Category: TV Show Reviews

The Summer I Turned Pretty, A Review

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TV Show: ★★★★ | Book: ★★

The Summer I Turned Pretty has been an annual summer-time series phenomenon. While the show hit No. 1 show on Amazon Prime following its Season 1 release, and its Season 2 is sure to hit the same, the books leave something to be desired.

Let’s start off with the classic caveat of, this book was originally released in 2009. It’s young adult. While I still read and enjoy young adult books, I feel no longer connected to the mindset of the characters and this has an overall impact on my reading experience.

Now back to the review. The book leaves something, a lot actually, to be desired. It’s what I would classify as a quick summer pool read with naive and young characters. Pool read is by no means a negative here, there are many types of pool reads and I enjoy many of them. In this case, you can read this book with no thoughts, head empty, and you’ll get the same out of it in the end as if you had been annotating and writing your dissertation on it. This is my personal opinion, if you disagree and loved the book, that’s great!

The TV Show on the other hand recognizes the missteps, flaws, and gaps in the book and builds upon it to make the hit show that it has become. There are still the bones, the story, the themes, but we’re getting a much deeper, richer story in the end. We see the strong female friendship of the mothers, the struggles of the teens and the adults, we get a more holistic experience. The book gave us bits and pieces, all from the perspective of a young girl, who is almost entirely unlikeable. In the show we see the raw struggles of dealing with such a heavy loss at pivotal teenage and young adult years, of losing both family and friend. It’s shown from all perspectives, multiple experiences intertwining to tell a story of different kinds of loss and recovery.

The book just didn’t have that. And again, it was written in a different era of teenage storytelling, it’s meant for a young audience than myself. But there are other stories, showcasing heavier topics to younger audiences, written in earlier times, that manage to tell this story in a stronger way. I’m glad the show saw these gaps, grew and expanded upon them to give us the moving picturew

The Enduring Magic of “Sabrina The Teenage Witch,” Review

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★★★★

No, this isn’t a review of the 2018 pop-drama The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, but rather the classic American sit-com of the 1990’s to early 2000’s, Sabrina The Teenage Witch.

I fear this show has been lost among the onslaught of new content coming in seemingly every day on the mass of streaming platforms. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful and thrilled by the sheer volume of film and television coming out in 2023, however I do think that sometimes Hollywood priorities volume and availability over quality. Not to the fault of the creators, but to the detriment of the talent involved in the creation of television and film, especially with the lack of equality in residuals pay and streaming studios taking shows off their platforms without notice never to be seen again…

But back to Sabrina the Teenage Witch. There’s something special, something entirely more magical in watching 90’s sitcoms in the 2020’s. I myself yearn for a simpler life, with less smart appliances, AI-infused into every technology, and everything electric or battery powered. Sometimes I prefer more analog means. While there are many, many things there were severely lacking in 1996, and many things that have vastly improved since then, there’s a comfort in sitting back and watching the 1990’s fashion, corded landlines, brick computers, and talk of Y2K.

Sabrina may be just a classic 90’s sitcom with fuzzy graphics and an animatronic cat, but it provides a type of comfort and certainty that cannot be achieved in modern sitcoms filled with iPhones and talk of dating apps.

Netflix’s Wednesday Hypes Expectations, Sticks the Landing

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★ ★ ★ ★

With much hype and anticipation, it’s no easy feat to stick the landing for an overhyped show plastered across everyone’s social media feeds. Even for a pessimist of the show, it impresses with its finger on the modern age while making timeless callbacks to the classics. The mixture of humor and eerie lends itself well to the character and the well-known Addams Family.

While the season took a moment to find its footing, after episode two it had settle firmly into the funny, eerie, teen detective show it claimed to be. Although it wasn’t initially apparent this was the genre it wanted for itself. Many reviews and recommendations of the show made it out to be much creepier and never quite gave away any details of the actual plot of the show. I’ll make it clear here, it’s an introvert outcast finding her way in a school for outcasts by solving a few murders, gaining a loyal following around her, and looking at her own family’s past. While she may have a dark sense of humor, the show itself isn’t really dark, creepy, or scary. No jump scares, and not many trigger warnings come to mind.

The main fallacy in the show is everyone’s obsession with Wednesday. For someone who insists on not wanting or needing friends and being altogether mean to everyone around her, no one seems to take the hint. Some characters go so far as stalking her, giving her surprise gifts she is uninterested in and actively dislikes. Her constant rejection of any romantic advances somehow are unclear to the many parties interested, which becomes honestly uncomfortable at times. Then when she does show some interest, it is wholly unclear if she is doing it out of curiosity or actual self-interest.

Enid’s character is the most pleasant surprise of the show. Her constant communicate and candor in difficult situations is something to inspire viewers. And while the character of Ajax is rather one-dimensional, there is some room for interesting character development in the future.

Overall, Tim Burton delivers in his usual style, although audiences expecting something more creepy and disturbing may be left disappointed. We can surely expect a second season, as this is Netflix and the show has been in the top 10 in multiple countries for a few weeks.