My friend Myke Cole is on TV again, this time on the Discovery Channel’s CONTACT, in which he, Mike Livingston, Sarah Cruddas, Nick Karnaze, Kawa Mawlayee, and Paul Beban, go hunting for answers to the question “have extraterrestrials made contact with humankind?”

This show is a LOT of fun. I did some fan art after episode one (before Paul and Kawa were introduced) and while I don’t actually expect the crew to find aliens to autopsy, they’re doing a fine job of making the case for alien visitation VERY hard to refute.

If I have a complaint, it’s that the show isn’t giving enough time to the asking of properly skeptical questions. That might be a choice made in the editing bay, however, because in my personal interactions with Myke, and my online interactions with Mike and Sarah, I get the impression that they’re very critical thinkers.

Not the sorts of people to hunt flying saucers with butterfly nets. My caricature does them a terrible disservice.

CONTACT airs on Wednesday nights on the Discovery Channel, and is available to cable subscribers for streaming on Discovery Go. 

Amazon’s Good Omens miniseries is a rare thing. Exceedingly rare. So rare, in fact, that I can’t off the top of my head name another thing like it, though I’m certain others must exist. It is a TV show which is as good as the great book from which it was adapted.

There have been plenty of TV shows which failed to live up to the brilliance of their namesake novels, and more than a few which have outshone the prose from which they stemmed. And of course there are countless programs which reached equilibrious mediocrity with their so-so source material.

Good Omens, however, is brilliant in both mediums. The book, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, is a classic of modern literature. The new miniseries from Amazon is every bit as artful. It plays with the form enough to surprise us, but not so much as to alienate the audience. It subverts some expectations, exceeds others, and will someday serve well as a master class in “how to turn a book into a TV show.”

It’s a far better piece of work than the fan art it inspired from me, but that didn’t even slow me down.

UPDATE: this review stands, but scroll to the bottom for my second-viewing reactions. 

I wanted to love the new live-action series The Tick, but as of this writing I only kind of like it.

I’ll lead with this: the 2001 series, starring Patrick Warburton, is my definitive Tick. The sheer Warburtonlessness of the 2017 series is a hurdle that could only have been cleared if Peter Serafinowicz (playing The Tick) was allowed to go full Warburton in his delivery of the lines.

Clearly, my standard is not a fair one for judging this particular series, most especially because the creator of the characters, Ben Edlund, is involved in this project and wrote the first two episodes. Also, it’s completely unfair to ask an actor to be more like an actor who wouldn’t or couldn’t take the part.

2017’s The Tick, now streaming free on Amazon Prime, does give us a satisfying amount of superhero action. I like this much more than the 2001 Tick’s “noises off” gags where we can only hear the fight. And the fights are funny! Well done!

My biggest “fair” gripe, then, is Arthur. We spend six episodes—the entire first season—on what is essentially his origin story. It begins with Arthur as a very sad, broken, PTSD-suffering shell of a young man. To my eye it aims at dark comedy, and ends up joylessly gritty. As first episodes go, it’s not really “best foot forward.” By episode three we begin to pull out of that humorless place, but that’s an episode and a half too late.

(This is probably going to put me in a bad way with hard-core Tick fans, because the episodes I liked the least were the ones written by the man who created the characters to begin with.)

Episodes five and six pulled the whole shebang out of its slump, and I enjoyed them quite a bit. To me they feel like the true beginning of the series. They’re also the last two episodes of the currently available season, making them quite a bit less satisfying. The show stops just as it starts to get good.

Update: Second Viewing

So… I watched it a second time and it was *much* better. Arthur’s character arc became less miserable, The Tick’s characterization became fixed as the right one, and I no longer have any misgivings recommending it to people. Familiarity bleeds contempt? Dunno.

I don’t watch much TV. We don’t have cable. If a program gets good reviews from my friends, I’ll pick it up on Amazon Prime, or I’ll wait until it hits Netflix. Sometimes I’ll buy DVDs and Blu-Rays.

My friend Myke Cole, whose books I’ve plugged in blog posts of yore¹, is featured in a reality TV program from CBS called “Hunted.” (Episode 1 is currently free to stream from CBS.²) Reality TV is pretty much my least favorite form of TV, but Myke is awesome so a gave it a shot.

No regrets. None.

A team of investigators, of which Myke is a part, break out all the tools of their trades to track down nine two-person teams of runners, who are playing the part of fugitives, with a $250k prize awaiting them if they can stay hidden for 28 days. We follow some of these teams each week, and each episode thus far has had at least one capture in it.

I have no idea what the actual mechanics are behind this game, but the tools and skills on display are the real deal. It’s a lot of fun to watch, and it’s entertaining to wonder how long you’d make it before Myke tracks your “untraceable” burner phone from a convenience store receipt and a traffic camera. (Answer: I can remain hidden for at least three meals if you give me a 1-hour head start. That’s probably it.)

Here’s the thing: The camera loves Myke. Several times during the first two episodes I noticed that shots were framed to include Myke in the background for no other reason than to make the shot look better. The costuming department is dressing him in t-shirts made of little more than paint and hard living, and I am forced to concede that not only is my friend Myke a fine human person and an outstanding writer, he looks really, really good on TV³.

¹ Here, here, and here. No yore was harmed in the reposting of these links.

² We’ve subscribed to the show via Amazon Prime, which is my least favorite part of this whole thing. Their digital delivery of HD is full of MPG artifacts that I never see from NetFlix. I’ll take MPG artifacts over commercials, but it stings to do that after spending actual real money on HD.

³That paragraph won’t embarrass Myke. His already-thick skin has been hardened under regular abrasion provided by his friend and mine, Sam Sykes, on Twitter. The Sam and Myke show (as I like to call it) is worth following: @MykeCole and @SamSykesSwears.