A work in progress.
Television
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- Billionaire’s Bunker: We begin 2026 with mediocrity. The premise is great and we absolutely loved Money Heist (Casa de Papel). But perhaps that was creator Álex Pina’s peak. This was a soap opera with too many stories and such melodrama! Painful.
- Stranger Things, Season 5: I actually skipped Season 4. Seeing the kids bickering and whining just felt too much, even though I’d watched the first three seasons. I sort of felt: Ugh. Teenagers. But I wanted to check this season out and I did enjoy how they wound things up, for the most part. The special effects are spectacular and Will’s coming out was wonderfully done. Some things didn’t make sense and I think it would have been better to make clear that Elle really did die at the end.
- The Pitt, Season 1: I didn’t expect how much I’d love this. Life and death decisions and situations every episode anchored by an incredible team of actors.
- The Beast in Me: Stressful.
- The Muppet Show (2026 special). I think Sabrina Carpenter is pretty great, as is Seth Rogan. The jokes are classic slapstick Muppets humour, and we actually found it slightly more dated than nostalgic.
- The Pitt, Season 2: Just as good as Season 1 so far.
Documentaries and Reality Television
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- Great Pottery Throw Down, Season 9. Yup, we’re still watching. For some reason, I didn’t love this season as much as some, but it was still good.
- Great British Bake Off, Season 6. Because I have loved the latest seasons so much, and having only discovered it recently, I thought we’d return to one of their most famous seasons, that discovered Nadiya. It was a lot of fun, and I got to see the fuss about Mary Berry, who is a national treasure.
- Survivor, Season 50. Starting to watch this series, entirely of returning cast members (fan favourites, all of them), we realised that we had somehow missed Season 49. Oops.
- Survivor, Season 49. We’re watching! Oh. We watched it. It was OK, though not my favourite season.
- Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. I’d caught episodes of this show during the decade or so it was on air. It was a guilty pleasure. There was something so trashy and juicy about it, I wasn’t sure why I liked it. But now, years later, it really has aged badly and this documentary shows how bad it was, and how Tyra Banks is … a monster, really. She takes no responsibility for her part in this, and the worst is watching a young, innocent woman, abroad for the first time who was basically sexually assaulted (being too drunk to give consent) and then had her story, framed as ‘cheating on her boyfriend back home’ exploited and blown up. Wow, what a clusterfuck. The ugly birth of the most ugly parts of reality TV.