What I'm Watching: M3GAN, Mayfair Witches, Velma, and More

Alexandra Daddario, Mayfair Witches, AMC

Here’s everything I watched this week, and what I thought about it:

The TV shows:

• I’ve been savoring Bob’s Burgers for years now, watching it a lot slower than any other show in my rotation because I only put on episodes when I need a low-stakes pick-me-up. I just finally finished season 10, and as is often the case with this animated sitcom, I was touched by how sweet and encouraging the parents-kid relationships in the Belcher family are. Particularly, in this season there’s an episode about Louise and her dad bonding over bathroom anxiety that’s way more heartfelt than I ever thought a story about poop could be.
• In the race to fill in as much of my Critics Choice TV ballot as possible, I tried to catch up on CBS’ Ghosts this week. I’m still not particularly far into the series, but so far I’m pretty endeared to its cast of spirits and the couple whose mansion home they haunt. I’ve heard this show is excellent, so I’ll definitely make sure to watch the rest of it even after voting has closed.
• Meanwhile, AMC’s would-be companion series to Interview with the Vampire, Mayfair Witches, is not particularly great. The show starts with a strong pilot episode centered on Alexandra Daddario’s character, a neurosurgeon who discovers she’s part of a witchy legacy, but it loses steam quickly and is weirdly listless overall. I’ll drop my full review in here next week, but the first five episodes really didn’t do it for me.
• I also tried to give HBO Max’s Velma, the very adult animated comedy reimagining of Scooby-Doo a try. The Mindy Kaling-led show starts next week, yet has already inspired some nay-sayers based on the very concept. As a lifelong Scooby-Doo fan, though, I think variety is the spice of this franchise and I was totally ready to love this. Except, folks, it turns out it’s bad. Cruel, surprisingly off-color, and all-around unlikeable, it barely has anything in common with its namesake, but I think it also wouldn’t be good even if it dropped the Scooby-Doo association and was a wholly unrelated show. I rarely tap out of screeners early, but so far I’ve barely been able to sit through two episodes.
• I didn’t think there was anything I might dislike as much as Velma this week, but the HBO standup special Nikki Glaser: Good Clean Filth gave it a run for its money. This hour-long riff on all the parts of sex women should hate and how to get a man to marry you (also, incest?) was nominated for a Critics Choice Award, and I truly do not understand why. Love yourself by skipping this mess and watching any of the other standup specials I’ve mentioned in this newsletter over the past two months instead.

The movies:

• Luckily, I was able to wash out the bad taste from some of the above titles with an excellent first film watch of the year. I finally caught Alan J. Pakula’s Watergate classic All the President’s Men, and really loved it! As a journalist, I admired the film’s entertaining but straightforward take on journalism; it trusts viewers to get into the minutiae of the characters’ jobs and to find them thrilling, and we totally do. With modern journalism fragmented and disempowered by fringe political interests and misinformation, and with presidential scandals distressingly normalized, this one’s arguably more vital today than ever before.
• Reader, I also got to see M3GAN this week. That’s right: the wacky deadpan horror flick in which a killer android doll breaks into song and dances down hallways — when she’s not terrorizing anyone who looks at her bestie wrong. It’s exactly what it sounds like in the best way, and a very fun one to watch in theaters, too. Oh, and I also wrote a bit about how killer robot stories are more timely than ever.

Odds and ends:

• My list of the best 15 TV shows of 2022 for Film School Rejects is finally here. Sometimes I get burnt out by the time I write this, but this year I didn’t, and I’m really proud of every word of it. It’s worth noting that I whittled down these 15 choices from roughly 100 different shows that I watched in the past year.
• I can’t talk about The Last of Us for a little while longer (not that I’ve had a countdown going for weeks or anything, ha), but I can tell anyone who loves the masterpiece video game and is eager to check out the HBO show that I love this feature about the series from The Hollywood Reporter, and I love this silly little interview with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey in which they fully sound like a real-life Ellie and Joel. Stay tuned to find out what I do and don’t love about the show itself.
• I also really dug this piece from Vanity Fair about a specific type of perfectionist archetype that Allison Williams has cornered the market on in recent years. I think the “Allison” goes back way further than the late-‘90s movie the author posits it originated from (she reminds me of Margaret from M*A*S*H, for one!) but I still thought this was a great read.

What were your first watches of the year? I hope they were better than some of mine!