Television

SCOOBY DOO: Mystery, Inc. is the latest cartoon to feature Scooby and the gang, here reinvented as teens in Crystal Cover, a tourist trap that promotes itself as the most haunted city in America (so the gang’s endless exposing of potential tourist attractions as frauds hasn’t made them popular). Along with the usual ghost-busting, there’s the running mystery centered on an earlier team of ghostbusters who vanished mysteriously, as they were on the brink of uncovering something amazing (which won’t be fully exposed until the Second Season). Fun, with references to past supporting characters such as Vincent van Ghoul and Scrappy Doo (“We promised we’d never talk about him.”).
After several years trying to get a movie out of the ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT series, it came to Netflix as a streaming series instead. It’s been five years since the show was cancelled and five years in the lives of the characters as George Michael moves to college, Maeby chooses to stay in high school until she’s 23, Lindsay looks for inner peace, Tobias tries to get Fantastic Four—the Musical off the ground and Michael tries to get a movie about his family up and running (“I think it’s more a TV series really.”). Great fun, though very convoluted as each episode reveals more about what happened in previous ones. A very weak end to the last episode though, so I do hope we get another season out of it (as has been rumored).
SHARPE’S CHALLENGE departs from the books, where Sharpe settled happily with his wife in France until the events of Sharpe’s Devil. Here, his wife is dead so Sharpe has no ties to stop him shipping off too India and helping Harper bust a Maharajah defying British rule with the help of a renegade Englishman. Strongly influenced by the Cornwell novels set early in Sharpe’s career in India, but this way they don’t have to worry about Sean Bean’s age. Fun, but not the best in the series by far. “Since you are determined to be as dull-witted and thick-skinned as a hippopotamus, I shall speak plainly.”