Honorable Mentions: “Bob Hearts Abishola” is probably the last laugh-track sitcom I’ll ever watch, and it’s true that many critics weren’t exactly wrong when they said the jokes were repetitive. However, I still feel compelled to have warm feelings towards one of the only TV shows I’ve ever seen that’s even remotely similar to my…
Category: Mindless Mondays
The Best TV Characters of 2024
Best character twist: John Sugar (Colin Farrell) in “Sugar”…Is the overall series “Sugar” very good? No, no it isn’t. But I admit I was genuinely surprised when the series abruptly changed genres in the middle of its first season. It’s a bold swing that I wish more series would attempt in this age of “we’ve…
The Worst TV Characters of 2024
Note: I do this countdown of the worst every year, and almost always do individual characters more than overall series, but this year I felt the problem was more systemic to the entire series. This list could almost double as “the most disappointing TV shows” of the year. As always, the 10th spot is not…
Top 5 Animated Villains Based on Trump
TV Review: The Surprising Reason Why “TWD: The Ones Who Live” Worked and “The Regime” Didn’t
Both “The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live” and “The Regime” are about the power moves behind oppressive states, and the lies it takes to sustain a dictatorship. By almost any conceivable metric, “Regime” is the better show–more cerebral, more realistic, more relevant, smarter characters, less “Comic Con” influenced–but, shockingly, “The Ones Who Live” actually…
ALL 2023 Movies Reviewed, Graded, and Ranked From Worst to Best
Since Alabama Liberal’s inception, I’ve been doing this annual countdown. This year’s countdown is not only the most belated (sorry) and longest (nearly 300 movies reviewed in one article is partly why it took so long), but also possibly the best year for movies since I started. It is extremely rare to have a handful…
The Co-Star Rebecca Ferguson Dissed Revealed
Recently, a rich, powerful, celebrity white woman used a press tour for an upcoming mega-budget movie to whine about past mistreatment from a star who used to be bigger than her when she started out in her career. I actually don’t think this is important–at all–and also think beautiful white women might be fascinated to…
All 2023 TV Shows Ranked from Worst to Best
Note: It is now impossible for any one human to watch all TV shows in a given year, especially all the bad ones. This list is 70-odd shows that I had a reasonable expectation would be good, and I ranked/graded them only on the basis of what I actually watched vs. hypothetically lousy shows I…
The Best TV Characters of 2023
Farewell to the best character on a bad show: Raymond “Red” Reddington (James Spader) from “The Blacklist”…Most of this list are either good characters on great shows or great characters on good shows, but Red stands out as being a truly terrific character let loose on a police procedural dull enough it could’ve been on…
The Worst TV Characters of 2023
Better late than never, right? We may be a full month into 2024, but I’ve done a countdown of the best and worst TV characters of the year ever since Alabama Liberal’s inception (many, many years ago), and it’d be a shame to miss it now. After all, I watched several lousy TV characters last…
The 2024 Movies I’m Most (and Least) Anticipating
Alabama Liberal is taking much longer than usual on the annual list of movies ranked from worst to best (2024 is now in its second month, and I’m still a week out from getting 2023’s list finished). In the meantime, I’ve put together a 2024 movie preview to get you looking at brighter days freed…
Is the Phenomenal Box Office of “Sound of Freedom” a Money Laundering Scheme?
In a Summer of movies that have largely “underperformed” (to put it charitably), there’s one movie that has exploded expectations so thoroughly, its box office graph looks more like the performance of Bernie Madoff’s hedge fund. Of course, I’m referring to the over 100-million (so far) grossing “Sound of Freedom.” Many box office prognosticators (or…
“The Blacklist” finale: Goodbye to a Great Character (On a Bad Show)
Like most “Blacklist” viewers, I had not actually seen the show in years. To be honest, I’m struggling to remember exactly when I stopped watching the series, but it was probably somewhere between the end of season 2 or 3. [I know I didn’t make it to Mr. Kaplan’s “turning” on Red–an event I’m only…