TV Season Diary

The Good Place

2016 TV Pilot Reviews, TV Season Diary

The Good Place Website
The Good Place @ Wikipedia
The Good Place @ IMDb

Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell, Veronica Mars) just died. And now she is in a multiplayer role-playing game on one of the infinite game servers that somewhat resembles the idea of the good version of the afterlife, like the Greek Elysian Fields or the Christian Heaven.

There’s only one catch: They are extremely (and I mean: extremely) picky on who gets in there. Everyone else from Joe(sephine) Average to Adolf Hitler gets send to the “bad place”. And Eleanor does not belong in the “good place”.

She’s just there by accident. Like it or not: The bureaucracy in the afterlife apparently has the accuracy of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration. Eleanor is only in the good place because she shares her name with a really good person.

She’s the glitch in the matrix. The fly in the ointment. The butterfly that causes the storm. Shortly after her arrival, the perfect balance of the good place is shattered and weird things start to happen. And the only way to stop it is for Eleanor to actually become a good person.

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Kevin Can Wait

2016 TV Pilot Reviews, TV Season Diary

Kevin Can Wait Website
Kevin Can Wait @ Wikipedia
Kevin Can Wait @ IMDb

Kevin Gable is a newly retired NYPD cop who has a typical American family and cop friends who are also retired. He plans to spend his days build a go-kart / paintball track and other fun activities. For further information, see here:

Unfortunately it does not turn out as planned. His teenage daughter (Taylor Spreitler, Melissa & Joey) announces to be engaged and wants to drop out of college to support her computer programmer nerd fiancé Chale (Ryan Cartwright, Bones‘ Vincent Nigel-Murray). You can tell her parents are not pleased.

To subsidize his retirement Keven had planned to rent out the garage apartment but that plan falls flat when he offers his daughter the place instead. And his buddies also have obstacles that wholly destroy his PowerPoint retirement plan.

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StartUp

2016 TV Pilot Reviews, TV Season Diary

StartUp @ Wikipedia
StartUp @ IMDb

A drug dealer, a hacker and a banker walk into a bar. Well, they don’t actually walk into a bar. But they do meet. This show came only accidentally across my radar so my knowledge of what it’s actually going to be about is a bit sketchy. I can only tell you what happened in the pilot episode and then infer what’s going to happen next.

The banker played by The O.C.‘s Adam Brody doesn’t seem too happy in his job. But he is even less happy when his father walks back into his life and asks him to launder some money for him.

The dad (who has disappeared by the end of the pilot so I don’t know his actual role in the things to come) is a player in the drug trade and was tracked down by a federal agent played by Martin Freeman (Sherlock, The Hobbit). Phil Rask (Freeman) tried to extort the dad which is why he went to his son in the first place.

The money Nick Talman (Brody) is expected to launder belongs to a Haitian drug lord who appears to live by at least some kind of honour and now finds his money gone and is understandably pissed.

The final player is a young woman and hacker (in the classical sense of the word), played by Otmara Marrero. She has developed a new digital currency, far better than Bitcoin per her own words. She’s trying to market it to the bank Talman is working at but they decline the offer. Talman on the other hand is suddenly very interested to invest.

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The Flash

TV Season 2014/2015 Diary, TV Season Diary

The Flash @ Wikipedia
The Flash @ IMDb

Synopsis: No, not that one. 😉
The Flash is a spin-off series of The CW’s Arrow where it started as a sort-of backdoor pilot until it got an actual pilot episode.
In Arrow‘s second season police lab technician Barry Allen visits Oliver Queen’s home town Starling City and actually meets the vigilante.
Back in his own town an experiment in a nearby research facility goes horribly wrong and puts Barry into a coma.
When he wakes up, his body is going into overdrive, allowing him to move and heal at incredible speeds.
But the accident changed other people as well and not all of them are such decent citizens as Barry.

My Opinion: They basically re-used the idea that Smallville had when Clark’s arrival on Earth did not just bring Clark but also the meteor shower that caused mutations and gave Clark enemies to fight against.
But that’s not such a bad thing. This way you don’t need to explain where suddenly all these people with weird powers come from, so that the Flash has something to do week after week.
I also enjoyed the cameo casting of John Wesley Shipp who used to be the Flash in the 1990s (also Barry Allen*).
To be honest I was a bit sceptical when Barry appeared in Starling City because I thought he looked a tad bit too young.
But over the course of these two Arrow episodes and the pre-released pilot episode of The Flash he already grew on me and I will be tuning in when it actually begins.

*The person carrying the moniker “The Flash” is not always the same person, just like there are different Green Lanterns. There were at least for people who used that name: Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, Wally West and Bart Allen. Smallville‘s version of the Flash (who went by “Impulse” in the early days) was Bart Allen.

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