What I'm Watching: Blindspotting, The Super Mario Bros Movie, A Brooke Shields Documentary, and More

The Super Mario Bros Movie, Universal Pictures

Here’s the rundown on everything I watched and wrote about this week:

The shows:

• I don’t really actively follow many channels on YouTube, but Watcher, the project by 3/4ths of the folks who brought us Buzzfeed Unsolved and Worth It, is a rare exception. Watcher’s shows are all delightful, but there’s none I love as much as Weird Wonderful World, a quirky and hilarious travelogue-style series that hasn’t aired new episodes in close to three years – until this week! The show came back for a special Montana-set one-off episode that has all the zany spirit of the original. You can watch it here or read more about why I love the show here.
• Blindspotting is back on Starz soon, and I hope people will show up for this underdog series, which has a strong voice and a whole lot of heart and humor. I have a full review to come, but for now I’ll say that season 2 marches to the beat of its own drum while continuing the Oakland-set story of a tough, loving woman (Jasmine Cephas Jones) attempting to raise her son while her husband (Rafael Casal) is incarcerated. You don’t have to watch the 2018 film of the same name to get into this spinoff series, but you should, because it’s amazing.
• I’m back writing at The Playlist for the first time in a while, reviewing Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields. This two-part docuseries (which is basically just a feature-length documentary chopped in two) does a great job exploring the surreal life of the actress and model, who has been aggressively objectified by the public since childhood. It’s a wide-ranging and thoughtful doc, although I was struck by the obvious friction between the way Shields explains her own history (particularly the exploitative aspects) and the much darker way archival footage remembers it.