BrainDead is Great TV

I don't write about television very often, but this summer our family has gotten hooked on a new series called BrainDead.


Braindead is on CBS Monday nights at 10, but we just record it so we can watch, usually the next day.
The show is funny and creepy and so timely.
The main character is Laurel (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who wants to make
documentaries about obscure cultures, but she doesn't have the money, so she returns to her hometown, Washington, D.C., and agrees to work for her brother, a democratic senator. She's drawn into a love/hate relationship with Garreth, who works for a republican senator.
Garreth is the whole reason we started watching the show because he is played by Aaron Tveit, who Grace looooooves, because he played Enjorals in the movie Les Miserables, and he has starred on Broadway.
The premise is that a meteor landed in Russia -- which is true and includes some of the actual footage. Then a U.S. scientist has the meteor brought to D.C. to study it. The meteor is filled with space bugs that look like ants. They crawl into people's brains and make them very strident about their political positions.
It seems like it could actually be happening because people are so dug in on beliefs.
I know it sounds crazy, but it's very entertaining and we can't wait each week to see what happens next.
At the beginning of each show, there's an adorable song summing up what has happened in the previous shows.
Here's one from Week 4.

There's a little gore, but mostly it's surprising and silly and the acting knocks us out. 

I hope you'll give it a try before a fun, new show meets its demise. 

Younger -- Must-See TV

I saw a newspaper article about a new television series and it sounded fun. So I DVR-ed it. The show is on TVLand, which I never watch. I didn't even realize it had new shows. I thought it only showed reruns from the 60s and 70s.
But this new show is delightful. It's called Younger. And the premise is Liza, a woman in her 40s who

worked in the publishing business but gave it up to raise her daughter and move to the suburbs. Now she's getting a divorce, her teenage daughter is studying in India, and she can't find a job because she is too qualified.
When a younger guy hits on her in a bar and says, they're about the same age, 26, she decides to become a 26 year old. She changes the way she dresses and speaks. She has highlights. She wears knit caps for no reason, and she gets a job as an assistant to the marketing director in a publishing house.
Each week when I watch the show on my DVR, I wish it was longer.
I'd never heard of the star, Sutton Foster, but my daughter Grace knows her as a Broadway star. I

looked her up, and she is just barely 40. Still, she carries off the 26-year-old thing pretty well.
She keeps getting caught in her own timeline lies, like when she confides to her 26-year-old boyfriend that she lost her virginity after a Nirvana concert, and he asks her if she was in elementary school. (See Nirvana broke up after Kurt Cobain died in 1994, and if she is 26 now, that means she was born in 1989.)
And the first time she went to the gym with two of her co-workers and got undressed, she realized her pubic hair looked nothing like the well-plucked girls in their 20s.
She knows nothing about social media and has to learn it all from scratch.
When she interviews for her job, she nails it when the marketing director asks her what makes her special. (Apparently, that's something that all 20-somethings think, that they're special.) Liza responds, "I'm a grown up. I don't think I'm special." Love that line, but her 40-something is showing.
It's fun to see how Liza gets herself out of each complication. But I'm not doing it justice.

Only two episodes left until the end of the season, so watch it. Set your DVR to Tuesday night at 10 p.m. on TVLand. Bet you'll laugh along with me.