Bands On the Run Amok - June 3rd - What's To Watch?

 

    Work's been hounding and hunting me down. Not only keeping me longer at the lab but pressing me to take care of more of it, remotely, when I finally get home. And I suspect there are events in the news that have been wearing on all of us. So, this week's piece is going to be light.

     Arrived on Hulu this past Tuesday is a 6-part biopic series on the punk band The Sex Pistols. Based on founding member and guitarist Steve Jones' memoir Lonely Boy: Tales From A Sex Pistol, this miniseries focuses on a key, three-year stretch for the band.
     Despite being nearly the same age as Sid, the punk era largely passed me by, with its positive influences being seen in performers and bands of what we came to know as the New Wave. Punk mostly seemed to be about anarchy over all else, with a particular disdain for anything positive. The result was that I never found anything there I thought of as musical. I'll be interested to see how this washes over me.
     It's Pistol:

      While in the vein of anarchy and British accents, it's been just under a year and a half since the close of season two, and (finally!) today Amazon Prime sees the return of the twisted and hyper-violent comics-to-screen adaptation of The Boys for its third season. This is a case where I've been enjoying the show, but still cannot recommend the source comics, which were mostly just about trying to find lines to cross. We're getting a much, much better distillation and interpretation on the screen.
     We get the first three episodes this week, then one per Friday through July 8th, I suppose. Here's the trailer for the new season:

     I'm looking forward to the twisted mayhem, including Billy Butcher's power-up, and the introduction of their WWII-era, dark, Captain America-esque Soldier Boy, who will be played by Supernatural alum Jensen Ackles.
     Having previewed the first episode of the season, it's difficult to come away with the sense that anything is taboo for this series. Certainly not in the veins of sex and graphic violence, often in the intersection of the two.

     A far more family-friendly bit of superheroing starts next Wednesday on Disney+, with the launch of a six-episode Ms. Marvel series. Well, they're billing it as a miniseries, giving the impression that it's meant to be a one-and-done item, primarily acting as a set-up for a 2023 film The Marvels, which will be the sequel to Captain Marvel (2019).
     The series centers on Kamala Khan, a 16 year-old Muslim Pakistani-American living in Jersey City, who is a big Avengers fan, writes fan fiction (much of it about Captain Marvel), and has the manifold complications and conflicts that come from her gender, ethnicity, religion, and being a teenager here in the U.S. Even without the head-in-the-clouds fixation on superheroes, she'd be fighting for her own identity in a world mostly intent on defining her by her faith and gender. As one would expect from a Marvel Cinematic Universe series, something happens to give her powers. Fairly obviously, this is a series intended to have a strong young adult appeal, along with generally looking to line up a new generation of heroes, much as the Hawkeye series introduced Kate Bishop, who is taking on the Hawkeye mantle.
     While the comics version's powers are an ability to stretch and/or enlarge parts or all of her body at will, reportedly as a cost-saving matter they changed them here to be energy construct powers more like Green Lantern uses. You'll get a good sense of that from the trailer. Again, that's for Ms.Marvel

     I suspect that aside from cost-saving in the effects, they likely also want to keep the stretching a little more fresh for when they more formally introduce Reed Richards/"Mr. Fantastic" to the mainstream MCU. Audiences got to see a version of him during Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness (currently, semi-officially scheduled - based largely on an announcement that slipped through in Germany - to arrive on Disney + June 22nd, btw)  sure, but alternate universe takes of characters are their own thing.

     In the meantime, new episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds continue to arrive each Thursday on Paramount+, Obi-Wan Kenobi's episodes (the 6-episode run already half over as of this week!) Wednesday's on Disney+, and Hulu's finally seen the return of Seth MacFarlane's The Orville: New Horizons -- all as noted in previous Friday posts.

      Here's hoping my workload is much better in hand by this time next week. We have plenty of cool new and returning things stretched out over June. In the meantime, enjoy the weekend, and take care. - Mike