the mysteries of this supposedly perfect community, guarding each other at night and trying to find the source of the horror they didn’t know they were living with. 

A bit more is revealed in each episode. The cast is excellent. Despite being at the end of their lives, everyone fights to live. 

DOA On TV January 12, 2025

 

Good morning, in a little late, but as always, in before midnight on post day counts as being on time.

 

Will Trent Season Three Episode One "I'm A Guest Here"

This week I watched the Season Three opener of ABC's Will Trent.  He's very smart, but has always suffered with Dyslexia, something he used to try to hide.  He would use a little voice recorder to note his keen on the scene observations, then use the playback of those recordings to help solve the case.  He rarely misses visual or auditory clues.  He's still using it at a crime scene this episode.

Now he has an app he calls Eduardo that does his reading of menus and everything else to let him know what written clues he has to work with.

His anchor in the world is his little chihuahua Betty.  Betty is very smart as all chihuahuas are.  Also, Betty dresses better than any dog ever.

Will himself usually dresses immaculately in a suit and tie, his armor against the world who might judge him for his dyslexia and his rough past as a maltreated orphan.  

This season, he's been hiding out with Betty in Soddy-Daisy Tennessee, working on getting dicey pics for divorce cases.  How many can there be?  He's drawn back by the execution death of a fellow officer, which in theory was ordered by an old friend from Will's foster care days, who Will thinks is innocent after they beat each other up as a greeting.

Officer Ormer is featured quite a bit, a fellow I never liked, but he is being softened up a bit by his divorce.  Angie, arrested by Will at the end of season 2 is working security in a posh community, with tasks such as having dog poo analyzed to see who did the nasty in front of a wealthy woman's house on her docket.

Lots of twists and turns as Will reluctantly gets involved to clear his friend and bring the killers to justice.  I binge watched the first two seasons, so being in "real time" TV watching mode is hard, as you've got to wait a whole week to find out what happens next.  18 episodes for this season, which seems huge when you've become used to streaming series with ten episodes at the most.

Missing You Netflix

 

 

Based on Harlan Coben's novel of the same name, Detective Kat Donovan is led down a labyrinthine path when she jokingly agrees to use an account on a dating app and sees a profile of the fiancee who disappeared eleven years ago, the day after her beloved father died. 

Also bringing her back to investigating her cop father's death, is the fact that his killer is dying in prison of cancer and likely only has a few days to live.  She's determined to find out what really happened to her dad, and she's certain he will tell her the truth at the last.

Further complicating her life is a tech savvy young man named Brendan who is hugely attached to his mom, and who insists that his mom has run afoul in her new relationship via a dating app.  He hasn't heard from her, has requested she be listed as missing, but he gets no help till he shows Kat a picture of the man from the app...it's long lost Josh, the fiancee who disappeared eleven years ago.

There's a ton packed into each of the five episodes.  Kat is a warm, loving character, but also a sharp, tough detective who stops at nothing to solve a case.

Archive 81: Mystery Signals (Netflix)

 

Dan Turner does film restoration work for a museum of video history.  His boss asks him to do a special restoration of an old tape that looks small enough to be an audio tape.  It turns out to be a recording from the 90s that was taken on a hand held camera.

Melody Pendras is doing a graduate oral history of the Visser building in New York. It was built directly on top of another building that was destroyed by a fire.  Why this particular building fascinates her we don't know. She's dedicated enough to pursue getting an apartment in the building.

Her efforts to interview the residents come to nothing until she talks to Jess Lewis, who is a teenager who was born in the building.

While Dan watches the restored tapes, his mind goes back to his family dying in a house fire while he was out walking the family dog.  He sees a picture of that dog on Melody's bulletin board, and is somehow sure she has his dog.

Dan is restoring the tapes in an old concrete bunker of a building. In a remote area of the Catskills, there's no Internet and poor cell service.  The isolation of the place creeps up on the viewer and Dan.

There was a scene where he was outside trying to call his friend, where it looked like someone in a red shirt was nearby, though Dan never saw him.  So creepy!

As the tape continues and Jess talks about someone named Samuel just before having a seizure. The tape gets grainy and the shape of a man (?) alternates with Melody trying to help Jess.

Then Melody is screaming, that they took Jess, and several men in uniforms come in and out of the frame.  She looks into the camera and says "find me!"

Really a rattling experience.  The tension just builds and builds.  I'll have to space out my viewing of the episodes.

Emily in Paris (Netflix)

 If you're in the mood for a breezy romantic comedy, Emily in Paris is perfect.  The series follows a young marketing executive from Chicago, Emily Cooper, as she is sent to spend a year in Paris helping the long established firm Savoir learn to do things the American way.

Emily is irrepressible.  She isn't well received in the offices of Savoir. It's partly because they hate that they've been bought out, and partly because Emily and her ideas go counter to the way business has been done.

Even in the face of a hostile boss and co-workers Emily remains cheerful, and finds ways to make her ideas work. It's all pure comedy, so there as many disasters as there are successes.

Outside of the office, Emily manages to make friends and find lovers aplenty.

Her personal fashion choices are fantastic, and not a soul could wear them but her.  They're such fun.

The series is a light, airy celebration of Paris, love, friendship, and good food.

There are currently two seasons available, with a third and fourth season just ordered.

Locke And Key Season 2 Trailer (Netflix)

 Locke and Key season one was fantastic. A family moves into an old family home that is filled with hidden keys that not only open doors to amazing and frightening places, they can change one person’s appearance into that of another.

Told mostly through the viewpoint of two teens and a younger boy, the kids face off against the last set of young people to investigate the house and it’s secrets.

The Christmas Chronicles (Netflix)

Here's a new Christmas Movie for 2018.  It stars Kurt Russell as a Santa caught on film by two kids, who then sneak into his sleigh and cause havoc with Christmas Eve deliveries.

He's a pretty with-it Santa Clause, rocking out in the jailhouse at one point, and spreading happiness as only Santa can.   He may be one of the best Santas Ever.

The kids in the movie hold it back from being a classic.  The girl is sort of borderline whiny throughout, and the boy was more convincing when he was being snappish than when he was joyful.

Santa's Elves reminded me quite a bit of the 80s movie Gremlins.  With Scandinavian of some sort accents.

Santa's bag was a revelation, as it kept filling from a giant conveyor belt at the North Pole.

I loved Goldie Hawn was Mrs Claus.

Travelers on Netflix Returns Today!

 This series ended last season explosively, as they say, with the Travelers all exposed, and the lives they'd built in the current day destroyed.    It was one of those endings that could have served as a series ender, because, how could they continue to fiddle with events in a timeline that now knew what they were up to?  Luckily, one whole year later, we get to see how they can continue their work.  Maybe we'll get a larger glimpse of the future they come from as well.

 https://www.netflix.com/title/80105699

DOA on TV: Netflixing Short Takes

Freezing weather and a nice cup of cocoa.   All that's needed are some idle evenings of television to snuggle down with.

I've been checking Netflix for programs and made a list of possibles.  I did a few searches for top shows, then for mystery series.  I'm dipping in to see what I think, and will note here as I watch them.

The Crown  I watched the first episode of season one.  It was disappointing that the show starts right at her marriage to Philip and doesn't show the girl she was before she met him.  Maybe I just liked the way Masterpiece's Victoria played out.  I only liked King George's character.  Everyone else was rather cold and distant and in some way unlikeable, even Elizabeth.  Matt Smith was and wasn't a departure from Dr. Who.  Like Who when playing with the children.  Not like Who and somewhat smarmy otherwise.

Agatha Christie's Poirot

Foyle's War

Midsomer Murders    I've seen the first three episodes from the beginnings of the series of this one.  I had some preconceptions of it being a cloying cozy from my impressions of customers at the library who checked it out avidly.  It's one of those where the customers could get a little edgy with you when they didn't get the DVDs on request soon enough.   The opening of the first show had a sort of dotty old lady on a bicycle and some other dotty old ladies about town hanging around snoopily.  Then, our bicyclist sees something in the woods and bammo, next thing you know she has a broken neck.  Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby and his sidekick Sgt Gavin Troy see past the apparent accidental death to find a twisted situation that hearkens to a past crime in the village.   Each of the episodes has many possible suspects, and a surprising amount  of secret sexual entanglements of every kind imaginable that make the finding of the killer really difficult.  I thought Troy was pretty flat at first, but by episode three he was getting off zingers of all kinds.  Hilariously, his theories of the crime and killer were completely off in every case.   I'll watch more.

Godless

Orange is the new Black

Marco Polo

Ripper Street

Merlin

Murdoch Mysteries

How To Get Away With Murder

Fargo

Bright   This is a movie made for Netflix that is getting a sequel.   I liked the gritty futuristic world where Will Smith is a cop with the first ever Orc cop partner.  Yup, there's Orcs, humans and Elves.  Magic users are called Brights and are hunted down by law enforcement of all levels.  His Orc partner played by Joel Edgerton is the quintessential idealistic rookie cop.   He is so happy to be a cop, his lifelong dream, he tries to ignore the hatred that comes his way from fellow officers, the public, and other orcs.  I love Will Smith when he's being a hero.  I don't mind that he is disillusioned and desperate.   At some point here he had to sell that working with a challenging partner who is everything he used to be starts changing him back to being that good guy.  Although he is shown to be eventually doing the right thing, you don't see him getting past his own prejudices, you don't see him changing back.  There's no heart to him.  It is also a flaw that his orc partner doesn't show much emotion of any kind through most of the show.  There are comments tossed out by Smith that in any other movie would have you laughing along with him, but not here.  All humor falls flat.  It's so odd.  It's like they couldn't decide quite what kind of a movie they wanted to make, one with social statements, or an interesting cop movie set in an alternate time and place.

Dark   Promoted as the next thing you want to watch if you loved Stranger Things, this was unwatchable for me.  Awful characters, grim hopeless tones, and floating mouths not quite syncing English dialogue with the original German.   I backed out about ten minutes in.

Black Mirror    Yikes, supposedly an updated edgy Twilight Zone.  I wish I had just watched the Star Trek type episode.  Nooo I had to go all the way back to an episode wherein the British Prime Minister is blackmailed into making merry with a pig for several hours while all the country watched live.  Eeew.  Can't unsee.

Pirates of the Carribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales      This is the first of the Pirates movies I didn't care for.  Johnny Depp was the worst Jack Sparrow ever.  The movie was way too long and needed a considerable amount chopped.  There was no lightness and humor that clicked.  Bah, Dead Men shouldn't have told this particular tale.

Fringe