A 10-episode series with each exploring some dramatic science demos you can do with "household" items. Mostly, this is a guy and his friend with a slo-mo camera who like to play with fire, etc. The experiments themselves aren't new and the explanations are not slick. Since he is explaining the events to people on the street, there is no opportunity for scaffolding concepts. The result is a strange mixture of too simplistic and too complex. Often the response from the viewer is "... cool". But the slo-mo viewing of some of these is pretty fun.
3 stars (out of 5)
Following the original, Sandler and Aniston now have a struggling detective business and their working together and being married together results in more tension than they can handle. When they are invited to a destination wedding of their ultra-wealthy friend, they take it. And when said friend is kidnapped, they are right back in the thick of things. Wacky, bumbling ineptitude-yet-brilliant detecting. Good "pink-panther-ish" vibe, but barely held my attention.
3 stars (out of 5)
Clint Eastwood stars and directs himself in a role starting to be a typecast for him. Curmudgeonly old guy, racist but charming. Here he loses his business and home and with remarkable easy, becomes a drug cartels most successful drug transporter, moving heroin from El Paso to Chicago. Rolling in money yet matter of fact about what he is doing, this is a pretty flat character drama without a significant story arc. Instead, it is a "slice of life", albeit an out of the ordinary life.
3 stars (out of 5)
A four-part series following 5 sibling pups through a training regiment to see if they can become cattle muster dogs within a year. Each pup goes to a different trainer/rancher in far-flung regions of Australia. Clearly lots of the hard work is done behind the scenes to condense a year into 4 episodes, but this is both interesting and fun to watch as the dog mature into working ranchers.
4 stars (out of 5)
Chris Hemsworth reprises his role as special-ops mercenary unicorn Tyler Rake. We start at the end of Episode 1, with Rake in a coma from the last op. He survives, finds a will to live, gets a job that is personal and apparently (with a couple months of chopping wood) is again a special-ops, mercenary, unicorn. Pretty consistent military action throughout the 2 hours. So consistent, in fact, that after the first third I realized there was not going to be any down-time or interstitial drama. Just fight...shoot...rescue...repeat...
3 stars (out of 5)
A car restoration series where a team of mechanics/sales people gets together to take old junkers and convert them into big sales. The hook here is that the cars are purchased in Mexico, brought across the border to El Paso where they are fixed and sold. Part of the story is the acquisition, part is the restoration. Similar to Gotham Garage, this evolves into a "let's get bigger and bigger deals" scenario. Unlike Gotham, this is a mercenary team, brought together for a 6 month project to see if it works, meaning not a local shop feel. Quick watch and I like the car restoration stuff.
3 stars (out of 5)
