Stream-It Saturday: Bloodline (Netflix)
In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday.
Check out all my previous recommendations over here.
Have you binge-watched Bloodline on Netflix yet? No?! What is wrong with you? Isn't your life missing dysfunctional family fun voiced-over by Kyle Chandler?
Here's the deal with Bloodline. It's about a tightly-knit family, the Rayburns, in the Florida Keys and the bad stuff that happens with the eldest sibling, Danny comes back to town. Think Parenthood but with realistic family dynamics. (Also, just like Parenthood, this show makes me really happy I don't have any siblings.)
This is a sun-soaked southern gothic that sort of rolls along and then hits you over the head. Obviously, I loved it.
This is one of those shows that isn't for everyone, though. It really messed up families make you uncomfortable, or you're not ready for Coach Taylor to be dropping f-bombs constantly, you may want to stay away. But, man, it was fascinating to me. I'd been trying to pace myself and only watch one episode a day but I spent last Sunday watching the final three, because I just couldn't look away.
Bloodline pulls off something that often doesn't work for me: By the end of the premiere, you know how the story ends. John (Kyle Chandler) then tells the audience that he and his siblings, aren't "bad people," but they "did a bad thing." (Not a spoiler, it's also in the trailer.) He continues to reveal the family's secrets throughout the season, as we discover a whole lot of "bad things" are hidden in the perfect-seeming Rayburn family history.
The cast is superb as well. Obviously, Kyle Chandler is fabulous, but so are Linda Cardellini, Sissy Spacek and especially Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn, who does an outstanding job keeping the viewer guessing about Danny's motivations and agenda.
Bloodline was created by the team behind Damages, which I've not watched and never interested me, but it makes me think I should give that series a spin. (Have you watched Damages? Should I watch it?)
Stream It: Bloodline is a Netflix exclusive.
The Trailer:
I'm always on the verge of canceling my Hulu subscription. It provides little to no value 92.3% of the time. And yet, they keep reeling me back in with some exclusive programming: Moone Boy, The Mindy Project, and now, The Wine Show.
You guys, I love wine. I'm not a lush or anything, but I just love wine. I am a member at two local wineries, walk down to my neighborhood wine shop's Friday wine tastings, recently took a class with Josh about winemaking and somehow managed to order a hundred pounds of wine grapes to try our hand at making our own.
I don't know how this all happened, but it did.
So, we were cruising around hulu this summer and happened upon The Wine Show, which was, obviously relevant to our interests in the Moon Casa.
Laura was harassing me to watch Mr. Robot--USA Network's new show--so aggressively that she was basically interrogating me about whether or not I'd watched the first episode every time we talked or texted. Then another friend (Hi, Jennifer!) also started raving about it. And my father-in-law started talking about it, too.
Obviously, Laura was right. Which is additional evidence that you should just listen to Laura the first time. Mr. Robot is one of the most interesting shows I've watched in a long time, and one of the hardest to talk about. Because, you see, it's a show ostensibly about hackers. But it's also about a whole lot more. It's about mental health and perception and corruption and corporate greed and a whole bunch of other things.
In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday.
Check out all my previous recommendations over here.
Have you binge-watched Bloodline on Netflix yet? No?! What is wrong with you? Isn't your life missing dysfunctional family fun voiced-over by Kyle Chandler?
In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday.
Check out all my previous recommendations over here.
Manhattan is the little show no one heard of when it debuted last year on WGN. The drama is set in 1940s Los Alamos, New Mexico and focuses on both family life in this weird little outpost and the professional drama among the scientists working on the Manhattan Project.
It's always interesting to find a surprise book-to-movie adaptation. Damn studios and their name-changing ways. I added British flick Now Is Good to my Netflix queue after watching How I Live Now, because I was looking for more YA-ish movies from the UK. I thought that film took some risks you would be unlikely to see in American films.
When I finally got around to streaming Now Is Good, the story and characters' names seemed immediately familiar. A quick Google told me that I wasn't nuts, that Now Is Good is an adaptation of a book I'd forgotten I'd read, Before I Die by Jenny Downham. (I didn't forget I'd read it because it wasn't good, because it was. Rather, it was a long time ago.)
In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday.
Check out all my previous recommendations over here.
Apparently, I am the target demographic for ABC Family--who knew? Between the show I'm spotlighting today, The Fosters, and my new binge-watching addition, Switched at Birth, I am a fan of the network, apparently.
In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday.
Check out all my previous recommendations over here.
At this point, everyone has watched Freaks & Geeks (is it bragging to say that I watched it when it aired?), but have you watched Judd Apatow's follow-up college-set comedy Undeclared?
In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday.
Check out all my previous recommendations over here.
If you're old enough to remember the 90s, then you definitely remember the great Tonya Harding versus Nancy Kerrigan debacle. Living in the same county as Tonya and skating that the same rink as she practiced (which was right in the middle of the big mall in the area), this was THE STORY of the mid-1990s for me.
In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday.
Check out all my previous recommendations over here.
One of the great television travesties of the modern era is that HBO's foul-mouthed western, Deadwood, was canceled after a mere three seasons. The series was supposed to conclude with two movie-length episodes, but that never happened for reasons that remain unexplained.
In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday.
This week's choice is one of my favorite movies, You Can Count on Me, released in 2000, starring Mark Ruffalo (Terry) and Laura Linney (Sammy) as estranged siblings reunited due to Sammy being broke once again.
I'm not usually a fan of sibling stories, since I don't have any brothers or sisters and I find those relationships rather weird (sorry!), but You Can Count on Me is beautiful in its messiness.
In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday.
This week, I'd like to introduce you to a fantastic thriller which originally aired on BBC and was a BBC-Northern Ireland production, The Fall. Starring the always-fascinating Gillian Anderson, with a fabulously-understated performance in a supporting role from Archie Panjabi, of The Good Wife fame, this is a great one for fans of stellar U.K. crime dramas like Luther.
In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday.
Check out all my previous recommendations over here.
Once upon a time, there was a weird and wonderful show on FX that no one watched called Terriers. It had a loyal following of approximately ten people. Sadly, television networks expect a slightly larger audience than that, and Terriers was canceled after a single season.
In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday. Check out all my previous recommendations over here.
This week's recommendation was pretty much inevitable: ABC Australia's charming half-hour teen ballet drama, Dance Academy.
Here's the deal: Dance Academy is set in Sydney, Australia at an elite school for aspiring dancers. Just getting into the school is intensely competitive, and it's a feeder for the National Ballet Company. Over three years, the students train in hopes of being one of two or three students selected to join the Company. It's intense and brutal, physically. Amidst all that competition and training, these are still teenagers dealing with all the stuff that teenagers deal with. And, it's also a boarding school story, since they live at the school at which they train.
Welcome to another installment of Stream-It Saturday, in which I feed your streaming addiction. Find past recommendations over here.
Have I mentioned that I'm embroiled in a deep love affair with the ukulele? It is a known fact that ukulele is the happiest instrument and that it's impossible to not be happy when playing or listening to ukulele. This is the truth.
Also true is that Hawaiian musician Jake Shimabukuro is the best, most innovative ukulele artist. I recently watched a wonderful documentary about Jake and his music and life, Life on Four Strings.
In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday.
This week's streaming choice is my beloved Moone Boy, shown in the U.S. exclusively via streaming on Hulu and broadcast in the U.K. on Sky.
Here's the deal. Moone Boy is a bit... bonkers.
But in the cutest, most endearing way. I swear!
It's loosely based on Irish cutie-pie Chris O'Dowd's childhood in a small town of Boyle, in Ireland. The main characters are 12-year old Martin Moone and his imaginary friend, played by O'Dowd, Sean Murphy. The two get in all sorts of capers and scrapes while Martin deals with life in his charmingly crazy family.
Moone Boy was one of my favorite new shows last year (along with The Mindy Project and Orange is the New Black) and it's back for another season on Hulu in about a week. If you haven't watched it, you've missed out on something special.
15 Reasons You Should Stream Moone Boy Immediately
I am so enjoying this "stream-it" series. All I want to do it post about things you can stream, but I am exercising restraint and just doing so once a week.
You can check out the rest of this ongoing series here.
When Hulu first became a thing, I became completely addicted. There wasn't a ton of content on there, but there was some show called Jericho. I've always been a survivalist/post-apocalyptic story junkie (which is amusing, given how ill-equipped I am for such a scenario), so I queued up the first episode and proceeded to give up sleep in favor of watching the two seasons in an embarrassingly short period of time. (For the record, I'm fairly certain that I watched a few episodes on CBS' Innertube service. Does anyone else remember that?)
I'm always digging around Netflix looking for shows that my husband and I will enjoy watching together. I know it's hard to believe, but he's really not up for yet another re-watch of Friday Night Lights. (I know, I know...)
One of our recent finds is the unusual and captivating Rectify, a six-episode show on the Sundance Channel, now streaming on Netflix.
Rectify follows Daniel Holden, who's been released from prison after 19 years on death row, for six days following his return to his Georgia hometown. His conviction was vacated due to DNA evidence--which is a critical distinction from exoneration. His conviction wasn't overturned, instead, it was dismissed, meaning that he could theoretically be tried for rape and murder again.
However, guilt or innocence isn't the focus of Rectify.
Have I mentioned that I am the unofficial Queen of Streaming?
We don't have cable or satellite television, so the majority of my television consumption is thanks to my beloved Roku box. (Note to self: Write a post about how we don't have cable & manage to watch a crap-ton of television.) I dig pretty deep into the streaming services for my screen time.
For awhile now I've been meaning to start an irregular series with my recommendations for finds on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant, and so on. I thought I'd kick off this series by featuring a movie I watch with week on Netflix, the film adaptation of Meg Roscoff's How I Live Now.
Support Clear Eyes, Full Shelves
Buying via these links help support our hosting & podcast production costs.
Giveaway & Mini Review: The Remedy by Suzanne Young
