My spouse and I watched all four seasons of this show more or less as they came out. The past few months have seen some pretty big changes to our family schedule, and we haven’t has as much time to watch TV together, so we recently decided to rewatch The Good Place (since episodes are short). It’s a very rewatchable show; you can get a lot out of it once you know what’s yet to come.

I love the premise and the characters of this show, but it felt like it was running out of steam by the third series (though I’ll admit I don’t know how much the mysterious disappearance of its creator had to do with this—I’d like to read the book on the subject). Burnside got less and less likeable as the show went on (though this might be the point!), and I got tired of how many plots boiled down to “Burnside doesn’t care and goes rogue.

I’m not sure I enjoyed the second series as much as the first, but over time, it grew on me. The finale nicely tied things together and helped me see how Burnside’s hubris was a running theme of the series (rather than a character derailment). Interested to see what happens in the final series!

I only learned about The Sandbaggers last weekend, on an episode of The Incomparable, but I watched the entire first series this week—and loved it. It isn’t perfect: There’s too much 1970s casual misogyny for it to be self-critical in the same way that a modern show set in the 70s would be, and the brown face in one episode is also embarassing. Not setting those aside, I was still impressed with the way the show combined the bumbling hypocrisy of Yes, Minister; the self-serving internal politics of Slow Horses; and the cynical despair of Le Carré into a single, compelling show.

I’ve been looking forward to this since the first season ended. Midway through watching the first season, I’d already begun reading the series, and I may have already finished the second book by the time I saw the trailer for the second series. This season did a great job at making use of the source material while changing and improving things as needed. It’s a fun book series, but I think it’s shaping up to be a better show.

I once had a neighbor who argued that because it had higher fidelity, 3-D was the future of cinema. To prove his point, he asked “who would prefer an audio adaptation to a video one?” and was surprised when I, a big radio fan, raised my hand. To be honest, I don’t know that I’d prefer radio to TV/cinema in every instance, but I believe firmly that it’s more about how you use a medium than it is about what medium you use.