What are we looking for from a summer television show? Some fun would be nice. A zany twist. Maybe a performance or two where the actor goes just massively huge in a way that makes it seem like they think they’re on a different show than everyone else.
Something that makes you ponder or speculate a little without retreating back into itself to leave you in a frustrating vortex of confusion. Nothing too heavy. Preferably very few shots of the protagonist driving around in the rain with that bluish tint on the screen that is supposed to convey moodiness and complexity but can sometimes come acr— zzzzzzzzzzzz .
Sorry, I seem to have nodded off just thinking about that last one. You can see how this would be a problem. Mostly, I think, the ideal summer show comes in somewhere around a B-plus.
This is not a derogatory statement, even if a few decades of Peak Television might have conditioned us to believe otherwise. It’s quite the opposite, actually. There is honor in a B-plus.
A B-plus is a grade that plops itself down in the shade between disappointing slacker and annoying try-hard. A B-plus is a grade usually given to C-students who are doing their best or A-students who are cruising along at a chill pace. This is an admirable quality in both people and television shows.
Apple TV+ has two of these fun little B-plus shows on its hands this summer. The first was Presumed Innocent , the whodunnit murder mystery starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a stressed-out and impossibly shredd.