More Places To Go - Video Distractions Friday with Mike Norton

Another week. Another fatiguing blur. Another week where work demands pile on insistently just when I'd foolishly thought I'd cleared a little space for myself.
Still, it's Friday.That its also May 1st is another of those details I can't casually wrap my mind around.
One quick note is that we're getting at least the start of the back half of the fourth season of Rick and Morty this Sunday at 11:30 PM Eastern on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, when episode 6 arrives.
  As ever, enjoy the show, and ignore the most toxic members of its fanbase if you happen to come across them. It's difficult to think of another show that has this big of a problem, attracting some of the most repellant people, who make for the antithesis of ambassadors.

  I enjoyed the launch of Showtime's Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, a show I mentioned last week in advance of its premier. As with the recently-concluded, very dark, alternate history miniseries The Plot Against America (on HBO), we're looking at an immediately pre-WWII timeframe, and seeing the seductive evil of an "America First" campaign.  This new series leans on the cultural issues in play in the U.S in 1938, particularly in Los Angeles with the Anglo/Mexican conflicts, layering in supernatural forces. Highlights so far include multiple roles for Natalie Dormer, and a more engaging character from Nathan Lane than I, for some reason, was expecting.
   Landing on Amazon Prime today is a new 10-part series: Upload. It centers on a technological innovation that allows people to choose to be digitized and uploaded to a virtual afterlife. Approached as a science fiction comedy and satire, Robbie Amell plays Nathan Brown, a young man who's natural life is suddenly cut very short, and now has this new, considerably less than private, commercialized, virtual reality to try to adjust to.
 As I (hopefully) get to reclaim part of my Friday - having been putting in long hours so far this week, including late night Thursday through pre-dawn work on projects - this will likely be where I'll be headed.

    If you happen to have Amazon Prime, you could do worse than note that come Sunday the fourth and final season of The Durrells (which you may have caught on PBS' Masterpiece) is added to Prime's catalog. Based on Gerald Durrell's trio of autobiographic books concerning the four years (1935-39) his family spent trying to build a life for themselves on the Greek island of Corfu. An often charming comedy-drama, I've not yet gotten to see this final run of episodes, so chances are I'll be giving them some attention come Sunday. (Here I've just plucked one of the early PBS teaser trailers for the show.)

  Over on Netflix, arriving today, is The Half of It.
  Generally speaking, having recently turned 59 I'm not looking for a teen romantic comedy/coming of age story, but I'm finding things to like in this trailer.

  Today's new Netflix offerings also includes the arrival of an original, apocalyptic series produced in Belgium: Into The Night. A desperate, seemingly never-ending flight to momentary safety. Based on the 2015 Polish science fiction novel The Old Axolotl, by Jacek Dukaj.

   That's as much as I have time for this week.
   I almost went into a reaction piece on the recently-concluded Dispatches From Elsewhere (AMC), which I'd on the whole greatly enjoyed for the first nine episodes, but which most seem to agree shat the bed in a horribly self-indulgent, meta, self-autopsy by the series star and creator Jason Segal in an expanded final episode. Did you watch it? Were you a fan? Did the finale work for you? (There are no wrong answers.)
   Any comments on that or anything else here are always appreciated.
   Stay safe and sane, or whatever state of mind works best for you.  - Mike

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