Down by the old millions of streams....

I mentioned the other day that my friends, from Thursday night's baseball game and Friday morning's appointment rescue, had also tipped me off to the return of Daniel Radcliffe and a lovely supporting cast to a show called Miracle Workers. The third series just began on TBS, which we may or may not have access to, but meanwhile back at the shithole, we'd never seen or heard anything about the earlier second season, and THAT is now back streaming on HBO Max. We watched the first two episodes last night. It reminded us both of Blackadder, in that it jumps the performers into a different time, place and arc. Here, Dan is a wimpy prince in the midst of the Dark Ages, and his Series 1 co-stars Geraldine Viswanathan and Steve Buscemi are put back on earth with him as literal shit-shovelers.

But I also noticed that Lolly Adefope is in the series, and we later came to adore her as one of the ghosts in Ghosts, a BBC series we really enjoyed on one of these stupid platforms. And lo! The interwebs proclaimed that this series was also back and that the BBC had dropped the entire third series on August 9th! 

Now, though: which of our 300 services was it streaming on?

(a) Netflix
(b) HBO Max
(c) Disney+
(d) Hulu
(e) Amazon Prime
(f) Paramount, formerly CBS All Access
(g) AMC, which we dropped
(h) PBS Passport, which may have expired
(i) Peacock, which we haven't signed up for yet
(j) None of the above

That's right, Alan! It's



Apparently, Auntie has decided to keep its Ghosts to itself for the immediate future. HBO Max had the two prior seasons we did watch, but not a peep from them about the third series or when it might show up there, if it does.

Much the same phenomenon surrounds yet another service to be added to that spreadsheet: Apple Plus. We've read all kinds of good reviews about a series called Ted Lasso, now in its second series. You'd think they would have interest in making the earlier one accessible to get people interested enough to maybe buy into the newer one. You know, put it out on DVD or something.  But that's not how things work in Cupertino: series one is only available streaming on their platform, and that means that even if we subscribed to the thing, we could not watch it directly on our smart Samsung, but would have to stream it through a laptop connected through HDMI via some sort of app.

And none of this gets into issues over rights to the characters themselves among the various playahs.  Last weekend, Eleanor wanted to watch Venom, one of your snarkier superhero types with Tom Hardy as his alter ego and doing much of the voice of the symbiote. Venom is a Marvel property, but his rights got parked with Sony, along with Spidey (who he shares a comic backstory with), before the Disney buyout of Marvel and the massive success of the MCU.  Disney and Sony have made nice-nice about Spiderman himself being allowed into Avengers and standalones under the Marvel Studios banner, but Venom remains outside that universe and they couldn't even mention the webslinger in the Venom feature film, much less put in any of the 300 actors to have portrayed him in the current era of reboots.  (Oddly, the DVD of Venom, which we really enjoyed, includes an extra of part of the animated Into the Spider-Verse film that was also released under Sony's auspices and which also makes clear Venom is part of THAT multiverse.)

We hope to figure this out and eventually catch the Venom sequel that was just released in cinemas when it begins streaming. Just don't ask me which fucking channel it's on.