Fashion houses vs houses of ninjas

A house doesn't need ninjas to feel like home.

I’ve been doing newsletters like this for a few years now. Every September, I find it takes a spell to get through the bulk of returning US broadcast network shows. It’s time consuming in that they all return at once, but then also there’s the added time of dealing with thoughts like:

• There’s three FBI shows?

• How has FBI been running for six seasons already?

• What even is FBI: Most Wanted?

• Wait, Resident Alien is still around? If so, how is it only up to season 3?

Thanks to the strikes, none of that thought process took place in September. But it all hit this week with the bulk of the strike impacted shows returning. You can go through the uninspired list of returning franchises in the listings below.

In terms of new programming… Am I missing titles here? It all seems very light on.

Netflix has a Japanese drama called House of Ninjas and it is… well, it’s all in the name. Pretty standard ninja stuff. And that’s okay by me, because boy do I love ninja stuff.

Prime Video has Jennifer Lopez’s $20m visual album accompaniment to her latest album. This Is Me… Now: A Love Story is apparently part-autobiography, part animated Puerto Rican myth, part sci-fi epic, part celebrity satire and part self-help exercise.

The big title of the week is Apple TV’s The New Look. And, like, the fashions from the French creators seen in the show, it sure if fancy to look at. Unfortunately, I didn’t think it offered that much more. Watching the three episodes it debuted with, I found the show plodding and committed the cardinal streaming show sin of stretching out the storytelling to meet an episode order rather than respecting the audience with a substantial experience with every episode.

Also, I love Ben Mendelsohn, but at no point did I ever buy him as French, or even vaguely European. Maybe you could get away with that another time, but here he is cast against the very French Juliette Binoche. Sharing no screen time together in that first batch of episodes only highlights the sense that the viewer is watching two different (if equally flat) TV shows.

Lovely fashions, tho.