Miniseries
Original Air Date: September 18–October 30, 2024

Note: I’m writing this before Agatha All Along‘s two-part finale, which comes out later this week. Marvel shows are notorious for dropping the ball right at the end, so keep that in mind. Maybe everyone will be really mad at this show tomorrow!

Three years after WandaVision, Agnes of Westview is a crime noir series about Agnes O’Connor (Kathryn Hahn), a surly detective working a Jane Doe case in Westview, New Jersey. At least, that’s what The Scarlet Witch wanted Agnes to believe when she escaped the hex at the end of WandaVision. Actually, Agnes is a performance that the witch Agatha Harkness is being forced to perform and the rest of the town humors because what else are they going to do. Her running around town with a hose nozzle in a holster isn’t hurting anyone. But all good things must come to an end, and a mysterious goth teen (Joe Locke) appears and helps wake Agatha up from the spell. The teen wants Agatha’s help finding the Witches’ Road, a trial that rewards witches what they desire most, which Agatha has survived once before. She’s not interested, but that’s when the green witch Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) shows up and tries to kill her.

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Season 1, Episode 9
Original Air Date: October 27, 1994

Halloween is a pretty wondrous time when you’re a young kid, what with all the candy, Halloween parades at school, and perfectly innocent mischief. When you’re a teenager, it’s not quite as clear what you should be getting out of Halloween. You’re a little too old to be trick or treating, you’re not quite old enough for Halloween parties where drinking is involved, and you’ve got enough problems to make it through the school week to care what you should be dressing up as. The Halloween episode from the lone season of My So-Called Life digs into this to some extent, since all of its various characters approach Halloween differently, but the episode also takes a little bit of a detour from its usual clear-eyed honesty. Continue reading →

Season 2, Episode 6
Original Air Date: October 31, 2017

Unlike most of the shows I’ve watched this Shocktober, I actually do have some familiarity with This Is Us, albeit for dumb reasons. Earlier this year, my YouTube algorithm started recommending I watch clips of the most emotional scenes from this series that ended in 2022 and I obliged the machine, as I am wont to do. Watched out of order and context, I saw enough to pick up the gist of the show and it’s characters. It’s a show about three siblings and their parents. My understanding is that every week, This Is Us would employ a technique now popularized by our diabolical criminal ex-president, “the weave,” to juxtapose pivotal moments in the lives of this family across decades. So, for example, you’ll see the siblings fight over something as kids and then support each other in the modern day, having learned some lesson from their great dad or whatever. Basically it is a well-oiled machine designed to make you cry. But does that actually make for good TV?

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Season 2, Episode 7
Original Air Date: October 25, 1997

And now for a little more from the twisted mind of David E. Kelley. Kelley created The Practice as a rebuttal to his Doogie Howser buddy Steven Bochco’s L.A. Law, which Kelley felt overly romanticized the American legal system. If Halloween special “Search and Seizure” is anything to go by, Kelley massively succeeded in making an unglamorous legal drama. In this episode alone the lawyers are sexually assaulted, witness an illegal arrest, bribed by drug dealers, fail at subverting Roe v, Wade, and forced a moral dilemma where they have to choose between faith, ethics, and the law. It’s quite a lot and hard to imagine how this evolves into the borderline comedy of Boston Legal by the end.

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