Publishers Weekly, the premiere trade magazine for the publishing industry, reviewed over 8000 books this year. Today they released their list of the top ten most-read reviews of the year and, guess what? Flight or Fright appears in the #5 position. More people read the review than reviews of books by Michael Ondaatje or Reese Witherspoon! I think that’s pretty cool.
I binged through quite a number of television series this year. My Flight or Fright co-editor and I are always exchanging recommendations. The full list can be found here. I say “full,” but it doesn’t include network shows I watch year-to-year, like Survivor or NCIS, and there’s only one network show on my top ten list.
This past week, I finished season 3 of Travelers, a cool science fiction series on Netflix that has a mostly Canadian cast, including Eric McCormack from Will and Grace. It’s about people from our dismal future who have come back in time to try to fix all the things that went wrong to create their dystopia. After three seasons of making changes without success, the group decides to take a radical approach, which will only pay off if there’s a season 4, which I hope there will be. There’s one guy named David, a social worker from the present, is one of the most terrific characters I’ve encountered recently. He’ll break your heart and make you laugh at the same time.
We also finished the sixth season of The Ranch (really? Six seasons already? According to some tabulations, this was the second half of season three, but still), which isn’t my favorite show but my wife likes it. I find the humor somewhat broad and the laugh track overbearing, but Debra Winger is good in it. The way they wrote out Rooster was really clumsy and we were glad when they got beyond the third episode and they put that mostly to rest.
Here is my top ten list of series I watched last year, in no particular order. It was hard to whittle the list down — there’s been a lot of good stuff on Netflix and Amazon Prime in particular.
- Travelers
- The Good Place
- The Deuce
- Star Trek Discovery
- Bosch
- Castle Rock
- Jessica Jones
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Ozark
- The Haunting of Hill House
- Little Drummer Girl
