This week, we have a special episode where I review six new TV shows and one movie that have recently premiered.

Hello, this is Chris Young. Welcome to a special episode of Contemplating Life.

Years ago, I used to write an entertainment blog in which I would post non-gossip entertainment news. That is, I didn’t care who was sleeping with whom. I didn’t care who got divorced or broken up or got married or got arrested for something. I simply covered things like what new TV shows were being released, what new movies were in production, what was being canceled, who was going to guest star, etc. I also did movie and TV reviews. Obviously, I couldn’t see every new movie. I did attempt to watch at least one episode of every new TV show in the new fall and midseason to review it.

Unfortunately, I got busy, and some of my favorite web sources quit putting their content on an RSS feed. This made it hard for me to keep up with the latest news. Although the broadcast networks still release new shows in the fall and some midseason premieres, streaming services release new shows all the time, and there are just too many to keep up with. For example, I just finished binge-watching three seasons of the hit show Ted Lasso on Apple TV+, even though it was highly recommended to me by many people and won 13 Emmys. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. It’s still streaming on Apple TV+ and is available for purchase on Blu-ray.

But that’s not why I’m here.

It’s been almost exactly two years since I last did an entertainment blog. Rather than go back to blogging reviews, I thought we would try some TV reviews for this podcast. Once again, I will attempt to watch and review every new series this fall season. I can’t promise you I will get through all of them, but we are going to give it a good attempt.

I will try to keep spoilers minimal, but I cannot make promises. I will give you a warning when I spoil.

In my old entertainment blog, I had my own system of ranking shows. Before we begin, I want to explain my system.

The worst rating was “Worthless.” Shows with this rating were so bad I didn’t even bother writing a complete review.

Only slightly better than that is a rating of “Skip It.” This is a bad show, and I will explain in detail why.

Next is “Could Be Watchable.” That means it’s not so bad that I’m telling you to skip it. On the other hand, either I wasn’t impressed or perhaps the jury was still out. I may have to watch another episode or two to decide. Some shows rated “Could Be Watchable” turned out okay, and I did add them to my viewing schedule. However, I usually drop such shows unless they get better.

Our next category is “I’m Watching.” This means the show may not be a must-see, highly recommended, wonderful show, but it’s good enough to hold my interest. Sometimes, it’s a type of guilty pleasure show that I like, even if it isn’t top-notch entertainment.

Our next category is “Recommended Watchable.” This is sort of equivalent to “I’m Watching” in that it’s good enough for me to watch but not so good that I would bump something out of my busy viewing schedule. You should consider it a mild endorsement, but I just don’t have space in my life for it. Check it out and see if it’s for you. You might like it.

Next is “I really like it.” I highly recommend it. I thoroughly enjoyed it and think you will too. It’s good for general audiences, not just sci-fi or comic book genre fans like myself. Count “Ted Lasso” in this category.

My top rating is “Must See.” This is extraordinary television that is above and beyond the average fair. It is destiny to become a classic. It works on every level. Great writing, acting, and directing make it sure to be an award winner. It is landmark television.

Now that we have that out of the way let’s get on with the reviews.

First on our agenda are a pair of spinoff shows set in comic book universes. One is set firmly in that fantasy world, while the other is quite realistic.

Let’s do fantasy first.

“Agatha All Along” is a sequel to the Marvel TV series “WandaVision” from Disney+ streaming. “WandaVision” was a surreal series about the Marvel character Wanda Maximoff, a.k.a. the Scarlet Witch. I can’t set up the premise of this new series without spoiling part of the plot “WandaVision.” I also cannot discuss this new series without spoiling something from the opening episode. Sorry about that.

In “WandaVision,” Wanda was trapped in a spell that made her believe she was a sitcom character. In each episode, she occupied a different style of sitcom ranging from a 60s black-and-white homage to shows such as “The Dick Van Dyke Show” up to more modern sitcoms.

Ultimately, we discovered that the villain in the series was an evil witch named Agatha Harkness. The big reveal in the final episode was, “It was Agatha all along.” Thus, we get the name of this new series. At the end of the previous series, Wanda steals Agatha’s powers.

In the new series, Agatha is now a woman named Agnes, who is a homicide detective in a small town. Along the way, we discover that everything is not what it seems.

This is going to spoil a plot point, but if you’re familiar with this character from the previous series, it should come as no surprise that what appears to be reality isn’t real. I mean, let’s face it: Wanda really wasn’t a character in a variety of five or six different sitcoms set over the course of five decades. She was a powerful witch living in a warped reality. It shouldn’t surprise you that Agatha/Agnes is not really a small-town detective.

Episode two sets Agatha on a quest to recruit other witches to travel something called the Witches’ Road, at the end of which you get whatever it is you desire. Naturally, Agatha desires to get her powers back.

Catherine Hahn reprises her role as Agatha. She really shows her acting range as she credibly portrays the small-town cop in the first two-thirds of the first episode and easily transitions into the over-the-top, conniving, evil witch Agatha.

Fans of the MCU, especially fans of “WandaVision,” will love this sequel, but I’m not sure it will find a wider audience. I would recommend that you watch “WandaVision” first if you’ve not seen it. If you don’t have time or inclination to do so, I think I’ve set things up well enough that you can probably jump into this series.

I’m ranking “Agatha All Along” as “I’m watching” with the caveat that it’s definitely a comic book/fantasy genre piece that might not appeal to someone who wasn’t a fan.

Our next review is another comic book piece that I can highly recommend. I will give it a ranking of “I really like it,” and you do not need to be a genre fan to appreciate it.

We are talking about the HBO/Max series “The Penguin.” It is set in the Batman/DC comics universe and is essentially a sequel to the 2022 film “The Batman,” directed by Matt Reeves and starring Robert Pattinson. In this series, Colin Farrell reprises his role as Oswald Cobb, a.k.a. The Penguin. Neither Batman nor Bruce Wayne appears in the opening episode, and I doubt that they will make an appearance in future episodes.

This series picks up immediately after the events of the film, and although it was enjoyable for me to go back and rewatch the film one more time as a refresher, this series does a great job of setting the scene without the need to watch that film.

Two crime families have controlled Gotham: the Falcone’s and the Maroni’s. In the film before this, the Maroni crime family was broken up, and its leader, Salvatore Maroni, was jailed. This leaves the Falcone family to take over the drug trade in the city. At the film’s end, Carmine Falcone is murdered, leaving his son Alberto to try to hold his father’s empire together. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the gangster skills to do the job. Oswald sees the opportunity to get rid of Alberto and try to take over the criminal enterprise.

Falcone’s daughter Sophia, who has only recently been released from the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, stands in the way of his plans. Oswald must find a way to avoid Sophia while avoiding getting caught by the police or either of the city’s criminal organizations.

Farrell gives a highly nuanced performance in this well-written character. We see how his mother manipulates him to become a powerful man despite his clubfoot, which causes a severe, penguin-like waddling gait. State-of-the-art prosthetic makeup completely obliterates Colin Farrell, and if you didn’t know that he was playing the part, you might have never guessed. Even if you do know it’s him, only in the eyes can we perhaps recognize the famous character actor who has previously won Golden Globe awards and an Oscar nomination. Certainly, he will add an Emmy nomination to his resume and perhaps a win this year for this role.

Along the way, he recruits a young black man named Victor as his assistant. Initially, he was going to have a young man help him dispose of a body and then kill him. However, when Victor begs for his life, Oz decides to give the kid a chance. They both grew up in the same neighborhood. Victor’s home was destroyed by a flood caused by the Riddler at the end of the Batman film. We explore Oswald’s character through Victor’s eyes. Victor is played by actor Rhenzy Feliz, who you might recall from the Marvel TV series Runaways, which I greatly enjoyed.

Sophia is brilliantly portrayed by Cristin Milioti, who gives a chilling performance as the heir to the Falcone family, who was recently released from an asylum. She will make a worthy adversary to the Penguin.

Overall, you don’t feel like you’re watching a comic book story. These are realistically drawn characters that could’ve appeared in a mainstream gangster movie by Martin Scorsese. There is none of the over-the-top theatrics that we come to expect from comic book villains.

As I said earlier, I’m rating this one as “I really like it,” and I highly recommend you check it out. It will run for eight weekly episodes, with new episodes premiering Sunday night on HBO. It will also be available for streaming on Max.

We will take a brief look at a pair of medical shows. It was with much anticipation that I watched “Brilliant Minds” on NBC, starring Zachary Quinto. Quinto is famous for playing Mr. Spock in the 2009 JJ Abrams reboot of the Star Trek franchise. Now playing a doctor in this NBC drama, it’s difficult not to refer to him as Doctor Spock. And if you know who that is, your back hurts.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure there are any brilliant minds in the writers’ room of “Brilliant Minds.” Quinto plays Doctor Oliver Wolf, a brilliant but unorthodox neurologist. In the opening scene, he helps an Alzheimer’s patient escape from the hospital to attend his granddaughter’s wedding. Although he helps the man come out of his zombielike state and recognize his granddaughter briefly, you know that afterward, the patient won’t remember anything. While we can feel some empathy towards the patient and sympathize with the doctor’s intent to give the man a happy moment in his otherwise empty life, the fact that he took a nearly catatonic patient on an adventure by having the man right on the back of a motorcycle stretches credibility. He is fired from his position.

We see him as a reclusive man who tends to his plants and keeps his nose in a book. A friend of his recruits into a new position at Bronx General, but he declines, saying, “You know why I can’t work there.” By the time the reason is revealed in the final scene of the opening episode, I already had it figured out.

Wolf struggles with a neurological condition called “face blindness.” It makes a person unable to recognize people’s faces. In the first episode, his first patient at his new job also struggles with a cognitive condition in which she doesn’t recognize her own children and thinks that they have been kidnapped and replaced by substitutes. In finding a solution to her problem, he’s forced to confront his own condition, which he keeps secret from everyone except the colleague who got him his new job.

In the new job, he is surrounded by four interns who he is forced to supervise even though he prefers to work alone. They have varying degrees of enthusiasm about working with a brilliant yet radically unlikable boss.

There’s nothing original here. If you want to watch a show about a neuro-atypical doctor, I recommend you go watch “The Good Doctor,” which has more compelling characters than this series.

I’m rating this one as very weak: “Could Be Watchable,” leaning strongly towards “Skip It.” There are much better medical dramas available than this. It appears on Monday nights on NBC and is available to stream on Peacock TV.

Unfortunately, among those better medical dramas is not the new ABC series “Doctor Odyssey.” Picture this: Someone walks into a TV executive office with a great pitch for a new serious. Imagine it. It’s a cross between Grey’s Anatomy and The Love Boat. The executive buys it on the spot without seeing a single script. I don’t know for a fact that this happened, but it sure looks that way.

The story follows Doctor Max, a newly hired ship’s Doctor on a luxury cruise liner called “The Odyssey.” He is played by Joshua Jackson, known for his roles in “Dawson’s Creek” and “Fringe.” He works with a pair of experienced ship medical nurses. Avery Morgan, played by Philippa Soo, is an attractive young nurse practitioner. She is accompanied by Triston Silva, a hot young Latino nurse and a ladies’ man who is secretly in love with Avery.

The ship’s captain is played by an aging Don Johnson, who gives long discourses about his commitment to creating a fantasy paradise for the passengers. He tries and fails to have the same charisma and mystery as Mr. Rourke from “Fantasy Island.” Again, if you know what “Fantasy Island” is, your back hurts.

Like most medical shows, it’s populated with realistic yet undistinguishable-sounding medical jargon as they treat their patients miles from the nearest hospital in a state-of-the-art sick bay. Unfortunately, whoever advised them on the medical jargon knows nothing about tracheostomy tubes. They inserted a trach into a patient, and he was still able to talk without a speaking valve. Technically, it is possible to do so with a partially inflated cuff. There was no sign of a cuff inflation balloon on the trach prop they were using.

It’s populated by beautiful people running around in skimpy bathing suits and partying constantly.

The characters are mildly interesting in the medical situations run from a serious man overboard rescue to a more comical man with a fractured penis and some food poisoning along the way.

If you are desperate for a new medical show with eye-candy characters and light humor and romance, then you might find this a guilty pleasure, but for the most part, I will have to say, “Skip It.”

We wrap up this episode with a pair of episodes that I can recommend.

First, we have the new CBS series, “Matlock,” which stars Kathy Bates as the title character. This isn’t exactly a reimagining of the original series. In the opening scene, she explains her name.

“I’m Matty, informally. Formally, Madeline Matlock. Yes, Matlock like the old TV show, which was all I heard between 1984 and 1992. “You’re a lawyer like Matlock. You’re a lawyer like Matlock.” And every time I’d correct ’em, “No, he’s just pretending. You know, I’m a real lawyer.” But, you know, you can only protest so much before you sound like you got a big old pole up your heinie, so I just let ’em have it, and I just said, “Yeah, well, yeah, I’m a lawyer just like Matlock.”

She makes this explanation after sneaking into a partner meeting of a large, prestigious law firm. She has been trying to get a job interview, but the firm is not interested in hiring a septuagenarian lawyer who hasn’t practiced for 30 years. She explained that she had put herself in a position to overhear a conversation with a lawyer on the opposite side of one of their cases and learned that they would accept a settlement of $4 million greater than their current offer. Because she just made the firm $4 million, they agreed to hire her on a two-week probationary basis.

She is assigned to work with partner Olympia Lawrence, played by Skye P. Marshall. Olympia is unhappy having her on her team but accepts her help because it is the only way to prevent the law firm from dropping her case. She is defending a woman who was wrongly accused of a crime and framed by corrupt, racist police.

Olympia is divorcing one of the other partners, Julian, who is played by Jason Ritter. Olivia sends Matlock the impossible task of getting Julian to give up Thanksgiving weekend with the child even though it’s his turn.

Matlock has some missteps along the way that nearly cost them the case, but it’s not much of a spoiler to say that it all works out in the end.

Bates gives a memorable performance as a quirky, down-home, “awe-shucks,” 70-something-year-old lawyer.

The closing scene contains a gigantic plot twist that reveals a running plot line throughout the series that you will not see coming. I will make no attempt to hint at what it is. All I can say is that even without this new continuing plotline to keep you coming back, I think the show is worth watching. The big secret plot is just icing on the cake.

I’m rating it “I Really Like It.” I suggest you check it out. Kathy Bates should be enough to get you to watch this, and the character they’ve written for her makes full use of her talent.

Our final new series is the ABC crime procedural “High Potential,” the title of which is an appropriate description of my opinion. The show has potential, but it remains to be seen if it will live up to it.

The series stars Kaitlin Olson as Morgan Gillory, a single mom who works nights cleaning a police station. In the opening scene, she is dancing around the office, listening to music while she works, and accidentally knocking over a stack of case files. As she picks up the files, she can’t help but see some crime scene photos that catch her eye. She then walks up to the murder board, where there is a photo of the murder victim’s wife. She crosses out the word “suspect” and writes in “victim.”

The next day, when the detectives discover that the board has been changed, they review the surveillance video to find out that the cleaning lady did it. They bring her in and threaten to charge her with obstructing an investigation. They ask why she did it, and she explains her theory of the case. Her argument is so compelling they decide to pursue her theory.

As you might guess, she was right. By the end of the episode, they offer her a job as a consultant.

I’ve always been skeptical of the outside police consultant sub-genre, which traces its origins to Edgar Allen Poe’s 1841 character C. Auguste Dupin in his short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 46 years before Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

On TV, we have had a wide variety of consulting detectives in shows such as Castle, The Mentalist, Elementary (which is a modern-day Sherlock Holmes), Psych, and Monk.

While it’s fascinating to think that there are people with such keen observation powers that they can see things that even the most highly trained detectives might miss, the entire premise of this entire genre is complete fantasy. In 2018, I wrote a review of a similar series, Carter, which I described as the worst ever such show. In that review, I expressed my dismay that the entire concept of consultant detective was a giant fiction with no basis in reality. I wish I knew someone in law enforcement who could verify for me that since things never take place.

Since then, I have spoken to at least three people who are familiar with real-life police work, and they assure me that they have never heard of a so-called “consulting detective” in their departments’ history. At best, a prosecutor might hire an expert witness to testify about evidence, but no outsiders ever participate in the actual investigations.

Along the way, we learn that Morgan is a bit of a savant with an IQ of 160. She can crunch numbers in her head faster than a calculator. So, her innate ability to observe what others have missed isn’t her only gift.

While it would be easy to dismiss this as yet another well-worn, unrealistic trope, something is compelling about these characters. If you enjoyed “Monk,” then consider this as potentially a reimagination of that series with a female hero.

I’m giving it a weak “I’m Watching It,” but it borders on “Could Be Watchable.” The jury is still out, but I liked the first episode for the same reasons I enjoyed Monk years ago. You might want to check it out and see for yourself. After a sneak preview episode, where episodes begin October 8 on ABC and streaming on Hulu.

One more quick review. If you subscribe to Apple TV+, check out the new movie, “Wolves,” starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, who portray the guys you call when you need to dispose of a dead body and make it look like it never happened. Through a contrived set of circumstances, these lone wolves are both called in to clean up the dead body of the young man who was accidentally killed in the hotel room of a female district attorney. They are forced to work together even though they prefer working alone.

It’s everything you would want from these two actors in a quirky comedy with some pretty good action sequences along the way. Highly recommended.

There are still more TV series in the coming days, and I will have another special episode to review them.

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I will see you next time as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.