|
About This Author
I am SoCalScribe. This is my InkSpot.
|
Blogocentric Formulations #1102771 added December 1, 2025 at 6:08pm
Restrictions: None
Watch List - November 2025
To qualify for my Watch List every month, the following has to be something that I've watched that's new to me. It doesn't necessarily have to be a current show, but it can't be reruns or rewatches of something I've already seen. So if I'm including it in this list, it means this month is the first time I've watched it. I'll put "DNF" (Did Not Finish) next to anything that I stopped watching and have no immediate plans to finish.
Movies
 Honey, Don't!
In Your Dreams
Now You See Me: Now You Don't
Rental Family
Roofman
The Running Man (2025)
The Substance
Weapons
Zootopia 2
I watched some really great movies this month. I also watched some just okay ones, which would be Now You See Me: Now You Don't, Weapons, In Your Dreams, and Honey, Don't! None of them were particularly bad, but they didn't capture my interest the way the other ones did.
I finally got around to seeing The Substance and, unlike Weapons, it lived up to the hype. It was a really great body horror movie with some good performances and really unique filmmaking. It's a modernized take on The Portrait of Dorian Gray, which is one of my favorite classic stories. And speaking of updates, Edgar Wright's update to The Running Man was also great; it's clear that he was really inspired by the source material (the Arnold Schwarzenegger film adaptation from 1987 took huge liberties with Stephen King's original story), and he was trying to make something closer to the original. Wright's frenetic style is a great fit for a movie where the protagonist is on the run the entire time, and I really enjoyed it.
Zootopia 2 was a worthy follow-up to a great first film, and I'm sure I'll be seeing it several more times with my kids. I think it'll hold up. And Roofman was a really interesting biopic about a guy who went to jail for robbing a series of McDonald's restaurants, escaped from prison, and then evaded the cops for months while basically living in a Toys'R'Us. It was a wild story and one that I'd never heard before, so it was fun to see a biopic about something that was completely new and fresh to me.
My favorite movie of the month was Rental Family, which is a movie about an expat American actor living in Japan who gets a job working for a company that rents out actors to play roles in people's lives (e.g., a mourner at someone's funeral, the "other woman" in an affair when the cheater needs to come clean, etc.). Brendan Fraser's character is asked to play a father to a little girl who's been raised by a single mom so she can get into a good school, and a writer/biographer for an aging actor struggling with memory issues, and he learns how to connect with people through his experiences. Honestly, it was a really moving, emotional movie about shared human experience and finding meaning in your life, and I highly recommend it.
Television
The Beast In Me
The Diplomat (Season 3)
Ginny & Georgia (Season 3)
Last Week Tonight (Season 12)
Man on the Inside (Season 2)
The Morning Show (Season 4)
Nobody Wants This (Season 2)
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (Season 3)
Selling the OC (Season 4)
The Studio (Season 1)
Wife Swap: Real Housewives Edition (Season 1) - DNF
My wife wanted to check out Wife Swap: Real Housewives Edition and we gave up after two episodes. The original Wife Swap (at least in the early years) was an interesting exercise in exposing people to lifestyles other than their own. But like the original show, this one was clearly done to be sensational ("let's find the most bizarre family we can to really make the Housewife feel out of her element!"), and that's not really all that interesting to watch, when you feel like the whole show has been engineered for comedy/ratings.
Similarly, the second season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Lives was pretty boring, as was the fourth season of Selling the OC. The latter felt like it was just focusing on the same old storylines for another season, and the former was really strange in that it's one of the only reality shows I've seen where the people on screen are super focused on their screen time. There was so much talk about doing stuff for "the views" or "the attention" and it's a little weird (and not very interesting) to watch a reality show about influencers arguing about how to get more influence and attention.
The latest episodes of Ginny & Georgia and Nobody Wants This were pretty disappointing. The characters are becoming less and less likable, and the storylines are starting to feel stale. Both had sensational first seasons and seem to be going downhill fast. The Studio and The Morning Show were both good shows, but felt a little underwhelming given how much they've both been hyped.
Last Week Tonight was excellent, as always. It remains one of my favorite comedy news shows, with deep dives on important topics in a way that's still engaging, funny, and illuminating. They deserve all of their Emmys; the show is outstanding. This most recent season of The Diplomat was also just as good as the first two, and The Beast In Me was a great mystery/thriller limited series that works almost entirely based on the chemistry of its leads (Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys). It's definitely worth a watch.
My favorite show of the month, though, was the second season of Man on the Inside. The first season features Ted Danson, a retiree and widower, who "gets back out there" by agreeing to work with a private investigator by going undercover at a retirement home to help her solve a mystery. It was an excellent first season, but there were definitely questions about whether it was replicable. I should have known to trust in Mike Schur (who also worked on The Office, Parks & Rec, and The Good Place), because he came up with a great premise for the second season, where he has to go undercover at a small liberal arts university that's trying to secure a $400 million donation from a billionaire alumni. They continued to develop and evolve the characters, while offering a fresh, new season-spanning case. And that's a format that really works for this show. I'm in for a season three, season four, or however many seasons they want to run it. Ted Danson is charming as always, and the writing is smart and funny.
TOP PICK:
Rental Family
&
Man on the Inside (Season 2)
|
© Copyright 2025 Jeff (UN: jeff at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
Jeff has granted InkSpot.Com, its affiliates and its syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work. |
