What I’m Watching: March Edition-Welcome to Flatch (Fox), Dropout (Hulu), After Party (Apple) etc

What I’m Watching: March Edition:

Welcome to Flatch (Fox): It’s a key ingredient in small-town comedies that you have to add a healthy dose of quirk but few shows have been able to find the comic sweet spot in those peculiarities as well as this show. The show uses a mockumentary style that might evoke comparisons to Parks and Recreation but the characters are much less universally relatable. The show’s protagonists are a pair of aimless cousins (likely around age 20) who are the product of a lack of parental supervision, a little bit of suppressed cabin fever, and hyper-active imaginations. Joining them is lovelorn small-town newspaper owner Cheryl Petersen (Aya Cash) who came to Flatch from the big city as the significant other to the town pastor (Seann William Scott) but got dumped at some indeterminate point. Cheryl, forever upbeat but often frightened at the change to small-town life, is an apt audience surrogate (and on a side note, my hero as a small-town journalism admirer). There’s also an uptight town historian, a perverted blind man, and a love interest for Shrub (one of the cousins) who is emotionally catatonic. Very few character beats are wasted on this show.

We Need to Talk About Cosby (Showtime)-W. Kamau Bell does his homework here in this thorough and emotionally moving look at Bill Cosby’s rise to fame as well as the development of the Dr. Jekyll behind one of Black America’s most steadfast role models…