Mr. Burke Reviews

Review #20: Santa Clarita Diet SPOILER ALERT! The actual Santa Clarita Diet is human flesh! That's right, this is a zombie show. A comedy-horror, mostly life-like zombie show. I didn't know that going in, but it didn't bother me at all. I don't watch zombie shows, but this one is worth it. Santa Clarita Diet stars Drew Barrymore , who I actually haven't seen in anything in years, and Timothy Olyphant , who I can't remember seeing in anything in particular, as a married pair of Realtors (or "Real-a-tors"), Sheila and Joel Hammond, raising a teenage daughter in quiet suburban Santa Clarita. While showing a house, Sheila suddenly gets ill, comedically throwing up -- as in "insane amount of vomit". Joel, at first, thinks she's dead, but she comes around. Fact is, she is dead. Or undead, as the case may be. Sheila discovers that she now prefers raw meat to cooked meat, and all is fine until another agent, Gary, wonderfully played by

Review #19: Collateral To determine the Emmy Awards, the Academy sends out DVDs with sample episodes of shows to its voters. I don't know how, but someone who worked in my last office left a bunch of these DVDs. Now, most of these discs were useless. Why would I want to see two or four random episodes in the middle of a series? Then I noticed that many of these nominated shows were available online or on Netflix. So I made a note a few that seemed interesting. Collateral was one of these. I knew nothing about it going in, other than it starred Carey Mulligan , whom I enjoyed in Bleak House and Doctor Who . (I didn't realize that both of these were over a decade ago, but there you go.) The pleasant surprise watching the opening credits was discovering that John Simm and Billie Piper , also of Doctor Who, were in the series. Mulligan is Kip Glaspie, a detective trying to solve what appears at first to be a random murder of a pizza delivery man. But, of course, there's

Review #18: Designated Survivor I recently binge-watched most of the last year and a half of Designated Survivor , which ran for two seasons, but seemed more like four half-seasons. Each midseason break had its own cliffhanger or shocking twist, and after its hiatus, the show seemed to move in a different direction, cleaning up the bits it left behind. So, yes, it sometimes seemed that the writers were making it up as they went along, but I could more gracefully call it "responding to viewer feedback". If it were the latter, it didn't help much. The premise of the show was fair enough, but it didn't allow itself to continue for the long term. Keifer Sutherland is Tom Kirkman, the HUD Secretary, who is left out of a State of the Union address (for some reason, given in September) as the "Designated Survivor". For reasons similar as to why the President and V.P. don't travel together, there is always a member of the line of presidential succession who