The Review Show

Episode 266. Extra, extra! It's a Review Show first! We're covering a filmed production of a live stage performance with Newsies: The Broadway Musical on Disney+. It's 1899, and gangs of young boys are living on the streets and selling newspapers with the hopes of moving up in the world. When the publisher suddenly raises the prices the boys have to pay to get their papers, and refuses to compensate them for what they can't sell, the kids unionize and strike. With the help of a rebellious girl reporter, they get all the other young workers of the city on their side and make a stand for kids everywhere.

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Episode 265. It's morphin' time! We read the first three volumes of the 2016 Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers comics from Boom Studios, written by Kyle Higgins and Steve Orlando. After Tommy was brainwashed into becoming Rita Repulsa's fearsome Green Ranger, he defected to the heroic Power Rangers and is still struggling to fit in and shake off these traumatic memories. Rita keeps launching destructive attack plans as the Rangers adapt to a new team member they still barely know, who could take the team to new levels or spell their downfall.

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Episode 264. We've reached the fourth and final season of The Good Place! The team works on a new experiment to purposefully coach people in another simulation to reach the actual good place, struggling to replicate their own personal journeys in becoming better people. When our friends finally get to spend time in the good place, they realize that it poses its own challenges and that infinite heavenly possibility may be an unsustainable way to live your afterlife, leaving the team to try and improve heaven as well as hell.

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Episode 263. In honor of the sci-fi animated series Futurama being rebooted on Hulu, we watched seven episodes from across its earlier seasons, giving us a sampler platter of the show's comedy, emotion, mathematics, and multiple kinds of time travel. We discuss Parasites Lost, The Luck of the Fryish, Roswell that Ends Well, The Sting, The Late Phillip J. Fry, The Prisoner of Benda, and the latest series finale, Meanwhile.

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Episode 262. To herald the coming of Barbie, we watched another movie about a candy-colored retro icon forced to contend with the modern world: 1995's loving satire, The Brady Bunch Movie. The Bradys struggle to collect $20,000 to save their home, while their unscrupulous neighbor tries to sabotage them, hoping to sell their land to develop into a mini-mall. As the family faces their own individual conflicts -- like jealousy, tattling, two dates for the school dance, and performing in a big talent show -- their bond remains strong and they're here to bring their sunny familial love to the entire neighborhood.

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Episode 261. We read the standalone graphic novel from Ram V and Filipe Andrade, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr. When humans become immortal, the goddess of death is out of a job. Her "retirement" is to be reincarnated as a human, and she arranges to live in the same city at the same time as the future inventor of immortality, with plans to kill him and get her old job back. She finds herself in a loop of accidental deaths and reincarnations across the years, encountering the inventor at different stages in his life, dealing with deaths of loved ones, and she learns what death and life truly mean to humans.

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Episode 260. We celebrated our second annual "National Treasure Weekend" watching another Nicolas Cage movie, 2002's Adaptation. Charlie Kaufman is hired to adapt Susan Orlean's nonfiction book The Orchid Thief into a Hollywood screenplay. As he deals with the book's lack of easy narrative structure, his loneliness and low self confidence, and his identical twin brother Donald pestering him in his own journey to become a screenwriter, Charlie spirals into distraction. The movie is everything the screenplay within the movie is: layers of flashbacks, fantasies, and the natural history of the world itself circling around each other in a search for connection.

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Episode 259. We continue our coverage of The Good Place by talking about season three, with the fourth and final season discussion coming next month. Michael has reset the timeline so the humans are alive again on Earth, trying to be better people after their near-death experiences, but he and Janet soon have to reveal themselves after too much meddling. With the realization that every action affects your points total to get into either the good place or bad place, the humans travel the world, encouraging their friends and family to lead better lives. Still, nobody is sure how many points you need, and they discover that there may be a flaw in the system that prevents even the best people from reaching the good place.

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Episode 258. We watched the 1996 movie The Watermelon Woman, the first feature film directed by a Black lesbian. Cheryl is an aspiring filmmaker working in a video store and trying to make a documentary about a Black actress from the 1930s and 40s credited only as "The Watermelon Woman." As she works to uncover this woman's identity, she discovers a queer history that echoes her own personal romantic life.

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Episode 257. We watched the original 2002 run of the adult animated show Clone High, which now has a new reboot season streaming on Max! Government scientists have cloned famous historical figures, who are now teenagers trying to navigate high school. Joan of Arc has a crush on Abe Lincoln, who has a crush on Cleopatra, who has an on-again-off-again relationship with JFK, while Ghandi just wants to party. The teens deal with romantic angst, living up to their historical counterparts, a mad scientist principal, and classic "very special episode" teen dangers like littering, smoking raisins, and appearing on the Canadian Spring Break Dance show hosted by Ashley Angel from O-Town.

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