PBS has a new series on Saturday nights called Frankie Drake Mysteries, and I've really enjoyed what little I've yet seen of it. Frankie is a redhead girl and the story takes place in the late 20s or early 30s some place on the East Coast of North America. Frankie and her settings and her storylines look like what I imagine the earliest Nancy Drew novels looked like.
(FYI: The original version of The Secret of the Old Clock was published in 1929, and I always thought River Heights was someplace in upstate New York. That's why Frankie Drake reminds me of Nancy Drew.)
A Canadian children's series by the same production company that created Heartland is now showing on UKids in the US. It's called Holly Hobbie but it has nothing to do with the pioneer girl drawings and dolls of the 1970s. Holly Hobbie is about a surprisingly self-centered 14-year-old girl who keeps getting into trouble because she wants to do things her way. As a result, she is grounded a lot. Her younger sister imitates her and also gets grounded a lot.
The show is well-done and the cast is made up of better actors than most children's cable series. However, I am having a hard time liking the characters. I keep wanting to smack them!
Holly Hobbie the doll has shown up on the bed in one scene I noticed. Since I've watched only two episodes I don't know if the doll reappears.
I could handle only 15 minutes of Indebted.
This new NBC unfunny comedy is on Thursday nights. Fran Drescher stars (that in and of itself should tell you how dislikeable this show was).
Fran and her husband have gone broke in retirement from too many long vacations and buying binges. So they move in with their grown son and his family. That was as far as I got before I turned it off.
Is it possible for a show to be too cute and sweet and trendy?
That's the new CW series Katy Keene, which premiered last week. Katy is a spinoff of Riverdale and is its exact opposite. I never knew that she was a character in Archie Comics. Riverdale is dark-lit and depressing and has lots of murders and cover-ups. Nothing like the lighthearted comic and cartoons I remember. Katy Keene the series is just the opposite. It's about a girl in New York who wants to be a fashion designer. The cute factor was starting to make me gag at the end of the second episode. She and her friends have a very nice place and lots of clothes for a show about millennials struggling in NYC.
Trying to find out if Magnum PI is cancelled, they brought MacGyver back. The new show on CBS "Tommy" is a major improvement over "Evil" the show it replaced.
Duncanville is a cartoon that began on Fox last week. It's about a family: mother, father, teen son, teen daughter and younger daughter. It was corny and a little sweet. I liked it! It's not like so many adult-oriented cartoons today, overly complicated and sometimes cruel.
Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist on NBC is somewhat like its competition on CBS, God Friended Me. It's about a person who discovers someone in need by a mystical event and tries to help him or her.
In Zoey, she hears a pop song in her head when she sees the person, and sometimes sees the entire crowd go into a musical dance. The first episode did not impress me--it was more annoying than anything--so I skipped the second episode. The third episode this week was much better, so I will stick around for a while to see how the series goes.
Linear Mode
