Evening Latte

Minor spoilers for all shows

The Shield (through season 3)

This show is almost always near the top of “best shows ever” lists, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

After a season and a half, I was planning on dropping it at the end of the end of season two. The acting by Michael Chiklis and Benito Martinez was so grind-your-teeth intense that it bordered on a caricature of “hardened cop” turned to 11. I didn’t find Vic a terribly interesting main character: he was a one-dimensional selfish prick who bullied his way through life with no serious consequences. I assume the Connie arc/background was supposed to make him more layered by showing he could care about a hooker and her kid, but that was lost in him constantly ignoring his actual family, cheating on his wife, and breaking the law for mostly selfish purposes. I also know a lot of people like the handheld camera work with weird angles, but it felt (and still feels) dated and forced to me.

The strike team took up a lot of the screen time, but most of their stuff was over the top and bordered on cop pulp rather than a serious drama. The money train arc stretched my suspension of disbelief about as far as it could go. On the other hand, I found the usually-more-subdued stories of the rest of the precinct (Claudette, Dutch, Dani, Julien) more interesting, but they were often per-episode and afterthoughts rather than real arcs.

In the closing episodes of season two, it seemed like they were going to shake up the precinct dynamic by giving Claudette a lot more power, eliminating the civilian oversight person, taking away some of Vic’s protection via Ben’s fall, and adding a new person to the strike team. So I changed my mind and decided to give it another season.

I think it’s a much better show in season three. Screen time is more evenly balanced, Vic’s divorce is changing him in ways that make him a more relatable/interesting character, Shane is becoming an actual character (never a bad idea to feature Walton Goggins in your show), Claudette’s role is to growing in intriguing ways, and the acting from Chiklis, Martinez, and others is generally more natural. There is definitely still pulp (Tavon’s accident, Aceveda’s sexual assault), but it feels like that’s becoming more of the exception than the norm.

Somewhere around the middle of season three, I started actively looking forward to watching the next episode instead of seeing it as a kind of project to check an entry off my TV nerd list. I’m planning on finishing the series.

Scrubs (2026) (season 1)

When I meet a fellow TV nerd, one of the questions I like to ask is, “An alien arrives on our planet with no previous exposure to humans, but they can understand all languages. What show would you have them watch to convey the full width and depth of the human experience?” There are many good answers, but the original Scrubs (minus season 9 that didn’t happen) is my favorite.

I’m generally cynical about potentially nostalgia-fueled reboots, but I trust Bill Lawrence, all the primary players came back for this one, and reviews were generally positive, so I added it to the list. I’m very glad I did.

This version has retained the silliness, relatability, and range that made the original a standout. It gets a lot of the “the main characters are old now” gags out of the way early, then gets on about the business of showing the highs and lows of such a complicated and high-stakes situation. The returning core cast gets to experience things from the mentor side, and we get to see a more modern version of the trial-by-fire intern gauntlet. The interns are all talented actors, and while there are some early “kids these days” plotlines and scenes, by about halfway through the season, the focus is more on their journey than their age.

Similar to the original, good secondary characters round out the setting and provide a fair amount of clever comic relief. These include an adjusted-for-the-times The Todd, a new rival in the form of a doctor who believes J.D. stole the chief of medicine title from him (don’t worry, The Janitor is coming back in season two), and two new nurses whose performances elevate them out of their somewhat stereotyped roles.

But my standout new secondary character is Vanessa Bayer’s Sibby, who fills in for Sam Lloyd’s iconic and beautifully layered Ted as the harried hospital administrator. While Ted was mostly abused by Kelso, Sibby catches some form of disdain from everyone. She initially felt like a pretty flat representation of the out of touch restrictions and byzantine requirements inherent in modern medicine, but similar to Ted, things got dark pretty fast, and she ended up delivery some of the my favorite one-liners of the season.

If you watched and liked the original show, you should definitely watch this one. If you bounced off the original a while ago, maybe give this one a shot. If you like it, you might try the original again; things hit differently during different parts of our lives.

Ted Lasso (season 4)

The short version: I think it’s about on par with season three. My personal season rankings are 1 > 2 > 3/4

It was great that they used such a massive platform to tell stories and expose attitudes about women’s sports overall. But there’s only so much runtime, so a combination of a huge theme and a couple big arcs about main characters’ romantic relationships resulted in a significant reduction in the number of supporting character stories. Keeley and Rebecca dominated the screentime this season, with Roy getting a bump because of the will-they-won’t-they. Alice basically took Nathan’s “other assistant coach” time, and Ted mostly dropped to a supporting role.

I personally missed spending time getting to know other people in the building. During the first three seasons, Jamie, Roy, Sam, Colin, and Dr. Sharon all had significant-to-major arcs that covered topics as varied as toxic parent relationships, being a closeted gay pro athlete, the loss of one’s identity due to aging, dealing with racism as a celebrity, and the difficult compartmentalization associated with being a therapist.

I enjoyed what they did with Gemma’s injury and her decision between sports and law (including what that brought out of Alice). We got a few glimpses of Lizzie’s parenting struggles, but the rest of the players seemed one-off. Boots was the weird keeper, Niamh and Siohan were bickering siblings, Margy and Mady were an on-again and off-again running gag, and Shannon was the plucky underdog. But we didn’t really get to know any of them past those basic archetypes, and I personally didn’t spend enough time with them to hang any real emotional weight on what happened to any one character. Which is kind of sad since the opening montage of episode seven gave us glimpses into a bunch of worlds that seemed interesting enough to be explored.

The “where are you” monologue was both funny and biting, Alice’s journey was both interesting and fulfilling, and the overall theme was both worthy and timely. I just wish we could have spent more time getting to know the players and less time on the half-baked takeover plot (whose villain was pretty obvious early on) and the relationship statuses of Keeley, Roy, and Rebecca.

Ren Faire

Ren Faire is…gross.

The trailer and summary suggest the show is about the transition of control of the world’s largest renaissance fair from its sole founder to one of the three people vying for the figurative and literal crown. The festival is large enough that they incorporated it as a town, and it has its own police force and city council. Interesting stuff. Of course, I assumed the fair’s creator, George, would feature prominently.

But as important as he is to the story, he somehow takes up an outsized amount of attention. At some point, the makers of this highly-stylized documentary got fixated on “King George” and seemingly made it their mission to show all his eccentricities (if we’re being very kind) and deeply distasteful character flaws (if we’re being honest).

These include: firing long-time and productive employees because they “piss me off,” yelling at employees for pointing out that his instructions directly contradict previous ones, openly talking about his erections in the workplace, saying he “did some reading” and found out the government decides when everyone dies, openly deriding his second in command in front of others for “not reading enough,” and on and on and on.

The misogyny deserves its own paragraph. He openly says all women are trying to “cut off my balls.” He has an assistant whose only job is managing his 15 dating profiles. He’s in his 80s and says he’s looking for a “companion” aged 30-50, but the two dates we see appear to be with 20-something women. That may be an editing decision, but George still chose to go on those specific dates. One of his opening lines during both shown dates is, “Are those your natural breasts?” A questionnaire/instruction set for his dating assistant is briefly shown, and it includes:

• Have you ever had a sugar Daddy?
• If so, how long? How did it work for you?
• Do you have Natural Breast?
• Let her know about the no Condom. Will it be a issue?
• Let her know to wear a LOW CUT Blouse and Low Cut Tennis Skirt?

Even the parts that have other people onscreen always revolve around George and how he’s controlling, manipulating, or simply punishing them. Over the course of the show, the question of who will control the festival mostly gets lost in the exploration of various facets of George’s life. Months of time that contained events hugely important to potential transitions get condensed to a few minutes to make room for more footage of George rambling about women and yelling at people.

It’s an interesting situation/story, but the show quickly stops being about the festival and becomes about George’s worst behaviors. I’m kind of over fictional shows about selfish sociopaths, so watching a documentary about one acting so horribly toward so many people with no real consequences isn’t something I particularly enjoyed.

In a final depressing note to the story, George committed suicide in May of 2025 (the show originally aired in 2024) shortly after two traumatic events: losing the mayorship of the town where the fair was held and being given a judicial order to sell the fair. The order was the outcome of an extended lawsuit filed after George pulled out of a deal at the last minute in 2023.