My Most Anticipated Television and Web Series of 2024

Only three of the eight series I listed on my last anticipation post actually made it to air in the year I made the post for, but that doesn't bother me much.  The idea here was always to get myself to take a closer look at projects working their way through the production pipeline, and remind myself that there are titles I'm looking forward to.  Still, this time around I'm putting down fewer titles and being a little more careful about timing.

This year in particular is going to see even more scheduling chaos because of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.  The entries below are listed in no particular order, and I'm doing away with my prior rule to limit picks to only one title per streamer or network.  After all, I'm not subscribing to all of these services anymore for the foreseeable future.

True Detective: Night Country (HBO) - Jodie Foster will lead this latest installment of HBO's crime anthology series, centering around an investigation into why all the scientists at an Arctic outpost were found dead.  John Hawks, Christopher Eccleston, and Fiona Shaw are part of the ensemble.  I'm especially interested in the showrunner being Issa Lopez, who made the wonderful "Tigers are Not Afraid" a few years back.  Since this was delayed from 2023, the trailer has already been in circulation for a long while.  

Anansi Boys (Prime) - This one's been in post-production since 2022, so I'm hoping it pops up sometime this year.  Based on a Neil Gaiman novel, and technically part of the "American Gods" universe, this is a fantasy series about a man who discovers that he has a double, as well as family ties to some powerful, and incredibly aggravating magic users.  Malachi Kirby and Delroy Lindo will head an all-star cast.  I'm a Gaiman fan who liked reading "Anansi Boys" much better than "American Gods," and I'm hopeful that this comes off well.

Skeleton Crew (Disney+) - I skipped "Ahsoka" because I wasn't keen on navigating a "Star Wars" show that functioned as a sequel to all the animated series I hadn't watched.  "Skeleton Crew," however, is reportedly designed to be an entry point for younger viewers new to the "Star Wars" universe.  The guys behind "Spider-man: Homecoming" are creating a show about four lost kids just trying to get home, and Jude Law will be in the mix somewhere as a "Force user."  I have no idea who any of the characters are, and neither does anyone else.  Perfect.  

Zero Day (Netflix) - This one had its filming interrupted by the strikes, but is shaping up to be a pretty high profile prestige title.  Described as a limited-series conspiracy thriller about an unfolding world crisis, "Zero Day" follows characters played by Robert DeNiro, Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, and more as they try to untangle the truth about a situation spinning out of control.  The script is co-written by Eric Newman from "Narcos," and Lesli Linka Glatter, best known for her work on "Mad Men" and "Homeland," is directing.  

The New Look (Apple TV+) - Here's an interesting one.  I have no idea if Ben Mendehlsohn playing Christian Dior will work, but I certainly want to see him try.  Juliette Binoche and John Malkovitch appearing in supporting roles as Coco Chanel and Lucien DeLong doesn't hurt either.  The series will focus on efforts to revive the French fashion industry post-WWII.  A first season has completed filming, and a second was planned before the SAG-AFTRA strike delayed it.   

Shogun (FX/Hulu) - James Clavell's popular Japanese historical fiction novel is one of the few properties out there that can actually be accurately described as being like "Game of Thrones," and it sure looks like FX has committed the resources to adapt it properly.  Hiroyuki Sanada is in the role of Toranga, originally played by Toshiro Mifune in the 1980s miniseries.  Justin Marks, formerly of the gone-too-soon "Counterpart," and Rachel Kondo will be showrunning.

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The Best Classic Films I Saw in 2023

In an effort to highlight older films, here are the best films I watched this year that were not released in 2023 or 2022.  I've also disqualified films from the 1940s, because I'll be writing about several of them for Top Ten lists in the next few months.  Entries are unranked and listed below by release date.

Lady Windermere's Fan (1925) - The Ernst Lubitsh directed adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play is less concerned with skewering Victorian moral hypocrisies, and more concerned with touching melodrama.  Also, an awful lot of Wilde's dialogue is lost because this is a silent film.  However, the actors are excellent, especially May McAvoy as the title character, and Lubitch is a deft hand at engineering farce and pathos.  

Havoc in Heaven (1961) - One of the highlights of Chinese animation, created by industry pioneers, the Wan brothers.  The film depicts the early days of the famous Monkey King from "Journey to the West," specifically his rebellion against the Chinese pantheon of gods and demons.  With character designs taking their cues from Peking opera traditions, this set the standard for the many, many adaptations of "Journey to the West" that followed.

Immortal Love (1961) - One of Keisuke Kinoshita's best domestic melodramas, starring Hideko Takamine and Tatsuya Nakadai as a bitter couple who hate each other throughout their long, eventful marriage.  It's a typical love story until it's not, transforming in its second half into this fascinating look at how people cope with disappointments and regrets.  It's also got the best performance I've seen from Nakadai, as the  crippled, self-loathing  husband.

Hollywood Shuffle (1987) - Robert Townsend famously was a struggling actor who observed too many of Hollywood's terrible practices in portraying African-American characters up close.  So, he independently wrote, produced, directed, and starred in this scorching satire of Hollywood from the African-American perspective.  The film often gets by on sheer enthusiasm more than anything else, but the talent of the filmmakers is undeniable.

Salaam Bombay! (1988) - Mira Nair's film debut follows the progress of life in a poor red light district in Bombay, with a special emphasis on the plight of its street children.  The cycles of exploitation, addiction, and vice are especially poignant to witness, as the young hero's hopes are dashed over and over again.  There's a lot of shameless heartstring tugging, but the movie is so well made and so humane in its outlook that I couldn't care less.    

Running on Empty (1988) - River Phoenix had such a fantastic screen presence.  This is the kind of film that could have so easily been maudlin and overdramatic, but between Sidney Lumet's careful direction and Phoenix's performance, the film stays small and intimate and wonderfully personal.  They really don't make films like this anymore, where the characters are allowed to be so wonderfully ordinary in spite of their unique circumstances.

Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991) - A startling reminder that the Material Girl, at the peak of her powers, was a cultural force to be reckoned with.  The provocation was all on purpose, the controversy was the point, and the music still makes me wanna dance.  Madonna herself is often terrible, often admirable, and just so deeply fascinating to watch.  Has there ever been another female pop star who embraced her own notoriety like Madonna?

Like Water for Chocolate (1992) - I want this movie to be better than it is, because I love the story and the characters and the whole magical realist approach to the material so very much.  However, the execution occasionally falls short, and there are points where director Alfonso Arau clearly bit off more than he could chew.  However, when the film works, it's about the most delicious, fantastical, over-the-top romantic cinema you could hope for.

Drag Me to Hell (2009) - It took me a while to warm up to Sam Raimi's charms, which are funnier and sillier than I gave them credit for.  This gleefully heightened supernatural tale is all about leaning into the grossness and the weirdness of the pulp horror.  You can bet our heroine is going to get what's coming to her, and the audience is going to have a great time.  Alison Lohman pretty much disappeared after this film, and it's such a shame.       

The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) - Finally, this is a small, unassuming horror film with a very simple premise, but the participation of Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch make all the difference.  Not many horror movies get me to care as much about the characters before all the terrible things start happening to them.  I didn't expect much from the film, and discovering it this year was one of my better surprises.

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"Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning" and "Sound of Freedom"

I can't remember whether or not I wrote anything about the last "Mission: Impossible" movie that came out in 2018.  I've gotten tired of this franchise, the same way I seem to have gotten tired of all the big action franchises this year.  I predicted that "Dead Reckoning Part One" was going to make a lot of money because it's coming off of Tom Cruise's success with "Top Gun: Maverick" last year.  However, "Dead Reckoning Part One" underperformed, maybe because it was a "Part One," maybe because it picked the wrong release date and got clobbered by Barbenheimer, and maybe because this is the first film where I can finally tell, unmistakably, that Tom Cruise is getting old.

Ethan Hunt certainly isn't slowing down, getting into death-defying chases and fighting countless bad guys.  He goes rogue almost immediately, as the race is on to recover a stolen key that may be the only chance to stop an evil AI called the Entity, and the evil terrorist Gabriel (Esai Morales) who is in league with it.  Ilsa Faust from "Rogue Nation" and "Fallout" is back, but Hunt shares most of the big action set pieces with a thief named Grace (Hayley Attwell), a newcomer who has gotten thoroughly mixed up in the fight over the key.  Other returning actors include Edgar Wright, Ving Rhames, Vanessa Kirby, and Henry Czerny, while new additions include Shea Whigham as Briggs, an intelligence officer trying to hunt down Hunt, and Pom Klementieff as an assassin named Paris.  

I really dislike the character of Ilsa Faust, which I've realized has nothing to do with Rebecca Ferguson, and everything to do with how terribly written Ilsa is, and how every time an interesting female character falls for Ethan Hunt, she becomes boring in a hurry.  The cycle repeats itself here with Grace.  Hayley Attwell is bright and snarky and the best part of the film by far.  And the second Ethan Hunt starts staring at her intensely, and promising that he'll risk everything to keep her safe, you can see her disappearing into the black hole of being his love interest of the moment.  I understand that the "Mission Impossible" movies are trying to distinguish themselves from the James Bond movies, but "Dead Reckoning" is absolutely dire when it comes to romance.  I don't buy for a second that Ethan Hunt is actually in love with any of these women.      

     

Frankly, the only thing that works about this movie is the action.  The opening scenes, with their endless expository scenes, are stilted and dull.  The business with the AI is played straight, and despite the best efforts of talented actors, it all comes off as very silly.  It's only when we get to the first cat-and-mouse sequence in the airport that everything seems to snap into focus, and the movie gets down to the business of being entertaining.  There are two other massive set pieces - a funny one involving a car chase with our heroes in a yellow Fiat, and a multi-stage train infiltration that involves that shot of Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle over a cliff that's been in all the advertisements.  It's wildly impressive stuff, and lives up to the action of any other "Mission: Impossible" installment.

So in the end I felt like I'd gotten my money's worth for the rental fee, but the franchise's formula is stale, and Cruise just can't get away with as much as he used to.  I'm sure he'll be making action movies for decades more - see Liam Neeson and Harrison Ford - but his time with "Mission Impossible" really feels like it's nearing its end.

As for "Sound of Freedom," the heavily fictionalized account of Tim Ballard's highly dubious efforts to combat human trafficking in South America, it's not a terrible movie.  However, it's certainly not very good, either as action or as melodrama, and Ballard has since been outed as a grifter and a fraud.  I feel some acknowledgement of the movie is appropriate, considering how well it did over the summer, but it's going to be better remembered for its unusual marketing tactics and pay-it-forward scheme than anything else.  I decided to tack on this assessment at the end of the "Mission Impossible" review because leading man Jim Caviezel's performance is similar to Tom Cruise's - super intense, unconvincing, and more creepy than anything else.

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"John Adams" is an Achievement

This 2008 HBO miniseries covering the life and times of "John Adams" has been on my "to watch" list for a very long time, and I'm happy I was finally able to make the time for it.  Covering Adams' political career from the early days of the American Revolution, through his journeys in Europe, his presidency, and finally old age, it's an epic in every sense of the word.  Each of the seven episodes runs over an hour, and the cast is full of familiar names.  Front and center are Paul Giamatti as Adams, with Laura Linney as his wife Abigail.  The biggest surprise, however, was discovering that the whole series had been directed by Tom Hooper, only a few years before he made "The King's Speech."

I found "John Adams" a more difficult watch than I was expecting, because it assumes the viewer is already very familiar with all the historical figures in play, and I wasn't as prepared as I should have been.  Also, the episodes are very dense with information, and the language often requires some focus to interpret, especially if you're not familiar with the politics of the era.  I kept being caught off guard when the show would skip ahead in time, sometimes crossing years with a single cut.  This is necessary due to the scope of "John Adams."  The series covers over fifty years, not only of Adams' career, but of early American history and politics.  The famous events like Adams' Presidency and Vice Presidency are covered, but we start in the first episode with Adams' involvement in a court case following the Boston Massacre, where he's taken the unpopular role of representing the British soldiers.  

Pains were clearly taken to present a historically accurate, and largely unvarnished look at life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Though the production design is immaculate, there's not much spectacle on display.  Instead, thanks to Tom Hooper's penchant for often uncomfortably close-up shots, we get a good long look at the effects of harsh weather, constant illnesses, and the unfortunate state of Adams' teeth in later episodes.  It's a little jarring at first, especially if you're only used to the more idealized and sanitized versions of history, but I eventually came to appreciate the degree of immersion.  You really appreciate the dangers presented by things we take for granted like international travel and inoculations.  And seeing the difficult environment the founding fathers operated in makes their accomplishments all the more impressive.   

 

John Adams was the cranky old man of the Founding Fathers, a Boston lawyer of great integrity and intellect who often rubbed other people the wrong way.  Giamatti is the perfect person to play him, both physically and temperamentally.  He easily gets across that Adams is well aware of his faults and his unpopularity, yet sure enough of his own skill and moral fiber to dive into the political arena regardless.  There's an insecurity and self-loathing to his actions at times, but also a relentless drive to fight for his own ideals, backed up by the unwavering support of his loving wife.  Giamatti is great at both the big speeches and the intimate conversations.  Laura Linney as Abigail Adams is thoroughly engaging, matching Giamatti in every scene they share.  She also provides the lion's share of the emotion, especially when faced with the prospect of being separated from her husband for long periods of time.  The famous partnership between Abigail and John forms the backbone of the whole series, and roughly equal time is spent on their home life and their public one.  

 

And it was the depiction of Adams' private life that I wound up liking best.  This is where it feels like the real emotional stakes are, while the Revolution and the founding of the nation are happening far too quickly around them to keep track of.  I especially appreciate that the final episode is entirely devoted to Adams' retirement and old age, marked by several tragedies, and ending in his death.  It's a deeply humane, sobering capper to a miniseries that managed to completely top my expectations for it.  "John Adams" requires some effort, but I found it well worth the time to seek out.

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"Bottoms" Chooses Violence

I spent a lot of last summer guiltily avoiding raunchy comedies starring women.  As much as I enjoy and want to support these filmmakers, raunchy comedies and I just don't get along.  Then came "Bottoms," directed by Emma Seligman and starring Rachel Sennott, and written by both of them.  There were an awful lot of other actors I liked on the cast list too, so I sucked it up and watched the movie. 

Besties PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edibiri) are "ugly, untalented gays," which put them at the bottom of the high school pecking order.  They want to lose their virginities to hot cheerleaders Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber), and come up with the idea to start a women's self-defense club under the sketchy guidance of their teacher Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch).  This attracts a group of other female outcasts - Hazel (Ruby Cruz), Annie (Zamani Wilder), and Sylvie (Summer Joy Campbell) among them.  This also attracts the ire of the football team, lead by star quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) and his best friend Tim (Miles Fowler).    

"Bottoms" is a very self-aware satire of high school sex comedies, purposefully built on a pile of absurd clichés that are sometimes called out, and sometimes just background visual gags that get more and more insane as the film goes on.  You have the football players and cheerleaders constantly in uniform no matter what the situation, it's impossible to tell what subject Mr. G teaches, and the high school football rivalry is ramped up to truly deranged extremes.  The violence, however, is what caught my attention.  In most comedies of this type, a lot of the big laughs come from raunch, gross out, and embarrassment humor.  "Bottoms" has some of this, but the overwhelming source of laughs is violence.  Boy, does "Bottoms" have a lot of violence, from the fight club to the football antics to a prank war.  And while a lot is exaggerated, there's an unusual brutality in the way Seligman shows it.  Even simple punches can cause bloody injuries, and there's a sequence of someone getting viciously beat up that is as horrifying as it is ridiculous.  

And that attitude is why I think "Bottoms" works so well.  It calls out misogyny, bigotry, and bullying without sugarcoating them, at the same time that it's mining these topics for humor.  The bullies behave in absurd ways, but the damage they deal to our heroes is very real.  The F-slur is thrown around constantly, but not casually.  There's a joke about sexual assault that's designed to make you wince at the same time you're laughing.    The film stops occasionally for someone to nudge the fourth wall, and point out something happening that doesn't make sense, but then rolls with the punches anyway.  For me, it also helps that "Bottoms" isn't much of a sex comedy.  PJ and Josie sort out their priorities and get the girls in the end, but their own self-improvement and decision to use violence for a good cause take up most of their attention in the last act.  And I, for one, thought it was funny as hell.

If nothing else, watch this movie for the cast.  Like the heroes of "Superbad," who they have a lot in common with, PJ and Josie are lovable, but also awful.  Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edibiri do a fantastic job of playing terrible liars and pathetic con-artists.  I don't buy for a second that they're high schoolers, but I got invested in their friendship.   Hazel, the earnest, wide-eyed true believer, is somehow Ruby Cruz's film debut, and Nicholas Galitzine takes a break from rom-com princes to play one of the dimmest, silliest screen himbos I've ever seen.  However, the MVP of the film may be Marshawn Lynch, who delivers his line readings with irresistible sincerity.  

   

I left "Bottoms" very happy that I had taken a chance on it.  This still is definitely not my genre, but I like that we're seeing female-led comedies like this and "Booksmart" come around more often.  And if Emma Seligman and company decide they want to make more movies in this vein, I'll happily stick around.   

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Rank 'Em: "Indiana Jones"

Well, after that last sequel, I think we're done with theatrical "Indiana Jones" films for a long time.  So, I'm ranking the five existing "Indiana Jones" from best to least.  Minor spoilers below.

"Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade" (1989) - After thinking long and hard about it, "Last Crusade" wins out over "Raiders" for me.  This is the installment of the original trilogy that I watched the most often as a kid, and have the most favorite moments from.  Indy was never more human or relatable than as the frustrated son to Sean Connery's Henry Jones Sr., and the opening with RIver Phoenix as the young Indiana Jones is so effortlessly entertaining.  They made an entire "Young Indiana Jones" television series based on those first few minutes.  I feel like this is the funniest of the original trilogy, with some visual gags that are as ambitious as they are absurd.  It's also the most touching, with the final tussle over the Holy Grail.  And I'll always love the last shot, of our heroes literally riding off into a perfect sunset the way they only can in the movies.  

"Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981) - This is one of the best pure action films ever made, and I can barely take any objective stance toward it because it's been such a cinematic touchstone for me.  Looking back on "Raiders" over forty years later, the Orientalism and the brownface don't pass muster anymore, and the special effects work is rough, but the fundamentals of the filmmaking are as astonishing as ever.  The chase sequences and the fights and the clever bits of visual storytelling come straight from the pulpy old adventure serials that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are paying homage to, but elevated to such an extent that they became iconic in their own right.  And I was so mad that Marion didn't come back for the rest of the original trilogy, and so relieved that she turned up in the later films.  I think she's still my favorite character in this franchise.

"Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom" (1984) - This was honestly in a very, very close race with "Dial of Destiny" because "Temple of Doom" was always an afterthought for me.  I think I've watched the whole film through a grand total of once, and just to check it off a list.  It's a much goofier film than "Raiders" and "Last Crusade," has a more difficult leading lady in Kate Capshaw's Willie, and the crummy portrayal of the Indian characters is just cringe now.  It didn't scare me as a kid, because I didn't see the scary parts until I was an adult.  However, the film had Short Round, who I knew through sheer cultural osmosis, who was one of the only memorable Asian child characters to be found anywhere in the movies in the 1980s.  And the opening sequence was a magnificent feat - the closest Spielberg got to directing a musical until "West Side Story" decades later.   

"Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny" (2023) - I was happy to write "Dial of Destiny" off as a well-intentioned mediocrity until the last act happened, and  found myself suddenly very happy that I was with Indiana Jones on this adventure.  James Mangold will likely be the only director besides Spielberg to have made an "Indiana Jones" film for the foreseeable future, and he did a perfectly fine job of it.  The trouble is that Harrison Ford has no business being in this kind of action spectacle anymore, and the digital double technology is not good enough to sustain that whole opening sequence with the younger Indiana Jones during WWII.  The scripting is also remarkably bad at giving Phoebe Waller-Bridge and her sidekick anything to do.  Still, "Dial of Destiny" got the premise of an older, outdated "Indiana Jones" right, in a way that "Crystal Skull" didn't.  Speaking of "Crystal Skull…"   

"Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (2008) - I honestly don't mind the film as much as other fans seem to.  I just don't like it enough to spend much time thinking about it.  The shift to the '50s and Russian villains made perfect sense, but they weren't handled well.  There was far too much reliance on CGI, and actors like Cate Blanchett and Ray Winstone were wasted.  I liked that they brought Marion back, and that's about it. 

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"Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake" and "Tiny Toons Looniversity"

It can't be a good sign that the majority of what I'm watching on Max these days are the animated shows.  Quickly, here are two of their latest ones that I have some notes on.

A long time ago, I expressed on this blog that while I was interested in "Adventure Time," the only parts of the show I'd really managed to form an attachment to were the rare "Fionna and Cake" episodes that featured the genderswapped, species-swapped, versions of the main characters, Finn and Jake.  Well, now Fionna and Cake have their own miniseries.  

The last time I saw Fionna (Madeleine Martin) and Cake (Roz Ryan), they were adventurers in a fantasy world much like the Land of Ooo, where "Adventure Time" takes place.  However, this time we meet Fionna Campbell as an ordinary young nobody, hopping from one dead-end job to another to try and get by in a very non-magical world.  Her cat Cake is a real cat, though she's been acting odd lately.  Meanwhile, in another universe, a man named Simon Petrikov (Tom Kenny), who used to be the villainous Ice King, is also living a sad, lonely existence after the loss of his fiancee Betty (Felicia Day).  However, there's plenty of magic in Simon's universe, and his attempts to find Betty open a portal to Fionna's world by accident.

Despite my having missed so much of "Adventure Time," which ended in 2018, but has seen the story continued in several spinoffs since, I could more or less follow "Fionna and Cake."  Essentially, it's "Adventure Time" really digging into the multiverse concept, with Fionna, Cake, and Simon journeying through several different universes, while trying to work through some personal problems.  Fionna is directionless and Simon is in mourning, and they both think magic can help them.  In their search for the magical Ice King crown, they meet many versions of familiar "Adventure Time" characters.  Fionna's friends Marshall Lee (Donald Glover) and Gary Prince (Andrew Rannels), who are male versions of Marceline (Olivia Olson) and Princess Bubblegum (Hynden Walch), get their own subplot in a few episodes.  Finn (Jeremy Shada) shows up too - sometimes as a grown-up with kids.  Many of the characters were ones I didn't recognize, but there was just enough hand-holding to keep things coherent.  For instance, it was nice to finally have a quick and easy explanation as to who Prismo the Wishmaster (Sean Rohan) is, and what his Time Room is all about.   

"Fionna and Cake" is definitely worth a watch.  It's obviously best enjoyed by existing fans, but if you just want to get a taste of how strange and oddly deep "Adventure Time" is, "Fionna and Cake" isn't a bad place to start.  I felt like I'd skipped about a decade of lore, and I honestly didn't mind, because I still got to see and appreciate the emotional payoffs to some big storylines.  Ice King/Simon is still so compelling after all this time, and it was nice to see some parts of his past filled out.  This is easily the best version of Fionna so far, a very brave and very green youngster who is trying out new roles and coming to some important realizations.  I think the series actually does work as a standalone story, though a very chaotic one.         

On to "Tiny Toons Looniversity," which is one of the strangest cartoon reboots I've seen.  I understand why you'd want to reboot this early '90s favorite, just as "Animaniacs" was rebooted a few years back, but "Looniversity" messes with the original formula in some very odd ways.  First of all, Acme Looniversity is now more analogous to a college or university than a high school, and the characters have all been adjusted to behave quite a bit older.  Most episodes revolve around the characters having issues around roommates, internships, and campus activities.  There's a very sitcommy vibe to the show, with a core group of regulars, two or three recurring locations, and a pat life lesson at the end of most episodes.  Except, you know, with "Tiny Toons" characters.

The trouble with "Looniversity" is that it's a new version of "Tiny Toons," while "Tiny Toons" was a new version of the old Warner Bros "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" shorts.  Though the shows are aimed at more or less the same audience, those are two very different goals, especially now that different things are expected from children's cartoons in the 2020s.  As one of the old show's decrepit old fans, I think "Looniversity" is fine for my kids, but it's not "Tiny Toons."  The changes are big, and often baffling.  Why are Babs (Ashleigh Crystal Hairston) and Buster Bunny (Eric Bauza), no relation, no longer best friends, but now fraternal twin siblings?  Why mess with the oldest and most consistent joke from the original show?  Giving Buster's new roommates Plucky Duck and Hamton J. Pig (both David Errigo Jr.) some additional backstory is fine, and pairing up Babs with a rage-prone Sweetie Pie (Tessa Netting) works okay, but Furball (Natalie Palamides) talks?  Villain Montana Max (Candi Milo) is only in one episode, and Elmyra's MIA?  I get that the creators of "Looniversity" want to appeal to the current crop of kid viewers, but every change here feels far too calculated to be safer, nicer, more digestible, and way less interesting than the "Tiny Toons" I watched as a kid.            

I suspect a big problem is that the initial order for "Tiny Toons Looniversity" was only ten episodes, so there was no chance to get really crazy like so many of the best episodes of "Tiny Toons" would.  There are occasionally glimpses of the old, anarchic Looney Tunes spirit in the show, like a brief "Road Warrior" spoof that really goes hard on the absurdity.  The Looniversity teaching staff is still composed of the classic characters from the '40s and '50s, including Bugs and Daffy (both Bauza), with Granny as the Dean (Milo).  There are even some real obscurities pulled out of the vaults for the Looney Tunes die hards to spot.  However, almost none of the old humor comes with them.  Cartoon violence went through a few controversies in the late '90s and early 2000s, and "Looney Tunes" style slapstick isn't a thing in kids' shows anymore.   

I toughed out all ten episodes of "Looniversity" because I was so baffled by the pilot episode I wanted to dissect the whole thing, and it doesn't get any better.  To be fair, it doesn't get any worse either.  You can tell there were some honest efforts to make a smart, positive show for young viewers with these characters.  I just wish it wasn't called "Tiny Toons."

 

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