Tag: Streaming

Quarantine Q2 TV Recommendations

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The obvious question here and one that Red immediately brought up IS the fact that we are not remotely close to being in Q2. And that is true, we are not in Q2….of the year. We are however in our second set of three months of quarantine. Our second quarter-year stuck mostly inside lest we infect ourselves and those around us with the virus named after Dom Toretto’s favorite beverage.

The problem with where a lot of us are at in life and in quarantine is that the obvious choices and nominations for our binging pleasure have indeed been binged. There are fears out there that we may even run out of T.V. That is why, spoiler alert, streaming services are already resorting to throwing the metaphorical spaghetti against the wall in the form of uploading shows from other English speaking areas of the world such as the UK and Australia. They are also banking, with some success, that we’ve expanded our horizons enough to have the patience to deal with either dubs or subtitles and have pushed foreign shows to our monolingual asses.

These and a few others make up my second hack at aggregating what’s out there for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.

Marcella (UK) – Netflix
(This may have been in the last binge blog but deserves another mention)

I may have noted in the past that FOTB Patty Blackouts has television tastes that run between police procedurals and the shittiest of reality T.V (Below Deck is his Sopranos). So needless to say I myself was shocked when I was able to hook him into this one. In Marcella, the titular character is drawn back onto the police force to hunt down a serial killer who has returned, despite the fact that her personal life is falling apart and she herself is in the throes of a perpetual psychotic break. If you like “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” you’ll like the familiar Nordic noir feel of this one, set in England and the UK aboard.

Dark (Germany) – Netflix

Grenga: Dark is a highly binge-able Sci-FI show, assuming you can get past the dubbing. It’s a mysterious ride through time that centers on 4 families in a small German town that is also home to a nuclear power plant. The first season is definitely confusing, but once you start to connect a few dots you can’t help but watch more. I haven’t finished the third season yet, but so far the show has lived up to it’s 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating.

Ladhood (UK) – Hulu

Hulu decided to just blatantly stage a British invasion of their platform, almost admitting they were running out of shit to promote. Ladhood might be the best of the bunch. In this interesting take of a coming of age tale, emotionally stunted, early-30’s Londoner Liam is probably a little more broken than he cares to admit (sound familiar). He tries to determine how this came to be by visiting scenes from his teenage years in Northern England, taking part as an audience member unseen by his younger self or friends as well as breaking the fourth wall to try and provide context. While it didn’t quite live up to what I wanted it to be it was a cool idea and definitely worth a watch. Here’s hoping for more seasons post-rona.

Hightown – Starz


We come back to Massachusetts for this round of attempted Boston accents and a fresh take on the opioid epidemic. Based on the Cape with a specific interest in Provincetown, Hightown centers on Jackie, a “fish cop” (National Marine Fishery Services Agent) who wants to have her cake and eat (snort) it too, enjoying all the carnal pleasures of living in PTown, New England’s gay capital, while investigating a murder off the books. Her moonlighting intersects with and gets in the way of an annoyed Statie Detective, Ray, whose not totally legit investigation into a drug trafficking ring is related to Jackie’s own search.


Stateless  (Australia) – Netflix

Fuck. A. Duck. Not only did I not see this one coming but when it arrived I did not expect to care. But here we are. This emotional, perfectly acted, gripping miniseries follows four separate but intertwined characters at an Australian detention center for refugees – an Aussie who thanks to a cult causing a psychotic break thinks she’s German; a guard who took the well-paying, government funded job with the center’s contractor to give his family a better life; a bureaucrat who is trying to keep the center’s as well as the refugee detention policy’s reputation above water, and an Afghan refugee desperate to give himself and his missing family the life he dreams for them. You can only imagine.


The Umbrella Academy – Netflix

Red: I’ll have a full blog about this later as I just finished season 1, but The Umbrella Academy is a quarantine must watch for anyone who’s into sci-fi, graphic novels, time travel, and just generally weird shows. You definitely have to kind of go with it in this show since it really leans into the weirdness, but hey that’s to be expected when you base a show off a comic written by the lead singer from My Chemical Romance.

Gomorrah – HBO Max

First things first from what I understand if you have HBO you probably have HBO Max for free although the Home Box Office has done a terrible fuckin job rolling this thing out. Anyway, I won’t try and lie, I’ve never watched Gomorrah. But I’ve been told it’s actually one of the best shows out there and I saw recently it was ranked the #5 foreign show of the decade. By the New York Times maybe? Anyway here’s the wikipedia rundown:

“Set in the suburbs of Naples, Italy, the crime drama goes inside the Camorra, a fierce Neapolitan crime organization led by Pietro Savastano. The story is told through the eyes of Don Pietro’s right-hand man, Ciro Di Marzio, whose faith in the family is tested when he realizes how far Don Pietro is willing to go to keep his power.“

“F” Is For Family – Netflix

This serves as more of a reminder that a new season of Bill Burr’s hilarious cartoon dropped during quarantine. The lightly-autobiographical tale of a working class family in the 70’s remains absolutely hysterical, something we all need right now.

The Sopranos – HBO

WATCH THE FUCKING SOPRANOS YOU UNAMERICAN FUCKS.

So the Oakland A’s Dropped Their Radio Broadcast Partner and Will Stream All Their Games Now

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FrontOfficeSports – In the best-selling “Moneyball,” author Michael Lewis portrayed the Oakland A’s as famously willing to abandon old ways of doing business. The A’s are at it again, becoming the first MLB club to ditch terrestrial radio in favor of internet streaming audio.

The A’s made headlines last week announcing they’ll exclusively stream all of their games in the Oakland/San Francisco market for free on TuneIn this season – while cutting ties with local radio station KTRB. “Fans are consuming media differently and we have to adapt to meet those needs,” A’s President Dave Kaval said in a statement.

The A’s and TuneIn launched a 24/7 channel dubbed “A’s Cast” last season. It grew into MLB’s No. 1 team podcast, with 650,000 downloads, and marked the first time the A’s boasted the league’s most popular and downloaded property.

During the off-season, TuneIn met with the ballclub to discuss testing exclusive streams of A’s games this season. The two sides were so impressed by the 2019 results they agreed to bypass the test phase – and name TuneIn the club’s exclusive audio distributor for the 2020 season.

This is a fascinating move by the A’s and to be perfectly frank it’s about time they did something radical because you can only lean on “Moneyball” as your sole contribution to society for so many years.

This will be a challenge for older fans who don’t know their ass from their elbow when it comes to technology, but if baseball is going to avoid the fate of prize fighting and horse racing it’s going to have to start adopting radical new ideas.

For anyone under the age of 40 though this is not that crazy of a change at all. You know how often I listen to a Red Sox game on the radio? Almost never except for when I’m sitting in traffic. I don’t even own an actual radio so anytime I’m listening to sports talk outside of my car is either on my iPhone or streaming over my Google Home at my house. A free streaming service is long overdue for baseball because if you don’t actually own a radio like me you’re shit out of luck unless you’re in front of the TV, in your car, or a paying MLB.TV subscriber. There is always the workaround of streaming on your laptop through your TV provider, but thats not exactly easy to access for anyone let alone a digital nomad.

If you’re a cynic you could argue this frees the A’s up from any local contractual obligations aside from their dump of a stadium, which could make it even easier for them to leave town. It’s like someone cutting the cord and signing up for YouTube TV as their main cable provider. No contracts and take it with you anywhere you go. Fair point.

The money they lose from licensing their broadcast rights to a radio station is a valid argument, but I’m sure TuneIn isn’t getting this for free so that’s not a huge deal. If your argument is the team will lose visibility and awareness because they’re no longer on terrestrial radio, well then pardon my french but you’re fucking out to lunch. I would say more than half of the time I’m in my car I’m listening to music or a podcast on my phone. Add in the fact that we are all constantly connected via text, twitter, Instagram, Facebook, ESPN push notifications etc. and there is almost nothing I become aware of because of the radio. The A’s will do just fine without being on an AM dial.

Not to mention the broadcast quality is going to sound world’s better. I was kind of joking about how the A’s will be fine not being on the AM dial, but their former radio broadcast partner KTRB is literally 860 AM in Oakland. That is preposterous in 2020. WEEI in Boston made the jump from 850 AM to 93.7 FM back in 2013 and the improvement in audio quality was titanic. AM signals usually sound like you’re broadcasting from a truck stop bathroom so digital streaming will be a slight upgrade over that.

The A’s could once again be paving the way for other teams to take their idea and achieve much greater success running with it if Moneyball is any indication. So I applaud the A’s for trying something new in a sport so averse to change.