Tonight
Ten for the evening
One to ten. Newest, most watched, highest on the Living Meter. Prime, Disney+, Hulu, Hallmark, Acorn, and Netflix.
Grief told honestly, then a fantasy that drafts the neighbors. Watch the bill.
The first honest thing is that she cannot stand the kitchen without him. Plenty of stories sneer at that. This one sits in it. The second honest thing, which arrives later, is that a private heaven built out of other people's minds is not love. It is a occupation with better lighting.
Stay through the moment she lets the fantasy go. That is the scene the standard cares about. If you only want the costume changes, you will miss the only adult decision in it. Grief is not a permission slip to rearrange the street.
Industry
4/10
The work of mourning is real. The work of the people trapped in it is stolen.
Household
5/10
A marriage and two boys. They are loved, and they are also a set she will not release.
Piety
4/10
Magic stands in for prayer. There is no one she is willing to answer to.
Courage
5/10
Facing the grave takes nerve. Keeping the town takes the other kind of will.
Republic
3/10
A street of neighbors is furniture until someone fights free.
Temperance
4/10
The comfort is total and therefore a kind of drunkenness.
Truth
7/10
The show's good turn is admitting the sitcom was a lie with hostages.
Stewardship
4/10
What the boys inherit is her power and her unfinished sorrow.
Live historicallyIf you are keeping a loss alive by controlling the people around it, name the loss to one of them instead.
A liar given a clock and a desk. The joke is better than the theology.
A man whose whole talent is the exit is forced to stay in the building. That is a useful premise. Bureaucracy as the enemy of a life is also useful, up to the point where the show replaces it with another glowing MacGuffin and forgets the man.
Take the part where he tells the truth at a cost and leave the rest of the mythology on the table. A clever man is not a good man until the cleverness stops being the way he avoids a promise. This one almost gets there. Almost is not the same as a vow.
Industry
5/10
He is finally given a job. He is still mostly performing it.
Household
3/10
Variant selves are not a household. Affection shows up late and sideways.
Piety
2/10
Gods are props. Reverence would end the bit.
Courage
6/10
He does, eventually, choose a hard future over a clever exit.
Republic
5/10
A secret office that edits history is the villain, which is the right instinct.
Temperance
4/10
Charm is the appetite. The show feeds it.
Truth
6/10
The plot only works if a liar becomes bored with lying.
Stewardship
5/10
The question of what timeline we hand on is the best thing in it.
Live historicallyKeep one promise this week that would have been easier to joke your way out of.
Keep it. True love here is a long errand, not a mood. Inigo's mercy is the best scene.
Westley keeps his word across years and a mostly-death. Buttercup has less to do than she should, and the film is still on the side of fidelity. The boy in the bed, rolling his eyes at the kiss, is the real audience, and the grandfather wins him without cheating. Inigo wants a killing and is given a chance to stop at justice. That pause is more grown than the swordfight, and the swordfight is perfect.
A whole house can watch this. Quote it if you must. Then notice you are quoting a story about people who did not quit.
Industry
7/10
A quest with chores: the cliffs, the fight, the pit.
Household
6/10
A grandfather and a boy. A love that waits.
Piety
4/10
A fairy tale with a moral spine.
Courage
8/10
Everybody comes back for somebody.
Republic
5/10
A corrupt prince, laughed at and defeated.
Temperance
6/10
Vengeance is answered and then set down.
Truth
7/10
The book in the grandfather's hands is the true object.
Stewardship
8/10
It hands on the habit of reading aloud.
Live historicallyRead a story aloud this week, all the way to the end.
Rules are not meanness. The creature is not a friend. A true cautionary tale.
Gizmo is gentle. The rules are clear. Billy breaks them the way a boy breaks a curfew, and the film does not wink him out of the bill. The gremlins are malice with a giggle, which is exactly the right picture of a small evil that multiplies when it is fed after midnight and left wet. The mother's fight in the kitchen is competence, not a joke.
Frightening, and some of the kills are played for a laugh you should not share. The spine is sound: a gift with conditions is still a gift, and sentimentality about a pet is how the town burns. Older children, with you in the room.
Industry
6/10
His mother can run a kitchen like a defense. His father is a tinkerer.
Household
6/10
A household that has to survive what the son brought home.
Piety
4/10
The rules are a kind of law. Breaking them is not liberation.
Courage
6/10
They fight for the street.
Republic
6/10
A whole town is the victim of one boy's exception.
Temperance
8/10
Cute is not a virtue. Appetite after midnight is the plot.
Truth
8/10
He was told. He did it anyway. The film does not call that bold.
Stewardship
7/10
What he owed the town was obedience to a simple care.
Live historicallyKeep the rule you were given about a thing you do not understand. Especially after dark.
The rare sequel that says winning is not the same as being well. He has to ask for help.
Future is about a young man whose entire childhood was other people's emergencies, and whose body keeps the emergencies after they end. The show does not solve him with a bigger fight. It makes him say the thing out loud to the people who raised him.
Good after the original, with a parent, especially for a teenager who has been the capable one. Not a starting point.
Industry
5/10
He tries to be useful in peacetime and learns that helping can be a way of hiding.
Household
7/10
The guardians are still the house. His friends are growing up on a different clock.
Piety
3/10
No creed beyond care, and care is starting to fail him.
Courage
6/10
The bravery is admitting he is not fine.
Republic
4/10
A town trying to live next to the people who used to occupy it.
Temperance
6/10
It refuses another season of triumph. The feeling is not indulged forever.
Truth
8/10
A hero who is hurting is allowed to be inaccurate about his own goodness.
Stewardship
7/10
What he hands on is a life that is not a mission. That is the correction.
Live historicallyAsk the competent child in your house how they actually are. Wait for the second answer.
Useful. A record of work and of vanity. Watch it for the work.
A wonder is often a tomb or a boast that took a city's labor. The honest documentary says both: the skill was real, and the person who ordered it may have been spending lives to be remembered. Use this with an older child who can hold those two facts. Turn it off if it becomes a list of spectacles with no one sweating.
Good beside you. Ask who cut the stone, and whether their own house still stood.
Industry
8/10
Stone, labor, engineering. The series is about people who finished enormous jobs.
Household
3/10
Kings and tombs more than kitchens. A household is rarely the wonder.
Piety
5/10
Room for the scale of a thing made for a god or a dead man. The series does not have to share the worship.
Courage
4/10
The courage belongs to the unnamed hands. The credit usually belongs to the ruler.
Republic
6/10
A public work is a kind of republic, even when a tyrant ordered it.
Temperance
6/10
It can describe glory without drooling. It sometimes drools.
Truth
7/10
It prefers the account of how the thing stood to the legend on the plaque.
Stewardship
7/10
The question under it is what we bother to keep, and for whom.
Live historicallyWalk to the oldest building you can reach this week and say who was meant to use it.
People who answer the call. The disasters are opera. The job is still a real one.
The fantasy disasters are absurd, and the series knows you know. Under them is a truer picture than most shows will sit with: a dispatcher who stays on the line, a firefighter who goes back in, a city that works only because some people answer. The personal plots are soap. The work, when they let it be work, is the reason the show is not empty.
Older teens can watch an episode with you and then you should tell them about a real emergency you know, which was smaller and not choreographed. Admire the answering. Do not admire the tornado.
Industry
8/10
The shifts are the moral fact: someone has to go in when the house is on fire.
Household
5/10
Found families and broken ones. The station is more stable than the marriages.
Piety
3/10
A chaplain sometimes. Mostly the creed is the job.
Courage
8/10
They go into the ridiculous and the awful for strangers.
Republic
7/10
A city held together by people on a radio.
Temperance
4/10
The spectacle is turned up past belief, on purpose.
Truth
5/10
Personal lies run under the rescues.
Stewardship
6/10
A rookie, a captain, a standard being passed at the table in the station.
Live historicallyPut the real local number and a plan somewhere the whole house can find it.
A family sitcom that lets the religious mother be a person. Better than the show it was spun from.
Sheldon is hard to live with, and the show's sympathy is often with the people doing the living. That is the correction. Mary prays and is not treated as the idiot for it. George coaches and comes home. A child who is good at school can watch this and still be asked to be good at the table.
Industry
5/10
School, a football coach father, a cafeteria. Ordinary work surrounds the gift.
Household
8/10
They keep him. He is difficult and he is theirs.
Piety
6/10
Mary's faith is not the joke. It is opposed, and it is allowed to answer.
Courage
4/10
The bravery is a small town raising a child who looks down on it.
Republic
5/10
A church, a school, a street.
Temperance
6/10
Gentle, mostly.
Truth
6/10
It is fairer to the people around the genius than The Big Bang Theory was.
Stewardship
6/10
The question is whether the gift will cost him the family.
Live historicallyIf you have a bright child, require the same manners you require of the others, and watch this only if it helps you do that.
Good enough for a child who loves animals. The freedom speech is doing a little too much.
Lucky Prescott arrives in a frontier town and meets a horse that will not be owned in the cheap way. The best episodes are about feeding, fear, and staying with an animal that does not owe you a trick. The weaker ones are about a girl who is right because she is spirited and the adults are slow. A child who loves horses can learn the first lesson here.
Watch with them. When Lucky ignores a warning, ask whether that was courage or hurry. The horse can usually tell.
Industry
6/10
The barn is work: feed, hoof, weather. You can see it.
Household
6/10
An aunt, a father, friends. The town is trying to raise her, and she is not always grateful.
Piety
4/10
Care for a creature is the reverence on offer.
Courage
6/10
She goes back for the horse. Sometimes she goes against the adult who was right.
Republic
6/10
A small town with a railroad and neighbors who have names.
Temperance
5/10
Recklessness is often called spirit. The show knows the difference and then fudges it.
Truth
6/10
The horse is not a prop that performs loyalty on command. That honesty matters.
Stewardship
7/10
Stewardship of an animal is the actual lesson, when they let it be.
Live historicallyIf the house keeps an animal, let a child do one real piece of its care today.
A child who will not stop searching for her mother. The comedy is in the way.
Tip's mother is taken in an alien relocation and Tip does not adjust. She goes. Oh is a coward from a culture of cheerful conformity, and the film thinks courage is catching. The Boov are comic invaders. The girl is not comic. That imbalance is the film's integrity.
It is bright and a bit frantic. Under it: do not relocate a family and call it help. Do not leave a child to be reasonable about a missing mother.
Industry
4/10
A journey, a scavenged car.
Household
8/10
The whole plot is a daughter retrieving her mother.
Piety
2/10
None.
Courage
7/10
She does not accept the relocation.
Republic
5/10
An empire that moves populations and smiles.
Temperance
5/10
Cowardice is Oh's starting vice.
Truth
7/10
The Boov call an invasion a welcome.
Stewardship
8/10
A mother and child belong in the same house.
Live historicallyIf a child is looking for you, be findable.
