Reviews

From the previews of Race to Survive Alaska, I saw that it was much like the three seasons of the excellent (even if sometimes staged) Ultimate Survival Alaska, even having some of the same wild and demanding locales and a promise of "elite athletes". RSA largely succeeds in the scenic filming, but fails in both its casting and editing.

"Elite athletes" is an exaggeration for most of the cast; even the best of them would not match the caliber of those in Ultimate Survival Alaska and many other similar shows. Worse, most of the cast are insufferable, with the editing playing up bickering and hurt feelings and speechifying. And since RSA is under the NBC banner, it is edited to be quite wõkë, with the expected tribal "representing" of the perpetual victim groups. Here, unbelievably, Max (who has a white mother), when he finds that he is the last "black" person left, says he is the last "person of color"; the Inupiaq Oliver and Wilson might disagree.

In a good survival show, I can root for one or more persons or teams; here, every pair was either off-putting or so-so, so I did not really care who won. And one final note: I'm quite tired of actors and especially narrators with affected frontal pronunciations, i.e. Lisps.

Having seen how CW ravaged Walker, I watched Walker: Independence only because of Matt Barr. In Blood and Treasure, he plays a strong, masculine lead teamed up with a strong, feminine lead, and the acting is pretty good throughout. B&T has diverse supporting characters who are all appropriate to their settings without "representing." The location shooting is excellent, the dialog is okay to crisp, and the plotting is a very good kind of pastiche of adventure shows.

In W:I Barr is a rogue, kind of an older Johnsey Hatfield (Hatfields & McCoys), teamed up with another strong woman, who is unfortunately somewhat of a Karen. The three leads are the strength of the show, each a pretty good actor with an interesting role. However, the dialog/delivery is almost bizarre in places, like this is the filming of a first run through. The diversity smacks more than a little of "representing", as Justin Johnson Cortez (Calian) stresses in his interviews (even though he is a Yaqui-Hispanic playing an Apache). The location shooting is a poor cliche: desert and scrub, even though the area of the real Independence, Texas, did and does not look like New Mexico, where this series is filmed. And finally, there is the music. Late 1800s Americana is rich in music; this series is penurious. The first episode imposes recent music on the audience, to the effect that the western ambience is absolutely shattered. (The spiritual The Wayfaring Stranger is given the singular worst rendition in history.)

W:I shows some promise: it has Matt Barr, and I'm intrigued enough to see what happens next. I can turn the sound down when the opposite-of-music comes on. But it already has that CW malaise, where something decent is like drawing to an inside straight. [ 4 stars which could increase.

I watch the regular Alone mostly for the great scenery and to see skilled survivalists display their building and crafting prowess. Alone: The Skills Challenged is a distilled version: there is still some good scenery, but the skills are emphasized. Each week one of seven of Alone's more successful contestants challenges three of the others to a different crafting/building project using the limited tools supplied and native materials. While all of the seven do some things alike, it is really interesting to watch just how much they do differently. And as in Alone, weather (and luck) may play a part in determining success. The editing of this series is first rate, moving seamlessly from person to person with no "wasted" minutes (=extra stars). I would really like to see these seven be the sole contestants on a regular season of Alone for the sheer scope of their skills and the unpredictability of a winner.

I loathed the terrible, rushed last episodes of the final season of GoTh; they and Martin the Sloth turned me against the franchise. I also am beyond sick of race-swapping and female-good/male-bad themes and the whole woke cult appropriation and ravaging of the works of their betters. But I read that Martin maybe, maybe could redeem his work with HotD. So I watched Episode 1.

First, the race-swapping here is limited and plausible: someone dark skinned from some country in Essos has married into the inbred albino ruling clan. There might even be an interesting love and/or political story here. Second, the rather unattractive tomboy princess Rhaenyra is probably in deliberate contrast to the goddess Daenerys, and she doesn't seem any more strong-willed than most other rich/powerful girls. Rhaenyra's situation certainly has precedent: Matilda in the Anarchy in England and Normandy; and the power struggles of the two Marys, Elizabeth, and the forgotten Jane--and the men who wanted to use them. Thus I am glad that the two factors that would have ruined this series for me are not here.

However, Episode 1 has problems. It seems less like GoTh and more like dozens of fantasy-world B films of the 80's and 90's. A lot of things (like the laughably bad wigs or plastic armor or uninspired architecture or even the iffy CGI dragons) seem a little cheap. Most of the characters--so far--are not especially well-cast or (worse) interesting. And where are the Heroes? I don't see Rhaenyra rising to the level of Arya, and hope that she isn't supposed to be a subversion of The Male Hero. If Daemon is going to be The Villain, he needs one or more heroic rivals.

I am going to be cautiously optimistic that the lack of woke continues and that future episodes will overcome this rather weak start. 6 stars (with a potential for 8)

Season 1 of "Raising Dion" (4 Stars) was check-box woke but had a certain charm and mystery. Dion was a cute kid, and like kids his age, he was a little bit goofy (in an amusing way). The gradual exploration of his world and his role in it held my interest, but it was on low burn. The series had the potential to outgrow the egoism of its source, a comic book one-shot, and maybe turn into something like a Milestone universe.

But it did not. Season 2 (1 Star) was a disappointment: the woke cultism got turned up with its villainization of whites and disdain for conservatives; the pacing was just bad; and the ending was weak. In short, season 2 failed to live up to its potential by focusing on I-Me-Mine wokery rather than good storytelling. And that is why I refer to this series in the past tense; season 3 of "Raising Dion" has been cancelled.

"Tom Swift", of course, isn't about Tom Swift at all; it's yet another corruption of a (very minor) literary work by woke cultists. Rather than make a show about, say, "Booker Thomas Carver" with the same premise, it engages in name-recognition bait-and-switch. The real Tom Swift is not black, gay, rich, political, smarmy, etc. The show in and of itself is loud and empty, and it lacks even the limited charm of a "Tom Swifty" (as in this title), hence the con to get the suckers to watch.

As in Season 41, CBS catered to radical pressure groups and forced Season 42 of Survivor to reserve more than half of the (paid) slots based on race, etc., so the cast does not match the demographics of North America, except for the gender ratio (which it always did anyway). People of principle should shun this show until the racism and genderism (and senseless format changes) end. The real Survivor spirit survives as Survivor South Africa and Survivor AU, with the last two seasons of the latter better than the US version has been in years.

"1883" has much of the feel of a long line of Pioneer Americana works like "Westward the Women," "How the West Was Won" and "Lonesome Dove". Cinematography and scoring are excellent, and both story and cast are good (I especially like Marc Rissmann's Josef). Overall, this is one of the few current must-watch series. But there are some flaws (and questions). Isabel May's Elsa is as interesting in her own way as Beth Dutton, but her narration makes me cringe. Is it designed to make her look a little "precious"? And why is her (inauthentic) dialect not that of her parents? And in trying to show the historical hardship of the pioneers' journey, will the series take on "The Walking Dead" syndrome of "who's going to get killed -this- week"?

This series is a welcome antidote to the poisoning of most American (& BBC) television. Yes, it is a revision, but it feels respectful of the spirit of the source material and does not hate most of its potential audience. The acting and production values are good; in short, the series makes me smile. (I think the series is even sweeter in our knowing that all too soon its world is going to vanish.)