What I'm Watching: Invincible, Theater Camp, No Hard Feelings, and More

Invincible, Prime Video

Here’s a quick rundown on everything I watched, read, and wrote about last week:

The shows:

• In a strange turn of events, I spent one night this week looking up quirky old Christmas specials and shorts with my partner. This led to us watching the 1973 special The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas, which is conceptually adorable despite the mush-mouthed lead voice performance by one of the Smothers Brothers, as well as the Russian short film The Insects’ Christmas, from 1912. That one’s an enchanting bit of movie magic, but also has some creepy taxidermy going on. As a kid I ended up with a VHS box set that included a weird and somewhat ridiculous special called Blue Toes The Christmas Elf, which I could not convince my partner to rewatch with me. Anyone else out there have some odd holiday special memories?
• I caught the first couple episodes of Eugene Levy’s The Reluctant Traveler on Apple TV+ this week, and while I loved the travel portion of the non-fiction show starring the famed comedian, I was less taken by the “reluctant” bit. Levy’s neurotic skepticism over even the most basic of outdoor adventures gets old very quickly, but it seems to come from a genuine place – he says he’s never been camping or fishing before the first episode. The biggest shock of the series is that the spry actor is somehow 76 years old, a revelation that makes some of his bolder exercises in the show feel pretty cheerworthy.
• I totally forgot to mention Invincible last week, which actually isn’t surprising given how meh the first part of the new season is without the subversiveness of season one’s Omni-Man plot. The voice cast rocks, and it’s pretty faithful to the comics, but is adherence to the source material always a good thing? Here’s my review.