Comfort Shows, Rewatches, and Clips are Part of Kentucky Woman’s Summer Watching
Summer is always a great time to catch up on shows you may have missed during the regular season, although many of the shows' episode counts were shortened this latest season due to last year's WGA/SAG strike. Thus, you got to watching reruns a lot sooner than usual or you did what I did, and you started to rewatch and binge your favorite new or old shows.
So, what have you been watching since it's been nice and humid outside? Forgive me, but sports are also a good summer watch, hello! the Paris Summer Olympics are coming up at the end of July. I decided to rewatch a sitcom I hadn't watched in a long time, and it's an odd one, American Dad!
This was the first animated sitcom creator Seth MacFarlane took on after knocking it out of the park with his monster hit Family Guy. If there's one thing I've always loved over the years, it's Fox's Animation Domination shows that usually air in a block on Sunday nights. American Dad! is very similar to Family Guy in its overt use of suggestive humor and just plain goofy characters and premises. The show switched networks in 2014, from Fox to TBS and this past season was the sitcom's 20th. That's the other thing about animated shows, they can last forever. The Simpsons will begin their 36th season on Fox this fall. I'm currently up to the middle of season 9, so it's going to be a little bit before I get to the TBS years.
Earlier this year, I invested in one of the live TV streaming services just so I could watch the latest season of RuPaul's Drag Race and I discovered a favorite show of mine I had not watched in years, Mama's Family. I started binging and I couldn't stop.
Vicki Lawrence's "Mama" character from the original Carol Burnett Show was primed for a show of her own. Yes, many of the jokes are very corny, but Lawrence never fails to make me giggle. I saw Mama and Vicki in a "two-woman" show a couple of years ago and the audience was of all ages. She, I mean they, are one-of-a-kind talents.
I think a pretty standard rewatch and comfort show for me and a lot of viewers is NBC's original run of Law & Order. But who's your favorite detective team and DA team? My family and I agree on Lenny (Jerry Orbach) and any partner he had from Logan (Chris Noth) to Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) and Green (Jesse L. Martin). We loved Abby (Angie Harmon) and honestly, she was the best ADA. Jack McCoy (Sam Waterson) is brilliant and he's back in the new iteration of the show as the boss, and main District Attorney.
And as always, my forever favorite comfort show, no matter what time of the year:
I mean Mystery Science Theater 3000 never lets me down. The riffing has grown since the original show left the air in the late 90s. We now have Rifftrax, the new version of MST3K that landed on Netflix two years ago, its last season was crowd-funded, and the short-lived Cinematic Titanic, which has an MST3K silhouette set-up in the form of two decks on a ship.
I've been to a couple of Rifftrax Live! screenings and they are so much fun. The guys (Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett originally from MST3K) will next be riffing Point Break (yes, that one) live in theaters through Fathom Events on August 8th with a replay on August 13th and yes, they do screen at the Malco here in Owensboro. My ultimate goal is to attend a live event at the Belcourt Theater in Nashville.
The Brand New Buc-ees in Smith's Grove KY
Gallery Credit: Dave Spencer