My 2023 Youtube Playlist

My yearly Youtube playlist is mostly made up of media ephemera that's difficult to categorize, and the only thing they really have in common is a strong musical element. Still, I think that they're worth recommending and writing about. This batch includes old variety show segments, deleted scenes, tie-in music videos, award show performances, and oddball musical numbers worth revisiting.

Mean Green Mother From Outer Space - Levi Stubbs sings this nominated song from "Little Shop of Horrors" at the 1987 Academy Awards.  Alan Menken wrote it specifically for the movie, so it was eligible, but it lost to "Take My Breath Away" from "Top Gun." 

Chuck E. Cheese - I have a fascination with weird pop acts from the '80s, so this 2022 Saturday Night Live sketch was catnip for me.   Bowen Yang and Benedict Cumberbatch appear as the synthpop duo Reflection Denied, filling in for the busted animatronics.  The song is legitimately fabulous and Cumberbatch's falsetto chorus is joyously absurd.  I have not been able to confirm who wrote this thing, but I will not give up the search.  

The Reindeer - Jim Henson's Muppets guest on Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall in 1965.  This was the first appearance of The Reindeer, a quintet of fuzzy Santa's helpers who were still a work in progress.  Eventually they'd show up on other programs with ears and noses and more Christmas themed hijinks.  However, I love this first appearance, especially for the little exchange with Jim at the end.  

Bosom Buddies - Angela Lansbury and Bea Arthur perform this number from "Mame" at the 1987 Tony Awards.  The lyrics are a little dated, but the leading ladies are immortal.  

Christine (Official Music Video) - Did you know that John Carpenter composed the scores to many of his beloved horror movies?  To celebrate the 2017 release of an anthology of his movie themes, Carpenter got to put together an official music video for the score of "Christine," which he cameos in as the driver.  It's also worth checking out some of Carpenter's non-score music, and their respective music videos.  

I Want To Be Evil - Eartha Kitt appears on the Swedish variety show "Kaskad" in 1962, singing as only Eartha Kitt can.  For an alternate version, check out Chiwetel Ejiofor's drag performance of this number in "Kinky Boots."

When I Grow Up - Tim Minchin and three of the Matildas from the "Matilda" stage musical  perform on Conan in 2015.  I couldn't find a clip with just the performance, so you'll just have to sit through Conan's interview with Minchin first.  

Bells and Whistles - Jane Krakowski plays the lawyer in the second season of "Schmigadoon!," which is patterned off of "Chicago."  That makes this a light spoof of Billy Flynn's "Razzle Dazzle" number, but Billy didn't have to dance in the courtroom in heels!

Clair de Lune - This lovely sequence set to Debussy's "Clair de Lune" was planned to be part of the original 1940 "Fantasia," but cut for time.  The animation was rescored and used in the "Blue Bayou" sequence from "Make Mine Music," but the original version was aired as part of a "Wonderful World of Color" episode in 1966.  It's available as an extra on several of the "Fantasia" home media releases.  

In Dreams - And finally, here's Harry Dean Stanton lip syncing to Roy Orbison's "In Dreams," providing a break from the violence in David Lynch's "Blue Velvet."  We miss you, Harry. 

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"Ozark," Years One and Two

Moderate spoilers ahead.

The first season finale of "Ozark" is easily its best episode so far, featuring a major surprise twist and setting up the character dynamics for the next season.  It's smart, it's nervy, and it's very well executed.  The show has proved consistently entertaining and easy to watch over its first twenty episodes.  However, I wouldn't put it up there with "Breaking Bad" or "The Americans," or other similar prestige shows yet, because it hasn't shown much interest in digging very deeply into the psyches of its characters.  It's more interested in the tricky twists and turns of its plotting, which is great, but I feel that the show could be more - especially considering the level of talent involved.

I appreciate that "Ozark" is very brisk for a crime show, and never lets the momentum flag, but I found myself having to suspend disbelief much more often than I was expecting.  New problems are always cropping up that Marty, Wendy, or Ruth manage to solve or at least significantly delay after an episode or two, usually through elaborate manipulations or dealmaking.  Sure, it's a nice change of pace that nobody seems to be able to keep a secret for more than two episodes, and Wendy not taking a backseat to Marty is great, but we're still operating in a world of wild coincidences and spectacle taking precedence over common sense.  Jonah is practically a comic book character, a fourteen year old boy who has taken to money laundering like a pro, and seems to be on the verge of becoming a violent enforcer too.  It makes his older sister Charlotte, who makes the kind of dumb mistakes that a real teenager would make, look incompetent by comparison.  She's the family's voice of reason, but is portrayed as such a petulant annoyance that it's been difficult to sympathize with her very legitimate concerns.  The irony is that "Ozark" has more interesting and engaging female characters than most similar thriller shows combined.       

Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, and Julia Garner continue to be the show's anchors.  "Ozark" boasts a very deep bench when it comes to onscreen talent.  Adding to the pile of secondary characters mentioned in the previous post, we have Ruth's felon father Cade Langmore (Trevor Long), her uncle Russ (Marc Menchaca), and Russ's teenage sons Wyatt (Charlie Tahan) and Three (Carson Holmes).  Then there are the much more dangerous, heroin producing Snells, led by Jacob (Peter Mullan) and Darlene (Lisa Emery).  In the second season, we also meet the Navarro cartel's formidable lawyer, Helen Pierce (Janet McTeer).  Many of them don't get to stick around for long, because that's the nature of the show, but nearly everyone gets to make a memorable impression.  Right now Emery's Darlene is the character I'm most impressed with, since there aren't many female villains on television that feel so viscerally dangerous.  There's also  Harris Yulin's Buddy, who makes for a great wildcard.   And it's always great to see Peter Mullan and Janet McTeer in anything.  

Ruth Langmore remains the show's best character, however, and it's clear why Julia Garner got so much attention for her performance.  "Ozark" is at its best when it's following Ruth's struggles to balance her loyalty to Cade with her loyalty to Marty.  Watching her bounce between two terrible father figures, while also doggedly looking after Wyatt this season, is way more compelling than watching the Byrdes being terrible parents to their kids (and several others) and letting their family disintegrate as they struggle to keep the cartel happy.  Marty and Ruth's relationship is especially poignant, because it's clearly not going to end well, and everything that Marty is offering her is a trap, but Ruth can't see it yet.  I've already been spoiled for how her storyline ends, and I'm bracing for it.      

 

Most of my dissatisfaction with the show probably comes from my expectations of it being too high.  "Ozark" was a critical darling in its early years, and positioned as a successor to many of the prestige programs I've enjoyed.  However, it simply isn't interested in being the kind of more nuanced, headier drama that I prefer - at least not consistently.  I expect that the remainder of the series will go down easier, once I've recalibrated a bit for this fact.  The things that it does well - colorful characters, ratcheting tension, and explosive confrontation scenes - it does very well.  And it's also been good at self-correcting, so I hold out hope for Charlotte becoming a better character by the end of "Ozark."  However, I'm glad that the show is only four seasons long and reportedly ended on its own terms.     

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"Scream" (2022) and "Scream VI"

I haven't kept up with the "Scream" movies after seeing the original, and don't have much nostalgia for this franchise.  However, I noticed that the newest entries featured Jenna Ortega and Jack Quaid, and it had been an awfully long time since I'd seen Neve Campbell or Courtney Cox in anything, so I decided to take a look.  

I immediately remembered why I didn't much enjoy the first movie.  "Scream" has always been a traditional slasher series, which means we spend a lot of time watching attractive people running around and getting killed off in gruesome ways.  There are jump scares and big reveals that require a lot of suspension of disbelief.  Ghostface is also one of those killers who won't shut up - their whole schtick is that they spend at least as much time taunting their victims as they do trying to cause them physical harm.  "Scream" distinguished itself by being the franchise that was self-aware, but these movies have gotten so meta that they're in danger of eating themselves. 

The 2022 "Scream," which I will refer to as "Scream V" to avoid further confusion, serves as a reboot/sequel or "requel," as the movie puts it.  Our main characters are a pair of sisters, Samantha Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) and Tara (Jenna Ortega), who find themselves being targeted by a new Ghostface.  Their friend group includes characters played by Jack Quaid, Dylan Minette, Mikey Madison, Kyle Gallner, Jasmin Savoy Brown, and Mason Gooding.  They seek help from the survivors from the first movie - Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), her ex husband Dewey Riley (David Arquette), and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell).   It turns out that Samantha and Tara have ties to the original Ghostface, Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), which may be tied to the new killer's motive.

The meta elements mostly come from a horror movie series that exists within the "Scream" universe called "Stab," which many of the characters are fans of and discuss constantly.  There's endless monologuing about various tropes and filmmaking sins, to the point where it stops being fun and gets very tedious.  However, the writers do play fair and have the extreme fandom around "Stab" tie into the motives of the killer.  So the villain was the audience all along!  The best parts of "Scream V" are when the material is actually played straight, and we have some nice moments with Dewey and Gale reconnecting.  The actual thrills and kills don't do much for me, though I like that Ghostface's primary female targets are more aggressive and willing to fight than the scream queens of older horror movies.

"Scream VI" is a step down, taking the survivors from "Scream V" and moving the action to New York City.  This allows for a big attack sequence on a subway train, but otherwise doesn't factor into the story much.  Hayden Panetierre, Samara Weaving, Tony Revolori, and Dermot Mulroney show up, and some of them are red herrings, and some of them aren't.  Courtney Cox is the only actor from the original "Scream" who bothers to make an appearance.  Again, unstable "Stab" fans are behind the newest round of Ghostface killings, but the meta is thankfully reduced to only one character, who keeps reminding everyone else that nobody is safe in horror franchise movies now, not even the main characters.  There's also one good in-joke, where Panetierre being an FBI Agent is called out as being highly dubious.         

I don't think I'll watch future installments of the "Scream" franchise.  These two latest installments aren't bad for what they are, but I'm not getting much entertainment value out of what they offer.  Still, credit should go where credit is due.  I find the self-aware bits mostly grating, but at least the fundamentals of pretty girls fending off stabby creeps are pretty solid.  The movies also understand what they are, and never try to get too full of themselves, the way those last two "Halloween" movies did.  "Scream" is very much a franchise that is ongoing, and has consistently featured some good talent and a good attitude about its place in pop culture.  It's the only slasher series left that really feels like it's trying to stay current, even if it's not always successful.

 

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Back to "The Baby-Sitters Club"

Mild spoilers ahead.

"The Baby-Sitters Club" is back in my life again.  I read a good chunk of the book series, about a group of junior high girls who run a baby-sitting business, when it was first being released in the '80s and '90s.  Now the books being re-released as graphic novels has sparked a new wave of interest.   I decided to take a look at the Netflix "Baby-Sitters Club" series, which ran for two seasons, and racked up a slew of good notices.  I'd never seen any of the "Baby-Sitters" adaptations from the 90s, so all I had to compare it to were the books.

The first season consists of ten half-hours, each episode loosely based on one of the books in the series.  Enterprising Kristy Thomas (Sophie Grace) has the great idea to start a baby-sitting business, and invites her friends Mary Anne Spier (Malia Baker) and Claudia Kishi (Momona Tamada) to join.  Soon  new girls Stacy McGill (Shay Rudolph) and Dawn Schafer (Xochitl Gomez) are added to the roster.  The girls work through friendship troubles, family spats, and school worries together, while bringing in the childcare money.  There's a lot of emphasis on the supporting adults in many of these stories, including Kristy's strong-minded mother Elizabeth (Alicia Silverstone) her boyfriend Watson (Mark Feuerstein), Claudia's beloved grandmother Mimi (Takayo Fischer), Mary Anne's strict father Richard (Mark Evan Jackson), and Dawn's free-spirited mother Sharon (Jessica Elaina Eason).

The show is great.  I love that it's for an age group that doesn't get enough media - preteen girls who are too old for kids' series but too young for the more adult ones.  I love that the old stories have retained their basic shapes, but have been updated for the 2020s (no texting on the job).  The young actresses are excellent, and the characters are just as memorably imperfect and loveable as I remember.  I like some of the changes, like cutting down the romances and putting them into more appropriate context.  I'm cooler on some of the others, like adding a lot more drama.  For instance, the "Kristy's Big Day" wedding episode sees Kristy get into a fight with her mother over a dress, reconcile at the last minute before the honeymoon, and experience her first period.  None of these things happen in the book, "Kristy's Big Day," where the big crisis was Kristy having to rally the club to babysit fourteen kids on short notice.      

It's a little ironic that the first thing cut out of most of these "Baby-Sitters Club" stories is the babysitting.  I was surprised that the show never really addresses how babysitting has changed since the 80s, except for acknowledging online apps and much higher fees.  The focus stays almost entirely on the girls navigating relationships with each other and their parents.  To be fair, that was a big part of the fun of the books  - there were always mild soap opera dramatics going on between babysitting gigs.  The series just turns up the juice a little more and speeds things up, so Mary Anne's father and Dawn's mother date, break up, and get back together over the course of about six episodes.  When Claudia's grandmother has her stroke, it also involves flashbacks to her time in an internment camp during WWII.  The season ends with a big two-parter where everyone spends summer vacation together, based on one of the periodic "Baby-Sitters Club: Super Special" books for big event stories.

So, as a fan of the books, I can fully endorse the series.  Would today's kids connect with it though?  I don't see why not.  As much as I like some of the adult performers, the show is at its best when it's sticking to the POVs of the girls.  They're a good collection of personality types, from sheltered Mary Anne to boy-crazy Stacey to activist Dawn to artsy Claudia, who will always be the coolest.  Sophia Grace, however, is definitely the strongest performer as Kristy, who is going through the roughest transition out of everyone, and best embodies all the woes of a thirteen-year-old who is ready to take on the world - but still can't stay up late on school nights.

 

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My Favorite Mira Nair Film

The best Mira Nair film is undeniably "Salaam Bombay!," her heartbreaking first feature about street children eking out a sad existence in Bombay.  It's what put her in the spotlight, as one of the first female Indian directors to enjoy international acclaim, leading to a long and eclectic career.  However, "Salaam Bombay!" doesn't have much of what I've come to enjoy most about Mira Nair films - moving immigrant narratives, sensual romance, and lush visuals.  Also, it doesn't have a young Denzel Washington setting the screen ablaze.

It takes a while for Washington to show up in "Mississippi Masala," Nair's second film, which opens with the expulsion of South Asians from Uganda in 1972.  Jay and Kinnu (Roshan Seth and Sharmila Tagore) and their young daughter Mina are among the refugees, who eventually end up in rural Mississippi many years later, running a motel.  The South Asian community is small, but well established, and Mina (Sarita Choudhury), now in her twenties, has adjusted to life in the U.S.  While her father continues to petition the Ugandan government to reclaim his seized property, Mina falls in love with an African-American man named Demetrius (Washington), who owns a carpet cleaning business.

The Ugandan exiles are a fascinating group - ethnic Indians who often had no ties to India, were forcibly displaced by Idi Amin's regime, and ended up scattered around the globe.  The community in Mississippi coexists uneasily alongside their mostly African-American neighbors, scraping by in typical immigrant fashion.  As committed as the film is to exploring both groups of residents, and putting an interracial relationship front and center, it doesn't hide the difficulties that come with it.  Mina and Demetrius immediately meet with hostility when their relationship is discovered, especially from Mina's parents.  Staying with each other means having to cut ties and leave, another expulsion driven by complicated motivations.  

Hollywood doesn't make enough romantic films anymore, and even fewer that are interested in being really sexy.  "Mississippi Masala" benefits from Choudhury and Washington's onscreen chemistry, but even more from Mira Nair's understanding of what to do with it.  90% of their courtship involves no dialogue, just watching the two of them physically and emotionally connect.  There are several points, including the end credits sequence, where Nair just lets her incredibly photogenic actors exist in the frame together, reacting to each other and enjoying each other's physical presence.  I was caught off guard by the sex scene, because it had been so long since I'd seen a halfway decent one in a major film.  It's not even a particularly erotic or explicit scene, but it stands out because it gets across how much both participants enjoy the act.   

Nair shot the film exactly where it takes place, both in Uganda and in Greenwood, Mississippi.  This lends a realism and authenticity to the film that is rare, and extremely effective.  The immersiveness is instantaneous in each locale, which is vital since the editing sometimes cuts quickly from one to the other, usually for flashbacks and memories.   The juxtaposition of Jay's narrative, which sees him grappling with the effects of an injustice that played out on such a historic scale, with Mina and Demetrious's much smaller, intimate romance, works very well.  It helps to give context to the behaviors and the biases we see in play without being too obvious or explicit, heightens the generational and social divides, and brings the parallels into sharper focus.   

  

Going through Mira Nair's filmography this year was one of the best film experiences I've had in a while.  She has such a strong body of work, and has such a distinct visual style and point of view.  I especially admire her willingness to tackle different cultural experiences, spending a considerable amount of time with Demetrious's family and friends in "Mississippi Masala," even as we see the story unfold mostly from Mina's point of view.  Many of Nair's films are ultimately celebrations of family and love and culture, some very personal and specific, but all wonderfully universal onscreen.  

What I've Seen - Mira Nair

Salaam Bombay! (1988)

Mississippi Masala (1991)

The Perez Family (1995)

Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996)

Monsoon Wedding (2001)

Hysterical Blindness (2002)

Vanity Fair (2004)

The Namesake (2006)

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012)

Queen of Katwe (2016)

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"Biosphere" and "They Cloned Tyrone"

My entry point into a lot of different mediums was science fiction.  However, occasionally it takes some digging to find the good stuff, and often the science fiction movies that I enjoy most are the weird, little-seen, independent and straight-to-streaming films that never seem to get much attention.  I decided to pair up "Biosphere" and "They Cloned Tyrone" for a double review, because they both fall into this category, and they both run the risk of being overlooked this year.

"Biosphere" is "The Twilight Zone" via mumblecore, starring and co-written by Mark Duplass, with Mel Elyn co-writing and directing.  It takes place entirely within a biosphere dome, inhabited by the last two people on Earth - BIlly (Duplass), the former president who was probably responsible for the apocalypse, and Ray (Sterling K. Brown), his childhood friend, former advisor, and the scientist who built the biosphere.  When we first meet them, they've been stuck inside the biosphere for a while, sticking to a careful regime of exercise, chores, and video games.  Everything outside the dome appears to be lifeless, with omnipresent clouds obscuring the sun.  Inside, the delicate ecosystem is threatened when their last female fish dies. 

I was never much one for mumblecore movies, finding their rough production values, rambling narratives, and focus on difficult relationship quandaries not very conducive to being entertaining. I respect the creative impulse behind this style of filmmaking, and it's clearly given us some invaluable talents like the Duplasses, but after a few attempts I decided it wasn't for me.  Though aesthetically pretty conventional, "Biosphere" tackles many of the same themes as a typical mumblecore production - I immediately thought of Lynn Shelton's "Humpday" - with the science fiction allowing some ideas to be taken to new extremes.  At its core, "Biosphere" is about charting the changes in a relationship, brought on by environmental pressures and lack of options.  When faced with being the last two people on earth, Billy and Ray find themselves changing drastically in order to survive - not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.  The scripting is messy, and feels unfinished, cutting off at what's essentially a cliffhanger.  However, the performances are good, deftly avoiding the campier possibilities while presenting an honest, often uncomfortable look at sex and gender dynamics.          

I admit that it took me an embarrassingly long time after I'd finished watching "Biosphere" to realize that the relationship that I'd been treating as totally theoretical, because it came about through events that don't typically occur in nature, wasn't actually theoretical at all.  There's a big, honking, obvious social allegory right in the middle of the movie that I'd completely missed, because I was so used to certain tropes and gender dynamics in science-fiction stories.  I take this as a sign that the movie worked as it was intended.  Despite the shoestring budget and the script issues, I bought into the emotional reality of the characters, and can't help hoping that somewhere, out there, in whatever insane, contrived existence they may inhabit, that those two can come out okay.

 

Now, on to "They Cloned Tyrone," which is "The Twilight Zone" by way of blaxploitation.  This movie is not made for me.  I had to turn on the subtitling to catch a lot of the dialogue, and even then I found certain exchanges impenetrable.  I was, however, very entertained from the outset.  Fontaine (John Boyega), is a drug dealer who lives in a run-down, crime-riddled, predominantly African-American neighborhood called the Glen.  Along with the local pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), and one of his hos, Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), Fontaine discovers that the Glen is built on top of an underground laboratory full of scientists, who are running sinister experiments and tests on the inhabitants above.  As you might guess from the title, Fontaine and several of his neighbors turn out to be clones.  

The movie is set in a retro fantasy vision of a '70s blaxploitation world, with production design and costuming to match, so I was expecting "They Cloned Tyrone" to be more pulpy and violent.  We do get to the big showdown and fight scenes eventually, but director Juel Taylor, who also co-wrote the film with Tony Rettenmaier, is more interested in the satire.  The banter in this film is the best thing about it, full of great lines and clever turns of phrase that the A-list cast has a field day with.  The performances are a ton of fun, leaning into the comedic stereotypes of the genre, and then happily subverting them.  Jamie Foxx as the fast-talking Slick is hysterical, and pairs nicely with Teyonah Parris as Yo-Yo the badass ho.  As for John Boyega, he's the heart of the movie.  "Tyrone" wouldn't work half as well without Boyega giving some real soul to Fontaine's hero journey.  Also keep an eye out for Kiefer Sutherland and David Alan Grier in smaller roles.

There have been several similar pieces of media this year like  "I'm a Virgo" and "The Blackening," that have used genre conventions and absurdity to poke fun at black culture.  "They Cloned Tyrone" is happy to throw around references to "A Clockwork Orange," and "The Hollow Man," alongside its references to "Superfly" and "Foxy Brown."  And with "Tyrone," we get full on genre-mashing, such as a sequence where we learn how the vast government conspiracy is keeping black folks down through fried chicken, hair products, and the church.  Shortly after, an insurgency is secretly organized through, er,  X-rated activities.  This is a blaxploitation film, remember, and the sex and vulgarity are abundant.  I don't think I got as much out of this as someone more well versed in black culture would, but I had a great time.  It's good to see the revolutionary spirit is still alive and well.  

  

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"The Witcher," Year Three

This is probably the last season of "The Witcher" I'm going to watch, since Henry Cavill is leaving the series, and even with his participation the show is severely hit-or-miss.  Frankly, the worldbuilding was always messy, and I'm bored of  all the various factions that are vying for power and trying to hunt down Ciri.  It's difficult to keep the secondary and minor characters straight, let alone care about them.  At least the narrative's pretty straightforward this year - no jumping around in time, and no annoying roadblocks like mysteriously lost powers or romantic miscommunications stand in the way.  The three main characters, Geralt, Yennefer, and Cirilla, actually get to spend a decent amount of time together being a quasi-family while they're searching the continent for a place to hide away in peace.

Of the eight episodes this year, there were exactly two that I enjoyed: the premiere where this season's story is laid out, and episode six, which sees a destructive attack on the magic academy of Aretuza.  It feels like most of the budget was spent on making these two episodes especially impressive, while the rest are pretty typical fantasy adventuring in the style of old "Hercules" and "Xena" hijinks.  "The Witcher" is obviously more expensive, with more impressive fight choreography and CGI beasties, but its attempts at political intrigue are clumsy, and even the beats of a basic love story between Geralt and Yennefer often seem to be too much for the writers to handle.  The show is better when  characters are reacting to immediate dangers, and at its worst whenever it tries to get us invested in anything else.  There's a lot of time spent on the various mages vying for power, scheming kingdoms, and the whole mess with the elves, and none of it really lands.

The oddest thing about this season is that it doesn't really give the audience a chance to say goodbye to Cavill as Geralt.  Episode six functions as a big climax, but the last two episodes of the season are busy setting up the next season, and leaves us without anything resolved.  The show brings back several characters like Cahir (Eamon Farren) and Dara (Wilson Mbomio) for updates, and introduces a bunch of new players like Milva the archer (Meng'er Zhang) and a new elf commander, Gallatin (Robbie Amell), but none of them are really around long enough to get attached to.  Ciri's progression toward becoming the chosen one is all well and good, including an entire episode of her wandering the desert on a vision quest, but Yennefer's arc has more or less stalled.  Cavill is as charismatic as ever onscreen, but season three doesn't doesn't give him anything new or interesting to play.  The character who actually gets the biggest badass moments and a real endpoint is Tissaia. 

And if Geralt is just spinning his proverbial wheels like this, I understand why Cavill decided to call it quits.  Bad timing has left him without a major franchise, but considering how talented he is, I can't imagine that it'll stay that way for long.  As for his replacement, poor Liam Hmsworth, I understand why he took the job but he's facing a no-win situation. Cavill was too good for "The Witcher" from the beginning, and the show is almost certainly going to capsize without him, unless it lets Anya Chalotra or Freya Allen take over as main character - which it won't.  "The Witcher" is still adapting the Andrez Sapkowski novels, and has four more to go.  

Looking back on the whole series, I can't see much to recommend.  The first season is a moderately fun watch, but the quality has been so up and down for the entire run, and there are so many better alternatives, it's a mistake to get too invested.  As a fan of high fantasy, I'm happy that "The Witcher" got made and found an audience, at least, which may hopefully pave the way for more shows like it.  Cavill left such an impression, though, I expect we'll see a remake in a few years - hopefully made by creatives with a better handle on things than this bunch.

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